Invoking the God

Musing #75 “Thoughts about Invoking the God”

February 17, 2016

The Republican presidential candidates utter idiocies about the God.  I am impelled to grimace in pain and chuckle in derision, simultaneously.  Pandering.  I know not in the least what they silently believe about the God; nor do I care.  I do not choose my ballot on the basis of how the nominee verbalizes about the God.  That’s all silliness.  Mere pandering.  It is quite obvious that they haven’t the faintest notion about the God.  They’re merely parroting what they’ve heard about the beliefs of the people whose vote they’re prostituting for.  Mere parrot-pandering.  In the name of the God.  Silliness.

It has become obvious to me (the guy who proclaims the God ultimately unknowable) that the several gods we evangelize are products of our own fantasies and needs.  The Judæans worshiped a YHWH, the God whom James’ letter later proclaimed absolutely unchangeable, but whom the tanach has constantly in flux.  Their writers tipped their hands at the very beginning of the collection with not one, but two creation stories.  In the first the God is magnificently transcendent, noble, simply uttering words which words themselves effect the creation; and in the second, a bumbling post-creation Gardener who breathes life into a handful of mud he’d molded, and then strolls, like any other patriarch through his oasis, searching for someone to chat with.  And from there the God morphs constantly, sequentially.  For the first patriarchs: a sex-obsessed family totem.  For the ragtag slave band: a warrior and emancipator.  For the newly forged people: a  law-giver and harsh social organizer.  Then a reluctant benefactor.  A petulant national god (though perhaps only for a minority).  A raving and raging bi-polar.  And finally the God creeps off silently into the gathering dusk.  Jesus and Paul tell out the God differently: a hovering heavenly Papa with impossibly high expectations who loves so much he manipulates his own son killed in satisfaction of his defeated expectations (does that sound twisted?)  Muhammad’s God has multiple personalities, some dangerously vengeful and exclusive, some peaceable and inclusive.  And the oldest of us all, the Buddhists, waste little thought about the God; they’re more interested in living.  “There’s only one God,” we mutter.  How can the God be so different, so variable?

The Judæans needed a God who met different needs at different points in their two millennia religi-national history.  The Rome-oppressed Christians needed a God who would sympathize with their paltriness and muddle them through.  The Muslims needed a God who would get their oppressors off their back, or failing that, kick the shit out of them.  The Buddhists had little need of the God except as an ultimate.

It becomes apparent to me that the God each of us chooses to worship has nothing to do with whatever is ultimate and so could rightly be called “the God,” and has everything to do with the brute facts on the ground in our neighborhood.  But emphatically not the brute facts out there in the physical world beyond our perceptions; only with our peculiar perceptions of those brute facts... perceptions shaped (or perhaps ‘warped’?) by the culture into which we happen to have been borne, by the family history that shaped us, by neighborhood and city and nation that fostered us, and by our own individual, idiosyncratic, formative life-experiences and histories which sculpt our idiosyncratic perceptions of the incoming stimuli into our peculiar understandings of our peculiar-to-me world, which in turn tells us what we want, and what we absolutely need from the world in which we find ourselves, and from the God who we perceived made this peculiar world in which we/I live.  The God is shaped and formed by what we/I think we/I want and need of the God, not by any objective, out-there reality.  That almost imperceptibly has become obvious to me.  I choose to worship the God I worship because that God is the one given me, the one I’ve learned to love, the one I judge to be most likely to give me the things I want, and especially the things I think I need, in order to survive, and to remain me (whatever ‘me’ is.)

Each of us worships some very idiosyncratic God collaboratively sculpted, and then worshiped individually within our worshiping community.  So for the Republican candidates to invoke some God in the hope that will gather to them more votes is, to me, an act of stupidity, of ignorance, of egocentricity, an act designed to be a smokescreen to hoodwink me, the dumb voter, an act intended to subvert my vote to his intentions.  

But on the other hand, these are the ravings of a tiny, tiny, inconsequential member of the electorate.  So who am I to make objections?

Jack Bowers