I watched Angels and Demons a few weeks ago...and it made me super love God again. Which, is not necessarily the reaction that is intended from that movie, but there it is. Anyway, after I watched it, I wrote this.
Watch the youtube clip. Then read. I know it's long, but it's not like you have homework to do.
Watch the youtube clip. Then read. I know it's long, but it's not like you have homework to do.
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What is belief in God? Is it just being religious, or is there more to it?
Is it better to know a religion inside and out, or to know God? Keeping your entire focus on religion is like relying on an Atlas to see the world. You can sit and stare at Yosemite National Park on a map all day and not experience the full beauty of the place. You have to, eventually, set down the map that got you there, get out of the car, and enter into the presence of Yosemite Valley in order to fully comprehend its natural majesty. Relying on religion is like spending an entire vacation in a museum gift shop: there are lots of fun little knick-knacks and expensive jewelry that may remind you of God, but are not actually God.
To know God, or rather, to be known by God, is a privilege that no human deserves. And yet it is something that God allows us to do. God is greater than everything on earth. You can be religious without knowing God or knowing what it is to be a follower of Christ. The amount of love, the amount of power, the amount of compassion that God possesses cannot be matched. When it’s remembered, when it’s acknowledged, the wonder of God should overwhelm us. It should envelope our entire being, define our very existence, and alter our entire purpose of living.
So why doesn’t it?
The world today wants to condense God down to a self-help manual, a manageable set of
formulas that will allow us to attain what we want under the comforting premise that we are doing God’s will. Reducing God to religion allows people to schedule God into their calendars and set apart time to “be a good person,” while continuing to lead an earthly and socially acceptable existence focused on the self rather than on the eternal Truth that transcends the minute human existence. But God is so much more than religion. He is so powerful that to minimize him to a convenient, controllable set of rules and doctrines is an insult.
Religion messes up because it is man made. People are so quick to point out all the terrible things that have been done “in the name of God.” But is it fair to discount and diminish God because of the evil things that people have done using his name as a front? Imagine if a person went out and killed people in YOUR name. What if someone went out and committed a heinous crime and said that it’s because you told them to, or because they wanted to honor you? Anyone who actually knew you would know that justifying evil with your name was unfounded. Just because someone attempts to excuse their actions by naming a certain person doesn’t make it true of that person. So why do people think that it is okay to do this to God? God didn’t lead the Crusades, God didn’t initiate the Holocaust. People did. People chose to invoke God’s name as justification for their own ends. But maybe the reason people want to attribute these evil things to God and discount His existence is because we, as humans, are afraid to acknowledge our own ability for evil.
Or is man right about God?
I took a class to cap out my undergraduate religious studies that was impressively called a “seminar,” though it can be more aptly described as a 3-hour weekly session of five college students making lofty analyses and assertions about things that a bunch of 21 year olds know very little about. Although religion is a subject that is often very emotionally charged, the discussion remained for the most part academic and objective, excluding the intermittent comments of how Christians are brainless fools who only believe in God because it is what they were taught as a child, who would as quickly belief in the existence of unicorns as they would in God. Needless to say, it was a tiring class both from an academic and spiritual standpoint. But, it was also an eye-opening class, particularly when the following conversation arose.
Discussing Dietrich Bonheoffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship, one of my fellow students summed up the German theologian’s point with the statement that “If you take the path of Jesus seriously, it will call you to make sacrifices,” to which another student in the room replied “Wow, that’s radical;” a sentiment that was echoed through murmurs and nods of approval from the rest of the class, Christian and Atheist alike. Though I had been zoning in and out for much of the conversation, this comment snapped me back into the discussion in a split-second because, in my experience as a Christian, making sacrifices for your belief is a central and integral part of following God. The fact that all these people around me thought this was a radical viewpoint was at once horrifying and heartbreaking. These people were missing what I consider to be a key part of Christianity: the call to live a life that isn’t focused on the self, but is centered on living for God.
But this surprise at the idea of personal sacrifice isn’t unfounded. The Jesus that lived and walked on this earth is not the Jesus that most people today want to make him. As Donald Miller points out, “the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all, comfortable.” Is this the real Jesus? Is this what God is really like?
Not in the slightest.
