Is there a God? A quick facetious answer: yes, there are millions of them, all inside people’s minds.
The most popular one resembles Santa Claus. If you’re good (do what the church tells you to do), you’ll receive presents and go to heaven. If you are bad, you’ll find coal in your stocking and go to hell, which, like heaven, exists only in people’s heads. (I’ve never met anyone who is going to heaven. I’ve met hundreds who are going to hell.)
The most common image of this god depicts a He/Him (mostly), a She/Her ( a new idea), or occasionally an It. The skin tone usually matches the believer’s skin color. He-She-It is old, wears white garments, has white hair and a matching beard, and lives above the third filament of the flat earth in beautiful mansions, surrounded by angels or cherubs playing harps and flutes. This god is a master puppeteer, pulling our strings 24-7 and overseeing almost eight billion earthlings and possibly the universe, encompassing all two-plus trillion galaxies. To add to this nonsense, believers tell me that this god’s son’s mother was a virgin and He-She-It was tortured and murdered for our sins. But he wasn’t really dead because some folks saw him alive. Next, Jesus ascended into outer space (still alive?) and shot through the atmosphere to his dad’s mansions, where he now lives. Yikes!
The church demands that I have to believe all this to be a clergy person in their club. I can’t. I have a brain that has been trained to think critically.
Sadly, He-She-It is alive and well in almost all Christian churches. Although all this is a total fabrication, people spend their lives worshiping He-She-It. Many clergy know this isn’t true, but they are forced to promote it if they want to keep their jobs.
This god was eradicated from my mind in October 1958 after a fire engine broadsided my friend Brad and me. Brad died. The day after the accident, a priest came into my room and suggested He-She-It was mad at Brad and me for something we had done in the past and sent a fire truck to kill Brad and injure me. I couldn’t believe anybody could think this or say it out loud. So I threw that priest out of my hospital room and abolished that Sunday School god.
This caused a dilemma. I was in seminary learning how to market this god. Now I had to find a new god while pretending I still believed in that Sunday School one so I could graduate from seminary and be ordained.
Then, as I was reading one of the epistles, I saw that Paul used the word creation, and, bingo, I found my new god, Creation. Sixty-seven years later, Creation is still working for me. Creation encompasses the entire universe and all living things in it. Creation has no gender or color, changes constantly, doesn’t judge or collect dues, and includes everyone.
After all this, I refer back to the thirteenth century and Meister Eckhart, a heretical German theologian who stated that one shouldn’t even try to define or explain God, so I won’t anymore. I’ll discuss Jesus next.
Who or what is your god?
PeaceLoveJoyHopeKindness
Bil
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P.S. People often ask me provocative questions about current events, both religious and secular. I have found that some of these questions are being asked universally. I’ll be periodically alternating regular articles with one of those questions and my answer. I invite you to send me your question to bilaulenbach@yahoo.com.
Photo by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash
I like creation. I’m going to adopt it. I’m always bewildered and frustrated by people who want to narrowly define “God.” How do they know something that is so unknowable? These are usually the same people who have been “saved.” It may be cynical of me, but I tend to think of those people as needing therapy more than they need a religion. Meanwhile, the unknowable and vastness of God reminds me of a short story in Ray Bradbury’s “The Illustrated Man.” In this story there are “beings” who have transcended to a higher reality plain and who are here to be with us in both good and difficult times. Sixty years later, this story stays with me and makes me think. Lets expand our definitions and restrictions on God.