God Is Not 3 Guys

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (from the “Four Quartets” by T.S. Eliot) I can call myself a Catholic Christian atheist. In the second half of the 1960s, I tried to be an atheist, not successfully. In the 1980s I learned that spirituality reigns in my life, that it trumps everything else and this explains my unbreakable ties to the religion I was born into. I can’t stop being Catholic, and I also can’t stop thinking about spiritual matters, which has led me to critically examine the beliefs of my childhood religion. When I get together with past classmates (who remind me of my Catholic faith decades ago), I confess I’m bored if they want to tell me how many kids and grandkids they have, but I like hearing how they and their kids are opening doors of the mind. I want to know how people are evolving in ways that matter—wisdom and emotional/spiritual maturity. My ...

Yay! Finally my website for God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky is fixed. Check out the excerpts, reader comments, etc. More updating will follow.

A comment that just came in to an older post, “Surface Religion,” sneers, “At their mystical core all religions agree? So I am actually in agreement with feminist witches, new agers, devil worshipers, and marxists and didn't even know it?” This language exposes offensive bias so obvious that no more need be stated about that, but it raises a point I made that needs expanding. What is the mystical core of religions not recognized by many of their practitioners? It is their efforts to direct people toward the spiritual core of the universe, what we call God. Each religion attempts to explain this unexplainable Source of all, this Formlessness that is God. It can do so only by using images grasped by our senses in a concrete physical world. We focus on the concrete imagery of our religion, which is to say, its mythology, but these symbols are not the core of the religion. When we stay with the images instead of recognizing the larger Reality they point to, we slide toward us versus t...

I apologize for the lack of updating on my events page. For some reason the site won’t update as it should. So I’ll mention an event coming up this coming Monday, May 12. At the Village Bean in Avon, I’ll be talking to a book group about God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky . Other reading groups have taken it on—it’s that kind of book. I encourage readers to discuss its topics with others and to delve deeper into them by reading the works I cite in my bibliography. As some comments on this blog indicate, it’s not easy to open up to a wider, inclusive view, when we’ve had a lifetime of training in following, without question, a line of thinking laid down by authority. Well, to be accurate, by some authority. I haven’t posted all the objections that came in to “Ultimate Authority” because they were repetitive and insulting. This sums up their outrage—that I “still claim identity in an organization where you outright reject its core beliefs.” What I reject in God Is Not Three Guys in the Sk...

Florian’s comment to Man vs. Myth is about authority. He thinks the Catholic hierarchy has the right to tell Catholics what to believe. I don’t. I follow the voice of authority within. This will be interpreted as arrogance. But is it less arrogant for human officials of the Catholic Church to claim the right to define truth? Florian says, if I don’t comply with Church teaching, I’m not Catholic. I say I can’t stop being Catholic because it is who I am. If I were excommunicated, I would still be Catholic. I believe in Ultimate Truth but consider it indefinable. This is why I like Joseph Campbell’s term for God—Transcendent Mystery. It indicates the incomprehensibility of what we call God. God is not a creature, not a being, not a somebody, not an individual alongside other individuals, as Karl Rahner pointed out. All God-images, including the Christian one of Jesus Christ, need to be distinguished from God Itself, which is beyond anything humanly imaginable. It is the Source of all rea...

I have great respect and liking for the man Jesus who actually lived in Palestine 2,000 years ago. But I don't worship Jesus because I don’t believe he's God, as I explain in God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky , where I also give reasons for my public confession. One incident in my spiritual evolution remains memorable. I was at the School of Theology and several of us were preparing for a liturgy when one of the women stated firmly, “I don’t consider Jesus my savior.” What a relief for me to hear that! Hallelujah! It motivated me to be firm in my realization that the Christian story is myth. I entered graduate school with the knowledge and what I learned there bolstered it, instead of refuting it. What my fellow graduate student and many authors, notably Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, did for me, I now do for others. In response, I get explosions of relief from active Christians afraid to say what they truly believe or even to confess their questions, fearful of activating relig...

I’m home and I’ll resume my recovery here. This is four weeks after I entered the hospital. Recovery is slow. I’ll be finding spiritual lessons from this for a long time to come. What touches me most deeply is the loving care and concern I’ve received from many people. I feel unworthy and helpless to adequately thank everyone. The profusion of flowers and cards in my room prompted a visitor to comment, “You are well loved.” Yes, and I didn’t earn it. I’m grateful that the expressions of love countered the pain of major surgery, but I have to make an effort to accept love I didn’t earn. This is one lesson—that love is not earned. I hope this experience increases my own loving care and concern for others. John Lennon’s statement spoke to me on my hospital bed: Life is what happens while we have other plans. In advance I’ll thank any reader who can give the exact quote and maybe circumstances accompanying it. I will resume nudging Christians out of our box of assumptions, encouraging them...