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"God"

Actually it is a word I do not like too much anymore, except in profanity. There was a time when I could not stand that either – when my father (I sometimes came to say, “that marvelously profane man”) would shout, especially in arguments with my mother, “God damn it!”

I would pull the pillows over my ears at night, trying not to hear him rave with his God damn its! It was “taking the Lord’s name in vain,” so my mother had taught me. How glad, how relieved, I was to learn from Professor Pierce Ellis as I studied Bible with him when I was a graduate student in religion at the University of Richmond that “God damn it” was not “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” It is a prayer. One would have to say “God damn God” to take the Lord’s name in vain. My father had never done that and I never did that when I took to profanity unless I was explaining my new theological knowledge to someone and that did not count. “God damn God,” indeed!

I was going to study for the Baptist ministry. That is why I had courses with Pierce Ellis before going on to Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. But early on I had God trouble – Jesus trouble too. I had admired, loved “Dr.” Sparks Melton under whom I had grown until late high school when he was my minister at Freeman Street Church in Norfolk, Virginia. I had often been impressed, stirred when he would whisper from the pulpit, “It is true.” “It is true.” When Dr. Adams preached at First Baptist Church in Richmond.

Then, thinking of and preparing to enter study for the ministry, I attended one of those “For the Youth” Christmas parties at Dr. Adams’ house. His family was there including his daughter, Betsy, and many young Baptists. I remember listening, as the Christmas scriptures were read, and thinking, “I do not believe that.” But I acted like I did. I was going to enter the ministry after all. I had to be devout, enthusiastic, right?

Pierce Ellis first broke my naïveté. I got Jesus scholarship. He took away my old Jesus. He introduced the mythical God, Mithra, the one who came before Jesus, son of the sun god, born on December 25 in a manger in a cave where shepherds came to adore him. He was worshiped on Sundays. He called twelve disciples, taught them a high ethical religion. He was killed but rose from the dead on the third day to go and sit on the right hand of God, his father, the sun. And he would come again “to judge the quick and the dead.” They built a church around him. The Romans had a Mithraic pope. They had hymns, churches, bells, books, and candles.

Old Mithra was strong with the troops (literal with the troops as his was an all male religion and Roman troops were believers in Mithra) until Constantine converted to Christianity, Christianity incorporated Mithraism and Constantine had his troops march, rank by rank, under wet trees where trees shaken up in the branches shook the wet trees on the soldiers. They went under one side Mithraics and emerged on the other side as Christians.

My doubts about religion nearly canceled my resolve to go to seminary, but I went. More of the same. When I had gone to Ellis saying, “I am having a terrible time believing Jesus actually got up and walked around in the flesh after he dies – the resurrection.”

Dr. Ellis had said, “Do not worry about that, Bob, the scholars do not believe that any more!”

Old history now. I attended Colgate-Rochester twice, six months each time. Jesus was finished, but maybe I could find a new compelling belief in God.

I remember a friend and I, back at Richmond College, agreeing, “We would cut off our legs with a pen knife if we could get our faith back.” It was not to be.

After I left Colgate-Rochester the first time, nearly paralyzed by analysis, scholarship, and doubt, I read Le Compte du Nouy’s Human Destiny. It attempted to prove there was a God. Chance could not have results in the nature that is our home. (His theories later were shot to pieces.) I went back to CRDS. The theology professor was exploring the attributes of God. I did not want to discuss the attributes of God. I wanted to know if there was one! He assigned me two stacks of book, one stack attempting to prove there is a God. The other stack asserting and “proving” – “Oh, no there's NOT!”

The “NO there is not” stack won in my book of faith. I developed a strong faith in no faith and left seminary for a second time – and left the Baptists.

The Unitarians “saved me" for religion. The ones I first came to know were “humanists.” They said the human things matter, the God things do not. Some were evangelical atheists, reverse fundamentalists, not-God folks and glad of it. I became one of them.

Then the Unitarian ministry. I dealt with, struggled with, flirted with, avoided, and embraced the God-thing through the years.

I used God language sometimes even though I knew it was a bad word and poor theology and impossible science.

The word had been chewed up, stomped on, mangled, used to lord it over people, used to kill people, used for great suffering, misused to a universal fare-thee-well, but when I thought of additional suffering ... When I suffered, when I struggled to find a way out of pain, I could think of no other symbol to raise in an hour of desperate need. I could think of no other word that would conjure up the idea or experience of the holy of awe (of ultimate things) the way that word did and does.

So I used it with care thinking there is something greater than we – the great mystery. The eternal “Oneness” – that may care no more for us than water does for fish, yet it sustains us, we are of it, one with it, and it will not let us go.

God language. I do not know. I am deeply programmed to keep fiddle-fudging with it, throwing it out and being disgusted with it in the months of fanatics, fundamentalists, and the naïve of all stripes.

So, no, I do not believe in God(s), certainly not the old ones, not the Biblical ones, not the Christian ones. I like the Zen approach to awareness and ones and intimacy better. That makes me a “mystical” naturalist, I guess.

I wonder, after thinking of this mess again, why I am still interested enough to have read Hans Kung’s Is There a God? years ago (he didn't prove it with all his “proofs.”) or Bart Kosko’s Fuzzy Thinking more recently (where God is the Mathmaker of multi-valued logic and beyond but sure as hell (or heaven either) not a fit subject for sentiment.

Awareness, consciousness, love of nature, love of (some) people, intellectual excitement, the highs of art and music and exercise, those are some of the good things now along with simple food (and, sometimes, not so simple).

Why is it, then, I still want to say, God damn it! I know there is no “God” that “damns” things, just an isness (I think) that IS THINGS.

At least when I think or say “God damn it” as I write this down, I can do it with a smile. Something (or nothing) has played a cosmic joke on humanity for a long time now.

Keep laughing!

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