When Gods Crash

"When a child first catches adults out -- when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just -- his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child's world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing."
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)1952

And the second is like the first. When a believer finds out that herm God, whatever it is, or the portrayal of it is not always wise, or true or just, and the god crashes, and shatters, the rebuilding is an interesting process as God cannot be unwise, unjust or untrue. Some put the shattered God back up on its pedestal, pastes the gold leaf back in place and denies the God ever fell. It does no good to point out the cracks, those cracks are not the cause of the fall and therefore do not exist, frequently with vehemence.

Others look at the ugly mess, and decide it is not worth even picking up the pieces, or find a few pieces that look OK and try to rebuild their life without God or perhaps with a new one built of the shards. Inevitably the wisdom, trust, and justness of the new God is tentative, and the failure causes reliance on the human resources for wisdom, trust, and justice inherent in all of us.

Those who have rebuilt their life after the fall, whether with a new God or none, are almost always good people to be around. Those who rebuilt their God are not.