Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

• Genesis 3:8

“I do not accept glory from human beings, but I know you.  I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts.  I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him.  How can you believe since you accept glory from one another but do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?

• John 5:41-44

“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands.  And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything.  Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else.  From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.  God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.  ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’  As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

• Acts 17:24-28

“Feuerbach suggests that in our yearning for all that is best in humankind — love, compassion, kindness, and so on—we have imagined a being that incorporates all of these qualities in the highest possible degree, and then called it “God.”  Theology (the study of God) is therefore nothing more than anthropology (the study of humanity).  Not only have we deceived ourselves into thinking that a divine being exists, we have also forgotten or forsaken what we are ourselves.  We have lost sight of the fact that these virtues actually exist in humans, not gods.  For this reason we should focus less on heavenly righteousness and more on human justice – it is people in this life, on this Earth, that deserve our attention.”

• Sam Atkinson (senior editor), The Philosophy Book, Big Ideas Simply Explained

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804-1872) says words that might make sense to the general public, but they have no holding power once you apply philosophical scrutiny.  Let’s follow the logic.  Someone cannot comprehend something or they feel hurt that someone took their pet rock from them, so they invent “God” so that “God” can explain the unexplainable and “God” can create a moral standard that says stealing pet rocks is wrong.  Then someone else feels that your “God” does not work for them, so they invent a “God” and so it goes.

But those unexplained events still remain unexplained.  And there is buried deep inside each of us the concept of justice.  Who put the same concept of justice within me and practically everyone that I know?

The argument that we, as humanity, invented a God does not explain that we invented a “God”, but our chief sin is to ignore the God, that Feuerbach thinks we invented and establish ourselves as god.

I like seeing all these videos of dominoes falling, but I am not going to spend days setting them up just to knock them down, yet Feuerbach is keen on trying to convince us of such lunacy.

Maybe, just maybe…

Never mind, the absolute truth is that we seek God because God exists.  God is the Creator of all things and we owe all things to Him.  We seek God because He is real.  We hide from God because we realize our guilt and we know that we do not belong in His presence, yet, we desire His mercy.

And if Feuerbach did not have his head in the sand, he might have seen the error in his logic, but many today have the same problem.  They believe in evolution although it is proven impossible as the origin of mankind.  The concept of millions of years cannot stand scrutiny.  But these fall into the Feuerbach snare.  Let’s make a theory that does not stand up to critical scrutiny to explain a world without God.

Because they do not wish to face the music when God calls them to judgment.  They want to hide as Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden.

When we hide from God when we have done wrong…

When we set ourselves up as a god, thinking we are so great…

Why would we invent a god or God in the first place?

Unless you throw logic out with the bath water, Feuerbach has no solid ground on which to stand.

God is real.  As Paul told the Athenians, He is closer than you think.  And He desires that you seek Him.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.