Make a Plan

We just returned from a walk in the drizzle during which we struck up a conversation with a neighbour on topics ranging from the pandemic to climate change to the invasion of Ukraine to aches and pains. We don't have many conversations these days, so we have to make the most of them when they happen by including everything that comes to mind, like weather and whether the world is going to hell.

In that regard, our friend expressed the traditional view, grounded in 'faith', that we are just acting out God's plan as foretold in prophetic scripture. We hinted that we thought otherwise, but avoided starting WW III by explaining why he was wrong. So this is me with steam blowing out my ears while I explain why he was wrong. You can be my safety valve, or if you think he was right, let's call a truce. My opinion is just my opinion and not worth casualties. You might want to close this page rather than stand by while I drop bombs on a friend's philosophy. On the other hand, if you have the habit of looking beyond ideas to the reality they are meant to describe, this is for you. Just don't pass it along to our neighbour. We have to live here.

I once thought with the 'faithful' that God had everything worked out from beginning to end and was pushing things around with his thoughts to keep us happy according to plan. That was our reality. Back then I was too young or too busy to think it through and discover what it implied. So for me, those ideas once had a place. I am just not there at the moment.

However, traditional wisdom exists because it is useful. So I ask, why is the phrase God's plan so persistent. The answer is not out there beyond the stars; it is in here between the ears and in the pulse and the belly where we experience fear, anxiety, longing, grief, uncertainty, and hope. God's plan is a mystical incantation which may be used to calm the mind. Reason and emotions both have their place, but they need to be managed to prevent a squabble, so we have these meditative tools to keep passion and rationality at peace while we take time out. 

Nothing to worry about. 

God's in charge. 

God's Plan is respite for the troubled mind.

Maybe you think the prophets were telling us what was going to happen for sure instead of what would happen if..., the future conditional. You needn't give up that belief without a fight. So let's see if there is anything in God's plan that is more than mantra?

If you have dipped into my blog elsewhere, you may have read my proposition that the God in "God's plan" is an empty word into which we pour meaning distilled from experience. If we simply trust the insights of the ancestors, we don't get it. God lives in the questions. The answers are up to us and are not quite true (NQT) because the mind uses heuristics that evade complexity. Simple answers are more persuasive. Faith in the answers is unjustified, as becomes apparent when we look at the errors of the ancestors, the atrocities committed in the name of 'faith'. A different sort of faith moves us to continue the search for the unknowable unknown beyond whatever NQT answers present themselves. Let's not repeat the errors of the past.

Some evidence for the NQT assertion. If God is love, the sages have substituted one empty word for another, and we must continue the quest to discover what love means. If God is the Father, that metaphor is loaded with meaning from family life, and God is surely more than a quarrel over household chores or generous welcome for the repentant prodigal while elsewhere millions of innocents are homeless and hungry because of fire, flood, drought or war. If you imagine that God has a plan, ask why an all-knowing intelligence would make up the story we are living, supply us with a mind like God's own, and then insist that using that mind is pointless because what is going to happen has already been decided.

No.
God's Plan is myth dressed up in metaphor.
Don't think it will explain the past,
much less predict the future.
Here and now we rest silent
breathing soothing words, 
God's plan.
God's plan.
God's plan....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzZZZ

Excuse me. I dozed off.
Then, mindful once again,
fill up the words with meaning;
answers for the who and why and when and how.
Perhaps the who is us; 

and the Plan is that we make a plan.
So we need to make a plan.
And whatever we are thinking,
it's NQT,
so we're not done with this.