In the beginning, God created man in his own image. Sound familiar? That idea has been circulating for at least four thousand years.
How about this one: in the beginning, man created God in his own image. Not quite as old, but popular enough. The exact formulation is essentially modern, but some Greeks and Romans were saying something very like it about their gods better than 2,000 years back.
So, option A or option B? One or the other is almost certainly right, but it’s unlikely that any of us will know the answers in our lifetimes (Warning: this statement void in case of rapture). Does it matter which idea is right? In a personal sense, there’s little that could be more important. In a political sense… maybe not as much as you think.
But even if you’re B all the way, it would pay for you to have some understanding of the people in the A camp, who this God character is, and how he became such a pain in the keester.
Some weeks ago, before every blog turned into the Fitzgerald Alert System, there was a flurry of God diaries. That’s good, because theological questions have been at the heart of societal and political movements since there were politics to move. Unfortunately, the tenor of many of the diaries came down to theological equivalent of “I know you are, but what am I?”
The trouble with statements such as “there is no God, and you know it,” is that it leaves the professed believer only three outs.
1) The believer is a liar, claiming a faith not really held
2) The believer is a simpleton, unable to give up superstition for reason
3) The believer is self-deluded, avoiding the unpleasanteries of reality (such as our own temporary nature) with an imaginary friend in the sky.
When you start your argument from such a position, is it any wonder you win few converts? Of course, the atheist who proselytizes in this way isn’t really interested in making converts. Like the fire and brimstone variety of Christian, this sort of argument is all about making yourself feel good by belittling someone else.
From the other side, professing that you need merely have “faith” is equally unlikely to gain points. First, because it’s often taken as tantamount to calling the non-believer a heartless bastard. Second, because it doesn’t mean anything to someone who is not already playing on the believer’s team.
Atheists and believers have a tendency to talk past each other, to the great frustration of both sides. That’s because they’re coming from different reference frames — and don’t go thinking it’s as simple as “yeah, one of them believes in logic and the other doesn’t.” Religious people have, and always have had, a great interest in applying logic to their beliefs. Many of the arguments of today are just shadows of fights that went on inside the religious communities hundreds, or thousands of years back (which is part of what can make it so frustrating when someone shows up one of the hoariest old chestnuts of argument and imparts it with a great dollop of “take that, idiot”). However, in discussing religion, even words you’ve used all your life become treacherous. What does it mean for something to be “true?” What is “real?” What constitutes “proof?” To paraphrase the immortal words of Edie Brickell, better get back into the shallow water before this gets too deep.
One point that’s raised over and over by critics of traditional religion is the cruelty, pettiness, and selfishness reflected in many religious texts, particularly the texts which follow that god worshiped by old Abram. To understand why believers and atheists see the same text in such a radically different way, it’s worth making a little time trip along the events of the Bible.
If you’ve got you’re life preserver buckled, let’s wind up the Way Back Machine, and set it for way the heck B.C. (or BCE. Your choice.)
In the beginning…
Before there were metal tools, before there was agriculture, even before Strom Thurmond, human beings conceived of a god who was the ruler of all things. This god hung the stars, caused the wind to blow, and created every creature. However, this god was completely beyond both human reach and understanding. There were no ceremonies to placate this god, no temples in which to offer sacrifices, no stories of this god’s coming or going or any fights against icky monsters.
And so, this almighty, all powerful god was forgotten.
That’s the origin of the God concept as postulated by theologian Father Wilhelm Schmidt. Father Schmidt studied “primitive” societies, and concluded that religion begins with a sort of vague monotheism, and only then moves toward “spirit worship,” and from there to polytheism. That sounds counter to the history we all learned in school (Sunday and otherwise). Isn’t it sort of a retrograde view of religion? It’s supposed to be spirits first, polytheism second, monotheism last, not the other way around.
Schmidt’s thesis is that a pure monotheism is unsatisfying. This all powerful “sky god” is so remote, so inaccessible, that he’s of little interest. Like Aristotle’s ideal “unmoved mover,” this is God reduced to a nearly mathematical concept. This God makes less impact on people’s lives than the value of the fourth digit in pi.
