The Significance of the Definition of God
Attempting to Define the Undefinable
As I was coming around to finding my faith, my cousin posed a question to me that I still roll around inside my head sometimes: How do you picture God?
When you hear or read the word “God”, what enters your mind? Do you picture God as the classic bearded, Gandalf-looking guy? Is He gazing down judgmentally or with sympathetic mercy? Or is He too occupied with some other cosmic endeavors to bother with humanity anymore? Is God even a “He”? Do you imagine “God” as something more abstract, like nature or the universe? Or when you hear “God”, does it only conjure up memories of the cruelty and indifference of Christians you’ve encountered and figure there can’t be a difference between them? Does the word only register as a void, like a father you never met, or a black hole in your mind’s eye?
Having constructed my identity around being an atheist for as long as I did, I know the in’s and out’s of most of the rhetoric. I don’t need to rehash every Dawkins or Hitchens talking point here, but I promise you, I had that shit down. I’m now somewhat embarrassed to admit that I used to take a bit of pride in it if I was able to shake a person’s faith. If I’m honest with myself, in hindsight I was more of an anti-theist than just an atheist. That is to say, I hated the idea that God existed and I wanted there to be no God. The world, as I understood it, made the most sense if there was no higher power than man’s selfishness.
However, if I’m REALLY honest with myself, and it pains my ego a little to admit: I doubt I had the intellectual capacity as a teenager to conceptualize God the way I do now. As much as I wanted to believe I had the whole universe more or less figured out before I turned 20, it turned out I was sorely mistaken. For awhile after my little “on the road to Damascus” moment, I teetered on the brink of sanity. I grappled with existential crises in a visceral way that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Now I’m as confident as one can be that I’m not hallucinating every waking moment, being fed an AI-simulated false reality, or living out a straitjacketed fantasy from a padded cell, so I feel I ought to confess that my atheism was rooted primarily in hurt and misunderstanding. This is not to say that this is what ALL atheism is, or what ALL atheists are feeling deep down, but I’d wager that this’ll resonate with someone out there.
I hold asshole Christians far more responsible than any scientific advancement, or anything else for that matter, for the decline of faith over the past few generations.
Yes, as we’ve grown increasingly industrialized we’ve also become more materialistic, and materialism is inarguably a huge obstacle to spiritual connectivity, BUT bad representatives of a religion do more damage to it than any outside force could ever hope to. A good representative destroyed only becomes a martyr.
So, more to the point, how should we define “God”, and why does it matter?
It matters because it’s impossible to come to an agreement about the existence of something without an agreed upon definition. If by not believing in “God”, you don’t believe a giant bearded white man lives invisibly in the sky, silently tallying and judging humanity’s actions, neither do most people who do believe in God. You’re not even arguing about the same concept.
It matters because who or what you believe God is informs how you behave. Even if you don’t believe in God, something will, and likely already has, taken that pedestaled position. Of course, I know as well as anyone that it’s totally possible to be “good without God”. Atheism doesn’t eclipse a moral compass any more than belief automatically equates to virtuousness.
When it comes to the definition of “God”, I think the Church bit off more than it could chew with all those “omni-’s”; omnipotence most of all. I know I’m not the only person whose childhood thought process of:
“Well, if this loving, all-powerful being IS out there watching what’s happening to me, why isn’t there more intervention in my suffering right now?”
Eventually turned into:
“There is no God, God is dead.”
God is, above all else, incomprehensible to my mortal mind, which is where I believe the necessity of faith comes in.
It’s important for me to note here that while I’ll say things in this piece that may sound dogmatic or matter-of-fact, I’m ultimately speaking only for my own experience. The bottom line is everyone has to choose for themselves.
I’ve heard many interpretations of the Garden of Eden story. Some take it to mean mankind’s original sin was disobedience. Others see it as a tale of deceit and miscommunication. I’ve even heard “The Forbidden Fruit” interpreted as a metaphor for anal sex (probably more to do with the interpreter if you ask me). Personally, I think the primary takeaway is in God’s intentions.
If you’ve ever been made to feel that some atrocity that happened to you was part of “God’s plan”, I hope I’m neither the first nor the last to dispute that heinous bullshit. God’s plan for humanity was companionship, kicking back in a garden with animals, infinite free food growing around us, but selfishness fucked that up; everything that followed has been improvisational. God implicitly needed to relinquish true omnipotence in order to create beings with Free Will. This abandoning of omnipotence and giving of Self for creation to take place was the first sacrifice, and why sacrifice has such a foundational role in our Universe.
So, enough dancing around the title, how do I define God? While God is ultimately beyond any description that could ever be conceived in any language, I believe in God as the primacy of our Universe, the entity that set everything into motion, and on a foundational level, as cliché as it may sound: Love. I don’t mean love as in “I love my kids,” or “I’m so in love,”. While these types of love are important, I’m referring to capital L “L-O-V-E”, as in the diametric opposite to the lesser phenomena of fear. I believe God exists both outside of the constraints of time and space, and within it, made manifest by humanity. God is like that full body chill that runs through your spine when you hear a song that speaks to you in a moment precisely when you need to hear it. God is perfect balance. God is completion. God is the incomprehensible source of consciousness.
This is less of a persuasion piece to atheists and agnostics, more an encouragement to believers to try to see God more in the faces of people you encounter. They are made in His image as much as yourself. Understand how life experience, lived or inherited, shapes behavior. Contemplate the weight of deciding to kill a part of yourself so that someone you love can live.
Don’t do unto others as you wouldn’t wish to have done unto you.
