Years ago when I read The Strain trilogy, its authors posited that God and DNA were synonymous, that God was found in the proteins that direct the development or perversion of living cells. That idea struck me with significant force and has worked its way into my understanding of God and how He functions. (Please forgive my use of the masculine pronoun. I am limited by the English language.)
God truly is in everything. He is the energy that makes stars burn and galaxies spin. He is mitochondria. He is chlorophyll. He is the volcanic eruption. He is the bond between two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. He is our intuition. He is the wind.
I am contemplating what this means when it is said that God's wrath will destroy nations. If prophecies of the brutal subjugation and destruction of the great Native American nations are to be believed, then God was, indeed, with the Europeans, but it wasn't because of their virtue or their professed religion that they conquered. It was because they carried God with them in the form of microbes. Charles Mann asserts in Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491 that it was smallpox, anthrax, measles, and other diseases that decimated the Native American populations, allowing Pizarro, Cortes, and the other conquerors to overcome them. Does that mean God sometimes destroys basically innocent people? It certainly sounds like something you'd hear in the Old Testament, doesn't it? Perhaps that explains the dichotomy of the biblical God. Perhaps how we face this aspect of God is an important factor in the health of our souls, or whatever you choose to call that which enlivens our physical selves.
No comments:
Post a Comment