What is God like?

People in our country seem to be abandoning religion. Or at least they are abandoning churches.

Is this a bad thing?

It’s not a new thing. As I read the Old Testament book of Chronicles, I am struck by how much of the history of the Jewish people was a history of abandoning the religion of Abraham and Moses. Often the abandonment was the people’s turning to other gods. But I suspect that a lot of their abandonment was a simple tossing aside of the faith handed on to them—busy with other stuff.

Then a prophet would arise and call the king back to true worship. The king was always central to the story.

 

Coercion

Kings coerce. They order and punish. Is that what is needed in order for religion to flourish?

When it comes to religious issues, we have quit ordering people around and punishing them when they deviate. We have decided that God doesn’t want that. So what does God want?

God wants people who relate to God freely, and lovingly. Churches exist to help people do that.

Here is how we should be helping them.

 

People of the Book

They say that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions of the Book. All three faiths take writings seriously. The reason they do that is because they believe that writings, stories and all the things that grow out of stories, are our best tools for learning about what God is like.

And that is the fundamental question, at least for these three faiths: what is God like? Our religions are schools of what God is like, and to explore the question we use a book.

What is God like?

Perhaps there are some people for whom that question is not important. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, some of the people think about God all of the time, and (almost) all of the people think about God some of the time, but all of the people don’t think about God all of the time. And maybe some of the people never think about God at all.

All of the people think about God some of the time. I think of children, who ask questions like “Why is there anything?” Or of people facing death, who can wonder about what God thinks of the way they have treated others. Certainly people who suffer seem to be drawn to religion.

And conversely, people who do not suffer can forget all about religion. Jesus said it is easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to know what God is like. We of the western world are rich. We suffer, but we suffer alone. We want the camera to see us smiling. And as long as we are smiling, we are embarrassed to let others see us being concerned about what God is like.

 

Let’s start with the essentials

First of all, none of us knows much about what God is like.

Start with the question of whether there is a God in the first place. We can’t prove that there is. It seems reasonable to assume that if something happens, there must be a cause for the something (one of Aquinas’s arguments, I believe). But just because it is reasonable doesn’t make it certain.

On the other hand, nobody can prove either that God doesn’t exist. The issue is not amenable to empirical proof. Which means it is an issue of faith.

That shouldn’t bother us. We operate on faith 99% of the time in our lives. If I had to be sure about everything, I would be afraid to step out of the door in the morning. Maybe the earth in front of the door wouldn’t really be solid the next time around.

Okay, so we can’t be sure that there is a God, any more than a husband can be sure that his wife really loves him. Still, things go better if the husband can believe that his wife really loves him. Sometimes husbands are deceived, but not always, and it is reasonable for them to trust in that belief.

Once we’ve gotten past that hurdle, the next question is, what is God like?

Here is where religion steps in. Our religions, at least our Book religions, are schools of what God is like. If they are not that, they are nothing. Perhaps one of the reasons people these days toss religions aside is because their religion does not seem to be helping them to know more about what God is like.

Religions are not in the business of entertaining us on the sabbath, or making the world better, or helping us live happier, or even of making death easier to face. They can do all of those things—Jesus did a lot of those things—but that is not why religions exist. They exist to help us know God better. Knowing God better can lead us to live better lives, but we shouldn’t confuse the effect with the cause.

The Book religions present us with a life project of knowing God better each day, no matter how many days we have. They do that by starting with the Book, and then using the Book to draw us to one another and then to do things with those others—actual physical behaviors—that are the results of our reading the Book. Some of those physical behaviors are “worship”—because what the Book teaches us about God suggests that if God is who the Book says God is, we ought to respond with courtesy and grace, and join with others in our response.

That is how we become religious people. We learn about what God is like, we respond with courtesy, and we do this with other people because that is what the Book suggests and doing it with others makes the experience come alive. To paraphrase an old sociologist, Emile Durkheim, doing religion with others can add zest to our lives.

 

Our Books are dangerous

The sacred texts of these religions of the Book are creations of people who did not know God very well. They knew God better than any of us do when we are starting out, but some of the ideas presented in the books are ideas that we no longer think are good. For example, “spare the rod and spoil the child.”

That should not surprise us. Jesus taught things that earlier sacred books did not teach. He said that he didn’t come to abolish those books but to bring them to perfection. He brought them to perfection by teaching us things about God that the sacred books before him did not teach, like the idea that God is more like a parent than like a dictator.

