Do you believe in God?
I don’t know how often you get asked. Maybe never. But every couple of months somebody asks me if I believe in God. They might ask in exactly that way, “Do you believe in God?” Or maybe, “You do believe in God, don’t you?” Or, from a child perhaps, “Is there really a God?”
How do you answer? I know that some of you figure, “There’s an easy question. The answer is ‘Yes.’” Or “The answer is ‘No.’” No problem. Another clump of you no doubt respond with something like, “It depends on what you mean by God.” You want your questioner to name the terms before you make a commitment. And then another batch of you probably goes right ahead and defines your own terms—your own conception of what might be sacred from your own perspective. You say something like, “Well, I do believe in some spirit out there, or something bigger than ourselves, or that there is some larger purpose to our lives.” Maybe you call that God, maybe you don’t.
When somebody asks me, “Do you believe in God?” I immediately feel uneasy. Not because I feel defensive about my belief system, not even because I can’t figure out why, in any given case, they might be asking. I feel uneasy because when someone asks, “Do you believe in God,” I don’t know what they’re talking about!
They know. They know what the word “God” means, or they wouldn’t ask the question in that way. And not only do they know what the word God means, they seem to understand a common definition of the word, a definition that they think I must be familiar with. But I’m not. And I’m a minister. It’s weird.
So, one day, I’m standing in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles, a long line, to accomplish a routine but not-able-to-be-done-online task, and I’m reading some God-related book or other and the guy ahead of me in line asks, “Do you believe in God?” And as usual, I have no idea what he means.
When someone uses the word “God” there in the Department of Motor Vehicles—or in church or in a serious discussion in your living room—when someone says the word “God” to me I see in my mind’s eye a menu. And on that menu is a list of gods. In Sunday school I was taught, and our Unitarian Universalist congregations still teach, that god has many faces.
So all those many faces occur to me there at the DMV in the driver’s license line. “Oh dear,” I wonder, “does this man mean God as love, or God as punisher, or God as nature, or God as benefactor?
Is his God a Presbyterian Sunday school God, a Roman Catholic God, a Quaker God? Is he talking about the Rainbow Serpent, or Allah, or the Goddess, or Yahweh, or God the Father, or the ground of all being? Is it the God who blesses sick babies or the God who sends violent tropical storms?” I don’t know.
But those aren’t the kinds of questions one can ask there in the DMV (the line’s not that long). The truth is, there are a lot of gods out there I don’t believe in.
And so I say to the man in line, “I believe in big mysteries. I believe in depth of feeling—feelings so deep within the spirit that the connection, or the bliss, or the peace, stay with us forever. And I believe in a goodness, a goodness created by our love and our care.”
He says, “Fine.” That was all there was to it, and I went back to my book.
No, as it turned out, my companion in the line had not wanted to engage in a spirited discussion of Richard Dawkins’s, Sam Harris’s, or Daniel Dennett’s books that challenge conventional conceptions of God. Nor did he want to recommend the many anthologies of spiritual readings available, or compendia of gods and goddesses from everywhere on earth. He didn’t even want to tell me what he thought, and he certainly had no interest in listening to further observations from me!
But still, the God question is a good one, even in its short and stark form, and ideally, we should all be able to blurt out a quick response. I, for one, did not have an answer at the ready—I found it hard to synthesize my own world-view in a cogent and succinct way at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
Oddly, once we get started on articulating our views on gods, it’s not so bad. One can think about hundreds of gods, gods around which whole civilizations developed, and quite readily cross them off our personal lists—I, for one, am just not going to relate, for example, to a caribou god. Closer to home, for me at least, it’s just as easy to cross off a vengeful god who punishes with earthquakes and
AIDS and shootings, or a god who only loves the Baptists, or a god who would hear me if I were to pray for good weather for a wedding. Once we’ve narrowed it down this far, we are within the range of what most Unitarian Universalists might believe.
We can carve up Unitarian Universalist views in a number of ways. In my mind, whether we use the word “God” or not doesn’t matter much. It’s a word I virtually never use, what with all the confusion around it. What I’m about to say applies to atheists as much as is does to theists and agnostics.
Each of us believes something about the nature of life and the cosmos—some call whatever that is “God,” some describe it in other ways. That’s more semantics than religion. But there are some theological categories that may be helpful. I’m going to remind you of three such categories here—obviously I could suggest a hundred or a thousand—no two Unitarian Universalists have exactly the same perspective.
But let’s take the label “theism” for openers. The technical, academic term. Some of you are theists, and strictly speaking, if you are a theist, you believe four things about God: Your god is personal. For example you can imagine your god, you can communicate with your god. Second: God merits worship and adoration because God is good and all-powerful. Third: God is separate from our world—above us, or beyond us somehow. And fourth: God is active in our world, here and now. If you call yourself a theist, that’s what religionists would expect you to believe.
A second traditional category in religion is pantheism. The label has never caught on in our popular culture, though I think the spirit of it has. If you believe that everything that exists is a part of a whole, a unity, and if you believe that this all-inclusive unity is in some sense divine, then you are a pantheist. For example, Matthew Fox—the Dominican priest who founded the “Creation Spirituality” movement some years back—Matthew Fox seems to think this way. He says:
I can pick up a blade of grass and experience its twenty-billion-year history and its color, shape, and form. We can feel awe when we experience the planet, or a dog, or a friend. Anything that has ‘being’ is holy…. I heard Beethoven for the first time when I was in high school, and it made my soul leap. And there was…Shakespeare…. I think that most people’s basic experience of God is like Einstein’s—the awe of the universe, the experience of the cosmos as our home, and God dwelling there…. We must learn to be entranced again by the presence of God in all things.
If you tend to think that way—of connection and unity and awe all around you—you may be a pantheist.
Or you may fit into a third category, you may be a Deist. Deists believe that there had to be something, God let’s say, that got the universe started in the first place. A Deist will say that the cosmos is just too complex to have happened by chance. But this God is not around to supervise our day-to-day lives. Deists believe then in an “absentee God.”
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and Thomas Paine were Deists. Tom Paine wrote:
I believe in one God, … and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy… But, lest it be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall … declare the things I do not believe:…I do not believe in the creed professed by the [Jews], by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church…. Do we want to contemplate [God’s] power?
We see it in the immensity of the Creation.
MeditatingWithin Unitarian Universalism, you can be, of course, a theist, a pantheist, or a Deist, or you can take any other religious position that pleases your heart and satisfies your mind, including atheism. In A History of God, the author, Karen Armstrong tells us that the statement “I believe in God” has no objective meaning at all, that each generation has to create the image of God that works for it. Unitarian Universalists are unified in that we are our own theologians, and the choice is ours, not once and for all, but throughout our lives.
Of course, you may not like being analytical about the experience of God, and categories don’t appeal to you. For you,simple experience may say it all. When we are paying attention, miraculous moments happen in each of our lives. Some of you call that “God.”
Perhaps the concept of God does not interest you much, but you know what you do and do not believe. Or maybe your beliefs are growing and changing all the time, and it helps to attach theological labels to them along the way. Maybe you simply have a feeling of God and don’t go much for talking it through. But wherever you are, whatever you believe, know that each of us has the same assignment: to name the source of our blessings, the foundation of all that is good, the ground of our being. So when the mysteries are close at hand—and the miracles, whether you believe in God or not—you know you have a grounded religion ready for the telling.
- Our Religion - July 1, 2015
- Do you believe in God? - December 1, 2014
- The Glove in the Subway - May 1, 2014
