The God Problem

I came to the question about the corruption of Christianity by a round about path. I was bothered as an adolescent, as many are, with the religion that my parents insisted I follow. I discarded it and proclaimed myself an atheist. To my mother's great comfort however, I attended the nice Christian related college they chose for me, married a nice Christian girl that I met there, and fathered a baby daughter who was dutifully baptized in the church. To my mother's chagrin, I refused to proclaim her religion, studied mathematics and science, and in general was successful with my life.

One of my interests has always been exploring what religion actually is and what I believed about it. I read the historical Jesus material by John Meier and John Dominic Crossan and studied the history of the reformation material by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Brad S. Gregory. After retiring, I returned to my college mathematics, physics and other science material. I started attending multiple adult ed class series at church and challenged obvious discrepancies that were espoused. I became alarmed at the current state of politics in the United States. I attended the dismal Alpha Course. None of this fits neatly together.

In his PBS series and book "The Question of God" by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr., he compares C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud's opposing views of God. In the prologue he states:

"Are these worldviews merely philosophical speculations with no right or wrong answer? No. One of them begins with the premise that God does not exist, the other with the premise that He does. They are, therefore, mutually exclusive--if one is right, the other must be wrong." [page 8]

This formulation represents a line of argument that bothers me. It is like asking "When did you stop beating your wife?" However you answer the question "Do you believe in God?", you are confirming the questioner's worldview. Rather, the real question is "Is there a definition of what God might be in whom you believe?" Depending on which christian you talk to, there are lots of different definitions of what God is. I suppose an atheist is one who responds "No, I don't believe in any of those." Clearly the anthropomorphic schizophrenic old man in the sky type God who zaps down demands by telepathic divine revelation has been invented out of someone's superstition and ignorant fantasy. Even worse is the one that manipulates matter and events violating the physical laws of energy and motion to micro manage history. And then the killer is the one which is so big and so great that logic and reasoning don't apply.

The question then is "If we rule out all the preposterous views of God, are there any left to consider?" This question is so threatening and subversive that it can't even be asked in hushed tones. If one wants to explore it, they have to do so in complete secrecy and isolation with all prior attempts by heretics and heathens censored, hidden, redacted, explained away, locked up, denied, and obliterated.

So to discuss rationally the subject of God, one would first need to build a definitional model that outlines all the possible arrangements of theological concepts and issues. This is so that the participants in the discussion could all be on the same page. While this could be interesting and fun it's not the topic that I've initially set out to pursue here in the Proud Individual Blog, "the Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Christianity". The relationship between these two topics, the God Model and the Bankruptcy of Christianity, is somewhat like that between "Creationism with Intelligent Design" and "Unified Evolutionary Theory in Biology". There we have religion versus science, and they're not in the same subject space either.

My next Proud Individual Blog entry will have to layout "the Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Christianity" subject space.

Again, rational comments are welcome.

Gary Young
Proud Individual