The Times and Transcript has made its online copy a "pay to see" service. So I am going to resume posting my columns on this site after the fact.

FAITH TODAY - Times and Transcript - December 2011

Most of us self-identify in some way. We are happy today, or sad; we are young, or old; we are male, or female.

Some of those identifications get thrown onto us, like whether we are part of the lower economic trenches or the middle class, or wealthy. When people say someone is poor, they have an image in their mind, and whether or not you fit into that, you are labeled.

Some of them are classic genetic differences that we cannot really do anything about, like being left handed; or fitting more into the world as an introvert or an extrovert.

So you are religious or atheist, right?

The best line ever in my education was this story about one of our professors. He was teaching a first year religious studies class at university; those classes are almost always filled with hundreds of curious students by the way and one very angry young man confronted the teacher after a lecture.

“I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said, “I don’t believe in God!”

To which the wise professor replied, “Tell me about this God, perhaps I don’t believe in them either.”

This is what always gets to me when I read books like Christopher Hitchins “God is not great” where he argues against Christians as being silly. Well, I have been ordained for 16 years, I went to church for a couple of decades before that, and I have undertaken four university degrees in religious studies; and you know what, I think the Christians he is talking about are silly too.  

He picked one narrow definition of someone who is religious and attacked them as the stand in for everyone.

Pick any issue of the faith that you are concerned about – were we created or did we spontaneously erupt from protoplasm, for example, and there will be people in the church, the synagogue, the mosque or the temple who will believe every single scientific and philosophical variation of this issue possible.

In other words, religious people are just as human and just as different as anyone.

I guess I mention this for two reasons: the first is that when I say I am a Christian, I am often judged, and judged in a way that is not very accurate of who I am. Most Christians for example, seem to argue I am not. 

Which is neither here nor there, just that we do not all come from a cookie cutter mould.

The second reason is that one of the things that has brought religion to its cast off state is this precise problem. People in the church think everyone has to be the same, or think the same, and act the same. We assume when people come to worship they are all looking for one thing.

Think about it, for the majority of people worship is: 200 year old music, liturgical moments where the leader does something almost magical, prayers that sound the same as they always have.

Now, on the plus side, tradition evokes emotion and allows us to easily enter into the experience. On the negative side, they are all cookie cutter moments designed for one type of person.

Within the pews of my church as an example, I have six generations of people. Some of them grew up listening to swing music, some to hippy folk music, and some to techno pop. What music should I play to inspire an emotional response from them?

There are people out there who firmly believed that moral issues like abortion, divorce, homosexuality and the like are so bad we should not even talk about them; while the people younger than me cannot even fathom why these should be issues.

And when it comes to faith my parents grew up in a world where a Catholic would not talk to a Protestant; by the time I was maturing that seemed silly, but there was no way a Muslim or a Jew or Buddhist was right about anything. For those born today they will not be able to fathom why we thought there was such a big difference between any religions.

Whether we are talking about church or culture, the one thing we need to do as soon as possible is realize that almost everyone is different. So let’s respect that and incorporate it into how we do the things we do. 

Then, perhaps, we can turn this world around. 

Beyond Theism

FAITH TODAY - Published May 15th 2010

I wish everyone would go out and read the book God at 2000.

This nifty little book by Morehouse Publishing is a series of lectures given at the University of Oregon by some of the best of today’s religious thinkers from our three sister religions; Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It is an easy read, because the question was one that we can all relate to. “Who is God for you? What does that mean to you?”

So there is very little academic double speak, or contemplation of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; instead, we find Marcos Borg, or Karen Armstrong, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, or Desmond Tutu all talking about their own personal faith in ways that we can get.

Since this is a work about modern Christian thought; the challenging thing for us to hear is that none of them see God as anything like how we saw “him” while we were growing up in Sunday School.

It is strange, isn’t it? How the way we see life, the universe and everything changes all the time, but the way we see religion, or our faith, or God, sometimes seems like it is stuck in Molasses.

So who is God to you?

The closest thing I think I have ever come to a personal definition is the concept of The Force from Star Wars (the old Star Wars, before there were microscopic God like aliens altering the fabric of the Force). This is not as wacky as it sounds; I don’t know if George Lucas was channelling God when he came up with this or what, but the force is a concept of divinity that actually makes sense to the modern post enlightenment, scientific, cynical, questioning people we have become.

I am not alone, I am connected to all things, and all things are connected to me. There is an invisible bond that has power, that inspires, that empowers, and that changes the fabric of the universe and my interaction with it. Consider that this force is neutral but can become either light or dark, and one chooses how they are going to interact with it becoming either Jedi or Sith.

Traditionally we call this Force the Logos; the Greek word for the creative Word of God. Which was in the beginning and all things came into being through it. Jesus became so capable of channelling the force that he was the living example of it, the Word Incarnate...

Think it is strange to use a Science Fiction movie to define God? Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, one of the greatest living scholars of Judaism, defines life as a video game:

It is a game that is played in a virtual environment we call “Earth” and has five rules:

1. You never know when the game is going to start.

2. You cannot ever stop playing the game once you start.

3. Just to keep you on your toes each player is awarded random and undeserved gifts and handicaps as they play.

4. Points are awarded whenever you discern that life is about more than you as a player, or whenever you catch glimpses of the divine.

5. Everything is connected to everything else.

Which brings us full circle to the force; and the modern concept of God that is actually not really mine, although I have applied it to Star Wars; but rather, the way a lot of people are seeing God and our relationship with God these days.

There has been a lot made about all these famous Atheists writing about how God doesn’t exist. The problem is, they suffer from the same thing that is stopping a lot of people from coming in our doors, and they are trapped in a thousand year old way of seeing God that just doesn’t make sense anymore.

I encourage you to read the book, to think about your faith, and to accept that God is beyond any way we can possibly explain it.