Is A Pandemic a God-Sent Plague or Something Else?

Theodicy (noun) 

from Greek theos, “god”; dikē, “justice”

explanation of why a perfectly good, almighty,

and all-knowing God permits evil

the vindication of God's divine goodness and providence

in view of the existence of evil.

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Concrescence (verb)

the coalescence or growing together of parts originally separate

a relational, interactive, interconnective evolving of parts to the whole

the consequent nature of God interacting with the world, prehending fully every

single actual occasion in the world, upon its concrescence to thus preserving

the past, affect the present, and produce greater generative networks of

wellbeing and novelty

Process philosophers characterize God's relation to the world as one of

mutual transcendence, mutual immanence, and mutual creation.

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Is A Pandemic a God-Sent Plague

or Something Else?

by R.E. Slater

March 22, 2020
rev. July 31, 2020

When it comes to plagues and disasters a church may chose the loving God approach (my preference) or, as many will do, chose the condemning God approach. One seeks restoration. The other blame. One seeks communion. The other seeks disunity and division.

If theology is any good at all then a bible centered on God's love is the more meaningful, helpful, and easily transportable path to healing and peace. Good things come out of it like forgiveness, mercy, and fellowship.

The uglier approach of surmising God as a vengeful, condemning God but creates communities i) of fear, ii) rules-based faiths and formulas for legalism, and iii) ascetic living (trying to be holy by personal or social restrictions, a set of stoicisms, a self-harming form penitence, and so forth). This kind of God-perception withholds goodness and love, excludes many of God's children for many made-up religious reasons, is always sharply critical of everything, preaches guilt and unworthiness, and justifies its gospel of fear on every occasion.

Why Do Bad Things Happen?

As to why bad things happen in this world is a question of theodicy. I've been asking it for a very long time. For myself, as well as for many others, it is the simple observation that we live in a freewill creation which God doesn't control but rather guides by partnering where He can with man and nature.

Our restless and brooding souls are not unlike the whirlwind or troubling seas. But when hearing the Lord's words of peace and goodwill we must chose either by saying "Yea, Lord, I hear you," or, "Be gone from me and let me have my own way." This is the nub of an indeterminate freewill creation and sentient life.

The Agency of a Freewill Creation

Choices, as they can be made, blending with divine guidance and goodness, where it can be made possible, lived out in a cosmos boiling with restless energy yearning for life, is often expressed in ways of unbecoming rather than in ways of nurturing becoming.

Believing God to be in control is hopeful, but it is using the wrong word. God is never in control of a freewill creation with an open, undetermined future. Yet through loving guidance He seeks a kind of control in what can better be described as a fellowship or a partnership. A fellowship which guides, allowing the fullest of creation's energy to create, imagine, and become all it can be under a fulfilling divine guidance.

A virus, illness, natural disaster, or suffering is the unfortunate result of a freewill creation exercising un-nurturing agency. Within this environment - as God can - He will deliver and guide, but when not, He will always be present with us in all of life's events in a deeply personal communion.

Does God Damn and Condemn?

In this sense then, our sins do not force God away towards condemnation and judgement as many will say. As a God who is always loving and filling life with goodness, He cannot be a God of damnation. It is our own sins which fill us with grief and feelings of cursedness, not God. This, He would take away in an instant, as we let Him, filling our lives in times of harm or in times of fullness, replacing condemnation with mercy, unforgiveness with love, feelings of hurt and harm with forbearance, wisdom, and deliverance.

More simply said, God's compassion is present with all His creation. There is nothing with may separate us from God's love. And though the bible narrates stories of judgment believed by the ancients as God-sent it would be more accurate to say that these events of suffering, hardship, ruination, disaster, were more in line with how a sin-marred creation operates. Not as acts of a loving God but as acts of agency from a creation willfully exhibiting itself.

How Does God Act in a Freewill Creation?

Once an initiating process bubbles forward it may bubble for good or bad releasing succeeding bubbles of goodness or badness. This is the essence of process theology. Through these bubbling consequences God is there throughout its process doing what He can within and without a freewill creation. This is not to speak of God as limited, but as a fully sovereign God guiding creation without coercing creation.

The easiest idea is to speak of God as determining and controlling creation. But if so, creation is not open, nor free, to become in its own way. Process thought will say that creation has an open and not determined future; and that its is not controlled by God but free to become what it was initial given in its essence... that of becoming like the image of God. That is, God poured God's Self into creation. In its bones, or DNA, is the strong yearning to exercise generative bubbles of goodness, nourishment, and wellbeing for all beings. To creative novel bubbles of relationships amid thriving continuity.

