Who is God?

  Do you still believe in God?”

It’s quite an involved question, but it occurred to me to share the following:

“I no longer believe in God in the way religion conceives it, which is some variation of the idea of Sky-God where God is a Herculean/Thor-like immortal being who rides the sky and rules the world from above. It’s a little scary how ancient sun worship, Greek mythology and institutional Christianity are not all that different in how they conceive of a deity. Another part of the religious idea of “God” is that God is separate from everything and everyone else, and that there is some correct sets of beliefs, practices and behaviors that satisfies and curries favor from this God. Typically this religious notion of God includes punishing unbelievers with eternal conscious torment.

So no, I don’t believe in ‘that’ “God” or the “God” that is imagined in ways that religion conceives it. By the way, I don’t believe Jesus did either. He was rejected by the religious establishment because he attacked the prevailing religious view of God.

Many people ascribe human characteristics ((anthropomorphize) to “God” because we want God to be personal. Hence, modern Christianity’s focus on “relationship with God.” The universe is a big and sometimes random and frightening place, and we’d like to think that there is someone or something out there bigger than us who has a plan, exercises ultimate control, and who loves and will take care of us. Some people don’t like the notion of “God” as some sort of impersonal field of energy floating through space, and want a more personal God.

An alternative is to think of “God” as the foundational life/essence/nature underlying all things including yourself. In this sense, “God” is the ground of all being and the ultimate reality from which all things derive their existence. One of the ways we touch and experience this reality is on a deeply personal level through the experience of deep feelings of peace, harmony, belonging, joy, beauty and love. One could argue that Jesus spoke of “God” as “Father,” not to convey that God was a man in the sky but instead that at the center of all things is a reality that we experience and comes to us in deeply personal ways that we use words like “love” to describe.

As an adjunct professor, one of the classes I teach is Linguistics and this is a significant element to consider in this conversation. The very word “God” evokes a myriad of different and sometimes conflicting ideas and beliefs. I don’t use the word as much anymore because I realize that the prevailing concepts that people associate with the word “God” are not ideas that I subscribe to. The word is often associated with an entire belief-system or framework that I don’t accept or wish to perpetuate.

One of the primary contributions Jesus made with respect to how God is conceived was teaching that God is not separate from the human person, and that whatever God is, it is an inseparable part of who we all are. When Jesus said, “I am the truth,” he was saying that the deepest and highest reality at the center of all things is what we are all fundamentally made of, connected to and able to express in human form.

The idea of "God" has often evoked hatred, hostility, violence, oppression and a long list of atrocities. It would be a step forward for humankind if we would equate the word "God" with the highest truths of love, goodness, compassion, peace, justice, virtue and harmony.

Entire libraries are filled with discussions on this topic, this is just a brief and spontaneous response based on how the question hit me in the moment.

Jim Palmer