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.

On Burning Qur'ans

This is an alternative column for this week - I did not get time to write it and get it published before my due date... so... for your consideration....

The news this week had a disturbing story for those of us who call ourselves Christian.

It seems there is a pastor in Florida who has convinced his church that it is a good idea to hold a book burning on September 11^th of this year. There is one book in particular which has been targeted: the Quran, the holy Bible of the Islamic Faith, passed down word for word to the prophet Mohammed in a vision.

The guy’s name is Terry Jones; and he and his church were unknown until this pronouncement. Now there are 11,600 news stories about him according to the Google news search. Oh, 11601 because I just gave him another one.

What would I have to do to up my Google count from 1400 to 14,000? Maybe convince my followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with arsenic? Perhaps I should lead everyone down to the rain forest and start sending out mysteriously ominous twitter messages? Or how about stockpile automatic rifles and get a few more wives?

I bet those things would get me in the news.

You know what won’t get me in the news? This week in church I will use, at the suggestion of another minister on Facebook, the first Surah of the Quran; the opening prayer of the Muslim faith, as the opening prayer for my congregation.

This week I will give a loonie to someone on the street who asks for it.

This week I will listen when someone tells me why they are having a bad day.

This week I will quietly sit in my office and pray for Terry Jones.

It is not simply that it is a publicity stunt; it is that it works. We eat this stuff up; and what we forget is that “news,” by definition, is anything out of the ordinary. It only makes headlines if it almost never happens. A plane crashes, a politician has an affair, an innocent bystander is murdered, quintuplets are born, and Santa Claus goes on strike... this is news, simply because it almost never happens, or happens so infrequently that it surprises us.

Our minds play tricks on us. We read news and categorize it as universal. A rogue wave hits a cruise ship and we will never, ever, go on a cruise. A plane is flown into the World Trade Centre and all Muslims are terrorists. A crazy nobody in a small town church says God told him to burn the Quran and all Christians are hate mongering lunatics.

It makes me want to resign. It makes me think I could do a heck of a lot more good separating myself from a fold that is broad enough to include Mr. Jones. But then.... But then... he wins.

As the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote almost two centuries ago, "Those who begin by burning books will end by burning people.” The theatre piece for which he wrote those words, called "Almansor," was addressing the Inquisition's burning of the Quran. In 1933, university students in Heine's own beloved homeland burned his books, along with many others. They burned people soon after.

But then, we are talking about a couple of crazy national socialists who formed a political party during a time when Germany was reeling from defeat in a World War. They played up nationalism, and hid a lot of what they were truly doing.

75 years later we still talk about “The Germans” as if any but a chosen few actually knew what the work camps were all about.

This is always my fear. This is why I want to scream when I hear about some crazy Christian proclamation which is racism wrapped up in religious language.... we are not like that. The spiritual wisdom we all received by our connection to the divine, whether we wrote it down in the Quran, I Ching, Baghavad Ghita, or Bible all says the same thing – Love will save the day.

Anyone who says anything different is lying. So say we all.