Sadly, with sin came a marring of creation. It is neither wholly good or wholly evil. But it is in need of redemptive atonement which God gave through His own sacrifice on the Cross. An atonement which has placed the path of creation back towards fellowship with its Creator. Empowering it from an old creation to a new creation.

Process theodicy does not need to defend God for the evil humanity or creation groans under. It states that any judgment type of events in life testifies to the struggle of creation to either give in to itself or to God. God is not sinful or evil. Nor is He powerless or weak. God has spawned God's Self into a process that will never end which He may have eternal fellowship with.

And like Himself it has agency. And with agency it has opportunities to move from being to becoming. From being what it is to becoming all that it might be in the image of God exhibiting deep fellowship not only with God but with itself. Between these tensions of being and becoming will be a titanic history of redemptive struggle.

Our Response in Time of Evil

We might incorrectly call these times of God's judgment but in actuality these will be times of opportunity through crisis to regain what was lost at Eden. Times of challenge to meet devastation with compassion, wisdom, mercy and love. To take loss of life, or loss of social justice, or loss of personal freedoms and rights to remake a crisis into a good thing rather than to perpetuate its evil.

In terms of today's coronavirus, to find effective vaccines, to double down on helping each other, in rebuking - or not encouraging - views of scapegoating, hatred, or slandering talk of the whys and hows and wherefores of the crisis being experienced. Of refusing lies by speaking truth. Of refusing racism by embracing the other. Of withstanding voices or churches or faiths which speak death to society by speaking life and love and wisdom.

Our responses may be like the effervescing bubbles of creativity, novelty, life-changing goodness by praying forth newer, more whole societies of healing, helping, and affecting responses. Perhaps an ecological society in place of a capitalistic or communist society with all the associative ills these have presented to the history of the world.

We may lean into the atoning sacrifice of God that His redemptive power bubbles forth new communities of healing, new ecologies of restoration, new personages of embracing multi-ethnic pluralistic cultures of strength. When such earthly "judgments" come our way we repent, we change our course in life, we mend broken fences, and lean into God even more to teach us wisdom and love.

These are times of restoration. Not loss of heart. Time of Courage. Not sobbing and worry as the lost world does. These times will want for vision. This then is our challenge... to be women and men of courage, vision, love, and healing. Go forward in God's empowering power. Raise up new generations of concrecsing beauty and imagination.

R.E. Slater
March 22, 2020
rev. July 31, 2020

PS...

The link here will graphically illustrate how traditional Christianity has

interpreted bad events through fear and judgment. I submit, there is

another way as expressed above when we change our idea of God.





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How Viruses Work - Molecular Biology Simplified (DNA, RNA, Protein Synthesis)

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Jacob Preciado

Listening & Understanding - "Why I Don't Follow God Anymore", Part 2

Let's try this again. But again using an open and relational biblical approach as opposed to Calvinism's so-called "biblical" approach.

Aaron Rodger's question of God being worthy of "Godness" (or even goodness) is an excellent observation and one many struggle with when imagining a God of love-and-life vs a God typically pictured as a God of wrath-and-judgment.

Relational theology teaches a different story. A story which re-centers God on the basis of His incarnation. As Jesus come as Savior-Messiah to a fallen world. As a God of love. A God of benevolent action. As one who grants generative life.

Yet the bible also speaks of God as a God of wrath and judgment upon evil doers -  especially those misrepresenting His ministries of healing, grace, and mercy (sic, the temple priests and religious teachers of Jesus' day emphasizing law over grace, propriety over inner holiness, tithing and sacrifice over a humbled heart, convention over a penitent heart).

So who is this God? Is He one who loves or one who condemns? If He is a God who condemns than it is inconsistent with being a God of rescuing love. If a God of love then it is inconsistent with being a God of damning holiness. So which is it? If both, then how? In what way?

For the church to reorient the story of God as first and foremost the story of a God of love over a God of judgment is rightly corrected in the face of older church stories teaching of a God who is austere, wholly unpleased with our thoughts and actions, and fully controlling our outcomes.

Relational theology says divine love precedes judgment, and in judgment love is the over-riding factor. And in this divine love arrangement with creation the Redeeming God works together with creation in determining its future - always for good, never for evil. He does not, and will not, determine its future by Himself. Creation's future is always open, continuously indeterminant, yet always fully immersed in the enabling / cooperating presence of God. This is the open part of open theology when it says the future is not closed but ever open to divine mystery, nurture, and flourishing.

