Tuesday, March 31, 2009

You Don't Have to Believe in God

I have to be honest and admit that I sometimes chuckle when I hear statements like, "Well that's not the kind of God I believe in."  My reaction to this is...as if.   As if...granting there is a God....or if you want...gods...his (or okay...her) nature could be modified based on our belief.  As if...we have that much control over anything...because if we did...wouldn't we make our lives much different from how they are (or at least somewhat different)?  As if...we can presume to have any idea about how God SHOULD behave or what He SHOULD look like...because we have that kind of omniscience.   As if...we would want a God that can be affected by our fickle desires, by our wants...by our whims.  As if...God doesn't chuckle when He hears someone say, "That's not the kind of God I believe in." 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As if... To quote Thomas Merton "Both Christianity and Buddhism agree that the root of man's problems is that his conscienceness is all fouled up and does not apprehend reality as it fully and really is; that moment he looks at something he begins to interpret it in ways that are prejudiced and predetermined to fit a certain wrong picture of the world, in which he exists as an individual ego in the center of things. From this basic ignorance, which our experience of ourselves as absolutely autonomous individual egos-from this basic experience of ourselves comes all the rest."

Could it be perhaps some people's individual views of "their" own personal God is due to their actual experience of God or their perception of who God is to them? As if their egos, which to me is the original sin; the element in all of us that makes us preceive that God is something separate from ourselves. Due to this ego, we live our lives as if we are individuals. Instead of living out lives as the one whom created us, do you now think that every word we say, every action we take is not hurting us but God? Due to our free will, we "freely" deny "all that is". As if.. perhaps if our individual God's were recognized, the "individual" we THINK we are would be no longer.