deeply held beliefs. Many are startled to find the leader of the service is less a spokesperson for
God than a human being with obvious biases. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism,
exhorted his fellow Christians to save their money and grow rich — instruction at odds with
Christ’s counsel to sell everything and give the proceeds to the poor; spiritual investigators,
however, must go a step farther and question Christ’s teachings in the New Testament. Now
and throughout history, many members of the clergy professed narrow ideas of God, right and
wrong, and the human sense of self that their parishioners either consciously or subconsciously
internalize.
While plumbing for answers to What is God? in religious texts, spiritual investigators may be
equally surprised to find the printed words and phrases are like inkblot tests: interpretations of
them often say more about the interpreter than about the books. To lessen the likelihood of
mechanically projecting personal meaning onto a venerated religious writing, it is important to
read it with a discerning eye, override any feel-good interpretations instilled earlier in life, and
study the historical context in which the work was written. It also helps to recognize that simply
because they were recorded, words do not carry moral or divine authority; in fact, much of the
ancient mystification of words and the magical or divine power they were assumed to possess
was born from little more than widespread illiteracy. When it comes to gleaning knowledge
about the human sense of self, the natural world, and God, we can learn more by observing the
habits of animals than by blindly accepting the information furnished by religious texts, followers,
and authorities combined.
The value in inquiring about God within the precincts of organized religion has more to do with
clearing and focusing the mind—the instrument of investigation—than with realizing verifiable
knowledge of God. But in discovering what God is, it is easiest to begin by realizing what God is
not. In firing up the burners of discrimination to warm the test tubes of reason, for instance, it
becomes possible to analyze limiting interpretations of God and unravel accepted truths. As
both begin to fall away and investigators bring the question What is God? to more receptive
arenas, as is suggested in Technique 1, further insights await their discovery. An answer to this
question may give rise to other penetrating questions. Or the mind might silence an attractive
yet incomplete answer, only to find a more complete answer coming to expression in a thought
or event. Or it might come to pass that repeatedly asking What is God? reveals more about the
mind’s conditioning than any conclusive answer ever could.
TECHNIQUE 1
Joining a Spirital Colloquium
A profoundly helpful technique to practice while asking What is God? involves joining a
colloquium of sincere spiritual investigators. Together, participants in such a spiritual colloquium
formulate increasingly sophisticated questions that challenge even those the great thinkers
pondered; this becomes clear as members discover that the great books these thinkers wrote
are effectively the products of colloquiums spanning centuries. Sharing ideas in this way
inspires a deeper understanding of issues than is possible by contemplating the same questions
in solitude.
Religions worldwide sponsor gatherings for their members. In the West, synagogues, churches,
and mosques offer venues where like-minded people can hear a sermon, interact socially, and
receive emotional encouragement; in the East, individuals can attend satsangas to receive
guidance from a particular teacher. But in offering a supportive group identity, such gatherings
tend to reinforce already shared belief systems and to inhibit innovative questioning.
In spiritual colloquiums, on the other hand, everyone is free to question, challenge, and doubt.
Nonsectarian, they generally meet once or twice a week to discuss philosophical and current
issues. In some, participants alternate hosting the gathering in their homes or college dormitory
rooms, preparing a relaxed ambiance that encourages members to speak from their hearts.
Others hold meetings in a public location such as a library reading room or a park, an
arrangement that helps focus their energy on the collective purpose.
Colloquium members ensure that their meetings are conducive to intellectual and emotional
growth. Instead of appointing a permanent leader to direct meetings, they take turns in the role
of facilitator, who may introduce the day’s topic and moderate the discussion. Whether
members sit around a large conference-room table or more casually in a living room, dorm
room, or park, they position themselves for maximum eye contact. The ensuing discussion is
animated and thought provoking, often initiated by the reading of a printed excerpt that elicits
widely differing interpretations. Most religious, philosophical, historical, or dramatic books work
well in such settings, where the contents are not likely to be construed with finality.
As the day’s discussion proceeds, the facilitator keeps it on course. A useful compass can be
found in the legendary distinction between a chicken farmer and an egg farmer: a chicken
farmer regards fertilized eggs (generative answers) as a means for producing more chickens
(questions), whereas an egg farmer views chickens (questions) as a means for producing more
unfertilized eggs (nongenerative answers). The colloquium is like a chicken farm, where
participants harvest new questions from fertilized answers and disregard crates of infertile
answers since they are incapable of producing deeper questions. And colloquium participants
know that answers alone mean nothing while questions reflect back their depth of insight.
Most towns and cities have such colloquiums. Notices of meetings can be found in the local
newspapers, on bulletin boards at health food stores, and in alternative newsletters; also,
librarians are often equipped to provide referrals, as are sales clerks at bookstores.
Alternatively, you could start a colloquium. In seeking colloquium members, disregard such
factors as age, gender, income, lifestyle, and religious background. The only criterion that
matters is willingness to engage in open-minded and sincere investigation of human spirituality.
Anyone unwilling to challenge their own notions, or fearful of having them challenged by others,
is not ideally suited for your colloquium.
If meeting publicly with others does not appeal to you, consider participating in an online
intellectual colloquium composed of people seeking to expand their ideas of God, the sense of
self, and reality. Online formats allow you to either read bulletin-board messages on specific
topics at the sponsoring Web site or have messages delivered to you by e-mail, to which you
can then post replies. Live online chats about religion, spirituality, and society are also available.