To replace this concept, societies all over the world developed a set of gods to split up some of the roles of the original absentee landlord. You know the drill. God of war. Goddess of the harvest. Demigod of hairy moles. While almost all of them retained a God in Chief at the top of the heap, they dialed this guy down a few notches from absolute omnipotence. It’s a lot more comfortable that way.
Enter Abram.
The way we all learned this story in Sunday School (or Hebrew School, or Madrasa) is that Abram wanders about in the desert, makes a deal to throw all his chips behind one god, gets a new name, and becomes the world’s first monotheist. But we have a great tendency to read these guys from our own perspective. Abram was no monotheist, and he didn’t become one when he changed his letterhead to say Abraham. In his wandering before and after hitting the city of Ur, Abraham readily threw over whatever gods he had worshipped before and adopted the pantheon in control over his new home. Then he gave up the city life and headed out into the Canaanite wilderness. Like most other cultures in the area, Abraham’s new neighbors had a council of gods overseen by one really sharp guy. It was this god that Abraham backed, a god named El Shaddai. The name has been translated as both “God of the Mountains,” “God of the Untilled Fields,” and “Mighty God.” Likely the meaning was something close to “God of the Everything Outside the City.” The Canaanites assigned the day-to-day duties of most god-man interaction to lesser characters like Baal, Anat, and Dagon (Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!). El Shaddai got what’s left. El’s what you remains of the old sky god once a few more human accessible companions had been assembled.
In pitching his lot with El, Abraham didn’t cease to believe in other gods. He did, however, cease to worship them. While it’s not monotheism as we think of it today, it was an important step down the road. Similarly, Isaac and Jacob also made commitments to worship a single god no matter the situation — though it’s none too clear that they were backing the same horse as Abraham.
What made the semi-monotheism of the patriarchs more tolerable, more appealing, than the old sky god cult? Personal involvement. Abraham shares a meal when God stops by his tent to chat with a pair of companions (these days, we think of these other two folks as angels, but no doubt when the story was first being recorded, they were intended to be other members of the Canaanite pantheon). Jacob actually spends a night in a wrestling match with El.
Though they still believe in a variety of gods (all lumped under the name “elohim”), the patriarchs have already begun to attribute great power to El, while at the same time holding a direct, face to face relationship. El asks of these men the devotion they would normally split among all the elohim. In exchange, he promises them that they will be better protected and cared for than those who change their allegiance depending on the circumstance. Pretty good deal all around.
It wasn’t going to last.
The God Spiral
If a distant, impersonal God makes people lose interest, a direct, personally-involved God makes them extremely uncomfortable. It’s like having your mom along on all your dates. Each succeeding generation that followed Jacob had less direct contact with their ancestor’s God. By the time the Hebrews headed down to Egypt, there’s every reason to believe that they were functional polytheists again, spending as much time on sacrifices to Baal as to stubborn old El.
When we take the next big step, Moses meets a God very unlike the fellow who shared bread with Abraham. This God is not human, not even vaguely. This is the burning bush God, the pillar of fire God, the God who you can’t even look on without dying. God’s got a new name, too. He tells Moses to call him “Yahweh” (though he goes through some pains to claim that he’s still the same God who knew Abraham and Jacob).
With the new attitude and the new name, more changes are coming. God promised to help Abraham have a stack of descendents, but his deal with Abraham at first seems very personal. Now Yahweh makes this “covenant” a group experience, explicitly extending his coverage to all the Hebrews. In exchange, he extracts some new requirements as the Hebrews march out of Egypt toward a new home.
Here’s another thing they always get wrong in Sunday School: when the impatient Aaron helps to create the Golden Calf it wasn’t because they were forgetting the God of their ancestors and traipsing off after some Egyptian pretender. Nope. The Golden Calf was the symbol of El. Aaron even says it, “here’s the God that freed you from Egypt.” The Israelites were trying to get back to the God of Abraham. Only God doesn’t want them to go back.
