I admit ... I've given this a good deal of thought over the last few days, and have yet to come up with an answer. Were we sitting over a beer and you asked that question, I might look at you with the tiniest shake of my head and open my palms as if to say, "Huh, what?" The implication, of course, would be that the answer is obvious. And that implication, of course, points straight to the heart of the problem of thinking the answer is obvious.
Necessary components (minimum):
• Definition of "God"
• Nature of religion in history
• Personal/individual perceptions of religion and religious faith
• • •
Definition of God
The
only working definition of God that I've found consists entirely of two words. I can use a lot more to describe what those two words mean, but to define God requires only the two words.
• God is.
Even this definition is tenuous; it is derived from the question of how God can be described. In the monotheistic context, it becomes inappropriate to say even that "God exists"; it's a ridiculously exacting conundrum for an issue so seemingly vague. I'll have to dig up a number of texts in order to lay out the historical development of the idea, but consider some things that people say about God:
• God is good/great.
• God is just.
• God is love.
• God is truth.
• God is ______ (fill in the blank).
The problem with such attributions is that they don't cover their opposites. If God is good, whence comes evil? If God is just, whence comes iniquity? If God is love, whence comes hatred? If God is truth, whence comes ignorance or deception?
An old philosophical question about God asks why, if God is all-powerful, He permits evil. What strikes me about this question is that the answer is actually quite easy, and it seems, historically, so distressing to people's psyches that they will literally pray for another answer.
The answer is that if God is good, then "evil" is good, and we only call it evil because "evil" is a human definition.
Typically, monotheists look at God as a creator, and consider themselves at the center of God's creation. This is a tremendous mistake. There is an entire Universe out there, and be there a God, we ought not pretend It's not busy elsewhere. Or, more appropriately, we anthropomorphize our idea of God until we have fashioned God in our own image.
The end result is that, while humans invent gods, the monotheistic deities we create reflect some seemingly ineffable truth or condition in the Universe we seek to master. We are afraid of death, and thus create the idea of an afterlife. We are afraid of ignorance, and thus create a singular, hidden Truth that is God's alone until we join Him in the afterlife. We are afraid of our own impotence, and thus justify ourselves according to God the Father, who is in fact our progeny.
In the end, all in all, "God" is a puff of smoke, a pipe dream, a vapid expression of introspective longing.
But what do we
do with that idea of God?
• • •
Nature of religion in history
If we could possibly skip the blow-by-blow, I would be grateful. It's been hashed over enough here at Sciforums, and also at large in the world. It should be enough to refer again to the Emma Goldman quotation included at the end of the topic post:
Religion! How it dominates man's mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion. But out of that nothing God has created a kingdom so despotic, so tyrannical, so cruel, so terribly exacting that naught but gloom and tears and blood have ruled the world since gods began. (
Anarchism: What it Really Stands For)
In human history we have fought and died, and murdered aplenty. We have raped and pillaged. Indeed, we have sought to tend the wounds and ease the burdens of the weak and injured, but our compassion is mostly aimed toward the wages of our own sins. This is the world we have created. The starving children abroad, poverty and strife ... only a few objects of our compassion seem to escape our responsibility, and for those we generally hold telethons.
The more words we use to define and describe God, the smaller God becomes. I call IHVH a "shoebox God", meaning you can fit the whole of God into a shoebox if you really want to. Is there no irony to the idea that the greatest truth in human existence should be so easily accessible while banging a hooker in a red-light motel? Did Reverend Haggard bring his own Bible, or read from the Gideons while doing meth and "getting a massage"? The next time you are in a motel, find the Bible, leave it where it is. Close the drawer again, and just stare at it for a moment, thinking, "God is in the drawer."
Absurd, isn't it?
The only reason God can fit in the drawer in the first place is that so damn many words have been used to bind and slice away at it.
The internet age has brought to prominence some of the most antithetical arguments about the Christian God I never before could have imagined. The foundations of Christian faith are routinely called into question by advocates and apologists. All the atheist or infidel needs do is ask a difficult question, and a thousand tiny daggers will fly forth from the hands of the faithful to pierce and bleed the savior. The argument of faith vs. works has been reduced to a straight dualism, one or the other. It seems very difficult to get the judgmental to acknowledge that their faith involves their actions. Sola fide is the last refuge of the Devil.
