*
“God has a plan for you”—no he doesn’t. This is often said to reassure people, but it’s not true and it never reassures them. “It all works out for the best”, “it all works to the good”—no, no, no.
I tackled the same question elsewhere from a different perspective, but the approach I’ll take here is that God is eternal—to be identified with God is to be identified with that which knows neither cause nor effect, good nor evil, past nor present, life nor death.
If you are identified with * then you cannot know “a plan”, a plan implies change over time—it implies movement from A to B, it implies a thing that can change and decay. These dualities do not exist in the unus mundus. So whatever “has a plan” isn’t God—it’s not eternal.
**
One reason people become more right-wing as they age is that they become aware of change. You might appreciate when you’re young that things change and decay in an abstract way—and you realise that in a concrete way when your first pet dies, usually a goldfish (short-lived animal).
But you only understand that the same thing happens at the social level when you reach about 30—when you’ve lived over the span of two generations (15 years in length). Never trust anyone over 30, so said the 68ers (hippies)—because after 30 you generally see reality (it’s also when your body literally starts to die, you have to be an actual conservative—about your own life, if nothing else).
It’s why you can’t stand to be president in America until you are 35—because that is when you are mature. Admittedly, the Americans have taken it too far—now they only elect men who are senile (70 years is man’s lifespan, so a country’s leader should be aged between 35 and 65, so as to allow time to be in senile retirement—you only start to see the world properly in middle-age, at 35).
So, from 30 on, you understand change at the social level, because you experience it around you—when you’re younger everything is new to you and you have no anchor point to see how everything has moved (from A to B); everything “just is”, so it seems eternal in a way and perfectly fine (“Why do these old people complain all the time? Everything’s fine, just relax!”).
Yet, after a certain point, it becomes clear to you that it has changed and that the change has almost all been for the worse (because everything is in decay).
To change means to die, almost always—almost all change signals death, except for a few exceptions. Hence, as you age, you come to realise that when something has changed it has almost certainly been for the worse.
It is true that there are people who realise this fact in an abstract way when quite young—sort of goody-good Tory boys like William Hague and Ben Shapiro, but they only realise it in an abstract way (because they like history books or like to be thought of as “good, sensible boys”).
Yet you don’t know it until you have experienced it, then you know it in your bones—which isn’t the same as a conservative politician who has said “standards have slipped” since he was eating his eggy-toast at fourteen, because that is his belief (perhaps he’s never really known what it is for a standard to slip, not really—he knows it happens but he has not been really disillusioned; and perhaps that’s why he’s impotent).
***
God exists in illud tempus—so he doesn’t have a plan by definition, since a plan is temporal; it’s perennial, not eternal. “But in the end God will make it all come good.” People find that a bit sentimental, even if they pretend to believe it—but people say that all the time; or they say, “God is testing you to improve you, to make you worthy.” God doesn’t know worthy or unworthy either, though.
God is beyond good and evil, beyond improvement and recession—God is non-dual, and only splits to create. To say, “God is good,” is trite and sentimental—and nobody believes it—because God is much more than that (and less too); and, worse, the “good God” leads to endless pseudo-arguments around “the problem of evil”.
The confusion arises, in part, because what I’ve called “God” here is really “the Godhead”—Christians conflate the two. Christians talk about a personal God who is a stern but loving Jewish father who has an interest in you like an embodied creature—who might point his celestial finger at you and is disappointed with you, or pleased with you, or rewards you, or punishes you.
At the same time, Christians, particularly theologians, talk about God as infinite, boundless, without spatial dimensions, ineffable, and so on. This leads to the reasonable question, “How can an entity have all these characteristics and still be personal, with a circumscribed personality?”.
The simple answer is that “the God you chat to” is a god like Zeus—who might even have a temporal existence and is subject to change (hence “has plans”, hence dies), whereas the Godhead is a mystery from which gods like Zeus and Jehovah emerge.
Christians don’t allow that because they want their “personal god” to be the only god, so they conflate it with the Godhead—and call that “monotheism”; though even the pagans would hold there’s a Godhead which is “the only God”, if you like—albeit it is not personal, unlike Zeus or Horus.
If you separate them out, it all makes more sense and is not contradictory—except then Christians can’t smuggle “a god” under the auspices of “the Godhead”. Really, the whole “monotheism” business is a propaganda game—sure, there’s one Godhead; but that’s a silent mystery that isn’t embodied—and then there are lots of gods that spring from that.
Christians make out their god is the Godhead and then call that “monotheism”—although they have plenty of angels and saints on the side which might as well be gods. If you refer to the Godhead, sure “there’s only one God”—but it’s ineffable, it’s unsayable; it’s not personal (then again, it’s not impersonal either).
“Monotheism” is a “view from inside” thing, just like from inside Marxism liberalism is just “false consciousness”—it’s negated, even if it says true things about reality. Yet from the outside, it’s obvious that religions all recognise the Godhead—and then lots of gods spring from that.
If I say, “There’s an eternal mystery that doesn’t know suffering because it doesn’t know right and wrong, true or false, before and after,” that’s different to saying, “Zeus takes a personal interest in you and your misfortunes—helps you when he can.” But mix the two up and it doesn’t make any sense—because how can the “silent mystery” also be the “benevolent planner with a personal interest in you”?
If you identify with the Godhead it’s not a question of whether there is good or evil in the world or whether life is better or worse—or whether there is a plan that comes to fruition or not, or even if everything is in decay. Because the Godhead just is. So what’s the problem?