We people of the Book get into trouble when we think we have to use every word of our Books as a guide to how we should relate to God and one another today. We Christians believe that the earlier Book people did not see God as three persons—admittedly a hard pill to swallow—but the story of Jesus seemed to leave us no other choice. This makes us part ways with Jews and Muslims, but we believe that Jesus did not tell us to make Jews and Muslims into Christians. He told us to make “disciples,” and a disciple is someone who is learning (the Latin root of the word means “to learn”). We are to invite others to share in the project of learning what God is like. And we know that others can teach us a thing or two about that—things not necessarily in our Books.

That means that we should be going through the world like fellow learners, with the hope that anybody we meet might teach us something about God.

We Christians believe that when Jesus said that the two greatest commandments were that we should love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and strength, and love our neighbors as ourselves—and that every person on the face of the earth is our neighbor—Jesus perfected a lot of the older moral norms.

Love is a difficult thing to define, which is probably why it is hard to find a definition of it. It is also probably why we can say we love our neighbors and then go out and kill them.

 

Love

Here is a working definition of love that has served me for the last thirty years or so. There are surely better definitions, but this one is the best I’ve found so far.

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement with others, including God.

For practical purposes, when I am sharing this definition, I leave out the word “passionate,” because passion is not under our control. We can’t produce it on demand. It’s a gift. And since it is a gift, for practical purposes, if we want to talk about love, we can bracket “passion” and hope that respect and vulnerability and faithfulness will gift us with it.

“Respect.” The first characteristic of love. Respect is just courtesy, and most cultures have customs of courtesy. Striking someone physically seems to us, at least in our culture, disrespectful. We say it violates a person’s physical integrity. That’s why we don’t use the rod in spite of the warning that we might spoil the child. We’ve gotten past that.

Our culture seems to see the gun as essential to safe living. If striking someone is disrespectful, how can shooting someone be respectful? Not to mention entering people’s neighborhoods with tanks, throwing exploding munitions at them from mikes away, and annihilating them with atomic weapons?

We do all these things not because we really want to be disrespectful, but because those things make money, and we too often put money ahead of more important things in life. Jesus said we cannot serve God and money.

But I’m getting away from my topic.

Love is also vulnerable. It is when another person “opens up” to us in genuine vulnerability that our hearts open up in love of that person.

And faithfulness. Faithfulness means that each involvement with another human being, even starting with the check-out clerk in the store, can be open to future involvements, to future interactions. Faithfulness keeps us from “using” people. We want to be able to greet them with warmth even weeks or months from now.

The four gospels are one of the Christian’s most important books. Surely the gospels show us a Jesus Christ who was respectful, vulnerable, and faithful. And because we believe that Jesus was God, we believe that God is respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in dealing with each human being. Which means that we can no longer fear God as one who might condemn us to an eternity of hell because of a moment’s behavior. 

Exploring the doctrine of hell would take me away from the main point I am trying to make here. But I can say one thing: the way we describe hell may be one of the reasons why so many people walk away from religion.

 

To sum up

We do religion because we see religion as a good way to learn about what God is like. Many of us may not worry much about what God is like, but many of us experience moments when we do want to think about the question. Churches exist to help people to learn what God is like. Jews and Christians and Muslims use a book as their main tool in learning. Then they surround the book with other ideas and rituals, and in the process they can experience life as more bearable and even more delightful.

That won’t fill huge churches, but it will fill small ones. When churches get too big, what God is like gets crowded out by keeping the lights on. We don’t need lights. We need our Books and one another.

Name change

     A few months ago the Quincy University Advancement Office helped me set up a blog on the University platform. I have friends who are Trump supporters, so I thought the blog title "Reflections from Magaland" would capture their attention. 

     Recent political events have convinced me that associating myself with the label "Maga" is not wise. I do not support Mr. Trump and never have, and think he is a dangerous demagogue. So I changed the title to "Reflections from Flyover Country." 

enthusiasm

           Emile Durkheim was an atheistic scholar who wrote some things that became very influential in the early days of the science of sociology. He did a study of suicide rates in France that was cited in sociology textbooks as a model of research. He wrote a very influential book with the title The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, published in 1911.

His book was a study of religious practices among aboriginal people in Australia. He never actually went to Australia, but he used written accounts by anthropologists of how aboriginal people lived. He came up with the following theory:

Aboriginal communities in Australia are held together by religious beliefs. Their beliefs and rituals are centered on totems, which are animals or people or objects that each group considers sacred to itself. For example, the group might consider the kangaroo sacred. The kangaroo is sacred only to that particular group. That group will not touch the animal, or harm it in any way. It will honor the animal symbolically. The group knows that other groups have different totems, and those groups  might kill and eat kangaroos, but that doesn't bother them. They are the people of the kangaroo, and for them the kangaroo is sacred.

