God as a communicator
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- Published on Wednesday, 08 February 2012 07:10
- Written by John Draper
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The Bible is supposed to be a communication from God - so is the Qur'an. God is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent. So why are his communications so incompetent? There are no doubt some parts of his books which are positive - they include sentences here and there that are good moral teaching. They also can be taken as lyrically and mystically inspirational if you take the overall impact. That means they are good literature. The problem is that they are also supposed to include a message from god; they are supposed to be telling us what god wants us to believe and how we should behave. Both the Bible and the Qur'an are presented to the world as recording communication from God - they are God's marketing output if you will. So looking at this communication, how well did he do?
The way to judge any communication is look at how it was received. A classic way to know if your message is understood is to ask the recipient to repeat it back to you in their own words. Using that method shows that God is a pitiful communicator. There are countless religions, cults and sects who have all heard God differently. Then every individual hears their priest, pastor, imam or rabbi differently, or they even reject parts of what they hear. If God was omniscient and omnipotent, he knew this would be the result so why did he let that happen? As Robert G. Ingersoll said: "Every (Christian) sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed His will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning. About the meaning of this book, called a revelation, there have been ages of war and centuries of sword and flame. If written by an infinite God, He must have known that these results must follow; and thus knowing, He must be responsible for all" [More on Ingersoll here]
Surely god knows how to communicate with his creation. Is he miscommunicating intentionally so as to not make it hard to claim he gave us free will? Is he saying that we are choosing to hear his message incorrectly? Why bother communicating at all if the intent is to confuse?
Of course many religions say that the holy books are not the only way God communicates - he can be "felt" though prayers and meditation. But the same arguments apply - in fact it's worse since there is so much ambiguity - you can simply believe whatever turns your crank.
The musical "Jesus Christ, Superstar" has lyrics which ask: "You'd have managed better, If you'd had it planned, Now why'd you choose such a backward time, And such a strange land? If you'd come today, You could have reached the whole nation, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication, Don't you get me wrong". A good question. Of all the centuries to come to earth to communicate a message - why then? And then when it got written down - supposedly inspired by God - why not make it clear what the message was?
OK, so God is omniscient and omnipotent but this does not include communicating skills. I guess if you are one of a kind, you don't need to know how to communicate to anyone.
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2012-02-08 15:46:22 | manfred - clarity is the key
When you say "communicator" it implies that the subject messages are clear and understood by all parties to the communication. If that is not the case, then "we have a failure to communicate" (famous movie line). That would basically disqualify the message creator as a "communicator" and in the case of any of the religious books, makes them failures in communication, reclassifying them as works of fiction, rather than communications.
Yes, its about time for God to deliver an updated modern version of the bible. But why did he leave us guessing what he really meant for over 2000 years? We are obviously of very little importance to him!