{ 2005 08 29 }

Believing in, believing that, believing

God separating darkness from lightMy friend Paul points out that the term “believing in God� represents an unusual idiom. In most other situations in which it is used, the phrase “believe in� means something slightly but importantly different from what it means when someone says that she “believes in� God.

If Emily’s husband is accused of philandering, Emily might say that she believes in her husband, and everyone would understand her meaning. Just so, when Colin Powell says that he believes in his President, or when a businessman states his belief in the free market, or a comrade at the barricades says that he believes in Communism, or even when a fan believes in the Yankees or the Mets. In each of those cases, “believing inâ€? is an assertion that the believed-in entity is trustworthy. In no case is it an assertion that the entity actually exists, as it is when someone asserts a “belief in” God. There is never any doubt that Emily’s husband exists, as does the POTUS, Communism, free market capitalism, and the Yankees.

I have no doubt that God exists, in exactly the same way that Communism exists, and the Yankees, and the Office of the President of the United States. God’s existence is validated by the same process that validates the existence of those other entities: people “believe in” Him, in the same way that people believe in Communism and the Yankees. That is, they believe that those entities are what their promotional literature and their apologists claim them to be; they have those particular powers and virtues; they’ve won those victories, defeated those enemies, rewarded, in just those ways, their particular friends and supporters. Indeed, it is more than simple validation at work here. The belief is what makes the existence real. Without believers, similar entities—the Easter Bunny, Almighty Jove, the Gold Standard, the Divine Right of Kings, the Mudville Nine—enter the realm of fairy tale and legend.

The evidence of God’s existence is all around us: in great cathedrals and soaring mosques, in mottos on currency, Bibles in hotel room bedside table drawers, crosses by the roadside and a large hole in lower Manhattan. God exists because people believe in him, believe that they know what He wants them to do, and do that. I believe that God exists.

I don’t, however, believe in God, any more than I believe in Communism or the Yankees. Or the POTUS. I don’t believe that any of those entities can deliver on the promises they make. They are all frauds. The Yankees are a pack of steroid-pumped, overpaid, cliché-ridden jocks wholly owned by an obscenely rich egotist; they have as much to do with sportsmanship and the Spirit of the Game as Minnesota Fats; you’ll find more heart, more human drama, and more entertainment value in a fast-paced game of stickball in a Brooklyn schoolyard than in a typical Yankees game. The President is a documented liar and con artist, a complete hypocrite, a terrorist and a sponsor of terrorists. Communism is based on a flawed vision of history and a flawed understanding of human nature; the promises it makes are undeliverable in any realistic society, and nations taken by those promises have suffered sadly.

And then there’s God. A paranoid, solipsistic, misogynistic deity whose only statistically significant and observable effect on the billions of humans who take Him to heart is to cause them to hurt one another cruelly and die young, frequently at the hands of other believers. That’s the God of the Torah, the God of St. Paul, the God of the Koran. Yahweh, God the Father, Allah. He promises Paradise alight with His love to those whose faith is perfect and eternal Hell for those who disobey His minutely detailed commands, and He challenges us, having set the stakes so high, to call His bluff.

Well, I think He’s an old Fraud. I don’t believe He has the Power He claims to possess. I don’t trust His promises or fear His threats. I’m quite confident that I’m better off and a better person without Him in my life, and I’m pretty certain that you would be as well.

“But,” you object. “But my God is not like that at all. He is a God of Love. He brings Peace to my heart.”

I believe you. I believe that the god you worship—the god who is in your mind when you pray, the god who watches over you as you sleep, the god who blesses those you invoke him/her to bless—is who you know her/him to be. I believe you because you have not lied to me before, and you have no reason to lie to me now. I believe that you have such a god, as I believe you have had the dreams that you tell me about, and I believe that you love those whom you claim to love, and that you are horrified by cruelty and injustice, and that you are a genuinely good person, working, hard, to become better. But please, because I believe you and believe in you, don’t ask me to believe in your god.

The god who informs you with what you need to do to be a good person is quintessentially private, speaking to you alone, known, albeit with convincing emotional force, to you alone, incapable of being shared with any others except through the effect the god has on you and your behavior. If your god makes you a good person, then, through your goodness, that god blesses all those with whom you have contact, and what that god is and your relationship with the god doesn’t really matter. And if you are not a good person, then nothing else matters.

I think that most people who have a god like that, a god with whom they have a personal relationship, a god who helps them be better people, really find their solace not so much in the god as in the qualities of goodness. If someone “worships” kindness, generosity, patience, tolerance, compassion, honesty—i.e. allows her life to be informed and guided by those qualities—then it is as if a god, embodying those qualities, informed and guided that life.

Every such god is as different from all other such gods as the individuals whom that god informs with the various virtues are different from all other such individuals. Each god is more like his or her individual worshipper than he or she is like any other gods. And as soon as your god starts claiming dominion over public realms; as soon as he begins to meddle with other people’s behavior, makes grandiose claims about creating this and that, presumes to proclaim absolute law and sit in judgment, then he is no better than God, indeed he is One with God. And I am sorry that you have Him in your life, because He will consume you, as he does all of His believers, leading them, by slow turns and almost imperceptible acts of self-deception, to behave in ways that are no longer kind, no longer generous, no longer tolerant and compassionate.

This is the first of several posts dealing with the general subject of belief; the next in the series, which should be done in a week or so, will deal with how we select what we believe in.

