God: More Secrets Revealed
I have to warn you, though: the kid's a bit of a serious chap, and can take you so far down the rabbit hole, you'll be scratching your hindquarters and begging for a carrot.
THE KID: I'm mad.
ME: What are you mad about?
THE KID: I don't remember.
A pause.
THE KID: I'm staying mad forever.
ME: How very God-like of you.
THE KID: Are you telling on God?!? That's not fair!
ME: It's not fair?
THE KID: Don't say that.
ME: Why not?
THE KID: Only kids can say that. Not humans.
Now, you're probably way ahead of me and don't need any kind of explanation, but I like to think with my fingers, so here's what I'm guessing the kid was saying.
I, his father, introduced God into the conversation by making a wry comment on one of the implications of the concept of an unchanging God that is posited by the Judeo-Christian worldview. To wit, that an unchanging God who gets angry sometimes must therefore always be angry.
Now, it's a complex and confusing point, about which theologians and philosophers have written reams of dense, nearly impenetrable prose; but what I want you to see here is how quickly and cuttingly the kid reminded me that it is foolish for a man to propose to speak for God at all. "Are you telling on God?" he asked, "That's not fair!"
He didn't stop there, though. My son - that wisest confounder of the the wise - went on to subtly suggest (I think - I'm a human, so I'm a little slow) that it is only children who have the spiritual grace, humility, and uncluttered reason to have the right to say anything about God's nature - to actually talk meaningfully about God at all. My son, I'm beginning think, would probably be aligned somewhat to a Kierkegaardian mode of thought... if that weren't such a human thing to do.
I never did find out what he was mad about, though. Probably the Republican primaries.
Yes we very quickly and thoroughly teach our children to be mad - just like us in our dreadful "sanity".
ReplyDeleteThe sins of the fathers are very quickly visited or molded into the bodies of our children. They thus very quickly become stiff and rigid like us in our dreadful "sanity".
http://www.dabase.org/2armP1.htm#ch2
http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/touch.htm
The antidote to all of that:
http://www.dabase.org/happytxt.htm
http://www.dabase.org/children.htm
In case anyone is curious, the person to whom the above anonymous commenter refers and links every time he/she comments on my blog, is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adi_Da
ReplyDeleteEven though this Adi Da Samraj guy (or Bubba Free Johan, Da Love-Ananda, Franklin Albert Jones, etc), is not at all my thing, I am certainly not here to police out comments I don't jive with. Y'all are of course free to check it out, if you want.