by James Coplin

Created on: December 20, 2009   Last Updated: December 22, 2009

If we are God's children and he the custodial parent, it is fortunate there is no celestial Department of Child Services.  There would almost certainly be an investigation.

 "Can you tell me, Mr. Jehovah, why you sat and watched your kids put their finger in the electrical socket and did nothing to stop them?" 

"Well, I warned them; even wrote it all down for them on these big stone tablets and hung it up in the living room were they couldn't miss it . If they don't want to listen to me, I guess that's their Free Will. Nothing I can do about that."

God seems to be the ultimate example of Tough Love.

Or, if, as Samuel Johnson said a man is best known by his works, I wonder if the same can't be said about God. If we are his creations, the pinnacle of his works and created in his image, it certainly should give us all pause. Greed, Vice, Indifference and Cruelty must have been as divine a concept as Selflessness, Virtue, Compassion and Kindness - each necessary to define the other just as one could not know day without the presence of night.  That is the highest example of fine engineering. Whether it shows Love is something else again.

The fact is, the Bible is filled with horrifying deeds done by the Divine Hand that would show up on Nancy Grace. There was Lot handing his daughters over to be raped by the mob to distract them from the Angels. How about the summoning of bears to eat up the children mocking Uriah? Then there was the bet between God and Lucifer using poor Job as a human poker chip - not to mention the greatest example of mass murder ever recorded; the total destruction of Noah's Flood. 

 I know all about the inability to know the mind of God and the infallibility of his Ways. Yet for a being acknowledged to be Merciful, Omnipotent, Omnipresent and the concrete example of compassion and kindness, he seems an extreme disciplinarian. When humans follow this example they are usually not described as loving. They are arrested.

If God does love, it seems to be in a manner unrecognizable to his children. Mere mortals often find our own disobedient and disappointments. Yet though we punish, no matter how they embarrass or even shame us, we love, forgive and even protect them. What parent would even consider something so corporal a punishment as tossing their child in a lake of fire, tortured by demons forever without any chance of parole? This is cruelty on so cosmic a level that it would shame the best

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