Forrest Church, former senior minister at All Souls UU in NYC, who died of cancer a few years ago, frequently noted that when he talked to parishioners (or others) who said they didn’t believe in God, he’d ask them to describe what they didn’t believe in. Almost universally, he was able to say “I don’t believe in that kind of God either.”
He has not, so far as I know, put in writing just what the characteristics described were. I bet that we could pretty easily imagine the typical conversation, tho.
We could describe a god who was dictatorial in telling us what to do, limiting in telling us what not to do, and interventionist because he would punish us if we didn’t do as we ought. But more than that, for we can say those things about natural forces such as gravity, we would also describe someone arbitrary, in singling out the select, and capricious in behavior, so that we could never be quite sure where we stood. In fact, this is the god that William Ellery Channing called “a being, whom we cannot love if we would, and whom we ought not to love if we could.”
Fortunately, we are not stuck with only that god. Nor are we stuck with any other image which we have created or been given and have associated with the word “god.” Instead, what we have is the realm of what Forrest Church called “transrational.” This is the realm for anyone who cannot accept the “standard model” God, but who nevertheless remains convinced that there’s something out there which we don’t, and maybe can’t, ever understand, but merely experience.
Our question then becomes: what does this mean to me? And that’s where we need to decide what *sort* of something we believe in.
In its broadest meaning, "theist" simply means someone who believes that at least one god exists. This definition carries no overtones about the sort of god or gods implied. The currently common definition, which equates theist with "stereotypical Christian God" really didn't start to take shape until the eighteenth century, when Deists, who believed a supreme creator had wound up the universe then left it to run, distinguished themselves from those with more traditional views by calling everyone else a Theist.
If we look at the entire spectrum of gods across history, I think that, taking a very broad brush, we can divide them all into three categories. Objectified gods are those who are directly associated with something we know in the physical world. The one that is perhaps most familiar to modern Americans is Pele, the goddess of the Hawaiian volcano. Animal spirits, some of the Egyptian gods, and ancestor worship also fall in this category. These gods are generally "right here" in the sense that they coinhabit something we know from our physical environment.
Personified or anthropomorphic gods are those who look and act like us, only more so. Greek, roman, norse, finnish, hindu, and possibly Wiccan gods fall in this category. They generally have the characteristic of living "out there." From Mr. Olympus on, they've always had a place the rest of us couldn't get to.
The last group are the "diffuse" gods. These are the ones who are simultaneously both everywhere and nowhere. The great spirit of Emersonian transcendentalism, the universe is god or universe is part of god theories of pantheism and panentheism, the ultimate Gaea hypothesis, and the cosmic consciousness movement all fit in this class.
It is interesting to consider the Christian trinity, and note how the triumverate of father, son and spirit seem to correlate with the three classes. I find this interesting and suggestive but it may well be nothing more than coincidence.
Thus far we have talked about the physical characteristics. But what about their behavior? Any god, regardless of class, can be evaluated along two major axes. First, do they intervene in our daily lives, or they leave us alone, except, perhaps, for offering advice when we open ourselves to it? Secondly, are they stern and perhaps even cruel, or do they tend to the side of infinite love?
Now we have a toolkit with which we can describe any sort of transrational entity, whether it is one which mirrors one we have personally experienced a glimpse of, or one which is completely the product of our imagination. The concept of God is so broad that it can encompass any set of assumptions about the physical realm and still embrace something spiritual, welcoming, and amazing.
Instead of a stark choice between a god we cannot believe in and a non-existent one, each of us has a huge palette of ethereal colors to choose from as we paint our personal image. And that leads me to note that no matter how people have viewed the ultimate reality, they all seem to have shared some common beliefs about ethical behavior. As a universalist, I think that’s important, because it looks to me like no matter what we believe, we all have the power to live with wisdom. Wisdom comes from many sources who follow many different traditions, and we do ourselves a disservice if we ignore some bit of it because it also comes with ideas we find unappealing.
I say it doesn’t matter if you believe there’s a god, and it doesn’t matter what kind of god you believe in. It doesn’t matter if you use “god” as a shorthand word to refer to something fuzzy that you can’t really describe but need to have a name for. It doesn’t matter if you think the entire question of god is nothing but “nonsense on stilts.” What matters is that we each find our own spiritual center, and live our lives as a brilliant testimonial to what we find there. To let our light so shine out in the world, we must carry an image of the ultimate truth - of god - that is true to both what we know with our brain, and what we know with our heart. To borrow from another famous tradition: “Love your god with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:30-31)
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