God: My Third Eye

I've been writing this for awhile, I finally took out most of the preachy parts about MY idea of God and put that somewhere else, but I really wanted to respond to Bill Maher's attack on religions the other evening. He basically called Mormonism luny crazy, and Christianity and Judaism weren't any less so. My point is, let's attack people's policies, not their cultural beliefs and familial traditions--even though religious people often attack our ways of being and beliefs, we can be bigger than they are.

May 2007

In the past few decades there have been a whole slate of either/or arguments in the political arena. It has been a tactic of the Republicans to divide Americans into conservative or NOT. If you want to keep abortion legal, you're a child killer. If you want to keep the environment clean, you're anti-business. If you're pro-union, you're a communist. If you are against the war, you're a weak-kneed, pinko commie. If you think about the needs of poor people, you're for big government (they are for big military). Anything that disagrees with the conservative worldview is considered immoral by them. That's how they think: good vs. evil.

Now, according to a growing number of voices on the LEFT, you're either a religious nutjob who believes in the fundamentalist God or you're an atheist (or Maher's "rationalist" which just cracks me up; do you and your family and friends always act rationally?!).

The atheists win their own arguments because they are based on empirical perception and define God by a biblical account of God, which is ripe with human imperfection, projections and bathed in metaphor. Yet atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, like fundamentalists, take the bible LITERALLY and therefore either give us or deny us a completely flat, predictable, imperfect and very often loathsome picture of God.

I am a liberal Methodist's preacher's kid (my father was born into a non-practicing Jewish family), I am now Jewish, and have settled on a pretty practical and ecumenical picture of God, or what I refer to as the force of life that people represent in different ways, "G-d", "Christ," "Buddha," "Allah," "the Goddess," "The Source," "Being," etc. For instance, it is my belief, and my husband's belief, that most people who describe their faith as a God that intervenes in their lives in judgmental and physical ways, completely obfuscate a spiritual sense of God. I was agnostic for a long time because so many believers were imperfect, and simply because I would not believe that God could save me from a car accident but let a child starve to death in Africa--I still don't believe in that kind of Republicanesque God of reward and punishment.

A wise woman I once knew in Ohio, a brilliant librarian, who was unique in her look and height and presence in this world (and rejected by superficial people), died shortly after telling me the following in response to my agnosticism:

"My darling, no one has ever accurately described God to you, they can't."

As inscrutable as that seemed to me then, it was also true, and remains true. God is a personal and universal truth that no one can be CERTAIN about. What the fundamentalists and the Atheists have IN COMMON is their certainty that their truth is THE truth. Faith in God is a personal truth that can't be verified by science or logic; it's a surrender of certainty, and an embrace of the subjective experiences of being and life's mysteries that people almost universally attribute to something like "God."

This is why no true believer can offer the "fact-finding" Atheist a proof of God, for whatever proof I find, it is in my own eyes, my own consciousness and imagination; my child's life, the connection with my husband, the deep bonds I have with family and friends. These experiences and relationships just seem to be biological and chemical (without awe) to the atheist. Is it this lack of spiritual appreciation that compels the atheist to try to disconnect any sense of holiness from the faithful; for his own rational purity; his version of truth? Sir, I am with you in the ambition to stop the evils that man commits in God's name, any abomination towards man is an abomination to both man and God, but I am against you in your efforts to deny individuals that which cannot be proven, only felt, in the most tenuous and imperfect ways in which we are capable.

I agree with the atheist argument that many religious "believers" do nothing to make the world a better place. The truth is, man either helps or doesn't help man because of moral motivations, either with God or without God and that is the only issue. I have no problem pointing out religious hypocrisy, but moral or immoral actions always trump religious declarations!

On the right it seems that the arguments FOR God are an effort to control people and how we think, now on the left, it seems the arguments AGAINST the existence of God are in order to INHIBIT people's spirituality and, more important, to be academically right (a weakness I myself enjoy). How can one be right about eliminating even the possibility of a greater life force than us--what ego?! Such a declaration does not seem logical or rational to me. The premise is that we know all possibilities, yet we in no way understand everything there is to know about nature, life and consciousness; and all the possible explanations for it all!

Of course, believing in God probably isn't rational either, but that's half the point. Half our brain isn't rational, we're emotional beings (that's a good reason why we shouldn't have guns). Admitting that a belief in God is somewhat irrational doesn't give "believers" any excuse to act on God's behalf to do anything irrational to others! Yes, this irrationality should forever be separate from the governance of the people by the people.

In my view, the argument to prove or disprove God in our culture is a waste of time; it makes far more sense to prove or disprove the EFFECTS of humankind upon each other and this world. In the end, it just doesn't matter if we believe in God or not, it's how we treat each other.

I beg atheists to just concentrate on arguing against the sins of man, rather than the blessed and inherent irrationality of faith. Why would a lack of belief in God make a more compelling argument about culture? The faithful don't have a more compelling argument about culture just because they are faithful either (and we can all make that clear). Those who go against man, go against God, period, whether they invoke God's name or not.

It's not what we say, it's what we do--and that's all there is to it.

Don't step on my imaginary third eye (-;