Reconsidering the Concept of God

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© Davidson Loehr

16 February 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

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Four Part Series

In the Beginning

Original Sins and Blessings

Reconsidering the Concept of God

The Legitimate Heir to Salvation

PRAYER

A. Powell Davies

May the life of our minds and breath of our being bring us once more to full remembrance of our greater calling. Strangely do we walk through the days of our years, unseeing, unhearing, inattentive, and the glory of life is all about us and we do not know that it is there. We wrap ourselves up in the petty and the trivial, and sometimes even in the mean and sordid, shutting out life’s promise. We are afraid of life – afraid of its truth and goodness and its mighty claim upon us – and we wall ourselves in, thinking to be safe: and so we scarcely live at all.

Oh, may the walls be broken down! Let winds that have swept the far horizons blow now upon the barriers that we have built to keep us paltry! Let them all be swept away! That the light of the heavens may light our lives, the vision of good enlarge our minds, and the love of all that is noble and true find room in our hearts.

How vain are all our hopes, how empty all our prayers, until we ourselves are ready to fulfill them.

SERMON: Reconsidering the Concept of God

The hymn we just sang was in 7/4 time. It’s an odd meter, you almost never hear or sing it, and it feels like you’re in strange territory, doing something you shouldn’t be. This sermon may strike you that way, too. How often have you even thought of reconsidering the concept of God?

God is discussed in our culture like a cartoon character, like a Critter. Almost the only “theological” question anyone thinks to ask is “Do you believe in God?” That’s a question that only makes sense if God is a kind of Critter. Then it’s like a simple true-false quiz: “God is a big Critter living up there somewhere: Yes or No?” And that’s really dumb.

So let’s get straight from the beginning. God is not and has never been a Critter, or a “being” of any kind that would have weight or occupy space. That’s Disneyworld, not religion. God is an idea, a concept. And theological questions are about the content and style of the concept, and it relevance to life.

Still, it may feel like we’re trying to dance in 7/4 time. So let’s start with a story.

One of my favorite stories from any religious scripture is the ancient story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with God. Technically, it wasn’t God he was wrestling with, just a local deity guarding the river he wanted to cross. That’s how we know what an ancient story this is. People used to believe that all boundaries were guarded by spirits, that to cross over, to grow beyond a boundary, you had to wrestle with the god that guarded that boundary.

Modern psychologists also know this is true. To grow beyond a boundary that’s kept us too small, too ignorant, too enslaved, we must be willing to wrestle with the gods that guard that boundary.

That’s kind of what we’re about this morning: wrestling with concepts of God that are unhealthy and small, that enslave rather than empower.

Still, it’s a risky thing to do. In the Jacob story, he held on all night, finally receiving the blessing of the god and the ability to cross over the river, and even getting a new name: Israel, the father of the Twelve Tribes. But he was wounded in the struggle, and came out with a limp. He had that limp for the rest of his life. So it’s risky. But we’re brave. Besides, we’re just pretending. Maybe.

I’m trying to do something hard as well as odd: I want to persuade you of something you need to know about gods by convincing you that it’s something you already know. And that is that all gods are more like hand puppets than they are like puppeteers. Everyone who tells you what God is like or what God wants or says is using the concept like a hand puppet, either creating or choosing which words their God can and can’t say. So whether it’s a decent God usually depends on whose hands he’s in.

I want to persuade you that you know the difference between healthy concepts and bogus ones, and that only you can decide whether a god is good or bad, is worth serving with your life or not. I want to show you that the power is in you, not in the gods, and want to convince you that you have known this, at some level, all along.

Here’s what you already know: we already and automatically wrestle with almost every authority claiming power over us. For instance:

1. Automakers routinely tell us their machines are perfectly safe. But both governmental and private firms are always testing them, always doubting that they’re really telling us the truth, and are routinely exposing the design flaws the manufacturers were covering up. Why did they cover them up? Because it benefited them, even though it didn’t benefit us. But we check it out, because lives are at stake.

