Wrestling with angels, God, scriptures, atheists, ourselves...

Poetic Outlaws
We create gods and struggle
with them, and they
bless us.
~ Hermann Hesse

Elizabeth

“The rabbis have a metaphor for this wrestling with the text: The story of Jacob wrestling the angel in Genesis 32. He struggles, and it is exhausting and tiring, and in the end his hip is injured. It hurts. And he walks away limping. Because when you wrestle with the text, you walk away limping.

And some people have no limp, because they haven’t wrestled. But the ones limping have had an experience with the living God.”

~ Rob Bell

Chuck

I have s limp, but I’ve never wrestled with text nor angels. It was spinal stenosis that robbed me of my youthful gait.

Sloan Bashinsky

A problem for me with this post is the meme, which relates to an Old Testament report of a man and an angel, which I am not sure jives with the Hesse quote. Based on his books, Hesse seemed to be a mystic. As such, he had unconventional views of religions and gods. Did you read his novel, Siddhartha?

Jacob wrestled with the angel, who cheated to win. Jacob came away with a limp in his gait, which became a badge for someone having wrestled with God, or an angel, and survived,and perhaps become like Jacob.

I imagine wrestling with the text is about trying to grok that and other passages in the scriptures, what do they really mean, how do they apply to someone wrestling with the texts?

As for creating gods, that is not what that passage is about. First, an angel is not a god, but is a supernatural being. You'd probably have to have lived in my skin, or in the skin of someone like me, who has been confronted, steered, rebuked, rescued, etc. by angels for decades, to not think I'm making it up, or am nuts, or whatever.

Something, call it what you like, is there, which is beyond human comprehension, to which the angels named in the Bible are allegiant. Demons also exist, and that to which they answer, which I call Lucifer. I've had experiences with them, as well. Head on, and indirectly, in spirit sensations and in their influence on people unaware of the influence in most cases.

For a very long time, people have had gods they worshiped, feared, loved, etc. And, yes, those gods were to some or a greater degree created in those people's own but enhanced image.

Yet, as I said above, there is something there, which is beyond human comprehension. I know this for a fact, but I'd be nuts if I thought I could prove it to anyone else. I have known people in similar predicament to my own. Strangners in a strange land might describe us pretty well.

Poetic Outlaws

“The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” 

― Martin Buber

Sloan Bashinsky

For some time now, I've said, if there were no God (or whatever we wish to call what started everything), then that topic would never come up.
I have told Christians that what a person believes is irrelevant, compared to how a person behaves. An atheist, for example, can be much closer to God and Jesus, than a Christian, without ever admitting either exist. 
On this I wager my life and my soul. Anyone, atheist or not, living in my skin since early 1987, would know for a fact that what I was raised to call God exists, and angels and demons and the Devil, too. And ETs, as well. And other sentient beings not recognized by human science and religions. 

I'd be nuts, though, if I thought I could convince anyone about that, who has not had his/her own similar experiences.

E Kay

Spirituality is a relationship with the divine, Religion is crowd control.

Norman

E Kay YES!

Sloan Bashinsky

E Kay Amen

Chris

the divine is also an illusion. ask the dog eating his own shit

E Kay

Chris Ok to each his own.

Liz

Chris 

Sounds like a perfect epitaph for you.

Sloan Bashinsky

Chris, if you lived in my skin, or the skins of some other people I have known, you would have a very different view. Meanwhile, dog spelled backward is? 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com