#19 "God, Whose Name May or May Not Be Howard" -- Don

The topic of God is extraordinarily complicated, but that shouldn’t prevent us from discussing it. Although I’m not a prophet, a preacher, or a missionary, I have spent a great deal of my life thinking about the nature of God, and as a result, I have developed some very strong opinions about what I think about God.  Some of the regular readers of this blog may be surprised to find this out, but my primary interest in getting a PhD in Composition and Rhetoric was so I could better understand the mechanics of religious belief and improve my ability to articulate those aspects about religion that leave me befuddled, frustrated, and disturbed.

Have you ever had a popcorn husk get stuck between two back teeth and your tongue won’t leave it alone?  Perhaps you have felt like you wanted to stick your finger deep into your mouth and with the edge of a fingernail extract that annoyance, but you were hopelessly stuck in polite company, and you have been taught since childhood that sticking your fingers into your mouth while in public is generally considered rude and disgusting.  So, in this situation, you probably act as though nothing is wrong while the whole time you couldn’t wait to get a little privacy so you could deal with your oral irritation.  This scenario pretty much describes my long and exasperating relationship with organized religion.  It’s as though the dogmatic aspects of other people’s beliefs gets stuck between my teeth, and my brain won’t let it go and decorum requires I leave it alone until I’m by myself.

Okay, so polite or not, today I’m going to stick my fingers deep into my mouth and extirpate what bothers me about traditional religious beliefs.  You’ve been forewarned; it’s not going to be pretty.

First and foremost, understand this: even though my mother passed away a few years ago, if someone said something disparaging about her, the comment would hurt my feelings.  Even if whoever made the comment felt they were speaking candidly and truthfully about my mother, because of my unique relationship with her, I would find the comment deeply offensive and I would want to argue for the truth of my own experience.  I feel exactly the same way about God. 

When I hear (or read) portrayals of God that depict Him as monstrous, barbaric, or irrational, I find those depictions odious and insulting, and furthermore, it matters not a whit to me whether those depictions are coming from the evening news or what other people consider sacred texts.  The Old Testament says God told Moses to command his men to kill all the women and children taken prisoner after a particular battle with the Midianites; Moses goes on to say that God said it was okay to spare any of the girls who were still virgins and take them into slavery to do whatever they wanted with them (Numbers 31).  The Book of Mormon says that God commanded Nephi to cut off the head off of Laban who had passed out from drinking too much (1 Nephi 4), and later, when Jesus came to America to minister to the people who were living here, he first killed several million of them by crushing their cities under earthquakes, tidal waves, fires and volcanoes (3 Nephi 9).  This part of the LDS narrative is written in the first person with Jesus saying, “I did this”; apologists can’t even make the argument that the millions of people who were killed were just victims of natural disasters that happened to coincide with Jesus’ arrival.  I don’t understand how anyone can reconcile the Jesus who forgave the people who actually drove nails through him (“Forgive them Father, they know not what they do.”) with the Jesus who takes his first opportunity in the New World to mass murder everyone in 16 cities (“And a many great destructions have I caused to come upon this land, and upon this people, because of their wickedness and their abominations.”)

I don’t know if I ultimately know anything about God, but when I hear someone say something about God that maligns his character, I am deeply offended by it, and I have a difficult time remaining quiet about it (even though most of the time, that’s what I feel I have to do).

Now here’s where it gets technical, but please, hang with me.  If anyone wants to dispute the soundness of my arguments about God, I would be glad to entertain those arguments as long the other person can show she gets the crux of my thesis.  I am not interested in arguing religion with anyone who is not willing to address the authenticity of my primary concerns.

Okay, so here goes: Aristotle would say that basically there’s two types of knowledge: Episteme and Endoxa.  Episteme is the type of knowledge that we gain from either scientific demonstrations or through strict logical deduction.  Endoxa is the type of knowledge that is useful but is based on what most people just happen to believe to be true (popular opinion) but would be impossible to show logically or scientifically.  Today, we might look at this Aristotelian classification as an attempt to separate knowledge into the two categories of what we can prove empirically (based on shared observations of our mutual physical reality) from what we can only understand constructively (based on our communal “socially constructed” ideas about meanings that are not open to physical experimentation).

This is to say, there are the things we can know because we can test the ideas scientifically and there are the things we can know because we have to agree we need to be able to talk about such things. Ideas like honesty, morality, justice, and spirituality all have a certain actuality in our shared reality, but anyone who would claim she could measure these terms and demonstrate their relationships empirically has a tenuous grasp of what we can really know through science.  I might say for example that scientists have proven they are entirely capable of splitting atoms to release enormous amounts of inherent energy, but their knowledge of the political and moral correctness of doing so remains outside of the scientific domain of expertise. 

Thus, moral pronouncements about right and wrong cannot be held to the same methods of discovery and verification as pronouncements about the speed of light.

