We've had the conversation turn to God a couple of times now in class and each time I roll my eyes. We've heard every argument or comment about God so many times it's obnoxious. Not to mention the rather out-spoken kids in our class seem to have a real attachment to the concept of God. Whatever, to each their own. I personally do not.
Unless you count anytime when Im truly scared first I wish for my dad to be there and then I pray that everything will be ok. I don't ever pray TO anything but I guess it's the thought that counts.
God has always seemed arbitrary to me. My parents never forced religion on me, instead allowing me to decide for myself. My brother took that freedom and ran with it exploring any religion he found intriguing. Then again my brother is brilliant and if it weren't for his lack of emotional intelligence and occasionally common sense I might always feel inferior to him... but that's another blog altogether.
God is an endless question. God cannot be proven and because of that also can't be disproven. Perhaps the ultimate philosophical question? But I guess my question is why do we feel the need to ask that particular question? Why do we feel the need to believe in God? I believe in karma, so I can't complain too much it just seems like an easy out. A nice neat way to make everything feel connected and right.
Maybe God is just the easy out for all the wrong awful things in the world. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" "To keep the rest of us humble" or whatever bs answer sounds good at the time. But ya can't fight city hall and we all need comfort. We seek it out. We seek comfort in each other but that's too risky. It's real. We can be let down.
So I guess my God is just a little different than everybody elses. But maybe everybodys God is different. We each have some mysterious power we have to believe in to make it all worth while. To feel that maybe all of this, the struggle and the ease is worth something. That we're always moving towards something besides death.
I wonder what would happen if we asked people to explain their form of God. What things we would hear....
"Mine is a pink elephant, like the one I had when I was little. Loyal, comfortable, loving..."
"A morally righteous man who keeps me humble and makes me want to be a better person..."
I don't really feel like continuing that but I think it would be interesting.
1 comment:
Well, I guess I do a bit of an eye-roll myself. From my point of view, any assertion about God is fraught with difficulties. You're quite right that everyone must have a slightly different perception of God. Jung argued that God, fundamentally, is the Self, but not understanding the nature of the Self, we project it into the outer world, construe it as being Other, whereas "in fact" it is our deepest inner being.
Simply because something cannot be proven I'm not sure that it can't be disproven, but certainly the existence of God has not been definitively affirmed or negated. I prefer to suppose that God is possible, and that the possibility of God's nature is very broad indeed. I personally believe in infinity, and in infinity it seems that in some situations God exists and in others does not exist, in some exists while not existing, in others neither exists nor does not exist, and so on and so forth.
I do not see any particular NEED for God, although the notion of God can be a convenient one.
I have had personal experiences which convince me of something along the lines of "God", but I would not by any stretch of the imagination propose those experiences as factual evidence, or as a good reason for acceptance of the existence of God.
Probably we would be best to find justifications for our lives without God, and then, should God so to speak show up, why, then we would be able to justify ourselves on our own grounds, which I would hope would be acceptable to God.
God is maybe too easy a solution -- a cop-out, a way of defraying moral responsibility, and of fostering guilt and superiority. And there is a whole problem of explaining not only the existence of God but the relationship between God and humanity that, frankly, inevitably becomes an intellectual and emotional drain on the average person. Again, in my view, better to work through our problems for ourselves.
To me, "God" is that which is supremely worthy of worship. I think a lot of folks have a too-narrow focus on this, miss the point, and, I fear, may pay later for their piety. But I guess that's their look-out.
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