Looking For God In All The Wrong Places

WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MAN

I grew up in a religious environment. My father was a theologian, my mother was a devout Anglican; all my friends when we lived overseas came from missionary families. I can remember sitting in the front pew while my father addressed the congregation: he was good, better than most I’ve heard, and funny in a way you don’t expect to find in a man of the cloth. With him up there somehow God became attainable.

And I did attain Him, for a little while anyway. Up until my teenage years I was sure He existed, that He was looking out for me, that meaning could come from His elusive yet ubiquitous presence.

But as I grew, and my capacity for critical thought grew with me, the idea of giving myself over to someone or something that I’d never actually experienced began to unsettle me. My faith, if you could call it that, rested on the backs of others – it was their interpretation of the Word, their understanding of its text, their system of value and judgment I had been calling my own.

It didn’t seem right. If this God figure is really going to take control of how I live my life, I thought, shouldn’t I be convinced beyond doubt that He actually exists?

So I stopped going to church. I stopped spending time with my Christian friends. And to their credit, my parents didn’t try to force the issue; they figured I’d return to the fold eventually, and a little soul-searching in the meantime could only help my conviction down the road.

That was well over a decade ago and I still haven’t gone back. In fact, I’m further now than ever from the Christian God I grew up with. So why is that? How can someone who was born in the church, whose parents – themselves intelligent and critical thinkers – to this day hold onto their conviction, and who would be willing to accept the presence of an Almighty if only there were sufficient evidence…how can someone like that not be a believer?

It comes down to a lack of faith. That may seem obvious, but it’s not faith in God that I’m talking about here. It’s faith in man.

“What a piece of work is man,” writes Shakespeare in Hamlet, “how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties….” I disagree -- at least with that last part. That man is a dynamic and astoundingly intelligent creature is, I think, indisputable. That his faculties are infinite, however, is clearly false, and it’s this very limitation that rests at the heart of my agnosticism.

THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS

If God is, as the Christian dogma purports him to be, omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent – three characteristics that are so far beyond the scope of human capability as to be almost laughably incomprehensible – then understanding Him requires a leap of imagination at best. More likely, it means a complete and utter fabrication.

Now, I’m all for creative thinking, but when it comes to making decisions that will govern my life (and subsequently my notion of an “afterlife”) I’d prefer to have them based on something a little more concrete.

Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islamism...all of these argue that they not only have a firm and complete understanding of their respective divinities, but that they know what He/They want, right down to what we do or do not have for breakfast. Sure, they’ve got an explanation for it – the Bible is the “word of God,” Bhagavad Gita literally means “song of God,” which is to say what’s in them is meant to be interpreted as God’s direct and explicit instructions – but for those explanations to work we have to believe in the deity in the first place (not to mention that they’ve been passed down without any tampering on man’s part, which history has shown is highly unlikely). How stable can we call evidence that requires a prior conviction to hold ground?

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying God doesn’t exist. But if He does exist, and He really is God with all that entails, then I would argue that He is beyond our comprehension. Our faculties, our very limited faculties, fail to bring us the understanding our heart’s desire.

GOD NOT CALLED GOD IS GOD

If you’ve followed me this far and you haven’t yet disregarded what I’ve been saying as complete and utter nonsense, then you might be wondering: Where do we go from here?

Many of our common values stem from a religious source – thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery – but if we do away with the source, doesn’t that mean we have to do away with the values also?

Not necessarily. Deciding that the bible (or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita) isn’t the verbatim “word of God” doesn’t mean some of the teachings found there aren’t worthwhile. When we hear “thou shalt not kill” we intrinsically sense the rightness of it, not because we know it comes from a higher power, but because we move about in the world and co-exist with others and can observe how killing runs counter to our nature, which is to live. With the case of adultery, anyone who’s witnessed it has noted the hurt and destruction it leaves in its wake. It doesn’t take a belief in God to want to avoid those things.

Which is to say, religious texts can be a valuable tool in helping a person create a system of morals and values. And we need those systems – without them there would be chaos. But the work should ultimately be done by the individual, based on their understanding of the world around them, rather than a dictum handed down from some unseen entity.

And the same goes for this “God” figure everyone keeps talking about. If we do away with the religious aspect of divinity and instead look at a more individualized, spiritual approach – accepting that “God” cannot be properly understood in logical, linguistic terms – religious texts become sources of insight rather than dogma, places where we can observe the work other people have done in their pursuit of understanding.

In all the reading I’ve done, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, the text that has come closest to this is the Tao Te Ching, written in the sixth century BCE by a person named Lao Tzu. I’m no Taoist, but I appreciate the manner in which Lao Tzu goes about his cosmology. There is no attempt to provide a systematic or logical definition of God or the universe. Rather, it’s simply a catalogue of observations and advice, intended to help guide the reader to his own personal wisdom. It begins:

Tao called Tao is not Tao.

Names can name no lasting name.

In other words, God, or the entity or stuff from which we came, cannot be comprehended by us in the usual fashion. The moment we apply language to it, we restrict it, we make it exclusive, and in so doing we miss the point of it. If it truly is what some might call God, then we cannot understand it intellectually.

But we can think around it, and think towards it, and perhaps eventually come to settle in a way of being that isn’t so exclusive or condemnatory. Deep down, I think the religiosity of my parents is after that same ideal, but by adhering to a doctrine that itself claims to be omniscient (how else could you know that yours is the one true God?) it limits itself, and relies too heavily on that creative leaping to cover the gaps.

And perhaps that’s what I’ll tell them, next time we sit down around the dinner table. I’ll say I’m not willing to force the understanding. I’ll say I’m looking for another way of knowing. It's not quite returning to the fold, but at least it's genuine. Hopefully that will be enough for them. For now, it’s all I’ve got.

I am, after all, just a man. And what a piece of work…