We had been sitting in her living room, chatting about friends and family for only a few minutes, when my friend noticed that her one year-old son had reached up and taken a pair of scissors from a table top and was happily sucking on the sharp point as he toddled around. Quick as a panther, my friend bounded up from her chair and ran to the child, pausing a split second on the way to grab a pacifier. She then skillfully pulled the scissors from the boy’s mouth while substituting the pacifier for the dangerous plaything. The boy hardly noticed the change and happily began sucking on the pacifier as his mother lifted him up.
She turned to me and said, made wise by past experience, “You can never take something away without giving something in return.”
The original idea for my book, Building a Better God, probably occurred to me more than 30 years ago. At the time I was a very young man, working in a high school in Los Angeles. It wasn’t a very demanding job and there was frequently time to chat about anything and everything with the small staff. One middle-aged woman employed there, I learned, was a Jehovah's Witness, and curious about her faith, I began to ask her questions..
(I had always been interested in ideas and philosophies, and had in high school once asked a friend who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) “What do you believe?”
I’m not sure if he had an accurate knowledge of his faith at that age, but he replied, telling me among other things, “We believe if you are good - I mean really good - that when you die you get your own solar system to be God to.”
I was astonished. “You mean like a MacDonald’s franchise?” I asked, and further angered him by asking, “Are there already people on the planets in the solar system- -or do you have to wait around for billions of years for intelligent life to evolve that you can torment?”)
My questions to the Jehovah's Witness weren’t quite as rude. I was mainly interested to know why they chose to interpret so severely a vague passage from the Bible concerning the mixing of the blood as to let their children die rather than allow blood infusions, as I would have interpreted the passage as simply a warning against intermarrying with non-Jews.
Her reply to me, after some minutes of my questions, shocked me and shut me up. She said, “If I didn’t have my religion I wouldn’t have any reason to live.”
No reason to live! We have the sun and the stars! We have the sound of babies’ laughter. We have butterflies and waterfalls, flowers and rainbows. Do we absolutely have to have strange and illogical explanations for our existence and for the bountiful heavens? And explanations that require us to waste our lives standing on street corners handing out dismal tracts? What kind of cold-hearted God would require such a life from his followers? And perhaps more importantly, would such a God deserve our worship?
But I stopped my questions, for I had nothing to replace her faith if my questions managed to severely shake it. I had no comfortable pacifier with which to replace the sharp scissors.
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it."
- Bertrand Russell
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
- H. L. Mencken
If the reader has ever tried to talk about or write about God for more than 5 minutes, the reader will have discovered how very hard it is to avoid using “He”. For, when one believes, as I do, that the idea of God having a gender is absurd, one would like to dispense with such inaccurate and primitive pronouns – but Lord, it ain’t easy.
So, as far as (humanly) possible I will try to use “He” only when describing the traditional view of God described in many religions and cultures. That is, God as the father, as the alpha-male.
I’m sure the Pope, the Grand Ayatollah, and some Hindu priests, if cornered, would all admit that-no, God isn’t male, a man, the possessor of a long white beard, much less a penis (..what would he use it for?? Unless the universe is a result of masturbation instead of intercourse!)
But none the less, for the sake of simple understanding, we are always told of His will, His love, His heaven, the other guy’s hell. Yes, the devil, too, is viewed as a masculine force. The female force, on the other hand, is apparently considered too impotent to be either truly godly - or ungodly.
And while so-called more primitive religions, such as Hinduism (so denigrated by us because of their multitude of Gods, both male and female) allow for female empowerment, Christianity and Islam seem to suggest the greatest divinity allowed females is virginity.
Along with the wish to consider a God who would be more moral, logical and thus more useful than the God traditionally described in Judeo-Christian terms, it is the wish of my book to get beyond a gender-based view of The Creator.
But a gender-neutral view of God will not be easy, as we seem to require a God who is in fact not all-forgiving- -and thus seemingly too feminine. Rather we seem to masochistically long for the stern disciplinarian. Someone overtly masculine to keep the other guy in line.
Perhaps our tendency to think of God as the Father, as a masculine force, comes from our concept of nature as something unpredictable and violent instead of nurturing and benign. The masculine propensity for aggression affects the human psyche and makes most of us subconsciously long for the ultimate father figure, a father who is always loving and just. But try as we may it remains almost impossible for us to believe the Ultimate Father does not also contain negative traits such as anger and irritability and the lust for vengeance. At best, God is occasionally a Grumpy Old Dad, at worst a dangerous tyrant, a maniac who demands the sacrifice of sons as a sign of obedience.
If humanity is to get beyond God as the ultimate human male, for good or bad, it is vital to always keep in mind our psychology, our biology and our family relations. And it is equally essential to realize that God, if God exists, does not possess our hopes, our fears, our desires or emotions. If God does possess anything akin to desires and emotions, these “feelings” are unlikely to bear any resemblance to ours. Unsettling as it may be, God may not be interested in love, justice, murder, sin, morality. Perhaps God is not even capable of interest in anything. For if God just is, it may be a fact that God has no consciousness, as Nature has no conscious overview, designs or goals.
Such an unconscious comatose God can be of little use to us, and of practically no prolonged interest. We could in some sense be grateful to such a God for coalescing everything, but we would find it difficult to continue much adoration.
And just as an unconscious God would seem fairly useless to us, an overly superior one would be equally useless. Imagine a race of beings visiting us from another planet, a race so intellectually superior that they were in essence unable to distinguish us and our feeble endeavours from bacteria and their by-products. We could never hope to easily relate to such beings. The vast distance between us would be an impossible chasm, and we should quickly come to hate such superior beings if they should ever deign to show interest or sympathy for us.
No, the distance between ourselves and our God cannot be too great. And in lieu of something better, we will sadly continue to content ourselves with Grumpy Old Dad.
Unless we are provided with a sensible alternative...
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
- Susan B. Anthony , addressing the National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting in 1896
In all religiousness there lurks the suspicion that we invented the story that God Loves us."
- Sebastian Moore
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
- W. H. Auden
If God created us in His image we have certainly returned the compliment.
- Voltaire
The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshiped anything but himself.
- Sir Richard Francis Burton
When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
- Peter O’Toole
If dogs had a god it would look like a dog.
- unknown
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