Well, after this essay my soul is likely to be sentenced to eternal damnation in Hell, but I can’t but help share with you some of my reservations about conventional religious beliefs.
Traditional monotheistic religions have been largely constructed by those who have claimed to have had particular, personal access to God.
In ancient times most people worshipped multiple gods. Often they were depicted by idols that had come to have religious significance. But gods are formed by necessity and hunter-gatherers often worshipped animals that were their major prey or competed with them for such prey. Those who learned to till the soil and harvest crops were more likely to worship gods that could influence the weather.
The major move to monotheism is attributed to Judaism. The Old Testament which attempts to portray the history of the Jews and their particular relationship with God makes interesting reading. The Jewish Patriarchs and Prophets that guide this evolution in the notion of God (and indeed also of Mankind) were relatively unsophisticated people.
Consequently their first notions about God were unsophisticated as well. Their original depiction of God seems to be that of a powerful tribal chieftain who had many very human characteristics. This God could be jealous, cruel, vindictive and wrathful and enjoyed such simple pleasures as walking with Adam in the afternoons in the Garden of Eden.
But as the Old Testament history of the Jews and their relationship with God progresses one thing that intrigues me is that only a select few seem to gain direct access to God.
Abraham, Jacob and Moses all seemed to have direct personal dialogue with God. Mind you Moses first encounter with God came via the medium of a burning bush.
You would believe that anyone who had such an encounter with God would be immediately persuaded to do as God suggests, but time and again this does not happen and those contacted directly don’t bow to God’s will without a lot of persuasion.
God himself seems uncertain of his own powers of persuasion. Why for example did he send Moses to petition for the release of the Israelites out of Egypt when he could have easily done so Himself?
In my blasphemous mind, these are not so much shortcomings in God but shortcomings in our perception of God.
Those in the Old Testament who had encounters with God perceived Him as a fellow being like themselves but just a whole lot more powerful. In Exodus 33:20 it is written that “nobody can look upon the face of God and live.” Consequently when Moses converses with God on Mt Sinai he is only permitted to see God’s back.
But still the Old Testament depiction of God assumes God is physically similar to human beings. So I think it is true to say that Mankind was not made in the image of God, but Mankind created God in Mankind’s own image.
(The Greek philosopher Xenophanes once said: “If cattle, horses, and lions had hands and could paint and make art just like humans can, then horses would make horse-shaped gods and cattle would make cow- shaped ones”.)
Religious history would have us believe that the average person can’t access God without help of an intermediary.
Maybe some of us just don’t listen well enough! Remember that God manifested Himself to the prophet Elijah in “a still, small voice”. Elijah had just fought in support of the Judaic God, Yahweh as he was then known, against the forces that championed the pagan god Baal. He pleaded for God to take his life but instead God consoled him, and then (as He was wont to do with prophets) provided further instruction.
Christianity teaches that Christians can’t access God directly but must do so via the intermediary of Jesus Christ.
Islam similarly teaches Muslims that God (Allah) can only be accessed through the teachings of the Prophet, Muhammad.
This seems to me abhorrent to human nature. If I have belief in God, which would be something fundamental to my very being, I want it to be a personal belief. I don’t want it to be filtered through the dogma and historical prejudices of another fallible human being. If such faith is to be sustained it must be because of a personal realisation that embeds itself in my psyche and not a lot of platitudes I mouth in order to be accepted into a particular religious community.
But let us pause for a moment and examine the phenomena of God speaking to humans. In the days of the Old Testament this was a privileged communication that someone received that enlightened them about God’s intent or God’s direction to inferior humans.
Today if I declared that God had spoken to me I would be accused of having a hallucinatory experience and my sanity would be most likely questioned.
Julian Jaynes wrote a very interesting book titled The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As you know neuroscientists have identified that the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain have different functions. The two sides of the brain are connected by the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is a very dense band of nerve fibres.
Neuroscientists believe that consciousness is a very late evolutionary construct in humans probably evolving in the last 100,000 years. Jaynes maintains that consciousness as we know it was actually arrived at in historical times. He uses a study of Homer’s writings to illustrate the final stages of this evolution.
Jaynes proposes that as the corpus callosum thickened each brain hemisphere began to be aware of the activity in the other. He surmises that initially when the left, rational hemisphere became aware of the intuitive thoughts of the right hemisphere humans initially believed they were being spoken to by the gods.
It seems entirely possible that the “still, small voice” might just have been a weak signal from the right hemisphere to the left!
As I intimated earlier, much of this problem seems to me consequential on how we define God.
The principal fallacy in traditional religion is that God is a being.
As religious thinking evolved it became evident that this could not be the case. I won’t bore you with too many references about how this transformation occurred. I will just refer to two.
St Augustine was one of the more influential participants in this debate. Augustine of Hippo was a fourth century theologian and philosopher. Augustine came to the conclusion that God was to be found in the mind.
As religious historian Karen Armstrong explained:
God therefore was not an objective reality but a spiritual presence in the complex depths of the self. Augustine not only shared this insight with Plato and Plotinus but also with Buddhists, Hindus and Shamans of the non-theistic religions. Yet his was not an impersonal deity but the highly personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Moving forward to the twentieth century, the German/American theologian, Paul Tillich, came up with what seems to me to be a more appropriate notion of God. Tillich was critical of the view of God as a type of being or a presence. He promoted the notion that God was not a Being as had been assumed in the traditional writings about religion, but that God needed to be recognised as “the ground of Being itself”.
Tillich agreed with Nietzsche that the personal God was a harmful idea. He wrote:
The concept of a ‘Personal God’ interfering with natural events, or being an independent cause of natural events, makes God a natural object beside others, a being among beings, maybe the highest but nevertheless a being. This indeed is not only the destruction of the physical system but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God.
A God who keeps tinkering with the universe is seemingly absurd. A God who purportedly gave Mankind free will but interferes with human freedom is also contradictory.
Karen Armstrong wrote:
If God is seen as a self in a world of his own, an ego that relates to a thou, a cause separate from its effects, ‘he’ becomes a being, not Being itself. An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who made everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a God is amply justified.
Now the overall problem with religion seems to me to be the fact that the average “believer” is not a “seeker” but an “acceptor”. As I pointed out the original concepts of God were formulated in historical times when we knew a lot less about the world and that concept of God suited the worldview of our ancestors of those historical times. Traditional religions were formed about those concepts resulting in a very unsophisticated notion of God. Some religious traditions persist in propagating such notions. Many of a religious bent who profess a belief in God are still reliant on this outdated concept.
Liberal, Christian theologians have tried to discover whether it is possible to reconcile a belief in God with developing understandings of science, mathematics, psychology, sociology and indeed of other religions. This is not just a recent endeavour but commenced in the second and third centuries with the work of Origen and Clement of Alexandria. A notable contributor to this endeavour in the twentieth century was from the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He wrote an influential book titled The Phenomenon of Man. (It certainly made an impression on me when I read it in my early twenties!)
Religion is demeaned by those who are dependent on archaic notions of God and the folk histories that they rely upon to underpin their unchallenged belief systems.
We would do well to return to Tillich who advised:
Religion is the state of being grasped by an ultimate concern which qualifies all other concerns as preliminary and which itself contains the answer to the question of the meaning of life.
It is time we abandoned archaic concepts of God and begin to develop a philosophy of religion that honours our new understanding of the nature of the universe.