Despite His Technical Proficiency, God's Soft Skills Pretty Much Suck

If HR conducted a 360-degree review of God, one of my comments would be, "God does not communicate well." Another would be, "Despite listing omnipresence on his resumé, I've never seen God in his cubicle." If he doesn't communicate well, then either he doesn't exist or he isn't interested in communicating clearly with us.

A brief note on my approach: In this blog, I am analyzing religion as well as performing a meta-analysis of religion. That is, I look at the traditional problems of religion, but I'm even more interested in the problems created by the very existence of problems. That's because I'm too busy (lazy) to do much more research than I've already done.

So here's the data.

The Bible has many apparent contradictions. For every apparent contradiction, you may have found an explanation that completely satisfies your intellect. But it is incontrovertible that apparent contradictions exist. I'm not that familiar with the Qur'an, but the internet tells me it has problems, too. (I'm not too concerned about the Vedas or the Buddhavacana. More on that in a later post.)

Even if someone were to blindly and/or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the Bible has apparent contradictions, you have to acknowledge that there are different ways to interpret scripture. Is salvation by grace or by works? Despite your beliefs, it is undeniable that there are verses that support both views (Ephesians 2:8 versus James 2:17). Is salvation activated by some act of our free will, or is our salvation predetermined? Again, I don't care which one you think is right. There are smart people who adamantly defend both positions. Multiple defensible interpretations of scripture demonstrates that God's word can be unclear, opaque, and confusing.

God (if he exists), by definition, has the technical skills to perform His job. Unfortunately, his written communication skills pretty much suck. As a result, he has been passed-over (rightly or wrongly) in many people's God-selection process. Which has got to be tough for the guy who basically invented passing people over.

In defense of God's soft skills, some people point out that He did not write the scriptures. Humans did - humans with suboptimal written communication skills. So the fact that scriptures are unclear and inconsistent indicates that God either (1) has poor written communication skills or (2) delegates poorly. Either way, it's His message, and the final draft is ambiguous and contradictory.

Based on the data above we are led to the following possible conclusions:

• God doesn't exist.
• God created the world but no longer engages with it.
• Our relationship with God is 100% dependent upon and initiated by Him and 0% dependent upon or initiated by us.

Okay. Maybe that last one is a bit overstated. It wouldn't be overstated, however, to say that our relationship with God could be dependent on God to such an extent that the confusion caused by scripture isn't even an issue.

Regardless, all three of those options - atheism, deism, and Calvinism - require the same response from me: nothing. Maybe openness. But mostly nothing.