idea is simple: we can reject, based on our personal experience, the
notion that some spirit can be relied upon to protect and help us,
without rejecting with it the notion that some unfathomably large and
incomprehensible connecting power still underlies the universe, in
roughly the sense the Deists took God.
Most of us have
had inconsolable nights where there was no angel, no spirit of God. We
have had things happen that we fervently wanted to avoid, and overall
have had no experience of benevolence from a higher power.
And
I was thinking that for some people, the asking from God is all too
close to the asking parents for help–protection, consolation,
guidance–that never materialized.
There comes a
psychological point for many, I think, where emotional stability and the
possibility for separation from a painful emotional linkage with past,
REQUIRES rejecting this notion of an omnipotent father who can be relied
upon. The rejection is imprecise, but one typically based upon the
sense I still see often, that the choice is between No God and a God
which is purportedly described in a book somewhere, with the God of the
Christians the most typical target.
These are the
dogmatic atheists. For them, I feel, to reconsider the idea of God is
to reopen an emotional witches brew of conflict and pain, even if
empirically something like a Deistic god–or more likely an interactive
universe with rules we don’t yet grasp–seems to be what science most
strongly supports, from the data.
The truth is that one
can easily assert that the True God has never been described, and that
no religion has a monopoly on truth, and that most of its most sacred
tales are simply myths–in both senses–rooted in primal unconscious
psychosocial realities.
So much of life is clearing
underbrush, space, for thinking and feeling clearly. The more barriers
you find, the more barriers you find. Most of us exist in very small
spaces, and what we call freedom is perhaps a slightly larger prison
cell than our neighbor. Spirituality is nothing more or less than
dreaming of leaving the prison entirely.