When Yahweh orders the calf smashed up and the people punished, it’s the announcement of a new phase. God is going mystical. Abraham sat across a lunch from God. Jacob wrestled him in the dark. Moses sat in the mists of God’s presence. From now on, no one will get that close.
For the next several hundred years, God will remain a remote, enigmatic figure who speaks to prophets in dreams or in Elisha’s still small voice. He’ll be worshipped through elaborate ritual, guarded by an arcane hierarchy of priests. Having been uncomfortably close to God, God is now slipping away.
That’s the cycle that repeats through history and through cultures. A close, human-centric God is gradually replaced by more remote, unknowable deity. To address this, cultures erect ladders of priests stretching up to heaven, and create tiers of lesser spiritual beings to form a bridge to Earth. Bishops and cardinals. Cherubim and seraphim. No matter how elaborate this attempt to ford the gap becomes, eventually the structures fall, and God and man have to come face to face again.
As the World Turns
The Hebrew School students can turn off here (though I hope they won’t). This next phase could be about the embodiment of Krishna, Mohamed wrestling with Gabriel, or even Sidhartha and his time under the tree, but I’m going to talk about that peculiar man from Galilee, Jesus.
Jesus appears at one of those times when all the structures are falling. The temple cult is in disarray and disrespect. God has not kept Israel from being swallowed up in the Roman Empire, the temple leaders are drowning in legalisms and procedures, and Yahweh seems very distant. The world has passed through the philosophical storms of the Axial Age, and there is a terrific yearning on many parts of the planet for something new.
This wandering Galilean (who was probably not a carpenter, darn it), offers just the right medicine. He’s one of several itinerant rabbis shouting from the hilltops around Jerusalem, and has apparently spent considerable time hanging around with another firebrand of the time, John. However, when Jesus gets his message tuned up, he suffuses John’s “get your act together before God gets you” proto-brimstone, with an incredible message of social relevance and reversal. When asked, Jesus sums up the law as loving God and loving other people. If Jesus’ own message was to be summed up, it’s this: the first shall be last.
Jesus is all about overturning social conventions and knocking down barriers. Occupation, sex, age, race, class, wealth — all the things that divide the people of his age (and ours) — are sent reeling. Being rich is bad. Being important is bad. Jesus is the guy who shows up at a black tie event in jeans. Then he invites the catering staff to sit down and eat. There are few books you could read more radical than the Gospel of Matthew.
The message of the gospels is an incredibly progressive message. It’s not who you are that counts, it’s what you do. Jesus goes even further, calling on people not just to act, but to think about why they act. He never asks for brainless, rote imitation. He calls on people to make a huge, disquieting shift, to give up their lives and follow him. Not follow him to death, but follow him into the idea that a life spent in service to others is better than a life acquiring wealth. It’s such a wrenching, difficult idea, that people still work hard to convince themselves that Jesus must have meant something else. Surely.
After Jesus’ death, many of his followers will come to believe that he is an actual manifestation of God, that God has given them a chance to sit face to face with him and share a meal, just as he did with Abraham. That idea will persist. Unfortunately, it will sometimes come to overshadow what Jesus actually said.
The Moving Unmoved
All this may seem like a huge aside from the initial point about atheists and believers, and in a way, it is. But having illustrated the enormous changes that God has gone through over the course of history, let me say this: God is unchanging.
Huh? How can El Shaddai and his traveling partners be the same as Yahweh on the mountain? How can that guy be Yahweh Sabboath, lord of the armies, who leads Israel in all that middle of the book “smiting?” How can any of these violent old bozos be conflated with the Loving Father of Christ and with social radical Jesus? Even if they are all the same guy, how could anyone maintain that God hadn’t changed?
That’s not how believers see it. God hasn’t changed, people have. Much as some might maintain otherwise, neither religious ideas nor morals are fixed points. Slavery once seemed okay to a lot of folks (Jesus included). Whipping an animal to death in the streets wouldn’t have raised eyebrows not so long ago. The idea of a God who offered personal gain for personal commitment seemed good to nomads living at the edge of a wilderness. The idea of a God who was fiercely partisan, and who ordered the death of enemies seemed normal enough to people who were surrounded by other cults, many of them just as violent (when some of your neighbors are still involved with child sacrifice, your own little peccadilloes don’t seem quite so bad).
