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It's not that I don't believe in God. I believe God is greater than the understanding of any mortal. So I don't believe translators are inerrant, or that the divine inspiration of millennia past would be immune to the limitations of its context.
Take it this way. You believe in free will, don't you? I could be a philosophical zombie, a robot, and act exactly as I do, without free will. You wouldn't be able to tell. And yet, free will is still what we see in the world. We can describe the behavior of the universe in ways that don't depend on God. That doesn't relegate God to the realm of phlogiston.
It is unknowable, perhaps. Unprovable. But we practice, just the same. That's what makes it faith. If you claim you know God with certainty, where is the room for faith?
I experience free will. And I experience the divine. You may not share my experience. But that does not mean God is foreign to me.
Of course, when I say God like that, I'm implying a particular facet. There doesn't have to be a glowing shamrock-face above stained glass. There can be benevolence in a thousand arms. Eight hundred trees and stones. An endless ring of halos, or sparks, or wings. The moon, the stars, the sunset. The patterns in the vagaries of life. Because, when it comes down to it, don't these conceptions say more about the viewer than the viewed? I, at least, am very much A Square in these matters. And God contains the multitudes of a jewel of jewels.
But still, I see the divine in the world. And I see humans, too, in their imperfections. When humans see God as requiring hatred, war, death, the demonization of the weak and the outcast, which is more likely? That God, perfect and benevolent, would deem such things necessary, find room for hate among boundless love? Or that what they worship is a false conception, a fractured image?
Thus I say, no. It is you who does not believe in God.
Take it this way. You believe in free will, don't you? I could be a philosophical zombie, a robot, and act exactly as I do, without free will. You wouldn't be able to tell. And yet, free will is still what we see in the world. We can describe the behavior of the universe in ways that don't depend on God. That doesn't relegate God to the realm of phlogiston.
It is unknowable, perhaps. Unprovable. But we practice, just the same. That's what makes it faith. If you claim you know God with certainty, where is the room for faith?
I experience free will. And I experience the divine. You may not share my experience. But that does not mean God is foreign to me.
Of course, when I say God like that, I'm implying a particular facet. There doesn't have to be a glowing shamrock-face above stained glass. There can be benevolence in a thousand arms. Eight hundred trees and stones. An endless ring of halos, or sparks, or wings. The moon, the stars, the sunset. The patterns in the vagaries of life. Because, when it comes down to it, don't these conceptions say more about the viewer than the viewed? I, at least, am very much A Square in these matters. And God contains the multitudes of a jewel of jewels.
But still, I see the divine in the world. And I see humans, too, in their imperfections. When humans see God as requiring hatred, war, death, the demonization of the weak and the outcast, which is more likely? That God, perfect and benevolent, would deem such things necessary, find room for hate among boundless love? Or that what they worship is a false conception, a fractured image?
Thus I say, no. It is you who does not believe in God.