Notes

God with a capital ‘H’ back to text

One of the most important attributes of God—the God I’m talking about in this article—is that references to Him are capitalized. That’s part of the bullshit surrounding God’s reality. He’s not just some god who got big-headed; there have been lots of those throughout history, including some who have significant bodies of worshippers now—a substantial majority of the world’s billion-plus Hindus, for example, worship either Vishnu or Shiva, and both Vaishnavites and Saivites claim pride of place for their chosen deity. But even though a Vaishnavite views Vishnu as the one true God, he does not claim that he is the only God; Shiva exists for him, and is a powerful god in his own right, but in essence, he is simply another avatar of Vishnu. And, for the Saivites, Vishnu is essentially an avatar of Shiva. As are the other 33 million plus gods in the Hindu pantheon. Yahweh, as far as I know, is the only god who claims to be the only God. And the only One to make the outrageous demand that His worshippers shall have no other gods beside Him. So, to distinguish Him from those other gods which are false and evil and don’t really exist, I will adopt the conventions that His followers insist upon and capitalize His pronoun.

And believe me, it’s He, not She, and not It, and never, never They. Although “elohim”, the name by which our God was known in His earliest Torah appearances, means “the gods”. Perhaps in those early days, God was still rational enough to realize that the other gods existed, even if they only existed as components of the conglomerate that was, essentially, Him. As his solipsism and paranoia grew, God’s masculinity became more and more assertive, and his misogyny became more and more pronounced. It’s egregious in Paul’s epistles, and positively septic in the Koran.

Gods need believers back to text

Nobody’s ever caught this more surehandedly than Terry Pratchett:

There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshipped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don’t demand much in the way of miracles.

They are the small gods—the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way.

Because what they lack is belief.

A handful, though, go on to greater things. Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes a minute or two to build a small cairn of stones in general thanks to whatever spirits might be around the place. Or a peculiarly shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an isolated stone. Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods.

Often it stops there. But sometimes it goes further. More rocks are added, more stones are raised, a temple is built on the site where the tree once stood. The god grows in strength, the belief of its worshippers raising it upwards like a thousand tons of rocket fuel. For a very few, the sky’s the limit.

And, sometimes, not even that.

Small Gods (1992), Page 9

atheism back to text

The fact that I don’t believe in God, however that phrase is construed, makes me, of course, an atheist—one who is without God. I am, as I have tried to show in this post and others in the general category, that I am entirely comfortable with that condition, and with that designation. It’s a shame that some people equate “atheism” with wickedness and immorality. That equation is not true of course, any more than it’s true that “Christian” equates with goodness and morality. People who are unwilling or unable to look at the logic of atheism and to see it without the bias imposed by a theistic upbringing in a theistic society are, to that extent, hampered in their ability to proceed with rational discourse. I have nothing to say to those people, because they cannot hear anything that I say; they hold their fingers in their ears and hum loudly as soon as I identify myself as an atheist.

To those who are not entirely deaf to reason, I commend several resources. The WikiPedia article on Atheism is, as one has come to expect, competently researched, relatively unbiassed, complete, and comprehensively linked to the topics it brings into the discussion. In a speech he made to the Atheists of Silicon Valley, Mark Thomas presents a closely reasoned explanation and justification of his own atheism. For an even more personal view, I commend the talk that Natalie Angier gave to the Ethical Culture Society of New York on “Raising Children with Secular Values in a Religious World.”

World 3 back to text

Those who are philosophically inclined might catch a whiff of Karl Popper in this discussion of the ontology of notional entities. In his 1972 book Objective Knowledge, Popper introduced the hypothesis that there were three worlds in which entities might exist. World 1 is the physical world, the world of stuff and action, matter and energy. World 2 is the psychological world, the world of emotions, thoughts, decisions, perceptions. World 3 is the world in which products of the human mind have their existence: languages, theories, plans, works of art. Popper recognizes that World 3 objects may be embodied in World 1 objects—the Constitution, the plays of Shakespeare, a Beethoven symphony, for example, may exist as World 1 manuscripts, books, reels of tape. But what is important about World 3 objects, the ways in which they interact with World 2 perceptions and decisions and, through the actions of the perceiving and decision-making individuals, alter the structure and content of World 1, is not their more or less accidental embodiment in material form, but the very fact that they exist as something other than those embodied forms. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle has existence beyond the many formulations and explanations of that principle printed in books and articles. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has existence beyond the many recordings that have been made of it, and beyond the wave forms created by an orchestra’s performance of it. Just so, Communism has existence beyond the printed words of Marx & Engels; the Yankees exist as something more than the particular players employed today by the Yankee Organization; and God exists in a World besides the World of Bibles and Korans, of temples and cathedrals and mosques. All of those entities, in Popper’s view, are World 3 objects, and their existence is no less real, no less “objective”, than that of the objects in which they are embodied in World 1.

If you find all this interesting, you might want to download, as a PDF file, Popper’s Tanner Lecture on Human Values, Three Worlds, delivered at the University of Michigan in 1978.

her/him back to text

That’s right, isn’t it? Any god of love, of peace and humane feeling, has to be of indeterminite gender. Gods and Goddesses, exclusively male or female, are inevitably and always Beings of Power; while any one of them may profess love for His or Her devotees, each One is, when push comes to shove, pushing for dominance, shoving for the first place position. A god who accepts believers, as yours certainly does, without a quid pro quo, without demanding your exclusive worship, also will not demand (or accept) your assignment of the god to a particular gender.

Posted by richard on Monday, August 29th, 2005, at 1:58 pm, and filed under perceive many gods, reject the one true God, respect rationality.

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