Instead of reading the story the way I put it down the first time, try it this way.
People from the beginning of time have had a sense of the numinous, the idea that there is something more. Something not only beyond our current understanding, but beyond any understanding. When people have sought this something — in meditation, in prayer, in ritual — many have found it profoundly moving. Many have sensed this other as a being, as something that both notices and responds to our presence. As God.
As people began to develop civilization, they built rules around all aspects of their lives. That’s what allowed more people to live together, to trade together, to fight together. It took rules to develop standard weights, coinage, and all the trappings of civilized life. These rules also extended into that sense of God, framing this experience in words and shared concepts that served to bind together communities. Some of those frames worked (hey, don’t think of a burning bush!), some didn’t.
At times, human beings found this God to be so close they could touch him. Could deal with him on an extremely intimate scale. At times, this concept of God was harnessed to the power of the state, using the glue that the shared “frame” provided as a means of holding the community together in the face of crisis. At times, this shared idea of God was used as a savage tool of destruction.
As morality changed, God’s fit into the social frame also changed. When society was about survival, God was about bringing the rain. When society was about fighting the neighbors, God was about armies. When society developed a concern for fairness, God became the champion of these new concerns.
If reading this sounds like a confirmation that man created God, that God is nothing but a big mirror in the sky, reflecting our own attitudes… well, you’re half right. We’ve often read into God what we wanted to see. On the other hand, people have received messages from God — like those of Jesus — that were profoundly upsetting and downright dangerous to their health.
If you try to read the Bible as if it’s the history of God, you’ll think it chaotic, inconsistent, filled with meaningless violence, and weighted by nonsense. It’s not that book. The Bible is the history of men and women. Of people trying to come to grips with the concept of God. Sometimes they caught a glimpse. Just as often they struggled on in the dark.
Through all this, God was unchanged. The name he gave Moses, the name he uttered from the burning bush, was Yahweh. Yahweh simply means “I am.” God is. What we do with him, is up to us.
As for truth, it’s all true. The garden. The flood. Job on his pile of rubble. Did it happen? No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. Not real. Not as integral to many people’s lives as their first kiss or the color of their baby’s eyes.
Seeking Compromise
The gulf between atheists and believers may be the most intractable gulf imaginable — wide enough to make the split over abortion rights look like a sidewalk crack. When I look back over this little essay, it’s clear enough to me that I haven’t even managed to drop a pebble into that void. Try as I might, I stand irrevocably on the believer’s side of the divide, and my best attempts to explain why come off like an arthritic man making shadow puppets.
I can only offer this to those who are really irritated by all the “God talk.” Remember the saying “God is love?” Take it seriously. Call it the “Charlie Brown Approach” to religious talk, only where Charlie and pals always hear wa-wa-wa from the adults, whenever you hear “God” or “Jesus,” just substitute the word “love.”
Think Love.
One nation, under Love.
Love Saves.
Does that sound so bad? I know there are many who will be quick to point out that many of our political opponents use God as a bettering ram to try and force through ideas that have little to nothing to do with love. All those things I said in the last section, about how people could use a shared concept of God for destructive purposes, apply now as well as in the past. There are certainly plenty of confessed believers who don’t act from love, who don’t practice what they preach, and who seem just as bad (or worse) than any jerk you’ve ever met.
You shouldn’t be surprised by that. There is no human being who makes any claim to morality who is not frequently found in breach of their own moral code. The only people who are not hypocrites, are monsters.
Think of this as an olive branch from the other side of the thought war. God is not your enemy. Neither are believers. Instead, the shared experience and references of those who believe can be a tremendous tool. Like Archimedes lever, this is an instrument that can move the world. It can server the progressive cause as well as the people trying to push us backwards.
Now, let’s roll up our sleeves, put our heads together, and go smite those guys on the other side (metaphorically speaking, of course).
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Great post, very well thought out, interesting, and convincing. kudos.
Great post, DT.