2. Or think about food. Governmental and private agencies are routinely inspecting the meat supplies and waste disposal processes at our largest food processing plants. The owners always tell us the meat and food are perfectly safe. But we know they have millions of dollars at stake, and we know they can and do lie to benefit themselves. So we expose a hundred tons of hamburger with e-coli, or Mad Cow Disease or other dangerous or deadly problems. The fact that an authoritative voice wearing a suit or a white lab coat tells us it’s safe doesn’t fool us until we have checked it out through our own agencies. Lives are at stake.

3. Or pharmaceuticals. To pick just one, I remember when the manufacturers of Fen-Phen were on trial, how they insisted that the drugs were just effective weight-reducing aids with no serious side effects, that they had done extensive testing, that everyone was safe. But the FDA wouldn’t take their word for it. They did independent tests and found that Fen-Phen damaged heart valves and could be fatal. A member of this church died here a year ago from heart damage from Fen-Phen. Authoritative people lie. Even if they really believe what they’re saying, we know they could be wrong. So we check it. Because lives are at stake.

The Three-Step

All of these claims and investigations have three parts. In every case I know of, all the truths, beliefs and gods we create have the same three steps. Just knowing them can give you a kind of User’s Guide to Hokum. Here is the three-step process by which truths and beliefs and gods are created. I won’t go through the steps in order, because the first step is invisible. It has to be invisible for the game to work.

The second step is that a company spokesman or other authoritative-looking person tells us something is true.

The third step is that they then say that, because it is true, we should go along with it, and everything will be all right.

But what all our investigations show is that there is a first step that they kept invisible. And the first step is that there is a set of facts or a state of affairs that would empower or enrich them, if it were really true. They have a stake in it; it’s how they see the world.

So the whole three-step process goes like this:

1. First, I want you to believe something because if you do it will empower or enrich me, or will confirm my view of the world.

2. Second, I convince myself, then tell you, that this is true and good and safe.

3. And third, since it is true and good and safe, you should follow it.

But when we want to know whether it’s really true or good or safe, we check it out. You don’t ask true believers to investigate their own truth-claims. You don’t ask Ford executives whether the gas tanks on its Pintos are really safe. You don’t ask the manufacturers of SUV’s whether they have a high likelihood of tipping over and injuring or killing the passengers. You don’t ask the manager of a Jack in the Box whether it’s safe to eat his hamburgers. You ask a nonbeliever. An outsider. You ask someone who has left the Garden of Eden, who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, good and evil, and let them investigate.

And that’s how we find out what we feel most safe believing is really true. This process looks a lot like the scientific method. Someone proposes a theory and says it’s true. So immediately other scientists who don’t believe the theory run the same experiments to see if the results are the same for nonbelievers. If not, the theory is false. If so, it may be true, at least for now.

And we do these tests, every day, because there are lives at stake. Now you already knew all of this. No news here. But this is how virtually every truth and every religious belief works, through the same three steps, with the same need for checking by unbelievers to see if it’s true or just familiar and convenient to the true believers.

We seem hardwired to respond to authoritative people and voices, so we are easy to fool. Advertising agencies, political advisors and slick preachers all count on it. I’ll tell you one more story that makes this point in a particularly enlightening way. You’ll be able to spot all three steps, with the invisible first step last, in an exceptionally clear and dramatic form:

The story is one Joseph Campbell told, about a tribe in Australia whose social order was maintained with the aid of “bullroarers.” These are long flat boards with a couple slits cut in them, which have a rope tied to the other end, and are swung around over one’s head, producing an eerie low kind of humming sound that seems quite otherworldly. When the gods were angry with the tribe, the gods would sound the bullroarers in the woods at night. No one, of course, ever saw them do this. The next day, the males of the tribe would explain what that gods were angry about, and what behaviors had to change.

This was far more than just a game. Campbell reports the time that a chief’s daughter found his bullroarer under his sleeping pad, brought it out and asked what it was: the chief killed her for violating this sacred object.

But the revelation comes at a key moment during the initiation of young men into manhood in the tribe. It’s all very dramatic, and very ritualized. In the evening, some of the tribe’s men, wearing masks, come to kidnap the young boy. The women pretend to defend him, though they know the routine, and eventually the men overpower them and drag the boy into the woods.

