The biggest obstacle to faith

For me, there is one great big obstacle for believing in a loving compassionate God. I have spent years trying to excuse it, work around it, ignore it, work through it, yet it still persists. I have prayed for an answer, any answer, but the silence is deafening. It is the big elephant in the room that simply won’t go away.   It is why God’s creation lets bad things happen to perfectly innocent helpless people.

No, I am not thinking about atrocities and the horrors of war. People make wars and are responsible for all their consequences, not God.   Nor am I thinking about tragedies that result from human greed or deliberate carelessness such as a drunk drivers killing people, or bridges collapsing because of cost-cutting or faulty design.  No, I put those squarely on human shoulders.

It is horrors over which people have no input on, and are totally blameless. Example abound such as the recent death of Johnathan Petrie as a result of a horrid skin disease, or an innocent young child contracting bone cancer.  Neither of these did anything to bring this on, nor is there a human agent behind them.

Oh yes, I have read more than one apologia including the one presented by Rabbi Kushner in “When Bad Things Happen to Good People, along with every treatise I can get my hands on. Still nothing.

And this leaves me looking over the edge of a mihilistic abyss where one of the following has to be true: God does not care, God does not exist, or God is a mean nasty travesty of a being who I want nothing whatever to do with.

If you have any possible useful apologia, please oh please sent it to me. No dogma ir empty platitudes please.

In the meantime, I will continue my long search spurred on by the terrifying beauty of the universe and the certainty that compassion, love, as expressed by Jesus offer hope for all of us trapped in the state of life,

So, what is God anyway?

A friend of mine once said that as a child, God was an old man in long white robes with an equally long beard,  gazing down sternly, wagging an accusing finger, and cautioning her to be good while threatening her with burning eternally in unquenchable in hell fire should she dare to transgress even slightly. She attended a Catholic school run by stern sisters. I am convinced the church used this image bolstered by the concept of original sin to keep active little children in line. As she grew older, she rejected these teachings and left her beliefs.   I am convinced many a faith was extinguished this way.. For her God was guilt and fear. So much for the idea of a loving God.  But more this an example of putting God in a box for a group"s own purposes- an abuse that recurs alarmingly but in slightly different variations.

Fortunately I escaped that fate.

For me God is best described by the name used by many First Nations: The Creator.
For me God is literally the source of everything.   Everything that is created by God, you, me, every animal,  every tree, every plant, every molecule, every atom, every particle, every wave is created by God and is part of God.. Everything in creation is part of God and has a role in fulfilling that creation. Any action that assists the fulfillment of God's creation is holy.  Anything that diminishes creation or destroys part of it, is a sin. Since we are part of God, a sin against God  is also a sin against ourselves.

People love labels. So what label would best describe my viewpoint.  I guess it would be a panentheist: we and everything in the universe are a part of God, but God has a meta presence that extended beyond the universe.