God is. Obviously, I'm not the first to come up with that one.
Adilbai Kharkovli writes:
Now, I will never be a Sufi, but I certainly sympathize with the idea Kharkovli seems to express. There is a truth or purpose to our religion or religious behavior; pursuing
that inner aspect, instead of the demonstrative acknowledgment of this or that God, this or that creed, this or that cult, better respects the purpose of our religious inclinations. Spiritually or religiously, one might say that this is the quest to achieve God's intended purpose for humanity and the individual. Scientifically, if we acknowledge that nature is not extraneous, the question arises as to what purpose our religious behavior serves. Certainly, our brains respond to religious stimuli, but there is no proof that religion is what best suits this part of our brain; that is, I can certainly dig a hole with a teaspoon, and I suppose I could stir tea with a shovel, but would I be using either tool to its best purpose in doing so?
The history of religion is also a history of accretions. Through the millennia, humanity has gathered more and more baggage to haul along on its quest, and among the weightiest of our trinket burdens are these shoebox-sized gods invented for comfort in lieu of genuine truth.
• • •
Personal/individual perceptions of religion and religious faith
It does seem that some folks don't stand a chance from the outset. Fundamentalism tends to promote the opposite of progress, be that advancement scientific, social, or religious. There are in sociology the related concepts of world-flight and world-mastery; faced with powerful and possibly overwhelming challenges, one will either retreat from the world (flight) or attempt to overcome it (mastery) in an effort to dispel the influence of the challenge. Some flight is obvious: hippie communes and the Amish come to mind. And some mastery is obvious: evangelical fundamentalist political organizations on up to terrorists. And there are aspects of each in the other; many world-flight responses involve microcosmic world-mastery, and world-mastery tends to require a flight from reality at the very least.
One of the ways fundamentalism mixes flight into its mastery is that it asserts very specific interpretations of reality. In American Christianity, fundamentalism requires adherence to anywhere between five and twenty fundamentals of faith. A 1910 Presbyterian assembly asserted:
• Biblical inerrancy
• Virgin birth of Christ
• Atonement/redemption through Christ
• Bodily resurrection of Christ
• Authenticity of miracles
(See
Moritz for an overview of Christian fundamentalism.)
So it is that some are so twisted into form, so beaten into submission, so conditioned against deviation or departure that they cannot conceive of God in any other terms than those seared into their consciences by a concerted effort of allegedly well-intended cultmasters.
There are also those who are actively conditioned against any belief in God, and, of course, there are myriad degrees in between.
I was raised in a holiday-Lutheran family; e.g., we made it to church on Easter and Christmas Eve, and my brother and I are confirmed into one or another Lutheran organization, but we have escaped the simplistic and weak trap of faith by which we were tempted. I even endured three years at a Jesuit high school, though I can't complain too greatly; in college, I wrote papers for friends of mine who had graduated from public schools with Advanced Placement credit. The Jesuits were not nearly as difficult as many outsiders and critics might suggest, and one thing they
did do was teach us how to do things like read, write, and communicate.
But Christian faith never stuck. It fought a hard fight, to be sure, but not even IHVH can win every round. I've traveled the road through Christianity, Satanism, High Magick, Witchcraft, atheism and its attendant nihilism, a passing fancy for Sufism, and eventually settled on the nondescript theism that allows me to speak to believers according to their rhetoric without actually believing any of it. If someone asks what God wants, and I respond by theorizing about what God wants, it's an artistic leap for me, one of metaphor in which the word "God" suffices in consideration of the number of words required to make the point without it. And, in the end, I have decided that it is more important to be able to communicate with the sick and deluded than it is to get an ego rush out of castigating their misfortune.
