Like others before me, I wondered how a Supreme Being could possibly care about us human beings. Job asks (7:17-18): “What is man, that you make much of him, that you fix your attention upon him—inspect him every morning, examine him every minute?”
“Lord, what are we to You?”
You are my face onto the world. And onto each other—you, whom I love. I want you to love each other. Christ’s two commandments …
Matthew 22:37-39: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
… are right. They are rooted in the Old Testament. It is hard for Me to love people directly (hard on them, that is). I need people to do it for Me.
It seems that we open the world to God. He experiences the world through us. I remembered French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s argument that, since perception is essentially perspectival—from a vantage point—there is literally no God’s-eye point of view. We are his eyes and ears.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.