Our Granddaddy Who Art in Heaven...the Senile Benevolence Each of Us So Desperately Wants, So Much So That We Oftentimes Recreate God In That (i.e. Our Own Preferred) Image...
I find I simply cannot get beyond the following words from the ever deft pen of C S Lewis, writing in his classic The Problem of Pain ... 'By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness - the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we liked doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven - a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all." Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds...