The Terrible God

Regardless of religion, much of the world worships, believes in, or supposes a terrible deity. This “God” causes or permits death, destruction, disaster, droughts, disorders, disease, and damnation—and these are just the words that alliterate nicely.  This “God” hates homosexuals, privileges males over females, has cursed certain races and religions and conditions, and does not tolerate differences.

Even atheists may harbor such thoughts when they think of the God they don’t believe in.

Most also imagine a highly regulatory God, one concerned with every detail of human life, including diet, clothing, dancing, worship, sex, feelings, thoughts, and what is read, watched, listened to, and talked about.

Religious fundamentalists accept more regulation from God than they would from the most benevolent of governments or institutions.

I don’t think God is in control of everything that happens. Nor do I think God gives a damn about much of what we worry about.

On several occasions on this blog, I have written of my favorite image of God, that of shepherd, whose rod wards off predators, whose staff leads us to green pastures beside still waters, whose familiar voice calls us by name, whose eyes search for us when we get lost, whose arms lift us up and carry us home.

These are the images conjured up by Psalm 23, which I often recite when I am anxious, confused, or simply in need of a good night’s sleep. It is what I recited to our dog Hobbes the morning she passed from our lives. It is part of an improvised “liturgy” the child narrator in one of my unpublished novels recites to remember his beloved friend who died after surgery.

There is a reason Psalm 23 has become a funeral card “cliché”: it comforts us. And this is why early Christians appropriated the then common cultural symbol of a Good Shepherd carrying a lamb to represent Jesus.

A friend, the wife of a pastor in New York City, once told me she thought of a depiction of this Good Shepherd in their sanctuary as too sentimental, until a person with AIDS explained how much strength he gained by gazing on it.

And the only vestige of its old sanctuary preserved in a modern church I served in Los Angeles was a stained glass representation of Jesus as The Good Shepherd. Given that congregation’s history of various ministries to the ‘60s counter-cultural “Flower Children,” ex-offenders, those in recovery, war protestors, the L.A. Free Clinic, those with developmental disabilities, LGBT people, the homeless, and sex workers, this church had put into practice what Jesus told his disciples: “I have other sheep, not of this fold. I must bring them also.”

Jesus and many who followed him resisted the regulatory nature of religion that often excluded “the least of these.”

Not what goes into a person is spiritually relevant, Jesus said, but what comes out of a person’s heart. Judge not, lest you be judged. Don’t worry about what you should eat or wear, but trust in God’s providence. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, even hardship. We have been set free, not for religious restrictions and observances, but for spiritual freedom.

Following the rules isn’t enough: go, sell what you have and give to the poor. Go the extra mile, give your cloak as well as your coat, instead of revenge turn the other cheek, forgive as you have been forgiven, be compassionate as God is compassionate.

Though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with us, preparing a table for us even in adversity and even in the midst of adversaries, anointing us with oil, overflowing our cups, blessing us with goodness and mercy all the days of our lives, as we dwell in God’s house always.

Related post: Beware of the God!

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Thank God for Atheists!

I believe we need to imagine a world without God.

We then might take greater responsibility for our own lives and the circumstances of others, as well as life on this planet.  Our consciences would not be alleviated by the notion that suffering or poverty is God’s will.  There would be no “acts of God” that can toss a baby through a window, drown a family, suffocate the elderly, or destroy a coastline. There would just be tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves, and hurricanes.

We wouldn’t wait for God to fix things, or save us, or take care of the world. We wouldn’t exclude anyone from basic human rights because God demands purity or orthodoxy or a particular form of religion or worship. We wouldn’t have those who do violence to themselves or others for the reward of various versions of an afterlife. We wouldn’t have American politicians who insist on saying “God bless America” rather than “God bless the world.”

Diseases, disabilities, and infirmities would not be blamed on God but on their true causes ascertained by science. Global warming and evolution would not be things of “belief” but challenges to human arrogance and pride. Sin would be viewed not as an offense against God but as an offense against ourselves, others, and the earth. Redemption would not be considered a supernatural event but a coming together of forgiveness, responsibility, mentoring, and community. Death would remind us of the unpostponable value of life.

Rather than prefer and await an invisible world, we might better value bodies, earth, the cosmos, and the moment.

So I am grateful for atheists and agnostics who remind me of my own “cloud of unknowing” when it comes to God’s definitions, actions, and desires.

Yet I still believe in God.

Letting go of the concepts above prompts me to believe still more that all we say and do and all we fail to say or do matters.

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith Than I Do

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Famed evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins is one of those atheists who inspire faith in me even while dissin’ it. I found a recent New York Times interview of him by Michael Powell more uplifting than that week’s religious articles. Of course that’s because most media coverage of religion highlights faults more than insights.

I’ve written before that I am not an atheist because it requires way too much faith! It’s easier for me to believe that there’s a God than that there’s not, not just for psychological comfort, but to fully comprehend the awesome cosmos and all its living things.

I’m with Marcus Borg when he invites atheists, “Tell me about the God you don’t believe in,” because the God I believe in is not the one on which I was reared. In fact, the more I might try to define or describe God, the more likely I am to be wrong, or idolatrous, or just plain presumptuous. At the least God is that “oomph” Dawkins implies when speaking of evolution as progressive, tending toward greater complexity. You could say that when I say the Lord’s Prayer each morning, I am aligning myself with that “oomph.”

The article quotes British literary critic Terry Eagleton’s observation that Dawkins offers “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” I can’t say if that’s true, but atheists and progressive Christians probably have a lot more in common about the God they don’t believe in than atheists might think.

“If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself,” Dawkins tells Powell, “And it is. But it’s not supernatural.”

I agree. My feeling and faith of something greater than myself is NOT supernatural. It is an embodied experience. That’s the reality that the story of the incarnation is pointing to: that which we call God is with us, among us, within us.

And the “something greater than myself” also is not supernatural, but a natural and integral part of all that is. The Milky Way serves as an icon revealing that God is also beyond us and beyond our imagination.

“Religion teaches you to be satisfied with non-answers,” Dawkins is quoted as saying. Actually, I believe that much religion has too many answers. Spirituality teaches us, in Rilke’s well-used phrase, to live the questions. 

For those interested in listening to my sermon in Wilmington, DE this past Sunday, Oct. 9, on same-gender marriage, please click on: "The Wedding Banquet"

Coming up:

Rockville, Maryland, Oct. 23: Chris will speak at the Rockville United Church, 355 Linthicum St. 20851 at the 9:30 am morning class on “Claim the God in You as a Progressive Christian” and his sermon title during the 10:45 worship will be “Jesus Was Not a Literalist.” Lunch follows with a question-and-answer period with Chris.