Moreover, the evil incurred is the evil we bring to this creation. It is not from God and never will be. And it's judgment is in itself, not as a result of God but as a result of freewill actors acting out fallen spirits. We may be judged by God as fallen but not moved by God to commit fallen acts. This is the wrong view of divine enabling sovereignty which acts for good out of love.

Nor is God one who scourges humanity for its fallenness but One who warns us of our sin and its affects. Who aides us away from its affects if we be so willing. The scourging thus lies in the acts of sin which harms and kills and not from the God of life and light.

Consequently, God is one who aides mankind as much as is possible in its fallenness, even up to its Armageddon, if you will. Yet, Armageddon is the judgment we bring upon ourselves for refusing to embrace God's love and grace to others - not God's acts of wrath upon a fallen world in which He kills and maims and brings creation to violent ends.

Like in Noah's day, the flood may have been attributed to God's activity in this event but it wholly fell upon a mankind refusing to enact God's grace and mercy to one another. The ancients ascribed the indeterminate (e.g. freewill) acts of nature as acts from God, but realizedly there were those who survived its force as well as those who didn't. To the one who did... who lived upright and obeyed... to that one God was said to have provided an ark of salvation against the destruction of the unholy. 

By this story, and many more like it, it has been more natural for the church to teach God as the active actor of determinative results thus over-ruling creation's own responsibility for its indeterminant freewill. But under a weak theology coupled with an open and relational theology, humanity is responsible for it's own fallenness and determinative ends whatever befalls it. The real story here is that humanity is responsible to cease from sin and evil, to show love and mercy, and become active actors in their own stories of redemption. When tragedy falls it cannot then be ascribed to sin but to a fallen world in which the innocent suffer. The floods will still come, the outcomes may be the same, but the ark of God's redemptive presence in times of tragedy overrules all disasters whether good or ill.

The central act of divine event - the most significant - is that of divine redemption. This event occurred at Jesus' atonement then reoccurs again and again when we repent to the fallenness of our hearts by receiving the salvation our Redeemer-God provided in Himself on Calvary's Hill. That hill of Golgotha known as "the skull." Who alone empowers salvation to the penitent and enables the redeemed one to act both as divine agent (e.g., ambassador, missionary, etc) and divinely-assisted agent (by the Spirit of God) towards redeeming a fallen world. Not to sit back and await the world's destruction but to become enmeshed in its processes of redemption to wit we will find in those same processes the Creator God similarly involved. Similarly concerned. Working tirelessly against the machinations of a fallen creation set in motion when granted its fearsome gift of freewill.

Herein lies the older concept of the divine-human cooperative removed from its Calvinistic setting into an updated Wesleyan setting. No longer is the emphasis on God's terror and judgment but upon the burden of handling, appreciating, and acting-out the love of God. Rather than seeing God in the light of the world's destruction, God is now seen in the light of the world's salvation.

Which, in the whole leads to a more biblical approach to the story of God in relation to the story of mankind thereby removing all older stories of the ancients seeing God alone in a negative light where only stolidly worthy followers may actually please God, holding back His wroth, until this old world burns up in tragic failure to the once ultimate divine plan of fellowship and communion with its Creator God.

In the relational view, whether succeeding or failing, the divine plan becomes one of redemptive success dependent upon creation itself as active pursuant of the divine. And should it fail, it fails by humanity's own sin and not by God's wrothful hand.

In this way, the question that holds Aaron Rodgers and others back is now re-righted in the story of a God of out-reaching love. Of in-reaching compassion. Who aides in life's difficult journeys. And, as an active presence promised in a fallen economic order, One who actively, moment-by-moment provides divine love, light, and hope.

R.E. Slater

January 27, 2020

Listening & Understanding - "Why I Don't Follow God Anymore", Part I

When people open up to share reflective questions and observations from their deep past it is always good to shut up and listen. These are times to simply be there for those who have very personal things to share. Not to comment, interpose personal observations of self, or say something stupid which would close down this time of intimacy between soul to soul. Just listen. And having listened to reflect with the one sharing where they may wish to go with the information they just shared with you. It is a time for deep wisdom and for asking the Spirit of the Lord to guide minds and hearts what's next. Where to go. How to go. To be. Perhaps, just to be. - re slater

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Oftentimes when I here conversations like the one above I remember my own feelings and judgments of my past - many good, some not so good. Hell was one of those topics I didn't understand but deeply felt about and feared to share in.

