“Do you believe in God?”
Sometimes there is a problem with the way that questions are asked. Those are the questions to which our response is sure to get someone upset. Perhaps they should not be asked? Perhaps they need to be asked differently?
When a response clashes with a person’s beliefs, this is guaranteed to create an uproar, because people are highly invested in their belief systems. We tend even to be highly invested in our opinions.
It is as if our whole identity is threatened when these opinions, and certainly our “deeply held” beliefs are questioned.
Why exactly do we feel threatened when these are challenged? Why does it feel so visceral? As if someone is threatening to chop off a finger or wrench out our heart? Indeed, it is as if these are more than material.
If my hand is amputated I can get a prosthesis. If my heart is diseased, I can maybe receive a transplant. I will still be the same person. Will I be the same person if I adopt a different religion or lose my faith?
I think it depends a lot upon what we base our identity.
So, do I believe in God?
I do not believe in a kindly or a wrathful deity sitting somewhere up in the sky, or one bearing similarly anthropomorphic features. I think that most educated, self-respecting contemporary people would probably give this same response whether or not this is really their image of the deity. They will mention a more sophisticated concept of what “God” represents for them.
It is necessary to dig a little deeper. If there really is an entity called God, Allah, Elohim, Siva, Ahura Mazda, Amida Butsu or whatever, this is going to have to be infinitely powerful and all-knowing. Above and beyond everything else. Anything less would be too limited. If our deity does not exceed all limitations, why do I need him / her / they?
Yet even if we think of God as limitless, omnipresent, omniscient and omnivalent, this remains a conception or a concept in our minds. As humans, We understand reality through such concepts, all of which are highly subjective and culturally conditioned. For example, according to Wikipedia, a banana is a a kind of berry produced by a large herbaceous flowering plant. A cucumber is a fruit that grows on a vine and people in some cultures would see it as blue.
Concepts are used to tame our anarchic reality and make it manageable. We take a feature of this reality and assign to it a definition. To define something means literally to place it within limitations, to limit it.
Do we wish to place limitations around God? If there is a God, could we? This is the entire reason that Jews and Muslims refuse to create images that represent the deity. Jews go further and refuse to “name” God. They replace the word with epithets. When pressed for a name in the Biblical tale, God’s response is only “I will be who I will be” (the meaning of “Yahwee”) – and Jews refuse to speak or write even that name. Muslims disallow even the artful representation of God’s creation. They see this as blasphemy.
When religions, such as Hinduism, do allow for such representations, they have highly sophisticated responses to the issue of the implied limitation – they understand the problem very well. This is even built into folk traditions so that not just the savants will understand it.
Ultimately, the question of God’s existence is less important than what it reveals about ourselves and our way of understanding the world.
Links of the day
Israeli complicity in Sri Lanka war crimes must be investigated | Opinions | Al Jazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/27/israeli-complicity-in-sri-lanka-war-crimes-must-be-investigated
“During the civil war, Israel sold weapons and backed the Sri Lankan army while it was committing grave atrocities.”
Israel OK’s plans for thousands of new settlement homes, defying White House calls for restraint | AP News https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-settlements-west-bank-biden-49c4788ffc5f5ee41d5c48365ac5395b
“Peace Now, an anti-settlement watchdog group, said Israel has now approved over 13,000 settlement housing units this year. That is nearly three times the number of homes approved in all of 2022 and marks the most approvals in any year since it began systematically tracking the planning procedures in 2012.”
French Government Bans “Earth Uprising” Direct-Action Climate Group
After the banning of [i]Les Soulèvements de la Terre[/i], it seems that George Monbiot did not choose the best possible moment to extoll the French government’s environmental response.