Wednesday, July 20, 2011

CAN 'GOD' BE PUT BACK TO WORK?

I QUITE LIKE TO ATTEND CHURCH, which you might think a little weird, given my agnostic/atheist leanings.  I go the the local Episcopal services.  I am surprisingly regular, hardly missing a Sunday.  I love the hymns, which are more ancient than modern.  A small quip tucked away here, as the  Church of England, Anglican, Episcopal (depending on the country in which one is living) had an earlier hymnal called, 'Hymns, Ancient and Modern'.

Going into the local church building (Christ Church), with its tower and stained glass windows, is a like leaving the 21st Century and entering the Middle Ages.  This is certainly true of the cosmology inherent in almost every thing we say and do.  We pray to our Heavenly Father, at whose right hand is Jesus, the Son of God.  One day, Jesus will descend from heaven to judge the living and the dead.  The dead will be raised from Hades, below the earth, to face the judgement day.  We are joined with the hosts of heaven through the life of the Holy Spirit, making us one in Christ, forming the people of God or the body of Christ.  We ask for the forgiveness of sins and for help to live peaceful, good, and useful lives.  If anyone needs forgiveness for sins, that would be me, and I am grateful for any help to attain to the latter three.

It is greatly interesting to me that, had I not begun to attend this church, I might never have heard of the writings of Lloyd Geering.  A regular attender, at the fellowship hour after the worship service on my first attendance, having heard my confession of agnosticism, said, 'Have you read any of Lloyd Geering?', and strait-way mentioned a title, Christianity without God.

Professor Geering is a New Zealand theologian who was tried for heresy by the Presbyterian Church in 1968 (but not found guilty).  I recommend you read his work should you be interested in thinking 'out of the box' about the history of Christianity and its possible contribution to our modern secular age.  His writings have greatly assisted my own thinking.  He is erudite in many areas and familiar with the challenges modern science offers to Christian believers.  I had been completely unaware of his writings as his period of active writing roughly coincides with the period in which I was going about my second sacking of God.

Does this mean that, having sacked 'God' twice, I am about to reengage?  Not in the manner you might expect.

I have put forward, for your consideration, that talk about God is not talk about a being in the real world, or some other 'world' but rather is talk about a concept which, like all concepts, exists somehow 'in our heads'.  In other words, a concept that can only exist so long as there is language and culture to support it.  Many cultures we know of through  history have developed some notion of gods, or god.  This is often advanced as an argument for the existence of god as a real being instead of what it patently shows, that 'god as a concept' is vitally important to human kind.

Why is this concept, gods or god, so important to us?  I am persuaded that the major reason is human kind's passion for meaning, our desire to understand how things are connected and how things work.  Amongst other things, we want to know the answer to questions such as, 'Who am I?', and 'Why am I here?'...and, 'Did all the things that continue to be around us have a beginning?' and, if so, "What is the story of how things have gone since then to now?'

For many, the answers seem to cohere around the concept of god.

However, before I can re-employ 'God', I will have to do some considerable 're-working' of the concept itself.  Watch this space.

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