Page 8 (1/1)

Part 2-WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE

Chapter 6

THE RIVAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD

I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I a that Christians do not need to believe If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are sih If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the ions of the whole world is sie mistake If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all those religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth When I was an atheist I had to try to persuadeabout the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take aa Christian does ions, Christianity is right and they are wrong As in arithht answer to a su answers aredivision of humanity is into the ods, and the minority who do not On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority�Clines up with ancient Greeks and Roes, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohaainst the o on to the next big division People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in There are two very different ideas on this subject One of theood and evil We hu to some people that is merely our human point of view These people would say that the wiser you becoood or bad, and the ood in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have disappeared altogether We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a eon bad because he kills a cancer It all depends on the point of view The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely &039;good&039; or &039;righteous,&039; a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, ants us to behave in one way and not in another The first of these views�Cthe one that thinks God beyond good and evil�Cis called Pantheisel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus The other view is held by Jews, Moha difference between Pantheisoes another Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything you find in the universe is a part of God The Christian idea is quite different They think God invented anda tune A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed You may say, &039;He&039;s put a lot of himself into it,&039; but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head His skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands I expect you see how this difference between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is, a part of God But, of course, if you think soood, then you cannot talk like that You must believe that God is separate fros we see in it are contrary to His will Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, &039;If you could only see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God&039; The Christian replies &039;Don&039;t talk daion It thinks God made the world�Cthat space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the anis that God &039;made up out of His head&039; as a reatwith the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting theain

One listener co But I mean exactly what I say�Cnonsense that is damned is under God&039;s curse, and will (apart frorace) lead those who believe it to eternal death

And, of course, that raises a very big question If a good God ? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling &039;whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn&039;t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not uments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?&039; But then that threw ainst God was that the universe seeot this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has so this universe hen I called it unjust? If the whole shoas bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, as supposed to be part of the show, find ainst it? A man feels hen he falls into water, because man is not a water aniiven upbut a private idea of ainst God collapsed too�Cfor the argu that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to pleaseto prove that God did not exist�Cin other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality�Cnamely my idea of justice�Cwas full of sense Consequently atheism turns out to be too si, we should never have found out that it has no ht in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never knoas dark Dark would be a ithout