Will you telephone God for me please?

[freethought]

WILL YOU TELEPHONE GOD FOR ME PLEASE?




Organised religion can often be a barrier that may prevent belief in God by a person of intelligence. In each facet of my life, I am expected to use my intelligence, logic, and rational thought to either accept or reject the ideas that are offered to me by the people that I meet. What happens if I try to apply that same logic and rational thought when faced with established religious belief systems? Priests and followers of those religious belief systems then regard me as a sceptic, an agnostic, an atheist or a heretic.




For example: If a man offered to sell the Eiffel Tower in Paris to me, and I paid my money to him, I will be thought to be very stupid. But if a man offered to me a religion that he believes in, he expects me also to believe in it simply because he and also millions of people believe in it. When I ask the man why he believes? The man quotes from what he thinks of as a “Holy Book” that he regards as very special. When I ask, ”Who wrote the book?” he may answer, “It is the words of God, written by the hands of the prophets and passed on to us by the apostles, a long time ago”




To a person of average intelligence, already this raises many questions, for example: If I read a copy of this very special holy book, I find that not only the prophets and the apostles, but also many other people have written and re-written this holy book. This means that the man believes and also expects me to believe:


That a God (who is not physical) speaks to prophets.


That the prophets had enough intelligence to be able to fully comprehend what God said to them.


That the prophets agreed with, and accurately wrote with complete honesty, precisely what God told them.


That this same accuracy and honesty has been used ever since by everyone that has re-written and reprinted the holy book, but was not spoken to by God.




It is a well-known fact that tiny, unintentional errors of translation, grammar, and punctuation will completely alter the intended meaning so that it means something totally different. It is also a well-known fact that during the many centuries since they were written, the holy books have been distorted, deleted, and altered in meaning for political purposes.




Very few people would deny that much valuable and helpful knowledge and advice is contained in the holy books. But if we study the holy books we find that they are simply compilations of what other men believe that God said to yet other men. For me this is not enough, because here a logical question enters my brain. The question is this. What is the difference between the prophets of the holy books and ME? If God spoke directly to the prophets (who were simply human beings like me) there should be no reason to suppose that God will not speak directly to me. So now we have another question to answer.




Of all mankind why did God select these men to speak to? Maybe the answer is that each of those prophets went in search of God. Most of mankind does not search for God because most of mankind is content to believe what other men tell them about God, but what other men tell them is based on assumptions that are not provable. Those assumptions, through very ancient tradition, have been given the implied status and authority of proven fact.


This places me in the same quandary as the prophets of past ages. If I cannot rely upon what other men tell me about God, where must my personal search for God begin? The only place I can search is inside me, but immediately I find difficulties that I must conquer before I can begin my search.


What are these difficulties? My emotions that I feel but I don’t understand, my fears, my doubt of myself, my tendency to compare and regard myself as better or worse than other men. Inside me is the training I received as a child; instilled into me by parents who loved me, and also instilled into me by family relations, friends, schoolteachers, and priests. All of this early training was benevolent and was intended to help me to conform to the preferred status quo of modern civilisation. But the status quo is always based in consensus opinion. We could say that if the majority of people believe something is true then individually each person will believe it is true, not because it is the truth, but because everyone he or she knows believes it is the truth. The same system of reliance on majority belief is used with established religions.




During its formative years a child is encouraged by parents to believe what the priest teaches the child about God. The child loves and trusts the parents, and so will believe what they believe. When the child grows to be an adult, usually he or she will continue to believe in God even though that belief is not based in personal experience of God. The situation as I have described it is typical of all religions, and is also typical of mankind. We can compare this situation to another situation where we adults teach a child that sugar is sweet, but we have never tasted sugar and never give the child the chance to taste sugar. The child believes sugar is sweet because we believe it. But the child and also we adults do not “KNOW” that sugar is sweet. Why? Simply because the priest, and we, the parents, have never tasted sugar, but we believe sugar is sweet because the priest read it in his holy book.




Maybe now you can understand some of the difficulties to be faced as I begin my personal search for God. So much of what I was taught as a child helped me to fit into this familiar world and helped me to find physical comfort and physical security. But God isn’t physical, and so what I was taught cannot aid my search for God. Established religions taught me that God created me, and that I am a child of God, and always will be a child of God. Religion failed to teach me “WHY” God created me. Why did a perfect non-physical God create an imperfect physical “Me”?




When a child is born to parents, what do those parents expect of the child? The parents expect the child to eventually grow to adulthood. The child is expected to grow in size and intelligence to become the equal of the parents. The parents do not expect the child to always remain as a child that must always be dependent on its parents. What does God expect of God’s children? Does God expect us to eternally remain as dependent children, or to eventually evolve to become independent Gods?


Why do I exist? This is the purpose of my personal search for God. The answers I need are inside me. The answers you need are inside you. Each of us is linked directly to God. In meditation each of us can develop that intuitive link and ask for those answers. We will only receive those answers when we enter our own private silence and are prepared to wait and to listen, and to learn. God knows already what you want and so you don’t have to pray, you just have forget all that you have been taught by men so that with an open and flexible mind you can listen to God, just as the prophets listened to God. Why ask a priest to telephone God for you when already you have your own telephone inside you?


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Love and Laughter from David and Yvonne Brittain

[Silent Watcher]

I liked the tone of this post. You've obviously taken the time to think the issue through at length, and several of the things you've said resonate with my own experience.

As me, there is very little I can offer to you that you won't learn through your own experiences in time. However, one thing I can tell you is this; true perfection cannot be found without the absence of totality. A thing that becomes complete, becomes perfect, ceases to grow; a thing that may never be complete in the total sense of the word will never stop growing, save by choice.

A child born into this world is expected to exceed the deeds and expectations of its parent; to tread new grounds, to learn new things, to meet new people. And in the realm of our experience, there is ever more to experience and learn. If it's God we are using as an example, then we as a life form are expected to exceed our parent in every possible way; to become independent Gods is, possibly, an accurate interpretation of this. Or, it could be completely off the mark; there's no telling where our potentially may eventually lead us, as individuals and a collective alike.

This is my perspective, my truth. It holds true for me, and it is my hope that in some way, it can help you. But in light of my own experience and your account of your own, remember this; the only holy book you can trust completely is the unwritten, the book which exists only as a compilation of your life and the experiences therein. No matter how good humanity becomes at deciphering the secrets of the world and all beyond it, we may never come to understand the complete truth that governs all things; it is possible that it simply does not exist.
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In each of us is a hollow that cannot be filled, a craving that is not quite hunger, but something more persistent, more real...

To touch divinity, one must first be prepared to brave reality.