I am definitely a “B”.
writes of is actually the purest theology of all, I’m not sure about the notion of vagueness applied to monotheism, maybe the mathematicians who have a more complex understanding of the concept of “one” can help.
The evangelical Christians would sure appreciate it. They are accustomed to think of themselves monotheists but lately they have been plunged into a theological crisis since somebody told them this would mean they share a supreme being with the Muslim Menace.
And just look at all the library vaults of weapons quality tomes the Abrahamic trifectists have produced on the subject of faith.
When Schmidt’s “primitive” could have saved them all that ink and finger cramps, just by saying, “Yo! look at this rose.”
Reminds me of Crom, Conan’s god who couldn’t give a shit about humanity. I tend to prefer that concept to the organized religions, which to me are quite simply a method of social control.
I think the post is commendable in its aims, but specifically these parts of the conclusion leave me a bit cold:
Not if I felt like more than 10% of supposedly pious people actually acted that way, as if God were Love. But they don’t and people have been using God to control and divide us for thousands of years.
My personal belief is somewhere between A and B. I think you do have to be illogical to believe there is a omnipotent being that takes any sort of role in the universe. BUT I actually think the idea of God has been around for so long because we inherently know there is a divine nature to the universe. The secret, if you ask me, is that WE are divine. We are the creators of our reality, of our universe. We shouldn’t be looking to God to absolve us or rationalize this or that. Instead, we should be finding the divine nature of our selves and our humanity and cultivating that until we are freed from those who sell us the false gods of money, religion and state. Unfortunately for me, there aren’t many who agree with me or see it that way… yet. But as the diarist points out, the notion of God is ever changing.
“Namaste” means “I salute the God in you.”
Rev. Bernice King, in her remarks at Miss Rosa’s funeral, referenced the Christian concept of “dying to oneself” in order to attain a higher level of spiritual enlightenment, in the context of merging oneself with Jesus, believed by Christians to be a manifestation of God.
If you read the poetry of Iqbal and Rumi, realizing one-ness with the supreme being is what their poetry, and Sufism, is about.
Buddhists seek Nirvana, which is also the same thing, the goal of transcending the human self in order to achieve that one-ness with the universe, which is another way of viewing the “supreme being.”
Of course, this kind of mystical arcana is not very mainstream, in any religion, where more effort is expended on worldly concepts than metaphysics, but this is not the fault of the faiths.
Here is a very useful prayer, which everyone of any or no religion can say:
“Oh Lord, please save me from your followers.”
“Oh Lord, please save me from your followers.”
LOL! I have that t-shirt! (Though I admit I don’t wear it often for fear of retribution from a follower.)
exactly.
but it’s the part that most arbiters of things religious don’t want you to know anything about. that takes away their power and control. it’s why the Gnostic message never spread – too dangerous to the status quo.
That religion emerged from an original monotheism seems to me both unsupported and unlikely.
I regard it as unsupported because Father Schmidt argues from the beliefs of so-called “primitive” people. Their beliefs, however, have emerged from a cultural evolution that is precisely as long as our own. To seek the origin of religion there may make more sense than to search for origins in the Vatican, but I find this methodology unpersuasive.
Further, I regard his thesis as unlikely because another seems more likely. Religion surely evolved together with human beings, that is, on a biological evolutionary time scale. It is far easier to imagine earlier, simpler minds regarding all moving things as animate than it is to imagine them pondering the origin of the cosmos. This simple animism blends into a world populated with spirits, which in turn blends into polytheism. I see this as a more natural and likely path of development.
Intuition is rarely right when it comes to the evolution of anything, in my experience.
This was a very thought provoking post. As a spiritual atheist, I find myself straddling the absolutist fence. As a spiritualist, I understand the need for humans to explore religious extasy and seek out alternate states of consciousness and awareness. As an atheist, I am not won’t to put lables like “God” on whatever I discover. As a spiritual atheist, I can understand both sides of the coin, but always find myself on the edge of said coin.
I agree that atheists who persist in stating that religious folks live in a state of delusion and fantasy do nothing to help bridge the divide. On the other hand, religious people who continually assert that this is Christian Nation and us godless folk should leave aren’t helping either.
