surely

I can talk all day about my religious upbringing, my unwilling indoctrination in the Christian faith. I understand that my involvement at church, my Christian education, and my extended family's heavily religious influence all predispose me to a kind of "God burnout," but I've been burnt out on God and church for many years and still never lost my faith in what I perceived to be a greater reality. Up until a few months ago, I still tried to pray every day and, anytime my back was to the wall, my eyes went upward to beseech God for help.

What put me off of God was the personal realization that two cornerstone, Biblical descriptions of God are incompatible. I've been overlooking bothersome and paradoxical scripture for many years, became comfortable with adopting a laissez-faire attitude that was necessary for me to be able to sustain an anemic faith in the words of a book that didn't make a lick of sense. 

I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine the other day about his experience deconverting from Christianity and he said something that's really stuck with me: He said that the first step for him was realizing that God was not good.  

"Goodness" isn't really a term that needs defining--we instinctively know what's "good." We use the term every day, from wishing people to have a "good day" to referring to an acquaintance with the reassuring term "good dude." When I die, somebody will undoubtedly sum up my existence by saying, "He was a good man," despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

If I killed 2,476,633 people, would you--could you--call me good? Is there a "greater good" that could justify this?

The Psalmist, like all the writers in the Bible, sure thought God was good. "Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; for His lovingkindness is everlasting,"  he says (Psalms 107:1). Elsewhere he says, "How great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast stored up for those who fear Thee, which Thou hast wrought for those who take refuge in Thee, before the sons of men!" (31:19). 

You can't really blame people for thinking this cosmic mass murderer was good, though, right? Because God himself constantly declares himself to be such, saying to Moses, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion” (Exodus 33:19).

So that's goodness. (Yeesh.)

The other cornerstone belief is of an omnipotent God, a belief that that God is all-powerful ("almighty" is the preferred Biblical term) and, unlike we fallen mortals, not bound by the laws of physics. He can make a body of water split down the middle to create a path; he can make bread and fish multiply by (I guess) mitosis and make boring water turn into AWESOME wine; he can make a virgin deliver a perfectly healthy little boy.  

So, tell me this--if God is good and God can do anything, why the fuck does everything suck so bad? I mean, really. God split the sea in two when the Israelites didn't have a boat, but he doesn't raise a hand to stop Hitler from slaughtering 6 million descendants of these boatless 4 million? He feeds 5 thousand people so that they don't have to stop gazing upon him in awe and go get dinner, but there are currently 49.1 million people living in food insecure households in the United States, one of the richest nations in the world. God chooses pregnancy as a means for the miraculous birth of his son, but my precious, innocent daughter was the 1 in 1,000 of babies that was born with a very specific fatal birth defect that robbed her of any chance of life.

A little bit of intervention isn't too much to ask, is it?

I've gone back and forth: God is good but not omnipotent, so there are things he wants to do but cannot and this breaks his good heart; or God is omnipotent but not good, so the plight of mid-century European Jews or modern-day Africans don't really concern him too much. But the Bible doesn't tell us to believe one or the other--we're told God is good, and God is Almighty. And I just have to throw up my hands and cry "bullshit," because, in failing to be both, he convinces me that he is neither...that he just plain isn't.