Durkheim's theory was that the people are not really worshipping the kangaroo. They are symbolically acknowledging that something is greater than the individuals in the group. What Durkheim speculated was that what the people were worshipping was not the totem, but the group itself. It was the group that was superior to the individual, outside the individual, and demanding respect and deference. The totem could be anything. For each group of people, some object or person symbolized a force greater than the individuals in the group. Since the totem was greater than the individuals, the perception of the participants was that the totem is greater than the group itself.

What religion does for people is to provide them a symbolic way of expressing their dependence on something outside themselves. The religious attitude is "I am not master of my own universe. My universe has a master greater than me." The individualism of modern cultures teaches people to say "I am master of my own universe. There is nothing that can put limits on what I can or cannot do."

Note that in Durkheim's understanding, the individual cannot live by a religious attitude without the involvement of a group. I cannot be my own religion. I have to unite with other people, through ritual and other group activities, if I want to live with zest and enthusiasm.

The zest and enthusiasm idea was central to Durkheim's theory. Religion does not just provide limits on people. It creates moments of excitement that take people out of themselves and gives them reason to live everyday life with some excitement. Religious rituals interrupt everyday life with moments of group enthusiasm. People need that.

Our society does seem to have a lot of people who lack enthusiasm for living. People seem vulnerable to all kinds of victimization--online bullying, rip-offs in everyday exchanges with other people, violence within forms of intimate contact. There is nothing greater than the individual which can put limits on how people should treat each other. We are all our own religion. We are limitless, free, and wandering in search of enthusiasm.

Wikipedia says "The word [enthusiasm] was originally used to refer to a person possessed by God, or someone who exhibited intense piety. It implies that something outside the individual has taken hold of a person."

There seem to be moments in our society when people experience such possession. Concerts by famous musicians come to my mind. But that kind of enthusiasm is not enough to sustain everyday living. People have to go back to their everyday environments, which no longer provide weekly, even though much less intense, moments of being taken out of themselves. Just gathering among other people on a regular basis can do a lot for people. What religious communities do is to systematize such gathering and make it predictable and controllable. That is reassuring to people.

But it is on the international, geopolitical level that the absence of a sense of "something outside oneself" is most felt. When a nation or warlord does not see itself limited by something outside itself, there are no limits on behavior. International law, the Geneva Conventions, or the rules of war are no longer relevant to the group's behavior.

Durkheim's theory originally shook my religious faith. If my worship is really only worship of the group of people that surround me, is my faith based on illusion? Perhaps I am just rationalizing my own prejudices. But I reason that the sense that we humans have of a need for something beyond ourselves could be written into our constitutions just as much as my body is sustained by mechanisms written into my biology. Maybe those functions originated out of evolution, but evolution itself could have been authored by a force or being characterized by wisdom and love.

I can't prove that it was authored that way, but no one else can prove that it wasn't. I choose to believe that it was. That is my faith. That is what faith means. But it sure helps when other people share that faith with me, and share it on a regular basis.

 

A collection of essays

 

For the past several months I have been completing a history of my Franciscan province. It will soon be self-published by "iUniverse" of Bloomington, Indiana and will be available with the title "Cura Animarum: The Sacred Heart Province of the Order of Friars Minor in North America: 1858-2023." During these months I have dashed off a few short essays, which I decided to share here.

 

 

Am I a fool?

 

This whole religion business still seems farfetched. Am I a fool for keeping on doing it?

This has to be one of the questions at the back of the mind of many believers these days. We are surrounded by people who seem to be doing just fine without religion. Maybe they are "spiritual but not religious." Maybe they are just plain atheist. Whatever they are, they must think people like me are fools. People like me must be deluded, willfully self-deceived, hopelessly benighted.

Are we?

I have grown up and lived my life cradled in a Roman Catholic world. When I am in that world, all is well. But I have to venture out of that world, partly because I feel called to do that.

"Called." Who is calling?

 

Prayer

One of the central behaviors of religious people is prayer. What is prayer?

Prayer is communicating with the divine, the sacred, the ineffable (a big word which means you can't talk about something). Like all other human communication, using language as a form of involvement with another person is to engage with a partly self-made image of that person. We do not know other people completely. We know only the stories that we create out of our experience with those people, or stories about them that have been given to us by other people.

There have been more than one individual who was perceived by people as saintly, but who turned out to be an emotional and sexual abuser. Marcial Maciel founded a religious order called the Legionaries of Christ, was praised and considered saintly by no less than Pope John Paul II, but was found to be a serial abuser of young men. Jean Vanier founded an ecumenical religious movement dedicated to living with and caring for people with disabilities called "L'Arche," but was found also to have sexually abused six women over the course of thirty-five years.