What gets me upset is that I don’t go to your house demanding that you give up God; I don’t start off public meetings with a prayer to Reason and Logic; I don’t persecute people for believing in something I do not, or a God different from my own. So why is it ok for Christians (or any other faith) to do that to me?
In another diary, actually two, we discussed why words matter. In God we Trust are words that matter. It does not say “In Love we Trust”. In fact, according to some of the more popular sects of Christianity today, God is not Love, God is a Wrathful and Vengeful deity who will smite down his foes. The war is a Crusade and the US is God’s Army. So, which is it? God is Love, or God is Vengeful?
This all brings me to the next point…while you seem to say that all Gods are one God, I don’t think the owner of the bumpersticker I saw a while back which read “My God Reigns” would agree with you. As a spiritual atheist, I probably would agree with the sentiment that all religions from around the world throughout history were tapping into the same thing, whether they called it God, Siva, Hecate or Cthulhu. Does George Bush believe that God and Allah are the same? Do most Evangelicals?
I am fine with anoyone believing anything they like so long as I am not forced to believe it to. I do not “trust in God” and I resent having to pray to a god I do not believe in. Sure, I can pretend they don’t really mean it, or they mean Love, or they mean the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but I still have to do it. Freedom of Religion and Freedom from Religion…that’s what I would like to see.
Great post! (Sorry, if I rambled on too long) :>)
for the notion that monotheism came first.
As for religious people using logic, it’s not actually true, because as you illustrate, there are all sorts of arbitrary and illogical constraints on the use of logic.
However, in discussing religion, even words you’ve used all your life become treacherous. What does it mean for something to be “true?” What is “real?” What constitutes “proof?” If you use logic, all these concepts and more are addressed far more “logically” and amenably to evidence than they are in religion.
We’re still stuck with the fact that faith is by definition a policy of believing certain ideas regardless of evidence. Given that policy, it is always possible for religion to drop God into the machinery and interrupt logic at every point where it become inconvenient to bureaucracy.
But I’ve seen an even more basic problem with Judeo-Christianity. Peoples the world over believe in family and tribal gods. Jews and Christians say they’re entirely different from this, they do not worship such Gods. However the personal experiences of God that I see reported by Christians at least of every persuasion, whether they’re lucky breaks, rescue from disaster, or finding the best person in the world for a spouse, are much more consistent with minor gods than with a universe-creating or even a national God.
I’ve never seen the least evidence that a universal God is useful for explaining anything or providing personal guidance for those of us who don’t influence the fate of nations.
So though I was raised a Christian, if I were to decide to practice a faith about practical involvement of deity in my daily life, I’d have to go with family gods or guardian angels etc.
While I can appreciate the goodness and sincerity in which this is written – it made me very uncomfortable to read it. And its not because I align with either A or B. Its because I am a woman.
All of your references are to men, he, patriarchy. For me, the God you are referring to is the God of the MEN who wrote history. It doesn’t speak to me at all.
I wonder if you have read books like “When God Was a Woman” by Merlin Stone or “The Chalice and the Blade” by Rianne Eisler. Put in a dose of their thinking and you might have something that would speak to me.
Actually, I’ve read both.
Sorry to make you uncomfortable. To me, God is an “it,” but I recognize that any road I take is going to offend someone on this point.
In several of her books, Karen Armstrong makes the point that at conception Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all about empowering women. It’s a message especially central to Christianity and Islam, as removing the class structure and overturning the existing ruling class are key.
However, any successful religion soon goes from being a rebellion against the society, to being a tool by which the society can be held together. When the religion becomes captured by the state, it immediately adopts all the male-oriented characteristics of that state, and becomes another instrument by which women can be subjugated.
I really don’t know enough about Islam to comment, but after 30 years of being immersed in Christianity – to the point of getting a masters in theology from an evangelical seminary – I don’t see anything that is liberating for women about the origins of that faith. Certainly Jesus could be seen as a liberating figure, but to me the origins of Judaism are nothing if not an attempt to dehumanize and control women. How do you go about finding the “point of conception” of these faiths if not in the words and deeds of those who lived them? And in my mind, those words and deeds are nothing if not misogynist.
