Someone Asked Me About God

In the old days, when an adult said of a child, "you're not old enough to understand" - mostly what was meant was: the child was not old enough to learn to stop asking. To learn "this is just the way we believe, and there's no use questioning it." In the old days, this sort of resigned acceptance was what passed as the understanding of an adult.

That's not good enough anymore. Children (or questioning adults) who are not given satisfactory answers to "why?" will begin to believe there's nothing there to understand. And because the "there" that they are being fed is a lot of irrelevancy, all to do with human hubris, and nothing to do with God - they will be right. And so they may simply fall away from faith. Into despair. All because of a stack of irrelevant beliefs that glorify not God, but one's sect; one's little group of rules about what way to believe is best.

If you can't defend your beliefs reasonably, particularly if you insist that the world and the universe cannot be understood in terms of human reason, in terms of science, or if you try to tell people that God conflicts with science and reason, well guess what: you are needlessly harming the ability of good and reasonable people to believe in God.

I said needlessly.

God does not conflict with science or with reason. We are told we were created in the image and likeness of God. This does not mean God is a hairy biped*. It doesn't mean that each of us "is God" i.e. there is no God except each of us. No. It means that among created beings, we were created creators. We were created with the capacity, the right, and perhaps even the duty to learn all we can of ourselves, of the universe, of anything we can - so that we can take all we have been given, and from it we can create. Create an offering to God, of whatever it is we make of ourselves, of whatever it is in our capacity to know and to do.

To offer it up.

We need more humility than we have. Asking for answers is not hubris, it is humility. To ask for answers is to admit we are not infallible, all-knowing - to admit we have much to learn. Force-feeding unreasonable beliefs about God to others, and insisting that those beliefs are unseverably linked to belief in God when in fact, they have no connection to God at all - that is hubris. We push beliefs that we can't defend, whose only attraction is that they feed our desire to control the behavior of others. We hook our prejudices and ignorant biases to God, so that we can palm off the responsibility onto God, for all the biases we hold most dear.

So yeah, I try to be nice about it, but when I see a representation made that belief in God must be in opposition to sense and reason, I'm going to have something to say about that. I don't care to have my own belief in God impugned in that manner. And I don't care to see someone else - some perfectly decent and reasonable human being who is searching for what to believe, who might be perfectly willing to believe in God's truth! - I don't want to see such a one turned off and turned away by some person who just because they're more comfortable living with mind turned off, tries to push everyone else to accept and believe that turning your mind off is the only way to God.