Once there, the boy is tied to a table, and a frightening and bloody initiation rite takes place. Technically, it’s called subincision, which means that, using a flint knife, a slit is made the length of the underside of the boy’s penis. (Men who have been through this have said that this makes them complete, with the genital marks of both a male and a female.)

But the revelation comes at the end. One of the men dips the end of the bullroarer in the boy’s blood, brings it up near his face, then removes his mask – so the boy will recognize him as a man he’s known all his life – and says the magical words: “We make the noises!” We make the noises we attribute to the gods. It’s equally true everywhere, it’s just seldom acknowledged as openly.

That’s what our independent investigations of defective cars, infected hamburger and deadly pharmaceuticals reveals, too. The authorities with the most to gain are the ones who make the noises saying we should believe them. And we have learned not to believe them until we have checked it out for ourselves. This is how concepts of gods are created.

There are thousands of examples from religion. To keep it manageable, I’ll only take three, and just take them from the Hebrew Scriptures that are common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three of these come from the book of Deuteronomy, chapters 20 to 22. You can find dozens more like these in that book:

1. If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die. (Deuteronomy 22:22)

2. If upon marriage it is discovered that a woman isn’t a virgin, the men of the city shall stone her to death. (Deut. 22: 20-21)

3.If a son is stubborn and won’t obey his parents, then his parents will bring him to the elders at the city gate and the men of the city will stone him to death. (Deut. 21:18-21, all RSV)

When you hear such things, you know that’s a horrible concept of God that no decent or healthy person would admit into their lives. Even those bible-shaking preachers who insist that every word of the Bible is literally true never seem to quote these lines. They don’t believe them, either, and would regard anyone who acted on them as psychopathic or worse.

And we know it too, intuitively. You hear this ancient speaker claiming that these things are the word of God and so you should obey them. But instinctively, you know better. Every parent of rebellious teen-agers can understand the frustration in that last one. But every parent knows that anyone who actually did that, who actually had their own child murdered, was a repugnant person following a repugnant god, not a god of life or truth or wholeness. You sense that these awful sayings must have originated in a particular time and place maybe 2500 years ago, where whoever made them up was having trouble with authority or social control, so put those bloody words in the mouth of his god, trying to give authority to them.

Last week, I talked about escaping from the fool’s paradise pictured as the Garden of Eden. For the first four centuries of Christianity, eating the apple was celebrated as the human freedom that let us learn about good and evil. Seen this way, it’s a profound myth, saying that the price of growing up and learning to make necessary distinctions expels us from a child’s kind of paradise.

This is the same kind of story. Only by doubting the authorities – in food production, car production, drug production or god production – and trying to find out for ourselves what is good and what is evil, only by doing that can we ever escape from the fool’s paradise of believing that all advertising companies, politicians and preachers are trying to empower us rather than themselves.

So far, this sounds like a simple story of courage, of challenging authorities, defeating them, and exulting in triumph – like a bad martial-arts movie. But that’s not all there is to it. Because every time we find another manufacturer’s claims proven false, every time another group of politicians is caught lying to us, every time religious claims are shown to have been false and self-serving, we lose some of our naivete and our trust.

That’s the price of leaving paradise, the price of leaving Eden. Wrestling with gods usually leaves us with a limp. It’s never a cheap victory. Remember when you stopped believing there was this one Santa Claus guy who came down every chimney bringing presents to every child every Christmas – even though you didn’t have a chimney? Remember what you lost? Some people mark that as the end of their naive childhood.

And what happens when you reconsider the concept of God? You look at whose hands God has been in, and suddenly God looks more like a hand puppet than a puppeteer. You investigate and you realize God was never making the noises. People were making the noises: parents, preachers, politicians, people with their own agenda for you. They made the noises they had been taught to make. Maybe they even believed them. But what happens when you realize they were not true?

This three-step model isn’t one I made up. It’s taught in the best divinity schools and sociology departments, and has been for a quarter century or more. And when you understand how it works, you realize that it creates a dilemma for us, especially in the field of religion.

