Heavenly fatherliness #5 - Support and loyalty

According to popular wisdom, a good father is supportive and loyal.

You might have heard that Our Father in Heaven will lift us up in our time of need. If that's all there were to it we could probably say that God's getting a thumbs up on this thing, but there's more. The thing is God will only sustain and support you if you're following his wishes and desires (i.e. Commandments). If you're not trying your hardest to do what he wants and being loyal to his standards, he'll make you pay. In this life and the next because the plan is you either do it God's way or you can face the consequences.

Instead of the All-powerful Father supporting his children, he calls on his children to validate and support him. Now what kind of father would act that way?

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Heavenly fatherliness #4 - Lending an ear

According to popular wisdom, a good father takes time to listen to his children and have a good, easy, and genuinely interested chat with them.

God's got this one nailed, right? Our Heavenly Father always hears and answers our prayers! He's just sitting by waiting to talk to us, listen to us, and comfort us. He's such a good dad!

Or maybe, if you dismiss the warm, reassuring rhetoric of the LDS Church and actually consider the logistics, the situation starts to smack of pure comedy.

Ok, I know, I know! He's God! He obviously has the means to receive all prayers and hearts' desires, to keep them all in context, to care about even the most mundane and empty of requests and praises, and to do something about them. So let's move on to what we don't know.

We have absolutely no way of knowing God's prayer answering stats. How's he doing? I say no one knows when or how God is answering your prayers, not even our wisest of religious leaders. Go ahead and talk with your trusted spiritual giants and ask about the answering of prayers. The best you'll get is some trite little breakdown of how God sometimes responds right away and sometimes He wants us to wait. It's all very personal depending on what we really truly need. Or maybe he's just busy taking other calls. Leaders and lay people alike realize that getting a good connection to Our Old Man can be challenging to say the least.

We should also consider the possibility that the Father doesn't give two shits about anything we have to say. Let's face it, we can't tell him anything he doesn't already know. On top of that, maybe it's time we recognized that "that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 15:16). So stop praying for your child's health, stop praying for a stable income for you family, stop praying for guidance for your political leaders, stop praying for peace and understanding in the world. It's abominable! Start talking to God more about the stuff that he highly esteems: Himself. What a wonderful father, right?

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Heavenly fatherliness #3 - Coping with emotions

According to popular wisdom, a good father must be able to express his feelings in a healthy, balanced way.

Talk to your typical Mormon and he'll tell you that the Heavenly Father feels love, pity, disappointment, wrath, and maybe a couple of other emotions, and because he's perfect he certainly never behaves badly when in a particular mood.

I say no way. If we take the stories of the Old and New Testaments as representative of God's standard behavior we have to conclude that he's anything but stable. It takes every effort you can muster to keep the Big Man from flying off the handle. Remember when he killed everyone on Earth except Noah and his small family? Remember how he killed Uzzah for trying to be helpful? Remember how he's supposedly responsible for earthquakes and pestilence and famine and all that sort of thing because that's how he expresses his anger toward people who don't obey His Holy Laws? When's the last time you met a father like that and didn't call the cops on him? Or at least think he was a total piece of shit?

But we should back up a bit here because I have a problem with the whole idea that God the Father feels anything at all. How can an omniscient being with a perfect spirit/soul (and a perfect body) be effected by any event or collection of events taking place in the universe that he himself made and utterly controls? If God has known since literally forever everything that we will have done in our lives doesn't that kind of soften the punch, if not totally neutralize it? If God's being is so complete (i.e. perfect) and integral how could anything we ever do move him in any direction, either towards happiness or sadness, peace or violence, contentment or frustration? What exactly is an omnipotent being supposed to be susceptible to?

Whether Our Father's the abusive shithead you read about in Scriptures, or the untouchable self-subsiting One beyond our petty emotions, I can only conclude that he doesn't sound like any dad I'd like to have.

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Heavenly fatherliness #2 - Relating

According to popular wisdom, a good father is a personal, approachable being that his children can talk to, relate to, and trust.

The Mormon take on this is that God loves us perfectly and desperately wants us to take our problems to him and trust in his solutions. We need to develop a personal relationship with our father in heaven through prayer and, because he loves us so much and knows exactly what's best for us, he'll communicate to us what we need to know and give us what we stand in need of. It's very personal. Very tailored to our specific needs.

I just have a few doubts. First off, God is personal only to the extent that each individual invents the god he or she prefers. We could perform the simple experiment of taking a sampling of Christians who maintain they have a personal relationship with God, ask them to describe him, and then compare and contrast. Guess what, they would all describe someone different, even drastically so. Not even all Mormons can agree on what God is like and how we should attempt contact and relate to him.

The idea that we can approach God (through prayer and learning to be like him) also fails to convince me. Let's not forget the typical set up here: God 'calls' upon a select few - almost always men - who are then responsible for relaying God's thoughts to the rest of the world. It's a pretty shitty way of reaching out to one's offspring. If my relationship with my dad were limited to listening to one of my siblings tell me about my dad, I'd be hard pressed to called my old man 'approachable'. "But you can always pray!" you might say, "it's like a phone call, you can talk to Him yourself!" Yeah, about prayer... it's horribly unreliable. 

The consideration of prayer working the way normal interpersonal relations work presents us with a troublesome scenario. Let's say I need to borrow $20 from my biological father. I go to him, ask him for the money, he thinks about it, and then either gives me the money or tells me that he doesn't have cash on hand. If we ask God to help us with money troubles, the best we can hope for is some magical appearance of funds in our bank account or maybe a chance encounter with some loose cash on the street. Imagine your "earthly" father placing a $20 bill for you to run across somewhere along your daily route in answer to your request. It's cute, but bizarre. He should really just be straight forward about the money.

