THERE IS NO Heavenly Father

I have earlier in another piece of writing observed that to force personhood and relationality on the Creator (or creative energy/force) would be to set boundaries on the Supreme Being out of which emerge endless misconceptions, faulty assumptions, and parochial understandings leading often to deviance and misbehavior.

Fatherhood is a relational idea and experience that limits the condition to one individual’s involvement in the life/lives of some specific others. The Creator cannot be a father hence in these terms. The Creator is a father of all creation and has no favourites - no favourite species and no favourite individuals or things.

Fathers are expected by virtue and the law to be carers and protectors of their children. They have serious responsibilities relating to their wards. It is natural for a good, moral, and responsible father to selflessly love and protect his children. It is not natural for a good, moral, and responsible father to sit in judgement on his children and hurt and torture them for any wrongs on their part.

God as father should do better than earthly fathers; but as we can see with grinding poverty in Africa and the woes of war in Ukraine, God as father does not stand up worthily to that test. Even in religion, some of God's ignoble actions can be explained off as required by his sense of morality and perfection. But those actions fail the test of normative fatherhood.

The Creator does good most of the time; but also does terribly bad things at least some time. Yet the Creator cannot be held responsible for the bad that happens and complaining against the Creator for the bad that happens will have no consequence for the Creator. The Creator cannot be appealed against and there is no court in the world that can take punitive action against the Creator for not behaving like a responsible, sane, and moral father. That’s another big reason why the Creator cannot be thought of as a father.

The Creator on the other hand is best known from what happens in the endless expanse of reality that surrounds us. If the Creator is responsible for human personhood, that same Creator is also responsible for the limitless and mind-boggling variety of impersonal beings and inanimate objects in the ever-expanding material realm out there. Religion superfluously determines that humans were created in the image of the Creator, and totally ignores the simultaneous claim of nonhuman beings and things to also be created in the image of the Creator. Everyone and everything must have resemblance to the life and being of the Creator without which it makes no sense to be created by the Creator. This means that if the Creator is a person the religious can pray to and it makes complete sense to them, the Creator must also be as impersonal and out of reach as Sagittarius A* to scientists and rationalists and must equally make complete sense to them.

From the amoeba and the atom to the largest and most complex beings and inanimate objects there are in the realm of material reality there is one factor that ascertains continuation and resists chaos and sudden death or destruction. That one factor is ORDER that works on pre-established principles. These principles are material, metaphysical, moral, and some may contend, spiritual/mystical/mental/psychic. It is the order that is laid to the functioning of all reality which gives sense to happenings and interestingly also brings to life faith in a God.

To understand the ORDER or decorum that is laid to all life is wisdom and to practice it results more often than not, in virtue. Complying with the ORDER that is laid down for all being is what life, society, and even the Creator (or God) are likely to require of us humans in this life.

'The mysterious Creator has revealed to all creation what goodness is. It is goodness which the Creator expects from creation. And goodness can be expressed through a just/righteous life, being merciful and forgiving, and being conscious of, accountable to, and humble before the Source of all being.' - Micah 6:8 in the Bible (my version of the verse)