But What Do You Think?

Some years ago a perceptive minister with whom I was having a conversation about philosophy, religion and all manner of abstract stuff asked me a question which caught me up short and to which I'm still working on how to respond. I suspect that he knew it might take me some time to answer, and that whatever my answer, it would not really be an answer so much as it would be a response.



Somewhere in the publications of the Federated Church of Orleans, a Christian church of the United Church of Christ denomination, I read recently that those of us who gather as a congregation do so without having to pledge allegiance to any particular creed, and that each of us who gather is understood, encouraged and supported to do so as part of a personal and individual search.

To that minister from the past I would respond today that I am agnostic on the subject of the existence of God, if a requirement for belief in God requires an acknowledgement that God is an anthropomorphic being, male, and that he created man in his own image.

Such beliefs are holdovers from hundreds and even thousands of years of human existence on this planet, when early humans didn't understand what caused the good things and the bad things in their lives. They only had their own experience with fathers and mothers to go by, and
assumed that there was and had to be a Great Father, Great Spirit, Creator, Shaker and Mover looking down on them from some awfully high place, so high that he could not be seen. Actually biblical scholars tell us that the One God, a so-called monotheistic being, was not the creation of the earliest humans, but that many gods were thought to be in control of many unexplained things, from storms to food to good fortune, etc.. and that they needed to be appeased. And appeasement often meant blood sacrifice, from animals to other humans. This God, at the last minute, in the story of Isaac and Jacob, stayed the hand of the father, who was testing him for his loyalty.

What's strange to me is that, in spite of the huge advances in knowledge through science of what causes good and bad things to happen, so many humans insist on keeping alive the archaic thoughts of primitive peoples.

In church, speaking as one who was baptized a Christian, we continue to speak in the most pagan of ways and words, by saying Jesus died for our sins. He was a blood sacrifice like the earlier lambs, (Lamb of God). It's been claimed for two millenia that he sacrificed himself, and, strangest of all, that he came back to life, and stranger still that he was transfigured and rose to Heaven in clouds, to live forever with that Super Human type God which he called his Father.
That God the Father did not stay the hands of his executioners though.

So vast millions of Humans continue to need myths to account for what has been explained by science, Creationism and Intelligent Design, but also to admit that we don't have a clue as to why the Universe itself appears to exist.

Our mental faculties, as incredible as they are, are limited to thinking in terms of space and time, which require that there is a beginning and an eventual end to all things. After all we each have a beginning and an end. How else can we think, except to believe that we will live forever after we die, and that we will be conscious of that, and even in a bodily sense, and it will be wonderful or horrible, based on what that Super Human God the Father decides, unilaterally, is our faith.

Did we please him or displease him in life? We, as children, are taught such stuff, rather like the Christmas tune, 'Oh you better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I'm telling you why. Santa Claus is coming to town. He's making a list, checking it twice, going to find out if your naughty or nice.___________'. Hello? By about third grade, or earlier we learned that we were lied to, but it was a nice myth for awhile, and so we conspire to keep it going for the next generation. We're doing that in Sunday and Sabbath Schools everywere.

So how is it that such a model persists for so many people throughout their entire lives? The last stanza of a poem I wrote in 1999, entitled A Riddle, goes like this. 'The Riddle goes unanswered/
For me I must confess./The only progress I have made/Is God is there, I guess." The last two words are my simple rhyme words to express the dictionary definition of "Agnostic": One who holds the view that ultimate reality(as God) is unknown, and probably unknowable".

That's what I think. But what do you think?

Leanderthal, Lighthouse Keeper