We do not know the complete story of the people closest to us. Are we deceived when we experience contact with God, however we perceive God?

Our critics fault us for being too willing to accept stories that may not be true. They may go further and claim that the stories we accept are not true. What is the evidence they provide for that claim?

I assume, without consulting such critics, that the evidence they give is that people can be deceived, just as the people around the two individuals I described were deceived. But, I reply, does the fact that some of us can be deceived by some people imply that billions of us are deceived about God?

Years ago I read a little of Sigmund Freud and about Sigmund Freud. His attitude toward religious believers seemed to me to be an accusation of infantilism. He was saying to religious people, "Grow up. We all have a tendency to want to go back to the womb, where everything was warm and comfortable. That is what you religious people want to do. Be a man. Face up to the hard, cold reality." (I don't imagine him saying "Be a woman." My own misogyny shows through here.)

The advice "Grow up" is a moral injunction. What is the grounding for such an injunction?

I suspect it is the experience of most of us that as we grow up, there are times when we would like to go back to days when we were cradled in some way. But we have learned from experience that it is not good for us to try to carry out such a desire. Freud's accusation is a move in a game of one-up-manship. He is more mature than we are. He can see the world as it is. We are infantile.

 

Community

Our U.S. culture says that it is better to stand alone than to go along with the crowd. Our culture assumes that the crowd is likely to be less enlightened than the individual. The result is that we move away from any involvement that would tie us closely to a particular group of people.

Religions, by definition (the word comes from a Latin word meaning "to bind"), begin with the statement that it is better to go along with a crowd than to stand alone. So it is not surprising that U.S. culture is not friendly to religion. Our critics say that it is because we are deceived and too anxious to go back to the womb that we practice religion. We can counter that it is because we accept the value that it is better to go along with others than to stand alone that we practice religion.

There is increasing evidence that, at all phases of the human life cycle, it is better to be in relationship with other people than to be alone.

So, to answer the question that I began this essay with, am I a fool? I answer: I am living in a counter-culture. I do not accept the culture's value that it is better to be alone than to be involved with other people. The empirical evidence of social science tells me that too much individualism is not healthy.

I still admit that I could be wrong. I can be deceived as much as the followers of Marcial Maciel and Jean Vanier were. But the presence of some deceivers does not prove that everyone is a deceiver.

Faith is to know something even when you cannot prove that the something is true. It is better to live with faith than to reject any story that you cannot prove true. We all depend on testimony--we trust some people to tell us the truth when we can't prove it by ourselves.

The prevalence of "fake news" made more visible by social media has highlighted the failure of our schools to help us think critically about the trustworthiness of our information sources. We have been sold the ideas that "STEM" courses (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) should replace traditional courses in history, literature, and philosophy, and that the primary goal of a college education is to get you a good job. 

If I believe somebody who tells me that I should study engineering instead of history, why is it foolish of me to believe somebody who tells me what God is like?

Probabilism and the transgender penitent

 

I studied moral theology in the early 1960s. At that time there was an interpretation of the sacrament of "confession" that saw the priest-confessor as a judge. I think the interpretation was based on John 20:23, where Jesus said, "Whose sins you forgive are forgiven; whose sins you retain are retained." Your job as a confessor was to judge whether the penitent's sins should be forgiven or retained (not forgiven).

If the confessor was to be a judge, the confessor had to be educated to give sound judgments. Thus arose a system of reasoning called "probabilism."

The system depended on the availability of a set of moral theology authors, some of whom would say a particular behavior was permissible, and some would say it was sinful. That in itself strains credibility. How many confessors would have a shelf of moral textbooks? Confessors would not have such a shelf, but moral theology professors would, and moral theologians taught in seminaries.

When a penitent confessed that he had had a vasectomy, the confessor was to consult the shelf of authors who discussed vasectomy. If only one author said that vasectomy was forbidden, the confessor should refuse absolution. The probabilist would say that even if there are only a few authors who permit the surgery, while the majority forbade it, the confessor should still grant absolution. There would be at least some probability that vasectomy was not sinful.

Franciscan tradition favored probabilism. When in doubt, judge in favor of the penitent. That was the bottom line.

We simply do not know enough about transgenderism to make dogmatic statements about what is moral and what is not moral about it. What we do know is that there are more people who claim transgender experience than there used to be. There are people who were labeled male at birth but who experience the world from a very early age as a female would experience it. Those people tell us that they are not deliberately faking the experience, and they are not being deceived by medical people out to make a profit.

So what do we do with such people?

