Searching…
Jun 13th, 2007 by Amanda
Earlier today I posted about how I have doubts. I had let an atheist argument rattle me.
Now?
Now I have to say that I love Donald Miller. My small group is going through his book Searching for God Knows What (one of my favorites!), and I had put off this week’s reading until today.
I just found out why.
There’s this whole section called “Imposters” that talks about how people’s perceptions of God (and truthfully how some people represent God) have nothing to do with God at all. I’d love to repost the whole section here, but I won’t. I’ll just pull out the parts that really spoke to me and gave me a new perspective on the thoughts I was having this morning.
There are, after all, a lot of people who don’t believe in God because they can’t reconcile their idea of Him with the idea presented on television. By that I mean televangelists and conservative talking heads who confuse good-ol’-boy politics with Christian spirituality. And that is just the beginning.
[…]
If I weren’t a Christian, and I kept seeing Christian leaders on television more concerned with money, fame and power than with grace, love, and social justice, I wouldn’t want to believe in God at all. I really wouldn’t. The whole thing would make me want to walk away from religion altogether because…their god must be an idiot to see the the world in such a one-sided way. The god who cares so much about getting rich must not have treasures stored up in heaven, and the god so concerned about getting even must not have very much patience, and the god who cares so much about the West must really hate the rest of the world, and that doesn’t sound like a very good god to me. The televangelist can have him for all I care.
You know, the real problem with God-imposters is that they worship a very small god, a god who exists simply to validate their identities. This god falls apart as soon as you touch him, as soon as you start asking very basic questions about the sanctity of all human life, the failure of combat mentality, and the lustful love of power.
When I was in high school, this simple god stopped making sense to me. I renounced my faith as soon as I stopped toeing the party line and started asking questions.
[…]
One of the needs on Maslow’s pyramid was the need to know God. Not to know God, but rather to supply for the human psyche a kind of divine heritage providing, among other benefits, an explanation of existence. Because science is severely deficient in details of origin, Maslow held that man had invented God as a kind of false bridge from one need to the next. God, far from a Being who had revealed Himself to man, was more an intellectual cuddly toy with which man snuggled during his dark night of the sould. God, in other words, was somebody who validated man’s identity. Man needed God to shove into the crack created by the truth of his meaninglessness.
[…]
I grew up hearing about God, hearing that He had created the universe, some animals, the Grand Canyon, that we weren’t supposed to have sex or drink whiskey or go to dance clubs, that sort of thing, you know. He’s making a list, He’s checking it twice, He’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice…
Maslow’s God, like the one I believed in, was a bridge for the psyche, an invention to calm our nerves and keep us in line. The small church I had been raised in, and from which my framework for God had been hoisted, provided no bulwark of protection from this attack, but rather an unfortified access to a straw man. We were all getting cuddly with Father Christmas, it seemed. I didn’t have a relationship with god; I had a relationship with a system of simple ideas, certain prejudices, and a feeling that I and people who thought as I thought were right.
[…]
I had been thinking about the whole Maslow thing for a few weeks, maybe a month, and I realized somewhere in this philosophy that provided an excuse; I could, if I wanted, walk away from God. I mean, if God didn’t answer the serious questions about life, then I didn’t have any responsibility to believe He existed. At first, it was frightening, but I could feel in my heart that I wanted to dissociate, that if I walked away from God I would have a kind of freedom.
[…]
I would rather spend my life in dark truth than leaning against the crutch of feel-good propaganda about good people and bad people.
That ended up describing what I was trying to say in my previous post. I’ve realized that recently I’ve begun to think a little too much like my atheist friends. Their logic was beginning to make sense. Reading Donald Miller, I realized why. They see the little god who validates man’s existence. And that’s what I began to see for a while there too. But that isn’t who the God I worship is. That isn’t who the God of the Bible is. It may very well be who the majority of people who call themselves Christian worship, but it isn’t who Christ followers worship. The God that I love isn’t the same god that atheists hate. Realizing that has made all of the difference.
Nothing irritates me more than the argument that atheists hate god. first off, you can’t hate something you don’t believe in. It’s like a grown man saying that he hates the tooth fairy and the easter bunny.
what atheists hate are those people who insist on shoving their religion into politics and other social constructs, thereby affecting the life of said atheist.
So “hate” was a poor word choice. But my point was that the god you see through the religion that is shoved into politics and other social constructs has absolutely nothing to do with God.
Fantastic post! I’m really glad God spoke to you through that book.
“But my point was that the god you see through the religion that is shoved into politics and other social constructs has absolutely nothing to do with God.”
Then perhaps someone should tell that to the “Christians” who have decided to speak for all of you. It’s interesting how the “real Christians” rarely speak up, at least not publicly, when religion gets shoved into every aspect of secular American life.
