This series is based on Mark Feldmeir’s book, Life After God.

Some select quotes...

Theodicy

I’m sitting in a seminary professor’s office one afternoon when, all at once, he pulls a gun on me. He fishes it out of his desk drawer, points it at my chest, leisurely pulls back the hammer, and asks me if I believe in God. It’s all so completely unexpected and so seemingly out of character for a professor who is, by all accounts, a vegan and a pacifist and is known for being really into the universe and having lots of houseplants and smoking peyote in the desert and practicing tai chi and commuting to campus on an old Schwinn Wayfarer ten-speed and wearing a tan corduroy sport jacket with those brown leather elbow patches. He is that kind of professor. (10)

Pascal’s Wager: Better to believe in God, because if God actually exists, you’re better off as a believer.  But to not believe in God if God exists might result in eternal condemnation.

C.S. Lewis to write his well-known book, The Problem of Pain, to resolve this enduring theological puzzle. In it, Lewis wrote famously, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, and shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” But later, after the death of his wife, Joy, Lewis reconsidered his notorious megaphone theodicy. In his book A Grief Observed, as he pondered whether God might be the “Eternal Vivisector,” the “Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile,” he confessed that, in the end, “you can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears.” (20)

When Pascal died, his servant found sewn into his jacket a brief document titled “Memorial,” which summarized his mystical experience and included the words— “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. . . . Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.” (21-22)

No Hard Questions?

What? Why, Shh? Because we don’t talk about these things. I tell you all of this because chances are the Shh! is as real for you as it was for me, and because there is for all of us the gun and the bullet and the questions and the contradictions and the faint sound of your own voice whispering, “I want to believe but I don’t know what I believe or how to believe.” Maybe you see the beauty of God and you can’t say no, but you see the suffering of the world and you can’t stop asking why. Maybe you believe and doubt and despair and you want to know that even this is faith. But then someone, something, some collective voice says, Shh! And then you stop asking why. And then you stop saying yes. And then you just stop believing. (26-27)

The God we no longer believe in

The Jewish sages taught that Jacob’s story suggests there’s another world—a dimension of the spiritual—right here within this world, that lies open to us whenever we awaken to it and pay attention to it. Like Joseph, we can access that world from this world, if only we can learn to see differently. (31-32)

Book Quotes: Feldmeir, Mark. Life after God: Finding Faith When You Can't Believe Anymore. Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.

Questions to Consider

1. The author begins with the story of his professor’s hypothetical question about God stopping a fired bullet. How do you find yourself challenged by questions of theodicy, or why an all-loving and all-powerful God does not stop bad things from happening? Do you consider this a problem that must be solved?

2. What do you think of Pascal’s wager that it is safer or wiser to believe in God than to risk eternal punishment? Do you agree with Pascal that “reason impels you to believe”?

3. How might the opposite—“reason impedes your ability to believe be true instead?

4. Have you heard the “shhh” the author discusses—the implicit or explicit warning not to ask the hard questions about God? What questions seem most threatening to some people?

5. How would you describe “the God you no longer believe in”?