Especially of a God I didn't understand. Of a God who said He loved me but then said I was condemned to hell if I didn't live up to His standards. Most of it I think I got right - in a twisted sort of way - but a lot of it I didn't understand. Especially this fear thing which was undeniable to the truth of hell. That sin and evil resided in its bowels and it was a place I did not wish either to reside or to reproduce through my life.

Many decades hence I have come to a re-visioning place in my life which has greatly helped my youth's fears and admonitions with the God who says He loves me but may condemn me. It required relearning the right things about God and removing the wrong things I had learned about Him or through my own bible readings.

Here's what I learned...

And it are things like this I could wish to share with others...

Firstly, under an open and relational theology the old concept of God condemning the planet and casting everyone into a fiery hell is abandoned.

Under this theology the planet and humanity's future is seen as a joined partnership with one another responsible for creating

i) loving communion with each other; 

ii) for fellowships of nurturing and thriving for the common good to the fore; and,

iii) for dissenting and resisting economies and theologies of profiteering to the harm of both earth and man.

It is not a loving God who has given to us the "fiery" or "terrible" gift of freewill who determines our outcome - but we, ourselves, and how we determine not only our own future but how we influence and affect the futures of all our fellow men and women - including this planet - by the use of our freewill.

The fiery hell of older theologies are now the hells we maintain within ourselves and persist by our actions upon this earth by choices for evil over good; for sin over loving actions; for selfishness and greed over sharing, respect, and thoughtfulness to one another and our planet.

And if, in the end, the world comes to its Armageddon or we, to our own, then it results not because of God's condemnation upon us but because we have lived lives of damnation refusing to allow or accept God's forever love into our lives to create actions and fellowships for good, for love, for hope.

Hell comes as much now, in this life, as it portends later in some life-after-death schemata which many like to think as true. And if you ask me, personally, of ultimate ends, I will say I cannot envision a forever hell as many think of it as.

For me, I see hell's reality or "state of condition" as much at the beginning of life - and persisting through every life in every kind of form - across the backdrop of the constancy of God's loving communion everyday present with His creation.

And at death, rather than being cast into a fiery hell, there will be those who join the ranks of one's who had enjoined hell in some everyday form of their lives in refusing (e.g., this freewill thing again) God's loving guidance and presence in every helpful situation they had faced and been asked to stop, fix, reform, aide, or help.

More so, in the end, it is not God's love which casts us into hell, but our refusal of God's love offered through Jesus who came as sacrifice, savior, and everyday guide we call the Holy Spirit.

That in the end, hell is not a place, but a condition better described as a state of annihilation, which is present with us from birth to death. And if there is an afterlife, as the bible teaches, then it is in this state of annihilation to which our souls finally die into a state of non-existence where torments cease from God's loving call to come, be healed, and there find wholeness.

It is this form of hell better described as annihilation which find us thrown about across erratic (or chaotic) states of spiritual death from God, from self, from others, and from creation. That is in this state of hell/annihilation which separates us from God, self, others, and creation.

We live with different kinds of deaths everyday in our lives unless we allow God's love to stop and rectify these daily deaths that are there calling us away from His love and community.

At the last, these interim states of deaths (or conditions of annihilation) finalize/coalesce at our death unless we actively choose to accept God's love and presence in our lives each and into everyone of those days we chose live as lives bourne across personal seas of death, chaos, and ruin.

For myself, as for many others, we can live life comforted by the fact that God has never abandoned us nor condemned us to hell but that He is present in our lives now, everyday, guiding, loving, caring. Not condemning, harming, or judging! This God I was taught was just the opposite of everything He really is... that His force of life had gotten turned around into something awful rather than being something really good. Really helpful. Really life changing.

And it is also why I and others say that rather than damning, God's holy presence sanctifies, redeems, reclaims, restores, and renews His creation everyday to be holy vessels bearing His divine love into a worlds of sin and destruction. Worlds of self-annihilating ruin and separation.

Though the older theologies had the sentiments right they had spoken it wrong.

It is not the God of the bible who condemns us but He who saves us.

The condemnation comes from within us unless we understand God alright as a loving presence seeking always our good in a world gone mad.

