~~ Knowing God ~~

I have looked at life from both sides now... From win and lose and still somehow... It's life's illusions I recall... and sometimes I feel that I really don't know life at all.... one of the various things that puzzle me is “GOD”

So… do you believe in God? This is a question often asked of me, and one I ask of myself as frequently. It's also a question that cannot be addressed without offending someone. The concept of higher mind or power, regardless of name, is ever appealing and its veracity eminently plausible given the interactive precision of structures and events that make up the human reality. But it's a crowded market, the god market, so which god exactly?


The God of gods, the supreme power sitting above all manipulating and puppeting our thoughts and deeds, the one true God, the god capable of loving Hitler, the god who seduces mortal women, the merciful god who saves a child lost in the forest and takes the lives of hundreds in an earthquake or typhoon, or perhaps the god of peace or war, or the creator, preserver and destroyer, or the god who built the dinosaurs, then drove them to extinction? Or, perhaps a futuristic god - an almighty that we multi-cellular bipeds of today cannot imagine beyond hypothesizing that all concepts of god entertained by man millennia hence will not include even trinket memories of what we believe in today.

Yes, I do believe in God, but I have no idea what God is and I doubt anyone who says he does. And this last is the most difficult part for me. Since childhood, when I first realized that the man of our local priest did not embody the words spoken by him, I've been unable to sustain a belief in a god so feeble, a god so much in need of "select" individuals to define and translate him that he bows to indelible human weakness as a means of communication.

There is no pope that is not a man, no rabbi, no mullah, no priest, teacher or guru that is not a man or a woman. And men are imperfect. Therefore assessments of the divine derived by them, regardless of their title and stature in the temporal world remains a narrow and inadequate measure upon which to discern original truth, the mind of God or exact a dissertation on human design.

I have turned to such men and agree they are profound, but life cannot complete a man and death hides his ultimate story. How then are we to judge the accuracy of any faith arising from men when so many believed for millennia that the Earth was the centre of the universe, that disease was the manufacture of evil spirits and that blood flowing through our veins was an impossible idea?

Errors in perception persist; belief in God, however deep, however strident, is not and cannot be equivalent to the God of belief.

At the risk of sounding harsh I would say that no "master" equals the power of God, and so he lacks the right to speak for or about God from a position superior to that of the average man. Nor has any man returned from the dead with viable proof of an immortal God and life eternal beyond the flesh. Failing proof of the same, a God defined by our present understanding of immortality evokes doubt in the reality of that God.

A conundrum indeed and one that brings us to another equally difficult question: Why do I believe? Why does anyone believe?

In a world where the line drawn between placebo and actual eludes direct observation, where no two people see the world from an equivalent perspective and all perspective evaluations are biased from the human point of view, belief, though it differs from person to person, is one ingredient in the mix that provides an adjudicative role over our lives.

Perhaps the God of our belief is our belief - an internal reality nominated by us to arbitrate the weight we cannot bear, the wisdom we cannot fathom and the purpose we cannot define.

Belief in God is human - an evolving adaptation of advantage over adverse circumstance that none will relinquish once attained. Belief is our ultimate bridge to survival, the vision to attribute unknown forces behind inchoate shadows in the night, a mechanism designed to shelter the mind from hostile uncertainty and reason to coalesce individuals into groups for greater fortification and procreation.

In the town where I lived, a woman suffering from serious financial and health problems and struggling to raise a son of 13, who is near deaf, blind in one eye and often debilitated by a weak heart and stomach, told me that she believed in God, that her belief was strong and God would save her and her son.

Though it may appear blind, God, even if it is just an idea - because ideas apart from what they define have power - has the power to direct human attention and consequently, human action, hope and purpose.

Yes, I do believe in God, in my way, and in my way I am connected to all beliefs. Still, I wonder, would a good man who believes in God remain a good man if he did not believe in God?