salt of the earth

I've got random music in my ears, a handful of customer rushes behind me and (I assume) ahead of me, and a shopfront window view of a darkening sky.

It's Thursday morning, somewhere around 11am.

(I'm not sure why I'm starting a blog.)

([But I do have some things to work out.])

God. I mean: Oh, my God or your God or whatever.

([(Whatever, probably.)])

I'm not sure if I believe in God. I've always believed in God and, at the same time, thought I might be wrong in that belief...I'm wrong about a lot of things a lot of the time, so it does stand to reason.

Now I'm fairly certain I don't believe in God as I once did. And, again, I think I might be wrong.

I don't have a hard time believing in the God of the Old Testament. The communities of faith I've been involved in off and on for the past decade haven't focused much on God as he was depicted in these books, a tendency I can understand--it's hard to love this God. He's kind of a jerk. But, from where I'm sitting right now, I find it easier to believe in a God who's distant and wholly focused on advancing his own agenda to the point of cruel indifference to the overwhelming plight of being human, which can be damned hard.

For example, Lot's wife. God didn't just knock her dead or have, you know, a boulder fall on her head. No, he humiliated her in her final moment by rearranging her atomic structure, robbing her of any semblance of humanity, transforming her into salt. Into salt. Cool parlor trick for a deity who controls the carbon that we and everything we can see, taste, touch, smell, and hear are made of--kind of like Three-Card Monty for a being who isn't limited by the laws of physics. But for her husband and children...sheesh, I can't even imagine, can you? One minute your wife or mother is there, running alongside you, and the next she's a pile of salt, already degenerating and blowing across the desert floor. This had to fuck her family up more than a little bit, right? Enough to have an incestuous three-way two nights in a row, maybe? (I guess God didn't mind this too much since they weren't being gay like the people who God just burned alive in their sleep. I guess getting your dad drunk and sleeping with him is okay so long as the sex is heterosexual.)

All the while, Lot's wife is just a shrinking pile of salt out in the middle of nowhere because she glanced back at her house one more time before it turned into a pile of smoking cinders, at her friends as they awoke from their sleep on fire, their lungs filled with smoke and oxygen denied entry into their bloodstream; as they died confused or, if they understood, heartbroken that a deity hated them literally to death because they didn't reproduce and build a nation-army of sons.

Growing up in a Baptist church in Kentucky (i.e., more than a little bit misogynistic), I was taught that Lot's wife was weak and disobedient. But I would look back. You would look back. I mean, all of your stuff is smoking and your neighbors are dying in a bonfire...you would look back in  horror, in sadness, and in regret. You couldn't not look back.

As a kid, I was told the Bible was better than an action movie--that it had more violence, sex, and drama than the pulpiest of R-rated movies and (stage-whispered with the church's panache for conspiratorial propaganda) we were more than allowed  to read this, we were expected  to, rewarded even (some day I'll tell you about AWANA, which is eerily similar to Hilter's youth regime).

As an adult, I look at these stories with horror and utter sadness. I see God drowning every human and terrestrial animal, saving only a handful of each. I see God participating without even a single tsk-tsk in a caste system that was unabashedly racist. I see God telling a father to kill his son and being overjoyed when said father was willing to stab his offspring in the heart, because this meant he was truly a man of God.       

I do not like this God. And yet, I find this God easier to believe in than a Jesus who made the preposterous claim that God is love. Jesus knew about Lot's wife, even referenced her as an example, as cited in Luke. And he still says God is love.

God is love? God has throughout the better part of his magnum opus killed us off for not living up to his expectations. I guess, in light of this, I can buy that the human race--we, the progenitors of the Holocaust, of the holocaust currently happening in Rwanda, of an Iraq war that considers loss of innocent life an acceptable risk--that we were created in God's image. But I don't see a whole lot of love in us.

This is where I am, and I'm terrified of being here--I'm afraid that when I hit "PUBLISH POST," I will turn into a pillar of salt heaped upon a cheap office seat to be found by an unsuspecting customer who's just looking for a cup of iced coffee.