If God is real and good and powerful, why won’t God fucking do something?

This is the question, more than any other, that unravelled the very last thread of my theistic belief.

Death and life and good and evil are locked in a chaotic equillibrium that tumbles onward but doesn’t necessarily bend toward justice, and almost certainly ends in the annihilation of all things.

The existence of a loving, active, all-powerful Creator of the world (God) is not impossible to believe, but it is implausible.

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If God is the one who created this whole system, wrote the laws of nature that are the conditions for all that exists, the fact (or illusion) of human free will is not enough to absolve God of the guilt for the reality that exists within the world God created.

When I look at the world as it is, it seems to reveal a God who is not loving, not active, not originator, or not existent at all.

The world is bathed in the absence of the God I once sought.

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Some forms of faith demand the denial of our existential reality, believing without seeing.

But it is not a moral virtue (faith) to insist against all evidence that the world is other than what it reveals itself to be.

If we persist in believing the implausible, rebelling against the evidence of reality as we encounter it, what is belief founded on at all other than our own longing?

If we insist that that the world is that which we long for it to be (created by a loving God), not what it actually is, on what foundation do we ground our existence other than our own implausible hope?

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It is not faithfulness to believe the implausible only because we really wish it were so.

This is idolatry. This is making God in the image of our longings.

My faith calls me to bow in humility before the world as it is, not as i wished or hoped it would be.

As a seeing, feeling, thinking, learning, conscious being who exists in this world, I cannot in good faith claim that this is a world made by a loving, all-powerful Creator.

It’s an amazing, intricate, world full of suffering and death.

It’s not enough.

But it’s all we have.

It is miraculous all the same.