A God whose salvation through Jesus a'rights those chaotic seas of hell, calms the storms, and allows us to walk across the dark, troubling of waters of life unto renewal and reclamation of fellowship with Creator, ourselves, others, and creation, forever and always.

R.E. Slater

January 23, 2010

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As an aside to the above discussion, let's read Isaiah 66's chapter and try reading it in the light just described above - in the light of a theology teaching the goodness and constancy of God's love over older theologies using God's love and light as threat, dictum, and judgment of hell into our lives.

As evidence, the Israelites also commonly understood God as judge which is why the old theologies have held on so long. Yet looked another way, these scripture passages are describing the judgment of God as the sentence men have passed upon themselves in persisting in not loving one another while holding to the belief that their religious activities protected them from evil.

Those self-same religious activities but condemned hearts already committed to evil. Unrepented hearts hiding under covers of religiosity and churchliness. Covers that hated others, loved self over others, ruined the earth as caretake for flourishing, and refusing God any entry into lives of perfidy.

As such, they brought judgment upon their own heads which the bible describes as judgment from God. Yet used in another way, it is the judgment of God and of our ourselves in our observations, that should we, or any, persist in unloving ways, those ways will overcome us under their own condemnations. Condemnations which assure choosing darkness over light is surely the way to death by a thousand deaths heaped upon by a thousand more.

R.E. Slater

January 23, 2010

Isaiah 66 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Heaven Is God’s Throne

66 Thus says the Lord,

“Heaven is My throne and the earth is My footstool.
Where then is a house you could build for Me?
And where is a place that [a]I may rest?
2 “For My hand made all these things,
Thus all these things came into being,” declares the Lord.
“But to this one I will look,
To him who is humble and contrite of spirit, and who trembles at My word.

Hypocrisy Rebuked

3 “But he who kills an ox is like one who slays a man;
He who sacrifices a lamb is like the one who breaks a dog’s neck;
He who offers a grain offering is like one who offers swine’s blood;
He who [b]burns incense is like the one who blesses an idol.
As they have chosen their own ways,
And their soul delights in their abominations,
4 So I will choose their [c]punishments
And will bring on them what they dread.
Because I called, but no one answered;
I spoke, but they did not listen.
And they did evil in My sight
And chose that in which I did not delight.”
5 Hear the word of the Lord, you who tremble at His word:
“Your brothers who hate you, who exclude you for My name’s sake,
Have said, ‘Let the Lord be glorified, that we may see your joy.’
But they will be put to shame.
6 “A voice of uproar from the city, a voice from the temple,
The voice of the Lord who is rendering recompense to His enemies.

7 “Before she travailed, she brought forth;
Before her pain came, she gave birth to a boy.
8 “Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things?
Can a land be [d]born in one day?
Can a nation be brought forth all at once?
As soon as Zion travailed, she also brought forth her sons.
9 “Shall I bring to the point of birth and not give delivery?” says the Lord.
“Or shall I who gives delivery shut the womb?” says your God.

Joy in Jerusalem’s Future

10 “Be joyful with Jerusalem and rejoice for her, all you who love her;
Be exceedingly glad with her, all you who mourn over her,
11 That you may nurse and be satisfied with her comforting breasts,
That you may suck and be delighted with her bountiful bosom.”
12 For thus says the Lord, “Behold, I extend peace to her like a river,
And the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream;
And you will [e]be nursed, you will be carried on the [f]hip and fondled on the knees.
13 “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you;
And you will be comforted in Jerusalem.”
14 Then you will see this, and your heart will be glad,
And your bones will flourish like the new grass;
And the hand of the Lord will be made known to His servants,
But He will be indignant toward His enemies.
15 For behold, the Lord will come in fire
And His chariots like the whirlwind,
To render His anger with fury,
And His rebuke with flames of fire.
16 For the Lord will execute judgment by fire
And by His sword on all flesh,
And those slain by the Lord will be many.
17 “Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go to the gardens,
[g]Following one in the center,
Who eat swine’s flesh, detestable things and mice,
Will come to an end altogether,” declares the Lord.

18 “For I [h]know their works and their thoughts; [i]the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come and see My glory. 19 I will set a sign among them and will send survivors from them to the nations: Tarshish, [j]Put, Lud, [k]Meshech, Tubal and [l]Javan, to the distant coastlands that have neither heard My fame nor seen My glory. And they will declare My glory among the nations. 20 Then they shall bring all your brethren from all the nations as a grain offering to the Lord, on horses, in chariots, in litters, on mules and on camels, to My holy mountain Jerusalem,” says the Lord, “just as the sons of Israel bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord. 21 I will also take some of them for priests and for Levites,” says the Lord.