Science can demonstrate that light travels at 186000 miles a second, but science cannot prove that it’s immoral to sneak into your neighbor’s house and take stuff that does not belong to you.  Even if we could achieve worldwide consensus that stealing from our neighbors is always wrong, this belief would still be epistemic rather than ontological; it would remain an idea that we accept rather than one we could prove.  Science could even demonstrate, perhaps, through psychological and sociological instruments that everyone gets along better when everyone agrees not to steal other people’s stuff, but science as a field of discourse is not equipped to demonstrate that stealing is immoral because the concept of immorality originates within the social acknowledgement that some behaviors are right and some behaviors are wrong.  Unless we agree that “immorality” exists, we cannot discuss how to manage the concept.

To sum this all up, the scientific authority that says, “two objects of different weights fall at precisely the same speed” is not the same moral authority that says, “you have an obligation not to take things that do not belong to you” because different types of knowledge require different models of authority.

Knowledge of God could never be empirically oriented because there is no way to scientifically control for God.  It is impossible to design an experiment that could factor God out because any explanation of God requires first a definition of God, and all definitions of God are linguistically limited to the words we can use to explain our relationships with Him.  Because God is beyond the limits of definition, God remains the mystery that lies beyond the physics of this world.

This is not to say that God doesn’t exist.  It is to say that our knowledge of God must always remain informed by our unique and personal experiences.

Now since God must be discussed as an ontological reality that exists beyond the scope of scientific devices, we must rely upon those who tell us about God to demonstrate their moral authority in ways that we can agree upon that by necessity lie beyond any physical or quantifiable evidence. 

I contend that whenever someone says something about God which conflicts with something else they said about God, then they have undermined the authority they were hoping to establish as “God’s spokesman.”

Think about it this way: If I were a cashier in a department store and someone handed me a credit card, the amount of credit available on the card is irrelevant to the process of establishing that the cardholder is authorized to use it.   If someone says, “Look, the person whose name on the card said I could use it; don’t you trust that person?” the issue of trust does not fall between me and the person whose name is on the card.  It’s between me and the person who is making the claim he is authorized to use the card.  Thus, if someone claims to be a Prophet of God and his claim to using God’s authority lies entirely within the argument that “if I don’t believe him, then I must not believe in God,” then the so-called Prophet of God seems to be missing the point.  It’s not about whether God has endless authority and credibility; it’s about whether that person who claims that God wants him to speak upon His behalf can prove to me he’s actually speaking with God’s authorization.

If God exists, then I expect He’s kinder, wiser, more intelligent, and more moral than I am. (Do I hear an “amen”?)  If God is more intelligent than I am, then He figured out eons ago something I learned within my first 50 years: that a motive to believe something is not the same as a reason to believe something.  If I offer to give you a million dollars to believe I have a unicorn in my basement, you have an excellent motive to believe in my unicorn, but you don’t have a rational reason to believe in it.

Even if I could show you the money is real, it would not have any relevancy for establishing the existence of the unicorn. If I threaten to shoot you in the head unless you say you believe in my unicorn, you have an excellent motive to say you believe in my unicorn, but you still don’t have a rational reason for believing in the unicorn.

So my argument goes like this: if God is more intelligent than I am (and I expect He is), then there can be no doubt that He’s known for a long, long time that while “promises of rewards” or “threats of tortures” may provide excellent motives for believing, they are irrelevant and irrational (and hence, immoral and unethical) reasons for believing.  Thus, if God were to choose someone to speak upon his behalf, the least I would expect is that God would carefully explain to that person that any messages the spokesman wants to claim comes from Him better be rational, relevant, and moral or else anyone who hear these messages will have excellent reasons to dismiss the claims as fraudulent.

This is to say, then, if God exists, then He is certainly more moral and rational than I am.  I would expect anyone who God has authorized to speak upon his behalf would totally get the part that immoral and irrational arguments only serve to demolish their credibility.

Anyone who says, “God wants you to know that if you don’t believe I’m actually speaking upon His behalf then He will burn you forever in hell” has proven he’s not actually speaking on God’s behalf because, you see, God (being wiser and more ethical than I am) would warn his official spokesmen not to make this type of threat. 

The Promise of Heaven and/or The Threat of Hell seems to me to be the primary rhetorical engine of most Biblical Prophets; and this is why I have to hand the credit card back to them and say, “I’m sorry, but just saying you have the cardholder’s authorization to use this unlimited credit is not the same as proving you have the owner’s authorization, and furthermore, trying to bribe me with the offer to buy me something if I’m willing to accept your story that you are sanctioned to use the card is precisely the unethical behavior that makes me think you’re probably a liar.  Furthermore, saying that unless I accept that you have the approved authority to use the card, then the real owner is going to come down to the store and set me on fire when I get off work also sounds like the type of threat someone who doesn’t really know the card owner very well would make. I can’t say how well I know the card owner, but He doesn’t strike me as the type who would use the vast resources He has at hand to promote violence and intolerance, and I certainly don’t see Him condoning bribes or threats.  Good day!”

I must end it here.  I’ve gone on too long.  I, naturally, have tons more to say about God but I’m guessing blog posts really shouldn’t run on this long.  I’m sure we’ll come back to this topic again someday.  So until then, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name. . .”