Why God Part II: Stop Believing in Believing

“Die Religion … ist das Opium des Volkes.” – Karl Marx

Karl Marx’s famous dictum that “religion is the opiate of the masses” is based on the idea that we humans, haunted by fears of our own mortality and apparent insignificance, need some kind of drug to get us through life and so we invented a God to fill that need. God being the elusive entity that it is, we also went ahead and invented a slew of more tangible drugs, like booze, money, fame and, well, drugs to get us through the day.

But God is the Big Drug, the one that assures us there really is a meaning to this thing called life, that someone or something is going to sort out the right from wrong, and that at the end of the game if we’ve more or less behaved ourselves and done everything to the best of our abilities will have a nice reward waiting for us (like mom with some fresh-baked cookies and a hug at the end of a long school day).

As I noted in the previous post, one of the more jarring moments of my existential crash came when, during a heartfelt supplication to God (followed by the usual non-response), the thought occurred, “Maybe God doesn’t exist.” I was so unnerved that I got back on my feet and wandered off to busy myself, which is to say, get my mind off that particular topic. At that moment in time I did not have it in me to let go of the Big Drug no matter how slight my imagined connection to it. I needed God because I had so little else upon which to lean. I needed my imaginary deity the way a desperately lonely child needs her imaginary friend.

In more recent years, however, I’ve been inclined toward the truth no matter how arduous the journey or unsavory its conclusion, and my search for God has been no different. And what is quite clear to me is that Marx and his ilk were spot-on, although I would alter his expression somewhat to suggest, quite simply, that Fear = God, and that the greater our experience of the former the greater our need of the latter (no atheists in foxholes and all that).

All of which, I suppose, suggests I don’t believe in God. To which I would respond, I no longer am inclined to believe in the belief in God.

Here is where I believe we humans have mucked it all up: We have allowed our fearful minds to create a mind-made God, which is to say, we have constructed God of fear, the result being a perpetuation of the very fear from which we so desperately wish to be liberated.

Fear is the foremost currency of the human mind. If you want to understand anything that comes out of the mind, work your way backward and eventually you’ll find fear. The mind knows it will die. It knows it is alone. It knows that everything around it is equally impermanent, that the dog lying at its feet will die, the computer will soon enough stop working, that the beloved mate may up and walk out the door. The modern mind even knows that the sun eventually will swallow up the earth as part of its own death throes, and with enough time the universe too will reach its end.

Bleak stuff.

So the mind concocts and comes to depend on its many drugs, one of which is God, which conveniently “transcends” all of these pesky dying things. Our dependence on God is a bit like our dependence on “they” or “them” when things go wrong (“they” usually being the authorities, government, police, etc.). We humans freak out about end-of-the-world scenarios precisely because we know “they” won’t be of any more use than will we, since “they” will be smack in the middle of the same mess.

So in the same way “they” will come to our rescue when the tornado wipes out our village, so too will God bail us out whenever the need arises. Only, God doesn’t. Ever. A mother clinging desperately to her children, hides in a closet, begging for God’s mercy, and the Hutus or Nazis or home invader does them in anyway. As Gordon Lightfoot sings about an ill-fated ship and its crew, “Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”

Now, I can hear many of you protest, “That is not true! God saved my little Johnny from his cancer!” Or, “We prayed and prayed and God saved Sally from that plane crash.” But who we don’t hear from are Sally’s 182 fellow passengers who also were praying fervently as the plane went down but didn’t make it, or from the half-dozen other patients in Johnny’s ward who died of their cancers, their loved ones’ prayers no less urgent or poignant.

This is where the mind (and our mind-made God) gets us into trouble, because at some level we know these ugly truths to be, well, true. We know Johnny and Sally dodged a bullet, but that in due time they won’t and neither will we. Furthermore, we know that in a generation or two we will be utterly forgotten; that it will be as if we never existed. I know that when I and my siblings die, for example, there will not be a soul alive who knew our grandparents. When our light goes out so too does any living memory of those individuals who once, not so very long ago, imagined themselves to be as “real” as you and I are today. And every mind reading these words knows this is its fate.

Still we persist in working hard to create “legacies” for ourselves, to be remembered, to love and be loved. When someone dies we tell ourselves that the deceased “lives on in our hearts,” knowing all the while that this is poppycock, that the dead guy is just a collection of hit or miss memories locked away in the brain (and that that same brain, with age, will begin to forget it all anyway). We romanticize our human concepts of love and human connection, but in truth – again, in truth – at any given moment we can struggle mightily merely to recall the face of the mate sitting in the next room.

Now here’s the thing: The mind that reads these words suggesting we question the reality of any God often becomes agitated. My unsubscribe rates always go up when I write about God. As the biggest of our drug dependencies (and often times our last), the mind simply cannot abide the idea of kicking that particular habit. There’s no methadone, no treatment facility strong enough to manage those kinds of withdrawal pains. The fear is simply too great.

But to me, the question is this: Can God and fear truly co-exist? Would we want it to? To put it bluntly, I don’t believe in the God of my forefathers because I don’t trust the stuff coming out of my own brain. I’ve seen the pattern in human thinking, it ain’t good. Again and again we humans demand to know why our world is such a mess and, of course, there is only one answer: the human mind. The koalas and kangaroos do just fine without us – we of the mighty brains are the ones who make a mess of things.

In the 1970s there was a popular slogan that urged youth not to trust anyone over 30. I would augment that to suggest we not trust anything that comes out of our own minds. It’s not to say we can’t motor through life doing all the silly, self-important things that we do. But perhaps we shouldn’t put so much weight on all of it, not imagine that the fate of the world or of ourselves really depends on anything that comes out of the human mind. And we certainly shouldn’t construct a God out of the same minds that are responsible for so much suffering and pain for their owners.

So what is the answer when it comes to God? I don’t think there is one. At least not one the human mind can possibly conceive. But that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? As the creator of the mind God must exist beyond it. So thank God for that 🙂

“The more you talk and think about it
the further you wander from the truth.
So cease attachment to talking and thinking,
and there is nothing you will not be able to know.”

– The Great Way