22 “For just as the new heavens and the new earth
Which I make will endure before Me,” declares the Lord,
“So your offspring and your name will endure.
23 “And it shall be from new moon to new moon
And from sabbath to sabbath,
All [m]mankind will come to bow down before Me,” says the Lord.
24 “Then they will go forth and look
On the corpses of the men
Who have [n]transgressed against Me.
For their worm will not die
And their fire will not be quenched;
And they will be an abhorrence to all [o]mankind.”

Footnotes:

1. Isaiah 66:1 Lit is My resting place?
2. Isaiah 66:3 Lit offers a memorial of incense
3. Isaiah 66:4 Lit ill treatments
4. Isaiah 66:8 Lit travailed with
5. Isaiah 66:12 Lit nurse
6. Isaiah 66:12 Lit side
7. Isaiah 66:17 Lit After
8. Isaiah 66:18 So with Gr; Heb omits know
9. Isaiah 66:18 Lit it is coming
10. Isaiah 66:19 So with Gr; Heb Pul
11. Isaiah 66:19 So with Gr; Heb those who draw the bow
12. Isaiah 66:19 I.e. Greece
13. Isaiah 66:23 Lit flesh
14. Isaiah 66:24 Or rebelled
15. Isaiah 66:24 Lit flesh

* * * * * * * * * *

Aaron Rodgers Opens Up About Religion to Danica Patrick: ‘I Don’t Know How You Can Believe in a God’

The Green Bay Packers quarterback sat down for an interview with girlfriend Danica Patrick

By Jason Duaine Hahn

January 22, 2020 03:05 PM | People Link here

In an intimate conversation with girlfriend Danica Patrick, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is discussing his Christian upbringing and how he first began to question his faith.

In a video posted to Patrick’s YouTube page for her Pretty Intense podcast in late December, Rodgers — who was raised as a Christian from a young age — said he had trouble connecting with his religious community as a child.

“Most people that I knew, church was just … you just had to go,” the Super Bowl XLV champion recalled.

It was his time with the youth group, Young Life, that he felt the most sense of community — which he said he didn’t experience during typical Sunday mass.

“We went to Mexico during two spring breaks and built houses,” he said of volunteering with the program. “We put together homes for these folks who were living [with] garage door sides thrown together and stuff, that was meaningful. That was really meaningful work.”

But it wasn’t until Rodgers was exposed to other religions as a young adult that he began to question his own.

“I just didn’t find any connection points with those things,” said Rodgers, who played at the University of California, Berkeley, before being selected by Green Bay in the 2005 NFL Draft. “I started questioning things, and had friends who had other beliefs — I enjoyed learning, that’s kind of a part of my life.”

Aaron Rodgers

“I had some good friendships along the way that helped me to figure out exactly what I wanted to believe in,” he added. “Ultimately, it was that rules and regulations and binary systems don’t really resonate with me.”

This realization eventually led Rodgers down a path to a “different type of spirituality,” he explained.

“I don’t know how you can believe in a God who wants to condemn most of the planet to a fiery hell,” he said. “What type of loving, sensitive, omnipresent, omnipotent being wants to condemn his beautiful creation to a fiery hell at the end of all this?”

Though Rodgers did not specifically refer to himself as an atheist — someone who does not believe in the existence of God or gods — his statements seem to echo those of a growing contingent of people in the United States. According to Pew Research, the number of Americans who identify with being an atheist has increased over the last decade (from 2 percent to 4 percent).

Aaron Rodgers and Danica Patrick | DANICA PATRICK/INSTAGRAM

RELATED: ‘Fame Can Change Things’: Aaron Rodgers’ Family Opens Up About Their Rift

For the two-time NFL MVP, it was the “us against them” attitude he observed that ultimately changed his views on organized religion.

“Religion can be a crutch, it can be something that people have to have to make themselves feel better,” Rodgers continued. “Because it’s set up binary, it’s us and them, saved and unsaved, heaven and hell, it’s enlightened and heathen, it’s holy and righteous … that makes a lot of people feel better about themselves.”

Patrick confirmed to the Associated Press that she was in a relationship with the NFL star in January 2018. Rodgers and Patrick made their red carpet debut at the ESPYs in July 2018 — when Patrick was the show’s first female host.

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  By Jason Duaine Hahn@jasonduaine