Читать книгу When People Speak for God - Henry E. Neufeld - Страница 8

But what does it mean then that our communication is with God? Many people want to find the one solid thing on which they can hang their thoughts and dreams, something that allows them to be sure that they are right. Thus they are comforted by the idea of a perfect communication from a perfect God.

So if God if perfect, why can't he just see to it that we understand perfectly?

Well, he can. There is nothing preventing God from making certain that there is no doubt about his will. But a moment's thinking about your own life and looking around you at the lives of others should be sufficient to convince you that God has not done so.

Nonetheless there are plenty of people who still think God has communicated perfectly, and that we could get it all right if he would just do so. Generally people who think this belong to groups that continuously shrink and splinter, because every disagreement must involve someone who is too stubborn, too stupid, or too demonically controlled to realize their error.

Since the one under the power of demons is not going to admit he is wrong, the group will have to split according to who supports which of the contenders, and they will separate, bemoaning how the devil won again by blinding brother or sister so-and-so's eyes to the obvious truth.

God could also have created us with minds that were unable to incorrectly process data. He would have had to use a somewhat different process, because human evolution is not a tidy thing, and it has not produced a tidy human mind. Our perceptions are easily deceived, and we can be massively disagreeable. We're not even always—or even most frequently—certain of precisely why we made a decision. A couple of times when I was younger I bought a car and then regretted it later. Nonetheless, at the time I thought I was carefully selecting the car and buying it for all the right reasons.

Now I examine more testing data and let my feelings be overcome by actual test results. But there are still many things in my life that are not decided that way.

God chose to make us the way we are, capable of both major feats of learning and major disasters of stupidity, sometimes committed by the same person. Thus until we reach that other plane, we will have disagreements on what God meant, and it is very likely that all of us are wrong on some things.

It's easy to forget, but if you work with communications between devices, you learn right from the start that the speed of a connection is limited by the slower of the two terminals. Now many people, even communications professionals, don't recall the days of slow serial connections. You had hand-shaking to determine what sort of error correction each side of a connection could handle, and then you carried out communications using the best possible set of options.

It is the same way with our communication with God. It's limited not by who he is but by who we are. Any speculations of what God might have done are pretty useless in the face of what he has done!