There’s a reason I loathe Paul and the vast majority of the things he wrote.
This is one of the finest essays I’ve ever read, far far beyond the quality of most blog pieces. Your turns of expression are often really remarkably fresh and sharp. As a believing Catholic who majored in religion and philosophy many years ago, I didn’t agree with everything, but I found the whole piece extremely fascinating. Good job! Thank you.
As I’m sure you realize, Father Schmidt’s point of view is not essential to your overall argument. But it was fascinating to read about.
I should probably stay out of this thread.
Well, no. False choice. Certainly neither of them is “certainly” anything.
We don’t know. Not in the sense of “certainly”, which I would define as a reproducable experience that can be shared across ALL boundaries, the way a mathematician can understand PI with a mathematician from another country, even if the only language they share is mathematics.
Experiences of the mysteries outside of quantifiable experience are subjective BY DEFINITION. Personally, though I find religion to be really fascinating, it isn’t a way to bring people together. I find Buddhism, Taoism, Baha’i and animist faiths to be much less threatening than the three major monotheistic faiths, but that, too, is purely subjective. I haven’t had personal experience of their ugly manifestations, like I have with Christianity.
So, I come down to this. Tell me about your faith, if you ask me if I mind first. It will tell me a lot about you and what you value, but leave it the fuck out of politics. Mixing the two together makes compromise impossible, which I know is what you’re trying to avoid with this diary, but sorry, and ignorant fuck who throws modern science out b/c of his superstitious belief in the literal truth of a book that bears NO resemblence to it’s original form is just that, an ignorant fuck. Those self-same ignorant fucks are driving this country back to the dark ages.
I can’t stop thinking about these lyrics (by XTC some years ago):
Dear God – XTC
Dear God, hope you got the letter and …
I pray you can make it better down here
I don’t mean a big reduction in the price of beer
But all the people that you made in your image
See them starving on their feet
‘Cause they don’t get enough to eat from
God,
I can’t believe in you
Dear God, sorry to disturb you but …
I feel that I should be heard loud and clear
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image
See them Þghting in the street
‘Cause the can’t make opinions meet about
God
I can’t believe in you
Did you make disease and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too!
Dear God don’t know if you’ve noticed but …
Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book
And us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look
And all the people that you made in your image
Still believing this junk is true
Well I know it ain’t, and so do you, dear God
I can’t believe in
I don’t believe in
I won’t believe in heaven and hell
No saints, no sinners, no devil as well
No pearly gates, no thorny crown
You’re always letting us humans down
The wars you bring, the babes you drown
Those lost at sea and never found
And it’s the same the whole world ’round
The hurt I see helps to compound
That Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Is just somebody’s unholy hoax
And if you’re up there you’d perceive
That my heart’s here upon my sleeve
If there’s one thing I don’t believe in
It’s you
Dear God
Perhaps this is entirely beside the point but I’ve been very troubled recently. All kinds of bad events in the world, where is god? Oh I know, god works in mysterious ways, and people will ultimately get their reward. But so much suffering and it goes on and on.
Instead, the shared experience and references of those who believe can be a tremendous tool.
Although I do like your statement equating god to love I’m not sure what the shared references are. Perhaps I’m being obtuse here but recently I’ve found myself moving further away from religion. It has been used as a tool to keep people in line for far too long.
Recently my synagogue sent around an extensive questionnaire about saturday services. One question stuck out: What would make you more likely to attend saturday services? Although I’m itching to reply that it would require a wholesale shift of organized religion to things that people actually need I probably won’t write this.
I know, I’m rambling here. But to me, religion should be private to the individual. Quite frankly I’m uncomfortable with the public discussion of things religiou put forward in recent years by the right. I’m not sure about the wisdom of using it as a tool as you suggest. It might actually serve to turn away progressives.
Yet I do find this to be a very interesting diary and certainly it provokes a worthwhile discussion.
Recommended.