The Trouble With “God.”

Often when I criticize the hateful actions of the Christian church, I am met with similar arguments that go something like this:

But, just look at all the good that has come from the faith!  The people that have been helped!  You’re just focusing on the negative and refuse to see anything positive because it suits your agenda!

Well, yes, it does suit my agenda.  But it runs a bit deeper than that.  There are positive things that can come to fruition through tremendous “faith,” however often I feel that the cons far outweigh the pros.  Many people are violently opposed to organized religion, and for some time, I was one of them.  However, the root of the problem is not within just the institution of organized religion itself.  It runs deeper than that.  The problem is with the idea of “God.”

Now, allow me to clarify before I continue.  When I say “God” in this post, I will be referring to the generally accepted definition of God as an intelligent, omniscient being who, in most cases, has direct influence over the events of our lives and has set down a particular set of rules and regulations for us to secure our standing in whatever afterlife a religion may afford us.

This God is a very dangerous concept.  On its surface, God, to the non-believer, can often seem inane and silly.  A sort of throw-away fairytale creature akin to the Fairy Godmother or The Wicked Witch.  It is easy to treat the idea of God with little concern, largely because those who are non-believers can find little reason to fear something that does not exist.  However, the idea of this fictional character is a powerful and dangerous one.  Why does an imaginary man or woman pose a threat to those of us who do exist in the physical realm?  Because it’s what his or her followers do with their intense devotion that has the ability to affect us.

I’m sure I’m not hitting on anything new.  I assume that scholars and writers well before my own time had this same “revelation”, if you will, about the nature of the imaginary God.  And they were correct.  The idea of a God, on a less detrimental scale, gives us a way to never truly take responsibility for our actions.  Difficult decisions are no longer as difficult, because as opposed to deliberating and making them ourselves, we can ask God.  Then, if our decision turns out to be the wrong one, we needn’t despair, for God has a plan, else this would not have happened.

Further, the idea of a God negates our need to think for ourselves, particularly a God who comes with his own supposedly self-written instruction manual to life.  We needn’t search our own hearts for the answer to life’s tough questions, we need only look to our God to lead the way.  We needn’t decide for ourselves if homosexuality is immoral, we need only look to our God.  On this small a scale, the idea of a God is relatively benign.  That is not to say that the hateful actions of those who are opposed to should-be freedoms like gay marriage are not wielding their God’s word as an instrument of hate and hurt – they are.  But, in the grand scheme of things it could be worse.  People could be dying for their blind faith!

Oh, wait.  They are.

The unwavering devotion of a true believer to his or her God is as terrifying a thing as there could be, and is rarely given credit for the potential weapon of destruction that it is.  Not only does God give us an excuse to treat others with hate and derision, God also gives us an excuse to behave in a manner that would otherwise be considered immoral and may give us pause, but will not because we believe that our God has commanded it.

Even a cursory glance at older religious practices demonstrates the supposed exemption from actions that would normally be considered atrocities, but are excusable by way of religious authority to those who practice such rituals.  The Celts, for example, were known for practicing ritual sacrifice for religious purposes.  They were not alone.  Although they were committing murder, in their eyes, this barbaric custom was justified by the demands of their religion and their Gods.

For a more recent example, examine the parents of 11-year-old Madeline Neumann, who died in March of last year (2008) because her parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, thought that they could pray her well.  How many stories in newspapers and magazines have we heard over the years mimicking this situation?  Madeline Neumann needn’t have died.  A trip to the hospital was all it took.  Under normal circumstances, parents who did not take their child to the hospital would be regarded as unfit and cruel.  In fact, I very much believe that had Madeline Neumann’s parents seen a news story of a young girl dying because her parents refused to take her to the hospital as a result of their wanting to stay home and watch Wheel of Fortune, they might have been appalled.

Yet, their God should have healed their little girl, and they believed this so fiercely than they let an 11-year-old child die to try and prove the worth of their faith.  And because what they did was done in “faith,” its failure is merely a result of their lack of faith, not the utter ignorance of refusing to seek medical help for their child.  Instead of feeling utter remorse at the loss of their child (as it was, quite clearly, the parents’ fault) these people will seek their God even more and imagine that Madeline is in “Heaven” with him.  Their God gave them an excuse to neglect their child, which resulted in death, and fell justified in doing so.

This feeling of justification for committing acts that, under any other circumstance, would generally be seen as immoral and repugnant makes the idea of God quite unsettling.  How far can the zealot justify his or her actions through the commandments of their God?  To treat this idea flippantly is to do a disservice to ourselves.  Although belief in a god may seem benign to those unwilling to examine the potential danger of the idea, it is not something to be treated lightly, and certainly worth examining more closely.

It is this idea of God that should, perhaps, be regarded as more harmful than helpful.  Yes, the need to please God can often lead to acts of great courage and fortitude, great charity and love for fellow man.  (Although, one wonders why we must have a mystical force behind our concern for the human condition, and why it cannot simply be something within us, as our own individual creatures, to do good.)  However, the destructive force underlying this pleasant farce is compromising and severely diminishes the good deeds done in the name of God.  Blood drives and donations to the Salvation Army don’t seem to stand up well to the wars and slaughter of innocents in the name of a religion’s God.

So, we must ask ourselves: What seems more logical?  Compassion for our fellow man as a result of our own desire to have compassion bestowed upon us and our own ability, as human beings, to sympathize with unfortunate conditions that we would not want to find ourselves in, or doing good in the name of a higher power, which may also cause us to dictate the lives of those around us who may or may not wish to subscribe themselves to our particular system of belief?  Particularly when this higher power may drive some of us to commit atrocious acts that we feel we can justify as the will of God.  A time has come in human evolution for the idea of the all-knowing, involved God to dissolve into an understanding that we are capable of greatness on our own.  We needn’t look to the Heavens for our inspiration to treat others with kindness.  We need only look within ourselves, and perhaps we will see that the “divine,” as we like to call it, was within us all along.  We merely had to evolve to a point of understanding that we choose to be good or “evil.”  We choose to be kind or cruel.  We need no mystical fairytale to point us in the right direction.  We are capable of finding it all on our own, and in doing so, can circumvent the danger of externalizing greatness and giving up our lives to something that, in all likelihood, may not exist.  At least, not in the way we so commonly choose to perceive it.

But, as always, that’s just my two cents.

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