Modern Orthoprax & Heterodox: Angry at God, for possibly not existing?
For me, it was a pretty straightforward sequence...not without anguish, but still:
Step A:
"5. Get angry at God...": Not only for possibly not existing, but for this pain-wracked world that He purportedly created and perpetuates. Hardly a novel question (tzaddik v'ra lo, etc.), but the standard and not-so-standard answers became mere tirutzim when viewed against the searing reality of the pain that they are attempting to explain away.
Step B:
"1. Accept that God possibly might not exist, but maintain a type of Pascal's wager..." Tried that one on for size, quickly realized I couldn't possibly satisfy the minimum demands of all of the possible Gods that have been postulated over the course of history, and so figured I may as well thow in the towel.
Step C:
"6. Wait for a sign from God..." Kind of ongoing. I suppose for me this means that I aspire to remain open enough to have my mind changed by some direct and clear communication. No more speaking in riddles for me.
Step D:
"4. Set aside the question of whether He exists or not, and throw yourself into secular ethics - the type that don't depend on a God to make you want to be good." Yeah, here's where I'm at. For me it was perhaps easier than Modern Orthoprax describes, since a core of my skepticism is my observation that "good"ness and "godli"ness in people are utterly unrelated. Lord knows (ha, ha) that plenty of otherwise believing Orthodox Jews (including/especially learned Rabbonim) cannot possibly be described as "good", and Ithere are many, many ordinary assimilated Jews and non-Jews of all stripes, who are very "good" indeed.
Skipped "2. Try and convince yourself...that God actually exists" - haven't I been doing this all my life until now?
Only dabbled in "3. Convince yourself that God does not exist." I don't need much convincing, but since this question is higly unlikely to ever be definitively settled, prefer to think of myself as falling on the atheistic end of the agnostic spectrum as opposed to the out-and-out atheistic.
“Man gets used to everything, the beast!” Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov
observe in “Crime and Punishment.”
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Garbage In, Garbage Out
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