Jesus didn’t despise people who were different from him and he certainly didn’t ask people to change before they were worthy of his love. He ate with prostitutes and tax collectors and fraternized with members of other communities that were deemed “unclean.” I think that if Jesus had come to our culture today, he wouldn’t be locked up in some church somewhere; he’d be out helping people. He would be making friends and eating dinner with homosexuals and atheists, not holding up signs on street corners proclaiming that the entire world is going to hell. He would stay in sketchy hostels rather than 5-star hotels, and his idea of a vacation would be helping bring food and water to a third world country rather than drinking wine on the Amalfi coast.
Who is God? If God is real, if God exists, then who we say He is will not change the fact of
who He is. You can say that Abraham Lincoln didn’t exist, and it’s not going to convince anyone. It isn’t up to us to decide if God is true or not. If God exists, he will exist regardless of whether or not we personally believe that he does. God is above the world, above the capabilities of the human mind. He’s higher than everything and everyone on earth. Religion, on the other hand, is man-made, a system created to facilitate orientation to a divine Being that transcends our understanding. God is above religion, because religion itself is not God. When God is reduced down to religion, to the do’s and don’ts, to the logistics, to the act of ritual, the very beauty and majesty that is the incomprehensible nature of God is lost.
So let’s get back to the question: do you believe in God, or do you believe in religion?
Personally, I choose to orient my life to the God who overthrows the social hierarchy that modern society wants to create, to the God who chooses to love people as they are, to the God who is so completely beyond my understanding that I can’t condense him down into a 5-Step Guide to Happiness and Fulfillment. Answering the question of whether or not you believe in God in reference to religion is entirely irrelevant. To get hung up on the bad things done in the name of “religion” by “religious” people and deny the presence of God based on these things is illogical. You may believe in God, or you may not believe in God. But I hope that you can at least acknowledge the difference between what is God and what is man.
What is belief in God? Is it just being religious, or is there more to it?
Is it better to know a religion inside and out, or to know God? Keeping your entire focus on religion is like relying on an Atlas to see the world. You can sit and stare at Yosemite National Park on a map all day and not experience the full beauty of the place. You have to, eventually, set down the map that got you there, get out of the car, and enter into the presence of Yosemite Valley in order to fully comprehend its natural majesty. Relying on religion is like spending an entire vacation in a museum gift shop: there are lots of fun little knick-knacks and expensive jewelry that may remind you of God, but are not actually God.
To know God, or rather, to be known by God, is a privilege that no human deserves. And yet it is something that God allows us to do. God is greater than everything on earth. You can be religious without knowing God or knowing what it is to be a follower of Christ. The amount of love, the amount of power, the amount of compassion that God possesses cannot be matched. When it’s remembered, when it’s acknowledged, the wonder of God should overwhelm us. It should envelope our entire being, define our very existence, and alter our entire purpose of living.
So why doesn’t it?
The world today wants to condense God down to a self-help manual, a manageable set of
formulas that will allow us to attain what we want under the comforting premise that we are doing God’s will. Reducing God to religion allows people to schedule God into their calendars and set apart time to “be a good person,” while continuing to lead an earthly and socially acceptable existence focused on the self rather than on the eternal Truth that transcends the minute human existence. But God is so much more than religion. He is so powerful that to minimize him to a convenient, controllable set of rules and doctrines is an insult.
Religion messes up because it is man made. People are so quick to point out all the terrible things that have been done “in the name of God.” But is it fair to discount and diminish God because of the evil things that people have done using his name as a front? Imagine if a person went out and killed people in YOUR name. What if someone went out and committed a heinous crime and said that it’s because you told them to, or because they wanted to honor you? Anyone who actually knew you would know that justifying evil with your name was unfounded. Just because someone attempts to excuse their actions by naming a certain person doesn’t make it true of that person. So why do people think that it is okay to do this to God? God didn’t lead the Crusades, God didn’t initiate the Holocaust. People did. People chose to invoke God’s name as justification for their own ends. But maybe the reason people want to attribute these evil things to God and discount His existence is because we, as humans, are afraid to acknowledge our own ability for evil.
Or is man right about God?
I took a class to cap out my undergraduate religious studies that was impressively called a “seminar,” though it can be more aptly described as a 3-hour weekly session of five college students making lofty analyses and assertions about things that a bunch of 21 year olds know very little about. Although religion is a subject that is often very emotionally charged, the discussion remained for the most part academic and objective, excluding the intermittent comments of how Christians are brainless fools who only believe in God because it is what they were taught as a child, who would as quickly belief in the existence of unicorns as they would in God. Needless to say, it was a tiring class both from an academic and spiritual standpoint. But, it was also an eye-opening class, particularly when the following conversation arose.
