“What we believe about God is what does the most to shape us.” Joseph Campbell
We humans are a very primitive species. President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, Barbara Mark Hubbard, says we are just now emerging from the womb as sentient beings after a gestation period of 200,000 years. What astounds me is we don’t know how our own minds work, why our hearts beat, or how our lungs breathe. Yet we know all there is to know about the Creator of the universe. How can that be? What is it about “him” that we know for sure?
For most of those 200,000 years God wasn’t knowable at all. His first appearance came to pre-humans as a sound in the forest and a light in the sky. As civilizations developed he began appearing as a vast array of specialized divinities who could be appealed to for protection and guidance. Monotheism wasn’t born until 1350 B.C. when God revealed himself to the tenth Pharoah of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt. Akhenaten decreed that there was only one God. The sun god Aten was the source of all life but otherwise ineffable and unreachable. God came much closer just a few years later when he spoke to Moses from a burning bush and revealed himself to have human-like needs. He said he needed us to obey him and worship him. Thus, as Eckhart Tolle says, God was finally made in man’s own image.
In the infancy of our childhood, it has been comforting to believe in a “heavenly father” watching over us, answering our prayers, and protecting us from his throne just above the sky. Our entire worldview is dependent on that picture of him. But science and technology are showing us that such a god can’t really exist.
Maurice Wiles (Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford) said this: Every generation has the task of constructing religious belief appropriate to its own time and culture. Christian faith should never be a matter of preserving belief as handed down to us by previous generations.
The trouble is, we’re having trouble letting go of Moses’ god. Uncertainty about what we will do without him has become a root cause of the collective anxiety befallen humanity at the beginning of the 21st century. Violence, crime, race relations, sexual identity, political confusion - all of the problems we face in this world are manifestations of the uncertainty we feel about God.
The first question has to be this. If we thought we had the wrong idea about God could we admit it? Would we want to know it? We say we want more of God. Do we really? Then we mustn’t be afraid to ask questions like this. When we think we have all the answers expansion ends, growth stops, and arrogance begins.
What if God told us not to defend ancient beliefs about him that separate us? What if he doesn’t care if we are Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim, Buddhist, Mormon, or have no religion at all? What if he doesn’t care if we are gay or straight, and isn’t going to punish us even if we don’t believe in him? What would happen if we came to the understanding that God loves us all the same way - regardless of our religion, race, color, gender or sexual orientation?
I understand how these words may be confrontational – even blasphemous for many Christians. It is almost unthinkable to give up our worship of a god who will punish us forever if we do. But it is time for that god to be excused. A god who demands that kind of obedience under threat of punishment could only be an insecure, unfulfilled tyrant - not the Creator of the universe.
It is okay now for us to remove this ancient story about God, and to stop telling it to our children.