The truth of the matter is that you’ll “benefit” from the crazy Christians taking over America and making this country a theocracy. That’s why you and others stay silent, or strive to maintain “neutrality” instead of telling Falwell (rest his spirit), the Banana Evolution man, and all the others to take their brand of Christianity and shove it where the sun don’t shine.
Also, I’m not an atheist. We’ve been through this a few times already.
1. I know you’re not an atheist. But you’re the one who chose to respond to this post, that spoke of atheists.
2. I don’t stay silent.
Perhaps there is a reason for that, Amanda.
Kisses,
JanieBelle
That ended up describing what I was trying to say in my previous post. I’ve realized that recently I’ve begun to think a little too much like my atheist friends. Their logic was beginning to make sense. Reading Donald Miller, I realized why. They see the little god who validates man’s existence.
I’d actually tend to disagree with this somewhat. There are lots of possible views of God. There’s the pantheistic “divine feel” to the universe. There’s the cosmic First Mover. There’s the guardian angel. There’s the angry beard in the sky. I fully understand that each view has its adherents.
But, regardless of the God-model, you hit the same set of dichotomies. Is God is an entity in His own right? If yes (deism or theism) then where’s the supporting evidence? If no (pantheism) then where’s the fuss?
Making God fuzzier and more cosmic, removing His beard and placing Him in a more mysterious abode, doesn’t save Him here. It provides an escape from the paradox of “the harder we look, the less God we find”. But it does so at the expense of completely detaching Him from reality. He becomes little more than a pantheistic impulse in the human psyche.
I don’t have a problem with that. I have a lot of respect for pantheism. But pantheism in the cloak of theism is misrepresentation at best.
[…] I was taking a stroll through my archives this afternoon and came across this post. […]
In a similar vain to what Lifewish wrote, the problem with the God you worship is that he can not be defined without running into contradictions.
Musicguy’s point about atheists not hating/disagreeing/rebelling against/etc. God is spot-on because it recognizes that we don’t believe He/She/It/They exists in the first place.
The problem we face is when we begin to speculate on the existence of your God. Paying attention to your definitions (which you haven’t yet given), we can begin to discuss the merits/demerits of this God, but barring any definitions, you can hardly expect us to read your mind, can you?
You also didn’t mention what exactly you were thinking when you said that you were beginning to think like atheists. What arguments were beginning to “make sense” to you or began to seem compelling? Spelling that out for us would go a long way into helping form a more coherent response.
Lastly, I wanted to address the heart of your post–David Miller’s argument in the “Imposters” section of his book. Contrary to his claims, I don’t not believe in God because of a certain portrayal of him found somewhere, be it TV, radio, books or by other people who claim to “know” God. Rather, as a former Christian of 24 years, I came to realized that there was not a single picture of God that sense rationally. That is to say, the problem wasn’t one picture of God, it was all of them. The more I began to think through the arguments of all the definitions/stories of God(s) that either exist in the world via holy-books/men or via my own imagination, the more I began to realize that none of them squared with reality. And when no suitable picture exists, then the real thing easily melted away.
He didn’t say all nonbelievers don’t believe because of that. He simply stated that it is true for a lot of people. And it is. I know several people who won’t believe simply because of the public face of God.
It think berle just addressed that in his recent post.
There is a difference between believing in and worshipping (or following, or something like that).
Even if there were some sort of evidence of God, that still doesnt mean I would follow him. What if we did find that there was a God and it ended up being that it was the Devil and only the devil. Does his ’supernaturality’ make us have to worship him? same goes for your god, if we did find evidence of him, I would still need some sort of affidavit clearing up all the nonsense in the bible, all the various interpretations, and so forth, before I would worship him (I’d even have trouble worshipping him, if he required worship!).
Do your ‘atheist’ friends truly not believe in him, because of his TV embodiment? Or do they believe in him, and refuse to follow him because of that embodiment?
Fair enough Amanda, but then it seems to me like he should address the biggest face of atheism then. It would be like me writing a post lambasting Christianity because (a minority of) Christians believe in universalism.
Sure, they exist, but they’re not the “face of Christianity”.
I think you’ve missed his point entirely. And this may be just because I only excerpted from the book and you haven’t read it (I assume you haven’t, anyways).
His point wasn’t to address atheists. The point of that section was to address the public face of Christianity and how crappy it is. He was talking about the Fred Phelps and Pat Robertsons of this world. The Jerry Falwells. And he was making the point that they’re screwing it up for everybody else.
The day I posted this, my current experience allowed me to equate the section with some Atheist beliefs - because I really do know people who have said, “Well I just can’t believe in a God who is _________” based on their perceptions. But that was me drawing the comparison, not Miller.