On the one hand, if you forget about the invisible first step, and simply internalize and obey the “truths” you are taught, eventually they will not fit the times, the situations, or you. Then they become kind of demonic – as they would if anyone really took the instructions in those examples from the book of Deuteronomy seriously.

On the other hand, if you take the liberal route, if you challenge and debunk those claims for truth or God, then in some ways the price is even steeper, and the limp is even greater. For if even the idea of God you’ve taught can be wrong, that what can’t be wrong? How and where could you ever again find absolutely unshakable certainty? And where, then, would you find your moral bearing?

You can lose faith in God. Do you also lose faith in even the idea of God? Many do. You don’t think that’s a limp? It’s a limp. Do you lose faith even in the idea of truth, or goodness, justice or beauty? That’s worse than a limp. Don’t do that.

You can always try to return to the fool’s paradise where you stay ignorant and don’t learn the difference. But the God in the Eden story was also created by priests and tribal chiefs who were served by that compliant ignorance. Why would you want to exalt them, or their self-serving idea of God? You might as well wrestle with God yourself, and cross over.

But crossing over, wrestling with God, isn’t cheap. For God is like Santa Claus in that way. You lost the child’s magical Santa when your eyes were opened. And you lose the child’s magical god in the same way – by having your eyes opened and realizing that we make the noises.

To wrestle with our gods is often to wind up disillusioned. I’ve had ministers tell me that’s why they don’t encourage their people to question the concept of God too deeply: they’re afraid they’ll become disillusioned. That sounds bad. But think about it: Is being disillusioned really worse than being “illusioned”? I’d think, if you’re illusioned, you’d want to get disillusioned! Or you can get cynical or desperate, thinking that nothing, after all, is sacred but the integrity of your own mind. But that isn’t true either.

To wrestle with the concept of God and win, I think we need to be armed with some of the things we’ve been examining in the last two sermons:

that we are made of stardust, we are deeply at home in the universe, intimately tied to everything, that the dynamic power of the universe is also in us, and that part of our destiny lies in reclaiming our noble origins.

that all life on earth is linked, too. We are not alone here, we are connected as members of a family, all the way down. All people are our brothers and sisters. Here, in Iraq, in Nicaragua, everywhere.

And we need to remember that authoritative claims that would take away our power and dignity and transfer them to others are always lies, lies and blasphemies against life and truth and everything that is whole and holy.

Wrestling with the concept of God grants us both honor, and a task. Since we make the noises, it is now up to us to see that those noises are sacred noises: noises of truth that empower, not that enslave, truth that sets us free, not that puts us or others in heavier chains.

Part of growing up religiously is escaping from a child’s Garden of Eden, understanding who makes the noises, and understanding that most of our truths and most of our gods are the hand puppets of the politicians, preachers and churches who benefit from using their voice to control people. Those are false gods and need to be unmasked. But there is still wonder and miracle and mystery, and the magic of transformation in the world. We lose an excuse not to act. We lose an excuse for not getting involved. That’s our human calling: to escape from the fool’s paradise and search for truth and wholeness East of Eden.

And what is left of the concept of God? Perhaps the Buddhists can help here. They tell the story of the finger pointing at the moon, and the poor people who spent all their time looking at the finger, never seeing the moon. Perhaps we will gain a fresh view of the moon. And once we can see the light, that pointing finger is just a distraction, isn’t it?

Good magicians don’t reveal their tricks at the end of the show. But I’m not a magician, I’m a preacher, so I’ll reveal mine here.

I hope you see that what I’ve tried to do today follows the same three steps I’ve been taking about. I start with what, to me, is the most true and useful way to understand how we make our gods. Then I’ve tried to persuade you that it’s true, so you will adapt it for your own life.

Am I right? Is this the best kind of truth for you here? It’s all I can offer you. From here, it’s up to you. This is where I came out when I wrestled with the idea of God. Eventually, you’ll need to wrestle, too. I recommend it. Even if the ordeal leaves you with a limp, it will bless you, and might give you a new kind of name. After all, lives are at stake. And one of them may be yours.