Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Answering Oleuanna.

Over the weekend, I received quite a few emails from blogcatalog that this or that blogger had invited me to become "friends"........ OK, sure, why not?

Naturally, then, a portion of the weekend was spent looking at the work of these bloggers. As it turned out, being adventurous, I looked at a few blogs belonging to folks who had visited the ones I was reading.

That was how I came across a blogger called Oleuanna and her blog of the same name. In her profile, she lists Scotland as her home. In describing herself, she writes, "There really isn't enough boxes..." [sic]
Her interests include "Laughing,shouting,politics,poetry,art,revolucion,Sancerre,human rights,no ism,or ist,in sight!,anti politics,anti religion,damn veggie,lover of the Gaia".

I read a few of her posts, but the one that caught my interest was the one entitled Make your deities case here !!
At the beginning of that post, she writes,"As I can’t write a serious piece on anyones god and lacking one myself, I thought it would be easier to throw it out for discussion".
Most of that post deals with her disdain for Catholicism stemming from her first hand experiences with the Church and Her teachings.

I'm not going to address her opinion of the Catholic Church. Most of her comments on the Church come from her personal life; I have no way of knowing what actually happened to her in childhood.

I am willing, however, to address the last bit of that post- where she asks;
"So just out of curiosity if you do or don’t support a deity I still would be interested in your opinion. What is a God?"
She goes on to list eight attributes that God might possess [ Omnipotent - Omnibenevolent -Omniscient - The Creator - The Sustainer - Perfectly Free - Eternally Existing - A Personal God ] and asks that we "choose one or more and describe why you think this."

I found the idea of placing my thoughts on the subject in a comment box too limiting. I need the space of my own blog to answer her.

I would say that God does indeed possess the eight attributes she listed; but God is much, much more than these eight. I could go on and list eight or eighty more - however, in doing so, I could not begin to give an accurate and full description of God.

God is beyond our comprehension. Our words can only limit the glory that God is.

All of us seek God.....and God has provided means for us to reach Him. The problem is on our end. We are incapable of understanding fully what He is trying to say to us. There are more than a few religions that are useful in our struggle. From my perspective, none do this better than the Roman Catholic Church.
It is only within the Church that we can received God's most precious gift to us - the body and blood of Christ present in the Eucharist.
Also within the Church are countless elements that can help us to follow the way God has provided. A few examples of these elements include (but are not limited to) Confession, Lent, the Rosary and daily prayer.

Still, many religions contain some elements of salvation embedded in their teachings and as someone once said to me, "Being a something is better than being a nothing".

From what I've read on her blog, I doubt that I could ever change Oleuanna's view of God. As she put it, she "graduated and went on to have a great life afterwards, mainly involving that of higher education, drinking sex and drugs a plenty."
No, this isn't an attempt to change her mind. She asked for other opinions and this is mine.

1 comment:

Larry Denninger said...

Yeah, blogs are a difficult forum to be persuasive. We sit behind our monitors and type words that may or may not reflect who we really are.

That being said, from what you wrote about Oleuanna, I get the sense she is raging against the night, because she on a deep, somewhat subconscious level, she knows that her life of higher education, drugs, drinking and sex (see how much she has to "experience" in order to make up for her disbelief?) are not providing the fulfillment she seeks.

Your answer is a great one.

Happy Thanksgiving!