god

God, not the name of God or a god; not the belief in God or a god; and not the religion created to worship a god; but god, the concept, has always fascinated me.  I don't mean like a magic window book or a freak show fascination, I mean come back to my mind and sent me on many searches for answers. The fact that someone's concept of god has caused almost every war we have known, whether directly or indirectly, should not shock me.  I am shocked, though.

Most of us develop our concept of god, our beliefs about god starting as children.  We are schooled in our parents version of god, through either formal training or through the strange osmotic process that occurs when no one talks of spiritual things but beliefs about good and bad, life and death, and feelings about other peoples religious, spiritual or life beliefs are either ridiculed or held up as correct.

I was no different, my parents were both raised in mainstream protestant religions and those basic beliefs were built into my life lessons at an early age.  As children, we went to church sometimes, and sometimes didn't go to church.  Neither parent was devout.  My father had been angry at his concept of god since his mother and sister died in his late teens.  My mother was a reader and we had books with maps of the holy land, and bible commentary and multiple versions of the bible in the house.  We prayed before meals when my mother's mother was around.

By my teens, I attended church regularly, read the bible in search of answers about the nature of god and the reason we are all here and what happens when we die.  Our bible study focused on the meaning of original translations, taught by a man that was trained in ancient Greek and Aramaic.  We rarely delved into the old testament except for the prophets.  We argued about the meaning of nouns and verbs, and discussed whether killing was wrong or only murder.  We tried to decide if we were living in the end times.  My father, usually silent if the bible came up at home, expressed the opinion that people had been saying we were in the end times since revelations was first written.

By my twenties, I too was angry at god as I understood him from my earlier life.  Unlike my father, I became obsessed with finding out who or what god was.  What god had to do with me.  I even considered that the desire to know and understand god might be some genetically determined quirk of the brain that bore no more spiritual importance than the paranoia of an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic.  It was an exhaustive search, and took twenty years for me to move past the obsession to a kind of  spiritual peace.  (At this point, I could probably argue the whole chemical basis of the schizophrenics paranoia, also,but that is another subject).  My outcome is that I found the answers I needed to live comfortably in my own head without ever needing to kill anyone that disagrees with me about my concept of god.  I guess that qualifies as Peace.

So why do people fight about god?  Why do they feel the need to punish people that say things about their beliefs, impugn their religion, speak things that they consider blasphemous or heretical.  Why?  When not a single version of god is based on anything but love and peace and learning to live together successfully?

I do get, that when the first leaders of each religion finished with god, they went on to justify the maligning of their enemies: other religions, misogyny, racism, not giving enough money, not being devout enough.  It might be that those leaders thought they were doing a good thing.  First they explain god to the rabble, then they give them very specific, rigid rules on how to live.  Then they tell them not to question either one--their concept of god or their rules, as that is a sign of a lack of faith or an act of ego, (or heresy, or blasphemy, or an affront to god) in simplest terms--wrong..

My first ten years of searching for answers was very slow.  I was hobbled by fear of being blasphemous.  I feared the wrath of GOD.  I worried about disloyalty to this powerful, unknowable spirit, about making god angry or jealous, about being struck by lightning.  And I wonder about the millions and billions of people that had chosen the wrong god, whether by poor judgement or by being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Were they in hell?  in purgatory? in limbo?  no where--just dead?   I got angry.  I was scared.  I was horrified.  But I kept looking, wandering farther and farther from the god I was born to.  I found people living by concepts that had no spirit being, yet they still believed in something, a unifying principle or consciousness, something directing things, creating.  An endless group of people had proceeded me and many of them had stopped on the end of the branch they had followed outward, then wrote down their beliefs, turned it into a new religion, "the one true religion" every time.

There seems to be a most common belief that god has not spoken directly to anyone since the person that wrote down the holy book set it to paper.  God does not change and therefore the one true religion can not change.  If a person lives in a community where most believe the same thing (and while the geographic community has broken down in this new global world, the religious communities, even in places with freedom of religion, remain quick to call anyone that does not believe as they do, an atheist.  If the person they are denouncing responds that they are a member of an organized religion that is not at all similar to the one of that community, they are free game to proselytize, a form of love aimed at taking them from their erroneous ways to the correct way.  It is not pleasant having someone try to change your beliefs against your will.  All the church suppers, prayer meetings and new friends in the world can not change that.

My own father left this world less angry at god, but scared of dying, because he "was not right with god".  His childhood beliefs--we used to joke that his family was old testament baptist, since it was all hellfire and brimstone with little mention of love or forgiveness, were never really shaken, just ignored on a day to day basis.  He felt that maybe the god of the animals had more in common with his view of god.  Oddly, I don't know that this god was not one he created himself, as he seemed to have a horrible time with the idea that animals might not have souls.   My mother, reader with an adventurous spirit, would venture out then pull back when she got too close to what she saw as dangerous ground.  We had some strange and conflicted conversations while I was on my search for god.  Neither of them ever expressed any concern for my soul.  I never felt judged by them on that front.  Perhaps they had their own searches that they didn't speak of.

So now i have my peace, my "higher power" as they say in AA.  I am fond of the Taoist beliefs, and they are technically an a-theistic philosophy, but so different than the usual person that refers to themselves that noun.  I have been asked many times how I can not believe, how is it possible to believe in nothing.  What a funny idea.  Try for one minute to NOT believe in anything.  It is harder than not thinking of an elephant once someone tells you not to think about an elephant.  My whole world is defined by my beliefs.  It always has been.  They just aren't the ones I had earlier.  They are the ones I have have chosen to have now.

And god, well, god is not a name.  It is a title.  If you believe there is only one, and the actually name can-for whatever reason-never be spoken, then GOD is fine.  Or if you call your god by a specific name, or no name, referring rather to it all as more process than noun, or as something so unknowable and undefinable that no single word can come close to a name or a description,  that is also fine.

But about god, we all have had some inner conversations that may or may not be done.  In mine, while I have some peace about the subject, I also have decided that god---whatever that means--is changing.  That may be just my perception, or it may be absolute truth.  I don't mean in some erratic or unguided or unhinged way, but rather that god is evolving just as we--humans, animals, everything, are evolving.   I think maybe that is why we are all here.