Providence by Daniel Quinn

Author:Daniel Quinn [Quinn, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Thought, Body; Mind & Spirit, Novelists; American, General, Literary, Religion, Civilization, Spiritual Life, Biography & Autobiography, Human Ecology, Fiction, Theology
ISBN: 9780553375497
Publisher: Bantam

What the priest had done with his casual remark about rules was to show me that the rock of papal primacy was standing in a desert. According to Peter and his successors, divorce and remarriage were forbidden, no two ways about it. What the priest had said was: Yes, you're right, this is certainly the rule, but... maybe rules don't matter all that much.

Now this priest was obviously not speaking ex cathedra. The Church wasn't revising its estimate of the importance of rules--hardly. According to the fundamental notions of the Church, forbidding and permitting is what it's all about, and Jesus himself made this crystal clear in his directive to Peter. And it isn't just a little part. If you look at that passage in Matthew, you'll see it's the whole job description. Now I had to compare this priest with the God who had conceived of this new dispensation. It took about ten seconds to see that I liked and admired this priest a whole hell of a lot better than I liked and admired this God. What kind of God is it who worries more about rules than about people? I didn't doubt that this God existed, I simply doubted that he deserved my allegiance. Was he seriously proposing to send me to hell for eternity if I remarried? If yes, he was a monster. If no, he was a liar. Either way, as I saw it then and today, he deserves nothing but my contempt...

Yes, this is a question that has been posed in various ways by many people. Why didn't I turn to some denomination in which divorce and remarriage is countenanced? This misses the point. My quarrel was not with the rules but with God. Do the Episcopalians worship a different God from the Catholics? Do the Lutherans worship a different God from the Catholics? There's no doubt about the answer to that one. No one would disagree: They all worship the same God. What separates and distinguishes these sects is not the God they worship but their take on what he permits and what he forbids. The issue is always rules, whether it's strict rules, lenient rules, or even no rules at all. If you're gay, you can join this denomination because, according to them, being gay is permitted. If you believe women have a right to abort an unwanted child, you'd better not join this denomination, because, according to them, abortion is definitely forbidden except in rare cases.

No, I hadn't the slightest interest in shopping around for a denomination with rules that suited the way I wanted to live. I turned my back on that God entirely and have never missed him for a single moment...

I understand the urgency of that question, and we'll definitely get to it eventually. All I can say right now is that I didn't say, "There is no God." What I said was, "If there is a God and he's the way the Christians say he is, then I renounce him.

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