What About God?

A comment (for which, thanks) on my last blog On Becoming a Person queries my views on religion and God.

I wondered there whether my teenage developing views were rational or a reaction against the fundamentalist regime of my upbringing. That certainly made me a critic of detail, since religious belief (across the religions) requires belief in miracles, magic, and the irrational generally. In the Old Testament, the sun stood still to give Joshua military victory, Lot's wife becomes a pillar of salt, the waters of the Red Sea pile up. The New Testament presents us with a virgin birth, a physical ascention to heaven, and numerous medical miracles. None of these is a problem if we can read them as folklore.

Today we have a vociferous evangelical atheist movement pursuing the demolition of myth and folklore, and denying the relevance of a concept of God. Religions need to respond by redefining themselves after such demythologising, so that belief in God does not ride on the irrational. Rudolph Bultmann applied demythologisation to the life of Jesus. Paul Tillich appealed to depth psychology to find God in (or as) the depth of personal being. This is not unlike philosophical Hinduism.The collection of articles by active Christians, called The Myth of God Incarnate was an unexpected but understandable best seller. That the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, are problematic historical documents is saying no more than that we should approach them as critically as we do Josephus, Tacitus or Suetonius. That the books were written to have an authoritative use should put us on our guard more, for that makes them socio-political propaganda, documents for contemporary people to accept without question and act on, and if required give up their lives for. All people in power try to write (and rewrite) history and it was no different in the early church. The Old Testament consists of foundation books for the origins of Judaism, written to promote the interests of a particular power group. Some off-text sections have survived which makes the archaeology of the text particularly interesting.

Religions mostly base themselves on stories of one or more deities. Theravada Buddhism alone presents their founder as human and not divine, which did not translate to Tibet, China and Japan, where deities abound in Mahayana Buddhism. People then as now varied from concrete/pictorial to philosophical. The common folk needed pictures, whether in words or icons; the more thoughtful could see beyond them to deeper principles. It is what God means in these deeper principles that concern us here.

God is pictured (described through a picture) even in the Hebrew Bible where creating images of God was forbidden. 'He' walked in the garden, was a shepherd and king, and so on. I describe this process in some detail in the chapter on symbolism in my Creating the Old Testament (1989). A picture can be demythologised. God is not really a shepherd but an aspect of care and protection is shepherd-like (the argument would go). Of course the same God who protects also destroys when in a different mood. The prophet Jeremiah focused on political disaster as a divine punishment for sin.  Hindu deities are iconic (presented in the form of icons or images). Saraswati goddess of wisdom is a lady, dressed in white, crowned, with a Sitar, rosary and book. I asked children what wisdom is, and one said, "a wise person is someone who knows a lot about a lot of thiongs, but is humble and not proud and uses what they know to help others". So this is what Saraswati means. This deep inner wisdom is part of what we mean by God. This is one of many images of God that Hindus use and all can be deconstructed similarly. Ganesh, with elephant head, is the remover of obstacles: what better than an elephant to knock a wall down; but Ganesh has an untied bond (meaning to remove inhibition), a cake (meaning to maintain strength), a goad (meaning to make maximum effort) and a broken tusk (meaning to take risks). Obstacles are only overcome thus, with inner strength and conviction. Inside each of us is a reservoir of inner strength, which we need to learn to draw on. God therefore refers to these inner strengths. But again, what is created comes from the destruction of what went before. Siva is creator, but also destroyer, reminding people of the procdess of change and entropy.

Religion can make us either dependent or independent. Fatalism is to say that God has it all planned and we can do nothing. If we do nothing, disaster will happen and we will say it is God's will. Blaming God for disaster is as old as religion. Praying for help might unlock inner strengths that will succeed.

Prayer is another interesting topic. In a sense, we pray within ourselves to no external person; but the inner dialogue may be helpful. By externalising the vision (that is, thinking of an objective God) we might focus ourselves to succeed instead of fail. We all need an inner reflexive dialogue to clarify our thoughts and motivations. Contemplation is a monologue, but prayer is a dialogue. Artificial maybe, but effective. Prayer is an internal discipline which is more helpful than unhelpful.

If I think about ethics, I can visualise the apogy of ethics: perfect, positive communitarian behaviour. This is part of the conceptual cluster I call God. Similarly with justice, there is a core concept of perfect justice. And virtue, and goodness, and altruism, and fidelity, and empowerment. All these give God substance, and I cherish them, the highest of all positive values.