I appreciate the responses! You needn't worry about disturbing my faith, but I do appreciate some dialogue. It definitely seems to me that your understanding of the faith is incomplete, so I'll respond to your points and questions further and perhaps we can have further productive discussion, though I certainly don't claim to know all the answers.
1. Regarding women and men being equal, why is it that being clergy is the criterion for equality? That is a rather arbitrary measuring stick to choose.
2. Man is free today to choose God and reject Satan's influence, and if everyone did that, that would indeed bring about the Kingdom of Heaven on earth; I totally agree with that assessment. The thing is, even though we could choose God, we still don't, so here we are.
3. It doesn't follow logically that, just because God is omnipotent, He would have no reason to be saddened at the choices of the free beings He created. If He wants us to act freely, and we do stupid stuff despite all His help towards the good, well, just making us be good would override our freedom and kind of defeat the whole point. Evil exists because God respects our freedom (and that of the angels, too, they were created as free, rational beings).
4. As I said above, if God wills us to be free beings, then that means He allows us to choose evil, and, of course, evil will bring about suffering. God could eliminate suffering, but that would also eliminate freedom. We're all on Nostr, so I'd imagine we all agree that freedom is pretty high on the hierarchy of values. Is allowing freedom worth it if the possibility of evil is a consequence?
I guess a question is, if you were God, what would you do differently? You want human beings to be free, but they abuse that freedom by cutting themselves off from your friendship and doing all manner of unspeakable evil to each other. Sure, you can repair all that evil, but that undoes the whole work of creating free beings in your own image in the first place; coerced love is no love at all.
As I said before, the thing God does is He suffers with us. If you can't fix a problem, sometimes the next best thing is just solidarity. Maybe that's not satisfying to you right now, but I'd challenge you to come up with anything better.
I believe that God wills the salvation and eternal happiness of every person, but He's not going to force it on us. The thing is, though, if we reject God in favor of our own devices, we tend to drag ourselves down even to the point of creating Hell on earth, and human history is more than sufficient proof of that.
It seems that you're really mad at God, or at least of some caricature of God. You're approaching it as a skeptic, and I'm answering as best I can by trying to at least provide a more complete picture of what the Church really professes. I don't expect to change you're mind, but I do hope we can come away understanding each other's positions better, at least.
Oh this is one of my favorites! I haven't heard this recording before, though. The virtuosity is incredible.
Do you do self-examination to see how you might become a better person?
That's a pretty core part of my daily prayer.
It sounds like, simply put, you're creating stress in your body to weed out distractions, and you use the time to collect your thoughts for the day.
Do you have an end-of-day routine as well?
A few responses:
1. Why do you say God "half-assed" a companion for Adam in Eve? How is another being with whom Adam can create new life in love an afterthought? We look for companions like ourselves. In the Garden, Adam had no companions like to himself, so God creates for him another human being like himself, but also free and distinct. Eve could give Adam what no animal could give: the love of an equal.
2. Genesis makes it clear that man is created in God's image. What is God? God freely creates the world and populates it with creatures. So if man is created in God's image, then man must also be free to create and govern. Man participates in creation most fundamentally by creating children (new life) and bringing it forth into the world; and, unlike the animals, man can freely choose whether or not to mate and bring forth offspring. Likewise, Adam is put in the garden to cultivate it, with a command to "fill the earth and subdue it," so man is given authority to govern the created world. Thus, we have man, like an echo of God in miniature, able to freely create and govern.
3. Going back to point 1, we look for beings like ourselves to love. God created us as beings like Himself (as like as a creature can be to its Creator), and invites us to loving relationship with Him. That's why Adam's sin was so devastating: Adam was given authority over all the earth so that he could be a friend to God, and he rejected that friendship by breaking the trust God had given him. Yes, Lucifer was plotting against man from the beginning, but Adam was free to reject Lucifer's temptation and maintain his relationship with God just as much as he was free to listen to Lucifer and break that divine friendship. Ever since, Lucifer only has power over the earth because Adam, to whom the earth was given, abdicated that authority.
4. God doesn't just sit back "sipping margaritas on the shores of Heaven," nor does He stay aloof from us as if we are too soiled and broken to be worth His notice. That's the whole Good News of the Gospel. God literally becomes one of us in Jesus, subjecting Himself to the chaotic, broken creation left in the wake of Adam's abdication, and lets us mock, beat, and kill Him. God is clearly not hands-off, nor does Jesus sit back waiting for us to "kiss the contrived ring." He's right here in the muck suffering with us.
So yeah, life is pretty miserable, but God joins us in the misery and still tries to restore that friendship that Adam lost.
Perhaps your past experience with Christianity overemphasized God as Judge, but there's a lot more to it, that's the whole point of the Gospel.
Not trying to proselytize, just curious.
Can you go more into what that practice looks like for you? What do you do, and what are the effects?
I'm a big fan of the Hours. Morning and Evening or Night Prayer are core to my daily routine.
Well I'm curious then. What makes you content with mindfulness meditation? Why wouldn't you feel the need to invite God into that?
I've heard St. Francis de Sales' "Introduction to the Devout Life" is an excellent manual for getting started in the spiritual life.
I always find structure to be super helpful in maintaining a habit of prayer, so praying with the Psalms or reading meditations and letting that guide my prayer time is super helpful.
Do you have any go-to practices? There is so much Christian tradition around prayer, there's a method for everyone.
I'd love to have a conversation about these topics if you'll refrain from casting aspersions about undiagnosed psychological problems.
If we're both in pursuit of truth, let's explore that together.
Which goes back to the point about mindfulness meditation. But some would say the meditation works fine, so why bring God into it?
I don't think it occurs to anyone, but when someone mentions it, a lightbulb goes off.
I've never seen any dramatically miraculous response to prayer. But there have been many times I was sure a prayer had been answered.
People who haven't experienced that, though, have a hard time grasping the concept. I think proper self-examination can help us to see the effects of grace, but it is a sense that has to be developed by practice.
So how to we encourage people we know to begin that practice?
Prayer is asking God for things we want, but it's also asking God to show us what we should want.
Christianity is very particularly—Jesus died for each of us individually—so generalizations don't usually work.
Really entering into prayer requires one to develop a deep knowledge of self.
In retrospect I can often see how a situation or series of events unfolded in such a way as to give me an opportunity to develop virtue, or have an important conversation, or learn something, and I see that as an answer to prayer.
Prayer doesn't always do anything, though, nor should it. It's simply communicating with God, and the most important part of that is aligning ourselves with what He wants for us.