I’ve been thinking about the idea of promises attributed to God in different religions—promises about justice, protection, answered prayers, or rewards for faith and obedience.
What I find difficult is that many of these promises don’t seem to be fulfilled in real life. Sincere believers pray, follow the rules, and still experience suffering, injustice, or silence. This raises a question for me: if these promises come from a perfect and all-powerful being, why do they so often appear unmet or inconsistent with reality?
I’m curious how others here see this.
Do you think these promises are meant to be taken literally, symbolically, or psychologically?
Or do unmet promises point to something deeper about the human origin of religions?
I’m interested in hearing different perspectives.
they usually quote it as what essentially boils down to:
The lord does work in mysterious ways, he giveth all and he taketh away
If you were christian, I think you know that is a common saying among preachers.
If you’re muslim, there is this one:
˹O Prophet˺ the Book, of which some verses are precise—they are the foundation of the Book—while others are elusive.1 Those with deviant hearts follow the elusive verses seeking ˹to spread˺ doubt through their ˹false˺ interpretations—but none grasps their ˹full˺ meaning except Allah. As for those well-grounded in knowledge, they say, “We believe in this ˹Quran˺—it is all from our Lord.” But none will be mindful ˹of this˺ except people of reason.
It keeps the mystique of their story appear as if those promises are coming.
Keyword: Story.
Such vagueness allows people to explain that your promises have already arrived in some way, and you just “didn’t open your eyes to see the truth”. OR those promises didn’t arrive because you “did something wrong”.
If I were to try and explain the internal logic of this diety they wrote in their stories, it would be lengthy and eventually become as nonsensical and contradictory like the deities in the story themselves.
Oh, don’t get me started, lol.
This is one of the two main reasons I left Christian fundamentalism in my mid 30s – the other one being the cognitive dissonance created by this and a lot of other stuff that just refused to add up.
Mind you, I wasn’t a member of a sub-sect that was into the name-it-and-claim-it charismatic/pentecostal/holiness nonsense. Nor did I lack willingness to sort of hoard my poker chips if you will – I was not some clown that orbited a city block in my car trying to pray a parking spot into existence. I only asked for things I truly, desperately needed, things without which people I loved and cared about would be permanently damaged or, in some cases killed. Even THEN I still didn’t get “answered prayer”. Things just unfolded however they unfolded – never in a way objectively distinguishable from random happenstance.
Perversely, I got some nice things that I not only didn’t ask for, but it didn’t even occur to me to ask for. For example, a big-fish-in-a-little-pond perch in my profession of choice where I made embarrassing amounts of money for relatively low-stress, enjoyable work. Work I’d do for free if I didn’t need money. THAT kind of work.
But when my first wife went insane? Nada. When my 2nd wife’s health deteriorated from chronic illness, ultimately resulting in her death? Nothing. When my youngest child dropped dead at work for no particular reason anyone could figure out? I still got The Call just as I was climbing into bed for the night. We worked on him for over an hour. Not even a flutter. Sorry. Do you want us to hold the body in the ER so you can view it?
This kind of thing is only supposed to “confound” the “wicked”. As a “righteous” person I was supposed to be ““blessed”.
Of course the church talked out of both sides of its mouth on such things. When they were proselytizing or trying to buck up the faithful, they would tell you that god was “in control” and would “take care” of his own. But when that didn’t happen, he was just there to “comfort” you (allegedly, not in reality – grief & sorrow are what they are, for believers and unbelievers alike). And if your situation became uncomfortable for the rest of the flock because you weren’t “getting over it” and “moving on” and returning to the “victorious Christian life”, then it was all your fault somehow. Insufficient piety. Secret sin. Lack of faith. Negative attitude. Harboring Doubts. And then of course “forsaking the assembling of yourself together” with others as you began to drift away.
For me, leaving my faith was mandatory to maintain my sanity by allowing reality to match up with my understanding of it instead of always dealing with the impedance mismatch between them. I could no longer “adopt” the reality spoon-fed to me by the dogma. It simply had no relation to actual lived experience.
Some theist might read this and say that I’m just “bitter” because my unrealistic expectations disappointed me. Or like my one brother who is still in the faith, they might say it’s “just a misunderstanding”. But my expectations were set by the extravagant, lavish, unambiguous promises in the holy book and preached regularly from the pulpit and sung in many of the hymns and gospel songs we sung or listened to daily. The maddening part for me wasn’t that life has difficulties – obviously it does and obviously no one is exempt. It was just that the difficulties believers had were the exact same ones unbelievers did, that the story arc was no different. Life just happens, some of it you love, some not so much, and them’s the breaks. I can cope with that. What I couldn’t cope with was the relentless triumphalist narrative.
Some Christian denominations take the opposite tack, of course. They almost celebrate suffering as character and faith-building. The Catholic church even has what I have come to call “suffering porn” – images of saints in prayer, their faces contorted in pain, begging god for things they don’t get and then wearing it as a badge of honor. That’s a choice, too, I suppose … but I prefer to deal in reality.
Thank you for sharing this. Your experience really highlights the gap between religious promises and lived reality, and I relate to that struggle.
I agree. Vagueness makes the promises unfalsifiable—they can always be explained away after the fact.
I have come to the view that all holy books are vague on purpose.
“Prophecies” for example are never of the form, “On the fourth day of the seventh month the United States will acheive its independence from Britain”. THAT would be impressive, even leaving out the year. But no it is something like “In those days a nation will rise up and cast off its yoke of bondage”. That way it can be claimed to be fulfilled in any number of ways by practically anyone.
The Bible mentions “the circle of the earth” and people who apparently don’t know the difference between a circle and a sphere or who don’t know that the flat earth was debunked by the ancient greeks claim the Bible understood the earth wasn’t flat.
So it goes …