We wait while experience accumulates. Science moves slowly. To prove something is harmful requires much careful research done honestly. In time we will know what is harmful and what is not. But until then, we should err in favor of the person claiming to be transgender. We should honor their description of their experience. To do otherwise disrespects them. Disrespect is not loving.

To use the old language, there is a probability that accepting transgenderism is harmless, and so anyone in a position to pass judgment on it should err in favor of the transgender person. We could be wrong, but only time will tell.

Serious study of sexuality is not more than a century old. There is much that we do not know. An appeal to "natural law" is irrelevant when nature creates a condition. When that happens, our attitude should be, "Withhold judgment, wait for good research, and in the meantime do not accuse people of acting immorally."

To do otherwise makes us risk the Galileo error. The Church rushed to judgment and condemned Galileo, and it took centuries for popes to apologize. We shouldn't do that again.

 

Mr. Trump and Truth

             It all started with academics, those people who hang out in universities. I am one of them.

The academics speculated, correctly, that truth is a creation of the human mind. More accurately, it is the creation of a group of human minds agreeing on a statement or a story.

Because truth statements are human creations, they are subject to error. More troubling is that truth can so often be used as a weapon to dominate someone else. This insight has become the basis of an intellectual movement labeled "postmodernism." Postmodernism agrees with the following statement: "Whenever someone claims to be speaking the truth, look out, because that someone is angling to get power over someone else."

The statement can easily be oversimplified to saying that there is no such thing as truth. Such misinterpretation leads people to reject any statement made by academics.  

 

What is Truth?

We have to have truth. So we need a definition of truth. I go to mathematics.

In geometry, we speak of a plane as a surface with width and length but no depth. There is no such thing in reality. But the idea is useful.

The concept of god or God is useful in the same way. I define truth as "the story the way God (or the gods) would tell it."

Truth is a quality of a story. Did the criminal intend to kill the victim? We may never know, but somewhere there is a truth: either the criminal did or did not intend to kill the victim. We have a tool to try to determine which story is true, the jury trial. We know that juries can be wrong, but they are the best we have.

In other areas, science plays the same role. Is the vaccine safe? It is or it isn't. We use observation and peer review to try to determine which story is true. Those tools can be wrong, but they are the best we have.

A third source, which supplements both jury trials and science, is testimony. We accept some people's story as true because we trust those people. Jurors trust witnesses. Scientists trust other scientists. Religious people trust their faith leaders. Politicians trust their pollsters. 

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump claims that the 2000 election was stolen. Either it was or it wasn't. The truth is the story that God would tell. We use science and testimony to try to determine which story is true.

We have used a combination of scientific observation of how the voting process is carried out and testimony of people who were involved in the voting process. Out of those two sources we have concluded that the story that God would tell is that the election was not stolen. We could be wrong. We have claimed to speak the truth, but watch out, we may be angling to get power over you.

The durability of the story that Mr. Trump tells is based on two things: the reality that many people do not understand the value of science, and the ease with which stories, true or false, can be propagated by social media. We combine those two facts with the danger that Mr. Trump and the people who testify in his defense are angling to get power, the power of government. He can correctly argue that people who oppose him are also angling to get power. Which is true? Which story would God tell?

 

Truth and Faith

I am a professionally religious person--I make my living from religion. My faith, Roman Catholicism, claims to speak the truth. Our claim is one of the reasons why academics say that people who claim to speak the truth are often angling to get power. We have a sad history of popes and other church leaders who have used power in very unfortunate ways.

The Catholic church leadership still uses power. If I state something publicly that goes against church teaching, I can be out of a job. That is power.

Catholic tradition has put too much weight on what we call "natural law." The term implies that there are certain stories that everyone accepts as true, and that anyone who does not accept the stories is either ignorant or is lying.

But there are no such stories. History is full of examples of stories that everyone thought were true but were later judged not to be true. One example from Christian (and Jewish and Muslim) tradition is that charging interest on loans leads to bad outcomes and is therefore evil. It was not until the 1400s or 1500s that most Christian communities accepted the alternate story: under some conditions, charging interest on loans will not lead to evil outcomes and is therefore permissible.

We are human beings, not gods. We cannot tell the story that God would tell. We can only grope towards the true story.

And once we think we have some grasp of the story that God would tell, we enrich our knowledge with our love of other people and of the creation that God has given us. We do the best we can not to use truth to get power over others.

For a fine reflection on the relationship between truth and love, I suggest reading Pope Benedict XVI's 2009 letter "Caritas in Veritate," ("Love joined with Truth"), available on the Vatican website. Benedict does not discuss definitions of truth. He asks us to reflect on the beautiful things that love can produce when it merges with and enriches truth. including scientific truth.