What the faithful tell me is that God is Alpha and Omega, that God is everything and forever, that nothing happens but for the will of God. And this is fine with me. I just can't bring myself to believe in any of these shoebox usurpers attempting to pass off as the real thing. The truth is that if God is all that, then God doesn't really care because God can't care. God simply
is, and has no priorities, emotions, or sentiments. We might look back in history at an atrocity and admit that without it, we would not have arrived where we find ourselves today. And so it is with the concept of God. We might wonder at evil, or at the seeming lack of justice about life, the Universe, and everything, but in the end, if things were to be any different, they would have been. If God could have made things different, It would have. If what holds humanity's station in life was supposed to be three-eyed, twelve-eared, two-inch gray creatures with bulbous heads and no genitalia, it would have been. Chaos constrained reflects its constraints; humanity has evolved and selected according to the conditions of the Universe around it; "God" has fashioned us in Its own image.
And at that point, it's as useless to attempt to deny the existence of God as it is to demand that God be what we want it to be. Religionists have described the general conditions of God, and there is a corresponding ineffability about the totality of what is; to transfer the word is enough for now, and hopes to disarm it so that future generations of humanity can wrestle with their own consciences in a real arena, and not one spun in fearful fantasy.
The boundaries we draw for God confine It. God is good. God raped a woman who begat Its son, who was in turn tortured and murdered in order that we can be freed from sin. Of course, we only need to be freed from sin because it is God's will (if God could have made things differently, He would have), which is okay because God is God, and God is perfect and good and loving and just. If God seems perverse, it is because we humans demand It be so.
My description of God acknowledges that God is a human invention, and posits that the invention is intended to represent
something; it is that something that I will acknowledge as God. In the end, the role of God may be filled by various things. The mythical, hidden name of God, for instance, is most likely a mathematical formula. Consider, in this context, the Hubble Telescope. At one point, we sent a team up to perform certain repairs intended to allow the unit to operate at full strength. At the time, it was theorized that the telescope's range equaled about 95% of the Universe. What happens when we get that last five percent? What is there? Do we see a hard edge to the Universe? Do we see some sort of void that escapes description? Does the Universe simply loop back onto itself so that by looking east we will see the western boundary? Will we, by looking so far back in time, actually see the leading edge of natural creation? And this last is a truly intriguing possibility, because it is also estimated that scientists can calculate within thousandths or, by some estimates, millionths of a second after the Big Bang. What will we find when we cover that gap? In either case, imagine that we learn something about physics from either the beginning or end of the Universe, and attempt to apply that knowledge on Earth. Given that we already can destroy significant pieces of the planet, what happens if our experiments with a newly-found mathematical concept cause catastrophe? By "speaking the name of God", we may well bring about our destruction.
To say that God is the Universe is, technically, insufficient. We must define what constitutes the Universe. What we commonly think of as the Universe may be part of a multiverse, in which case the collective multiverse would seem to be the whole Universe. (And so on, and so on, and so on. A drop in an ocean that is a drop in an ocean that is a drop in an ocean that is ....)
What is any fraction compared to infinity? If we count x+1 to infinity, and simultaneously multiply 2y to infinity, which loop will achieve infinity first?
The divisions we identify are, compared to God, infinitesimal. God is inconsequential, not insignificant but sublime. We cannot say, as the Bible does, that God loves or God hates. We cannot say what God wants. God is neither pleased nor displeased, good nor evil, great nor small. God, simply,
is.
One need not pray, as it makes no difference to God. One need not worship. There is no creed yet known to man that describes God, and reciting creeds only helps or harms us as humans. If we say God is blind, that may be so, but we have only asserted that God does not perceive as we do. God does not think, does not judge. God only is and does.
There is no religion large enough to contain God. There is no faith subtle enough to touch God. There is no point to being like God; it would be but an anemic shadow of a poor imitation one seeks to imitate.
In the meantime, I won't give over to more mundane religious zeal. While I would sooner join the Church of Baseball than the Church of Wealth, it seems that either would be, much like joining churches devoted God, an exercise in arrogance carried through for my own witness. And, frankly, masturbation suffices at that point.
____________________
Notes:
Kharkovli, Adilbai. "Those Astonishing Sufis". Sufi Thought and Action. Idries Shah, ed. London: Octagon, 1990. (pp. 170-171)
See Also:
