God Is Not 3 Guys

David Brooks on things spiritual --March 11 I’m intrigued by a trend in our society that no one else has noted. Stories about religion losing ground flourish in the media, but has anyone else noticed a concurrent rise of interest in things spiritual? Religious and moral disagreements—often called “social issues”—as well as deeper questions concerning spiritual reality also fill the media. Ironically, one signal of the rising interest in spirituality is louder sounds coming from atheists. How so? I’ll repeat what I’ve said often—atheists become atheists BECAUSE their spiritual integrity is offended by the flaws, foolishness, and outright corruption in religions. Atheists today force spiritual discourse past religions, past specific, narrow beliefs to a more inclusive, more eclectic, generic and secular spirituality. The latest development exciting me is a new book, The Social Animal , by David Brooks. No one better typifies the American secular and intellectual culture that is emotion...

February 20, 2011 I read—well, I stopped reading and moved to skimming and then quit altogether—reading a book that purports to be the Catholic answer to atheists. It’s not. The authors claim that atheism enables sociopathic behavior and warn that “a significant number of people” who deny the existence of God could “do terrible damage to society.” As proof they list totalitarian atheist regimes under Hitler (said to be “Godless”), Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, and others. Their exaggerated charges resemble Christopher Hitchens' charges against religion in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything . Such alarmist, one-sided observations inevitably distort reality. My greatest disappointment is the authors’ inability to transcend the traditional, primitive concept of Divinity—an individual with a humanlike mind and will. Their routine references to “Him” reduce Infinite Intelligence to human dimensions, and they assume that all atheists deny ALL spiritual reality because the...

I’ve had discussions lately with people for whom God is an anthropomorphized god. Having been conditioned to “Father” and “Lord,” it distresses them to hear more scientific, philosophical, and mystical terms for what we call “God”—Source, Consciousness, Infinity, Void, and so on. I think it gives them real pain to hear that a Christian does not pray to “The Father,” an individual being who, they imagine, rules the universe—“the big guy in the sky,” as a Buddhist Christian minster called the anthropomorphic god. “Anthropomorphic” means humanlike. Anthropomorphism attributes human characteristics to things that are not human. Children delight in stories about animals that talk, trees that walk, winds that rock, wily foxes, wise turtles, and laughing lizards. Religious mythology teems with divine beings in human form having humanlike personalities with humanlike thoughts and making humanlike decisions. We learned to scoff at pagan deities, but “The Lord” in the Bible behaves in eq...

January 25, 2011 This Vatican move, its about-face on liturgical language , may receive less automatic, unquestioning obedience than most. For about thirty years, scores of translators, consultants, theologians, etc. had labored to add more reverence and awe to English-language Mass prayers that were hurriedly produced after Vatican II. It was agreed that the language of ritual needed a tone more elevated, more set apart from the familiar style heard in everyday speech. The product of decades-long work by the International Commission on English (ICEL), submitted to the Vatican with the expectation that it would be speedily approved, was rejected. Instead, the Vatican imposes its own English translation, refusing to accept the work of the world-class experts assembled to carry out the liturgical reform launched at Vatican II. This time, reaction to Rome’s tyrannical move raises anger around the world in addition to the usual gearing up to obey. Language experts find the Vatican-imposed...

One morning in bed, which is where and when the best insights come, this phrase “Infinite Depth” came to me. Another term for what we call “God.” Out of that depth come all creative ideas, an infinite variety of physical forms, answers to intellectual questions, solutions to problems, and so on and on and on. The wisdom of this Depth comes to us because it’s within us. It’s the Within. Teilhard de Chardin teaches us that consciousness and matter are aspects of the same reality, the Within and the Without of things. Evolution of all forms physical and spiritual is a progression in consciousness—humans are increasingly more conscious of our own consciousness, more aware of our own Within. But we fail when we try to capture it in words because words refer to individual ideas, and the Within is beyond any individuals. There’s a story that an Eastern sage tried to express the inexpressibility of what we call “God” by saying something like this: Think of all the ideas and objects that exi...

Jesus’ real significance was concealed by the halo put around the man. The god in our liturgy and popular piety started emitting a bad smell for me early in my life. Worshipful language by Jesus-freaks turned me off.  What a different figure I found when I read the scriptures with new eyes! A person so refreshing, so human, so real—a feisty, earthy, gutsy, and passionate man! He uses spit and dirt to heal, weeps openly, raises havoc, makes merry, and gets angry. He calls people names, loves it when a woman fusses over him, and uses shocking language to thrust home his points. Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26). Jesus did not act like a “good Christian”—always nice, always accommodating, always smoothing things over. I like the real Jesus a lot better than the image coming out of evangelical fervor. Present-day worshippers would shun the man who...

by Karen Tate I asked Karen to write this guest blogpost. She calls herself a "recovering Catholic" and that’s not the only reason her perspective has value. In hindsight, it is telling that I gave little thought to Jesus until I was no longer Catholic. Growing up in the Bible Belt of New Orleans, a conservative Christian region of the southern United States, I was not encouraged to question religious authority, much less express dissent, but instead I was to accept as fact whatever was preached from the pulpit on Sundays. When I actually identified with a spirituality that inspired my sincere mind and heart connection with the Divine, it was Goddess Spirituality, and it was as a Goddess Advocate that I began to really think about Jesus, Christianity and the institution that I’ll loosely call The Church. Thinking back, Jesus was little more than that sad and suffering figure on the cross at the front of the church, or that little baby in the manger at Christmas time, whil...