The Divine Playwright.

[jackofallgeeks]

So I was talking to Cindy today. And at one point she mentioned having a discussion about depression with one of her other friends, and her friends said, "you know why you get depressed? Because you're not doing God's Will. Because there's something you should be doing and you're not." And Cindy's reply was, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Duh."

And I was thinking, "No. No it doesn't."

And this highlights a significant difference between myself and a good number of the people who go to Steubenville and Christendom and the like. Put simply, I don't have 'practical' faith, for lack of a better word. Maybe 'trust in God,' is better. I believe in God and Jesus and the Resurrection, Heaven and Hell and salvation. I believe that God has made us for a purpose and generally has our best in mind.

But from there I get a bit Deistic. At the end of the day, it's what you do with your life that matters. I don't believe God has every day of our lives, yet alone every action, scripted out from here until eternity. I don't even believe that God will guarantee your life will be as it ought to be: people fail. People are miserable. It happens.

What I really don't like about the above, "you get depressed because you aren't doung God's Will," it that t leads itself so easily to being over-scrupulous about things. How can you know God's Will? Can can you be sure you're doing it? If you're depressed, but you've been doing everything 'right,' then what?

I do believe in God, and that we have a purpose, and I'm even pretty sure that he does take a hand in things now and again -- I don't think he's just watching his clockwork reality wind down. But I also don't think we're meant to run like robots according to some divine script we aren't allowed to read. You get depressed because there are sad things you can't get over, or because stress is tearing at you, or because you're biologic chemistry is off. Life is ambiguous. The best you can do is to do the best you know. To be a good person and do what's right, as well as you can with what you have and know.

As for my lack of faith, which I do think is a failing in certain respects, we can discuss that another time.

Comments

[tzohekiti.livejournal.com]

Dear shit that child needs to read "Why Good Things Happen To Good People"...

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Lest you embarrass yourself or hurt someone's feelings, she can read this as easily as you can.

That book, though, sounds like something I might be interested in reading.

[tzohekiti.livejournal.com]

It just rubs me the wrong way when someone blames the fact that something goes wrong on god. Do you explain a small childs illness by saying that the child wasn't doing god's word?

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

Some people might, which as I noted in my reply to Jenny bugs me, too. I don't believe God is passive-aggressive.

[metis2be.livejournal.com]

Her belief in that can be a good thing. If she is thinking she's not doing what god intended for her, it might be inspiration to pull herself out of a rut and change what's making her depressed.

Problem is, that only works on some forms of depression. My relationship with Joel made me horribly depressed, and that belief may have made me end my relationship with him earlier. Then again, I get depressed every fall when the weather changes, but moving to florida and saying it's gods will isn't the solution.

I have to say, very few things make me as angry as when people such as politicians say that god spoke to them and told them what to do. As an athiest it angers me that people will try to weild their religion to suit their own desires, but on a practical level I find it unbelievably arrogent that they think an all powerful being would waste its time telling them how to design foreign policy.

I think the best belief structure has to do with the fact that if God's all knowing, it's not possible for humans to understand its wills and desires.

And if you think about it, how boring would a world be if you controlled all aspects of it?

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

This is all true. Having faith can be a good thing; a study found that believing in "one true-love" or a soulmate (something else I don't believe in) makes breakups easier because "it wasn't meant to be." And I do consider my lack of faith to be something of a failing, as noted above.

I think it's rather arrogant and presumptuous to imagine that anyone can really know even the smallest part of God's plan. Perhaps we can make educated guesses -- I'd be really surprised if I wasn't meant to have a family -- but more often than not I can't be sure of what I intend, let alone what He might. And it very well may be that my strong desire to have a family is just another tool by which someone else's life is impacted for the better; that I have a family of my own or not may be immaterial, or it may be that I'm best with the abstract notion of a family and putting that in perspective for others rather than having one of my own, and all the practical stickiness that entails. (I don't really believe that, but I wouldn't really be surprised if I was surprised).

You know Cruxshadows, right? You know the song "Helen"? There's a mix of it (on Shadowbox or something) with the line "Everything in life has a purpose, everything you do has meaning in the world. everything in life has a purpose; sometimes that purpose is somebody else." I think that's something to really sit and think about.

And really? I think what bothers me most about the Divine playwright idea is that it pretty much denies human free will. I mean, I guess it doesn't, but it turns it from being actual free will into a kind of passive-aggressive divine coercion. "Oh, sure, you can do whatever you want, but if you don't play by my rules, well, let's just say you won't be happy." Momentarily putting aside philosophical arguments about what 'happy' means, 'good' people can be miserable, and 'bad' people can be happy. Even the Bible, should we resort to that, has the story a Job, a man who did everything 'right' but who had a miserable life -- arguably because if he hadn't had a miserable life he wouldn't have had the opportunity to do everything right, but that bit is my own speculation.

The world is much more complicated and complex than black and white. I do think that, in the end, He does what's best for us, even though that may very often not be what we want, or think we want, or whatever.

I think I'm rambling.

[xenu.livejournal.com]

I also don't think we're meant to run like robots according to some divine script we aren't allowed to read.

For some reason that sentence is really really beautiful to me right now.

What I believe is this: we can not define the undefinable (and to me, this whole cosmic mishmosh is just that) but we can have a damned good time with the pieces we DO manage to decipher, even if we're wrong.

And even though I'm closer to what we might call a skeptical agnostic (or perhaps an open-minded atheist), sometimes everything does seem a bit too beautiful to be happy coincidence. Then again, perhaps that is exactly why the world is so heartbreakingly beautiful.

From the perspective of Cindy

[abbasangel35.livejournal.com]

I have depression and take medicine for it. I actually didn't have any depressing thoughts (which had never happened before) for a few weeks before this. I've been trying to listen to God more closely, because I don't even know who I am, or what I'm supposed to do with my life. Why it made sense that I was depressed because I didn't listen to God is because I was supposed to tell someone something, but didn't because of something they said which made me depressed.
Being depressed, made me even more depressed. Plus, I was depressed about something I didnt want to be depressed about, which made me even more depressed. I didnt want to be depressed anymore. I hate being depressed so I wanted to get out of it. When my friend said that, it made sense to me, and so I told the person the thing I was supposed to tell them, and I'm out of my depressive state.
Thank you.