God as an Exercise of the Imagination

Posted on December 6, 2002 in Agnosticism Myths & Mysticism

My faithful reader or two may be confused by my repeated references to remarks directed at God, Dante’s Inferno, or to some saint or another that I admire. “But you’re agnostic!” they cry in protest. “And you like dykes, so how can you talk about homosexuality as a sin?”

First question answered: When things are going bad for me, it feels good to have someone to vent my rage at. Lynn doesn’t deserve being yelled at for her losing her job. If I hang outside the offices of her last employer and scream at the executives going by in their Jaguars and Mercedes, she’s liable to be blacklisted. Yelling at the Republicans in Dalnet #politics is somewhat gratifying — they need to hear what their blind support of the Bush administration has done to a pair of human lives. My psychiatrist is sympathetic, but she only dispenses medications. I’m in line to meet with an MFC. But I need someone who can be there in all hours of the day and night.

Kay Almere Read and Jason J. Gonzalez, who are a pair of skeptically minded religious studies and anthropology professors, provided a practical answer for me in their introduction to Mesoamerican Mythology. Myths, ghosts, and miracles cannot be scientifically proved. In many cases, we can decisively demonstrate that they have no factual basis or are chicanery. Read and Gonzalez accept this. Nevertheless, they write:

…all myths (whether individual or communal) act in and on the tangible world metaphorically. They are at least partially based on actual things without being tangibly real themselves. They express and discuss actual issues and teach real things, even if all the players and events are imaginary. Myths do this because even though actual things happen to us every day of our lives, in order to act at all, we must somehow understand those things and make sense of them….one must interpret events.

Experiences strike us unexpectedly and wildly out of our existence. Lynn loses her job without good reason from our perspective; chari’s Princess finds a lump on her breast. Tanya worries that her butt is growing too big. Many of us are upset at the growing power of the extreme right in this country.

The locus of disease, social strife, an economic slump, natural disaster, or other catastrophe can be impossible to fix. Anger wells up in us and, from an evolutionary standpoint, we feel it must be directed at someone. If the source is obscure or impersonal or a danger to confront directly, we can release on a creature of our imagination, namely God as depicted in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. Or as we personally fabricate Him or Her.

I note in haste that sometimes the source of good things can be obscure, too. This same being can be thanked for them.

I use the God puppet to direct much of my anger about the apparent punishment that Lynn and I are being made to suffer at this moment. There’s a crazy theme running through our society, one which says that when you lose a job, get sick, gain weight, etc., that you’re being rebuked by a divine force. I use my conversations with God as a way of speaking up against this totally stupid idea. Once I have vented my rage, I turn to practical approaches: I help Lynn find work; I make an appointment with a doctor; I go on a diet or learn to ignore the comments of stupid people who have been brainwashed by the “near-fatal anorexia is beautiful” message of the fashion industry.

About my actual perception of God: I don’t believe in personifying the Universe. Consider what people say God is: omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. Consider what our body allows: we exist in one place; we can only move things with our strength or with tools that supplement it;and we only know those thoughts going on in our own heads. We are substantially limited in our perceptions and powers. “God” is unlimited.

Now consider the amoeba, an entity which is even more limited than us. What does an amoeba know of intelligence? Suppose for a moment that we granted a single amoeba a few moments in a human body. Then we sent it back to being an amoeba. How could the amoeba, being an amoeba, relate to other amoebas what intelligence is all about? If there have been people who have directly experienced something of “God”, who is unlimited, they’ve been strapped by their own intelligence. They cannot possibly relate to others the consciousness of something that vast. So they speak in metaphors and they fill in a lot with their own expectations, metaphors, and prejudices.

I call myself agnostic because I am uncertain. If there is a greater consciousness, I know that I lack all but the rudimentary elements of what I require to completely understand it. Would I note its presence as it knows itself any more than an amoeba would comprehend what is swimming by it when I take a dip in its pond? I don’t think so. When I talk to “God”, I am fully aware that this being is in my head and entirely of my own imagination. “God” helps me get by as an imaginary friend might help a lonely child pass the hours.

Now, for the second question: I don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin or that it is unnatural. To speak to homophobes who found their belief on religion, I turn to their own religion. It’s a tactic that Jesus used: you ask “Why are you so concerned about the sexuality of another when you yourself are engaged in or, at best, turning a blind eye to far greater sins?” I stand by my assessment of Christian tradition when I say that if homosexuality is a sin, it is a lesser sin than hatred and wrath. I believe that in the absence of a supreme being, it is still a bad thing to hate and to be violent towards others. Even if from the evolutionary perspective we can show some slight harm about homosexuality, there remain other aspects of human expression that do greater harm. Even littering, I think, hurts us more than lesbianism and masturbation. And I personally don’t think that they harm us at all. Homosexuality may revile some, but hatred can lead to mutilation or murder. Bombs and land mines don’t allow their shrapnel to choose who lives and who dies. Utilitarian that I am, I think we should concentrate on the greater threats.

No one will ever be able to convince me that two women or two men who live together in a loving, sexual relationship are a greater threat to the world than the incessant creation and use of weapons. It is like saying that the ravages of a mouse outweigh the carnage wrought by Godzilla. And yet, many people would happily kill the mouse and leave Godzilla to chew down Tokyo.

Yes, I know Godzilla doesn’t exist. I’m couching a sound truth in a myth.

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There is good news: chari’s Princess’s lump turned out to be benign. Lynn (knock on wood) has her first interview on Tuesday. And I bet Tanya’s butt isn’t so big.