Unfortunately for us God's not a very clear communicator and doesn't always keep his story straight which is why people spend so much time arguing with each other about what God said, what he wants, and how we know that's what he wants. Getting recognizable answers to prayers is about like playing darts in a pitch black stadium without knowing exactly where the dartboard is. Sure you might hit something from time to time that might sound like a dartboard, but was it really? Did God really answer my prayer or am I just being hopeful?

As far as God being a relatable father, I have to say that I have a hard time understanding how anyone can relate to someone whose nature is as highly debated as God's. We are stuck somewhere between believing we are like god in some ways (e.g. physical resemblance, ability to use logic, etc.) and fundamentally different in others (e.g. moral perfection, ability to “see” and comprehend, etc.). And then there's that Isaiah dude (or some other dude) in the Old Testament writing stuff like this: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord” (55:8). It sounds like God's trying to tell us something here about our ability to relate to him...
 
When was the last time you and God had a heart to heart about your thoughts on something like the season finale of your favorite TV show? He was totally shocked too, right? Do you honestly think God gets you when you feel like shit all week because your team lost? Or that God gets embarrassed with you when you have a slip of the tongue during your big presentation at work? Or that God can empathize with you in the slightest when you're so pissed because you're the worst player of your online gaming friends? How can a perfect being relate to any of us mortals in the slightest? I can't help but recall the lyrics from an oldish, kinda country-ish song: "there's nothing he [your father] can give you 'cause he's never once been wrong." God's got nothing for us.

Finally there's trust. You can't trust someone you don't (and can't) know, nor can you really trust someone who can't really understand and empathize with you. Given his record, God doesn't deserve anyone's trust anyway. I mean, the guy's a total sadist sitting up in Heaven looking down on us, watching us suffer and fight, listening to us and only kind of responding to some of us sometimes. It's all a very sick game. God's like those horrible fathers who bait their kids into fighting so they can catch all the fun on film and put it online. Worse dad in the whole universe!

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

The Fridge Profet on leaving one's faith

Here's a great post from the Church of the Fridge. Read it. We thank thee, O God, for the Profet.

Heavenly fatherliness #1 - Sticking around

According to popular wisdom, a good father does not abandon his children.

Mormons like to think that God is always there watching and listening to you. He's never far away even though you might feel alone.

I say bullshit. We can make lists all day of people who claim to have seen god or to have been heard by God but let's be real here: there are no confirmed sightings in the history of humanity, just stories we have to accept on one's word.

Isn't it a little contradictory for us to say that God sent us here alone to test our faith and then claim that God's here too? We might not be banished eternally from Heaven like the evil third, but we are, according to the official story, not allowed back whenever we want. Is being banished all that different from being abandoned? God is very much out of the picture.

The evidence of abandonment is all too obvious if we look at the rampant suffering and chaotic nature of existence. Blame it on Satan if you want, but don't turn around and say God's in control. God's children suffer mercilessly and he is nowhere to be seen, heard, felt, tasted, or smelled.

If you were to walk onto some guys property and see his children starving, dying of sickness, naked, and killing each other, you'd think "holy shit, this jerk's the worst dad in the universe" and immediately call child services. 

*These attributes represent the popular thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father.

Heavenly fatherliness - Is Heavenly Father a good father?

All of my life I was told that God, in addition to being Ruler of the Universe, was also my dad. I was not a mere creation God takes casual interest in, nor could I be compared to an abandoned puppy or a stranger taken under the wing a loving being - I was one of God’s spiritual sons who agreed to be born to earthly parents, live a life of absolute dedication to my Heavenly Father, and then hopefully return to live with him in complete Celestial Glory. I was taught that I could completely trust in God even more than I could trust my earthly father (who fortunately for me turned out to be a very caring and responsible guy) because, while my earthly father would be imperfect, have a limited knowledge and understanding of the Universe, and be only as powerful as your slightly above average human, my Heavenly Father is perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent. So in a nutshell, however much my biological dad wishes for my success and happiness, Heavenly Father wishes for it infinitely more and actually has the power to make me truly and totally happy. True and total happiness, this is the first thing Mormons will explain to you when you ask them what the meaning of life is, but millions of others have grown up viewing life under this same premise and billions more have heard similar conjectures. God is our father and he loves us. He is on our side and chooses to help us. God cares for us just as a father cares for his children. 

Viewing God as a father suggests that we can understand to some extent the thoughts and feelings that motivate his interactions with human beings. And when life gets hard and we start to feel picked on a little too much, viewing God as a knowing and loving father helps us reach the conclusion that everything will be alright and we just have keep trusting in him.

I used to cherish my “divine parentage” with only occasionally acknowledging the problems underlying the Heavenly Father narrative. Even after outgrowing the Mormon faith tradition I would at times revisit the idea that God is somehow the father of humanity and what that would mean for our expectations of God’s behavior toward us. As believers we impose expectations on God. Jesus, for example, taught that human fathers know how to give better gifts than stones, snakes, and scorpions and Heavenly Father knows how to give even better gifts (Matt. 7:9-11; Luke 11:11-13), and consequently we actually expect God to answer, open, and give when we seek, knock, and ask (Matt. 7:7-8; Luke 11:9-10).

This series will touch on a number of characteristics and behaviors of a good father. These attributes represent the popularized (and popularizing) thoughts of Ask Men’s Jullian Marcus, examiner.com’s Tanya Tringali, and Open Talk Magazine’s Glenn Silvestre as per their respective articles on what makes a good father all distilled into the most concise bullet points possible. What makes these authors or their publishers reliable authorities on fatherhood has simply been decided by Google Search. 

Please share your thoughts, unless, of course, you're an asshole.