Big Questions Letter Exchange II.

[rivka]

My church's "Big Questions Letter Exchange" continues. This week I really struggled with my letter.

What are your thoughts about God? Is there a God? By what name (if any) do you call God?

I'm not very articulate on these questions.

The one thing I'm sure of is that there isn't an interventionist God who acts on the world by handing out rewards and punishments, or granting certain prayers. But not others, is the part that usually gets left unspoken, and that's the part I have trouble with. God answered your prayers and cured your kid's cancer, great. Did the mother of the kid in the next bed not pray hard enough, then? Pursuing that line of reasoning doesn't lead anywhere good; if God really did work that way, such a God should be opposed rather than worshipped.

I do, however, believe in a force that is larger than the knowable. (This is where my articulateness breaks down.) The way I think of it is that out of all the vast uncountable forms of life, and the connections between them, and the connections between life and other forms of matter - the part where our bodies and everything around us are made of tiny bits of long-exploded stars - that out of all of those connections and interweavings there emerges something larger. Not outside the material universe, but arising from it, and shaped by everything in it. For lack of a better name, I call that thing "God."

My sense of this force is that it isn't personal, not a being with awareness or consciousness who, you know, notices me and knows who I am. But I am aware of myself as part of it, and I find value in practices which help me feel aware of and connected to the larger force: mindfulness exercises, meditation, prayer. And I see God manifest as well in the things people do to connect themselves to each other and to the world: in kindness, compassion, courage, usefulness.

Comments

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

I'm an atheist, and that's the clearest definition of my spiritual life* I've seen that didn't come from my own pen. :-)



(*Yes, yes, for some value of "spirit", but I am fine with using those words -- spirit, soul, even god -- among people who understand that I don't mean something supernatural by them.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Now we should have a long pointless argument about whether you ought to be calling yourself a theist or I ought to be calling myself an atheist.

[ex-serenejo.livejournal.com]

Hee! Let's just consider it argued, and skip right to the potluck, shall we? Potlucks (and church music) are the best things about churches, in my opinion. (Kidding, but only partly.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

At my church, on any given week there are a few people who show up for coffee hour after missing the service.

[mizchalmers.livejournal.com]

+1

[pameladean]

I'm an atheist, but I get a tremendous thrill out of the fact that we are all made of bits of exploded stars. Your essay really resonates with me; I just don't use the term "God" at all, except perhaps if I hit my thumb with a hammer and am taken off guard.

P.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Yes yes yes. The odds against us existing at all are so literally astronomical, it's awe-inspiring that we exist at all. That we do, and because we do, create these connections... yup, that's it, right there.

[bosssio.livejournal.com]

My take on it. I agree with everything you said about the something that is larger, the "we are made of star stuff" concept. I don't call it god, mainly because I feel like that the word god is already taken, ya know? It seems to me (and just for me) like a cop out - like saying "no, really I am a theist, just not a theist in any form that most other monotheistic religions would be happy with". - This is my baggage and no one else's...

See, I realized a few years back, when I claimed to be a weak theist/agnostic, that really I was only falling short of calling myself an atheist because of social conventions and semantic need.

First off, it is HARD to say I don't believe in god. Conversations can get incredibly confrontational so quickly. It is almost as though people are allowed to say "I believe in God, but not {insert specifics of a monotheistic religion here}" but NOT to say "I don't believe in God." To say one doesn't believe in God is to say that one is a staunch self-interested materialist who has no ethical system at all. Atheists as a group have a BAD (and very unfair) reputation.

Secondly, there is no good term for that all encompassing, humbling, awesome *thing/stuff/existence/universe* that is greater than us. God is a very very useful short hand IF you are coming from a theological/philosophical background (like a standard UU church or say the Jesuits) where the essence of the definition of the divine has been discussed and explored. But if coming from the background of the average American with the average theological education, the word God has very different connotations, in my experience.

Just some musings...