Discussing Dietrich Bonheoffer’s book, The Cost of Discipleship, one of my fellow students summed up the German theologian’s point with the statement that “If you take the path of Jesus seriously, it will call you to make sacrifices,” to which another student in the room replied “Wow, that’s radical;” a sentiment that was echoed through murmurs and nods of approval from the rest of the class, Christian and Atheist alike. Though I had been zoning in and out for much of the conversation, this comment snapped me back into the discussion in a split-second because, in my experience as a Christian, making sacrifices for your belief is a central and integral part of following God. The fact that all these people around me thought this was a radical viewpoint was at once horrifying and heartbreaking. These people were missing what I consider to be a key part of Christianity: the call to live a life that isn’t focused on the self, but is centered on living for God.
But this surprise at the idea of personal sacrifice isn’t unfounded. The Jesus that lived and walked on this earth is not the Jesus that most people today want to make him. As Donald Miller points out, “the Jesus that exists in our minds is hardly the real Jesus. The Jesus on CNN, the Jesus in our books and in our movies, the Jesus that is a collection of evangelical personalities, is often a Jesus of the suburbs, a Jesus who wants you to be a better yuppie, a Jesus who is extremely political and supports a specific party, a Jesus who has declared a kind of culture war in the name of our children, a Jesus who worked through the founding fathers to begin America, a Jesus who dresses very well, speaks perfect English, has three points that fulfill any number of promises and wants you and me to be, above all, comfortable.” Is this the real Jesus? Is this what God is really like?
Not in the slightest.
Jesus didn’t despise people who were different from him and he certainly didn’t ask people to change before they were worthy of his love. He ate with prostitutes and tax collectors and fraternized with members of other communities that were deemed “unclean.” I think that if Jesus had come to our culture today, he wouldn’t be locked up in some church somewhere; he’d be out helping people. He would be making friends and eating dinner with homosexuals and atheists, not holding up signs on street corners proclaiming that the entire world is going to hell. He would stay in sketchy hostels rather than 5-star hotels, and his idea of a vacation would be helping bring food and water to a third world country rather than drinking wine on the Amalfi coast.
Who is God? If God is real, if God exists, then who we say He is will not change the fact of
who He is. You can say that Abraham Lincoln didn’t exist, and it’s not going to convince anyone. It isn’t up to us to decide if God is true or not. If God exists, he will exist regardless of whether or not we personally believe that he does. God is above the world, above the capabilities of the human mind. He’s higher than everything and everyone on earth. Religion, on the other hand, is man-made, a system created to facilitate orientation to a divine Being that transcends our understanding. God is above religion, because religion itself is not God. When God is reduced down to religion, to the do’s and don’ts, to the logistics, to the act of ritual, the very beauty and majesty that is the incomprehensible nature of God is lost.
So let’s get back to the question: do you believe in God, or do you believe in religion?
Personally, I choose to orient my life to the God who overthrows the social hierarchy that modern society wants to create, to the God who chooses to love people as they are, to the God who is so completely beyond my understanding that I can’t condense him down into a 5-Step Guide to Happiness and Fulfillment. Answering the question of whether or not you believe in God in reference to religion is entirely irrelevant. To get hung up on the bad things done in the name of “religion” by “religious” people and deny the presence of God based on these things is illogical. You may believe in God, or you may not believe in God. But I hope that you can at least acknowledge the difference between what is God and what is man.
Okay, so I didn't watch the clip because I haven't seen that movie yet and I don't want to ruin anything for myself. But the post doesn't seem to require it's viewing. I understand you're argument, "don't blame God or try to pretend you are religious by invoking his name", might be the message you're trying to get at. I really like this sentence: "The world today wants to condense God down to a self-help manual, a manageable set of
ReplyDeleteformulas that will allow us to attain what we want under the comforting premise that we are doing God’s will." It's very true. God help me with my problems, isn't that what you're there for? We don't seem to get beyond that when we're talking about religion in our everyday lives. I also really liked what you said about how would we feel if someone waged war in our name. That's an interesting thing to think about. I suppose we just want God to come inside us and fix us, but I think the step to doing that is to first get inside of Him. or Her whatever.