On God, Part I

First, what or who is God?

• God may be the God of Nature: the laws of nature are the Laws of God, the Laws of God are the laws of nature.  In 1674, Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch Jew of Spanish-Portugese descent, suggested this.  The Jewish community of Amsterdam excommunicated him (this may be the only case on record of Jewish ex-communication).  The so-called Deists believed in this God, half of our Founding Fathers were deists.  Today, many New Age people believe in this God, as they are truly doubters who are uncomfortable with their own disbelief (their culture has dismissed him but their theology cannot).  Any and all of the Western religions would consider this god not God at all; deism is a heresy in any Jewish or Christian or Muslim context.  No card-carrying atheist would argue against the existence of this God.
• God may be the prima causi, the first cause of things, the “author” of the Big Bang who pre-existed that sublime event but who has left creation alone since it was created.  St. Thomas argues for this God as a proof of a greater God, a silly argument.  While an atheist would argue against this God’s actual existence, he would not waste much time on it as this God has not and will not interfere in human and earthly history; he merely set the clock ticking and it ticks its inevitability.
• God may be the God of the Torah, the being who walked in the garden with Adam and Eve, the God who visited Abraham and Sarah for an hour or two, the God who spoke to Moses through a Burning bush, the God who spoke to Samuel and the other prophets through dreams.  This is an angry God who has a real problem with the disobedient crown of his own creation.  So, he moves further and further away.  Some very spiritual Diaspora Jews believe that all He can do when his children kill each other and break His commandments is weep; the Second Covenant is an oath never to kill his own again.  Prayers to this deity are prayers of gratitude and hope that we may do better in His eyes; there are no prayers for a favor, big or small.  This God is a personal God but He is so distant that it is WE who hear our own prayers.  This is not a God of eternal Heaven or Hell.
• God may be the God of the Christian Bible, the God who “gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  Ah, now here is a God worth fighting and dying for, a God who gives us mortals what we have always wished for: personal immortality (there is some fine print: most men are headed for eternal damnation, not eternal glory).  Ever since man has become conscious of death, he has rebelled against it.  Not that death IS NOT the end, but that life is unbearable if death IS the end.  Look back in history, far back as you can, and you will see that every single monument that has survived the ravages of Time was a monument to our struggle with death.  Atheists believe this God to be the Judaeo-Christian myth; they would claim that there is no evidence for his existence, and they would be right.  Not that a lack of evidence proves the negative.
• Then God may be the God of the End of Times.  The Second Coming and the End of Times have been pronounced many dozens of times over the past two millennia.  In all cases, each newer generation has dismissed the falsified claims of the previous one (“Christ did NOT show up as planned”) with “biblical misinterpretation.”  The problem with this form of God belief is that its adherents are literally not afraid of death.  Like Muslim suicide bombers, they are afraid of life, of an indefinite future, and, while they are not afraid of a rapturous rapture, they are afraid of joy, especially the joy of others.  Atheists are frightened of these people; those who are convinced of their own personal immortality have no real passion for the here and now, and none for tomorrow either.  Indeed, if their own children died, they would rejoice in the certain knowledge that they were in a better place and that they would all be reunited soon enough.  If these folks ever sat at the head of the tables of power, humanity’s poor stewardship of spaceship Earth would be replaced not by Immortals but by cockroaches and rats and mosquitoes.

The history of Western religion is the history of evolving views of God’s true personhood, the history of intolerance and religious persecution, and the history of wars fought in the name of God or Christ or Allah.  So far as I know, no atheist has ever killed a believer because of his religious convictions.

The history of Western religion is the history of increasing personal professions of faith (at least in the USA and other fundamentally fundamentalist countries) in the face of a culture finding less and less NEED for a personal God.

If the West allowed God to die, to RIP, rest in peace, there would be one less very powerful reason for men to kill one another.  No?  Imagine tomorrow morning the world’s Muslims waking up convinced that Muhammad was a fraud and that Allah was a cruel invention to keep them under their leaders’ thumbs.

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