It does not bother me when people have questions for God. God is big enough to be able to handle that. I am often disappointed, though, when otherwise intelligent people think poorly about God. I have enjoyed Larry King for many reasons throughout my life. (Most of my conservative Christian friends, relatives, and colleagues just disowned me.) I like that he is a radio pioneer, that he brought democracy into political conversation through national call-ins, and that he doesn't accept things without thinking them through. Larry King and I often disagree, but even disagreement doesn't disappoint me.
I've known for a long time that Larry King claims to be agnostic: he claims no belief in God. I feel disappointed because today on (my favorite) Q with (another favorite) Jian Ghomeshi, Larry King was questioned about his claim to agnosticism. Jian was surprised about it, which I was not. Larry surprised me because he mentioned that he had never found satisfactory answers from people of faith and deduced, as a result, that there must be no God. He continued to cite several examples of people who gave him dissatisfactory answers, including evangelicalism's hero Billy Graham. He said that no person of faith, including Billy Graham, had been able to answer satisfactorily about atrocities like the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks, so he assumed his conclusion was correct.
I will not write much on Billy Graham's answer, since Larry only paraphrased it (though if the paraphrase accurately represented Billy, then I was disappointed). However, let me say that someone as intelligent as Larry King should be able to make a couple of intelligent distincitions. First, there is a difference between God and people. It is illogical to hold God responsible for problems that humans create. Problems like the Holocaust and the 9/11 attacks were not begun by God. They were begun by people. Fighting that takes place between churches and faiths did not begin with God; it began with people. Even interpretations of the Bible that seem so short-sighted and one-sided did not begin with God. Most of what we hear about the Bible is still human interpretation, hence the examples we can point to of spiritual abuse in the name of the Bible or God (like excusing slavery in the 1800s).
That paragraph barely addresses the real issue there, but what I find least logical in Larry's questioning of God is that he doesn't believe in God. If one does not believe in God, why does one suddenly bring God into conversations about the Holocaust and 9/11? If Larry is really an agnostic, why is he holding God hostage for human atrocities? If he doesn't believe God exists, why does he blame God so much? Why does he tell God, "My disbelief is Your own fault!" Who is he talking to with questions like that? Someone who doesn't exist?
C'mon, Larry, you're much smarter than that.