In addition to protecting your privacy, the online option allows you to link up with other sincere
investigators whenever you wish; at the same time, online anonymity requires extra screening to
insure participants are actively seeking to challenge their religious and spiritual identities.
The company we keep, in person or online, strongly influences the development of our ideas of
self. Associating regularly with people who are bogged down in dogma can contribute to more
intractable beliefs and superficial attitudes. Joining with earnest truth-seekers whose penetrating
questions are no longer answered by organized religion, however, can help eradicate
obstructing patterns, setting the stage for accelerated intellectual development and
self-realization.
The hardest part of colloquium for me was getting over myself and the knowledge I thought I
had. Even if I turned out to have a better answer, I’d initially feel defensive whenever
challenged. But whenever I was successfully challenged with a better question, I felt the joy of
expansion. I soon realized that it wasn’t learning and growing that scared me but threats to
anything I identified with too strongly. Once I ceased to identify with my views or opinions and
instead joined others in doing my best to undermine them, my gut defensiveness vanished and I
benefited immensely from every colloquium.
As a teacher, my biggest challenge was to respect every student’s process. It was too easy to
jump ten steps ahead in a thought by asking questions that, while valid, were unrelated to the
experiences and history of the student. It took me a long time to appreciate that while quantum
leaps are uncommon in colloquium, they are more likely when each person feels free to and
safe in assimilating a realization on her own time schedule. The beauty of life is not so much in
the big leaps that often can’t be maintained but in our capacity to evolve in our ideas of self, at
whatever pace.
Wondering about the nature of God and the qualities and actions religions attribute to God
offers immense rewards on a personal level. After undermining a poor answer, spiritual
investigators will never be able to return to it with the same conviction. On the other hand, any
answer that withstands rigorous testing will strengthen one’s spiritual foundation. Even if without
widely accepted answers investigators never stop asking What is God? they will cultivate an
unshakable foundation based on honestly tested ideas. The more our sense of self is infused
with personal inquiry, the better equipped it will be to support its inherently expansive potential
endeavoring to identify with more and more people.
Collectively, the ramifications of sincerely wondering about God within and without the confines
of religion are vast. With increasing numbers of people striving to include all of humanity in their
intuitive perception of themselves, fewer and fewer zealots will be able to pervert the worship of
God into violent religious crusades against people of differing backgrounds. With the passage of
more time, any human being demeaned or impoverished by another’s beliefs will be an affront
to us all. Today, when millions of individuals are starving physically, emotionally, intellectually,
and spiritually, wonder can single-handedly combat dogma, superstition, and divisiveness—the
real enemies of humanity.
Gods Made in the Image of Men
And in that Heaven of all their wish, There shall be no more land, say fish.
—Rupert Brooke
Historical images of God provide a pantheon of fertile impressions for the inquiring mind. In
answer to the question What is God? each religion has its own answer based on a particular
ideal—an icon, name, or state of being—coupled with historical chronicles and a series of
instructions for the devout. Most religions claim that their manner of showing devotion is inspired
by the will of God and therefore the best. They further assert that God or the divine laws he set
in motion rewards the faithful for their piety and inflicts some form of retribution on the unfaithful.
A chronological survey of images used to portray God over the last thirty-five hundred years
reveals an uncanny resemblance between them and the people who furnished them. Religions
of antiquity, such as Vaishnavism in the East, the cult of Mithra in the Near East, and Zeus in
the Mediterranean rendered their gods in the form of humans, only larger than life, as can be
seen in ancient statues of Rama and Sita, Krishna, Isis and Osiris, Apollo and Aphrodite, and
other celebrated deities. Science-minded thinkers interested in the workings of the cosmos
might view these male and female gods as personifications of natural cycles, including birth and
death; and to ancient philosophers, feuding gods often symbolized the contending forces of
nature and human conflict. Early religions also depicted their gods in dramatic stories of
tribulation, sacrifice, and resurrection, expressing the human longing for life beyond death and
freedom from suffering and physical limitations. From the vantage point of historical
investigation, these details indicate that aspirations and fears, nature’s seasons, and the trials of
human life can be personalized into an image, or when needed, many images of God.
With the advent of monotheism, images of God came to mirror not only man’s physical attributes
but his tribal ideals as well. The Hebrew Bible, for instance, states that God created man in his
image and woman from the flesh of man. This depiction of God, recorded by some of the men
who wrote Genesis, introduced the ideal of God the Creator and All-Knowing Father. Through
the written and spoken words of scribes and prophets, he promises the land of Israel, spiritual
redemption, and the anointing of kings to be messiahs of Israel. The Hebrews, in turn, fancied
the House of Israel to be God’s chosen, God’s son, and at times God’s bride.
Spiritual investigators mining the question What is God? might regard this male figure as an
incomplete answer based less on the impersonal ideas emerging from the forces of nature that
historically animated God’s images than on a child’s natural inclination to revere the father; it
also theologically supports men’s desire to serve the needs of their patriarchal society. Had the
Bible been written by women, a truth seeker might point out, it would probably emphasize
feminine imagery in the same way that religious writings emerging from societies more engaged
with motherly attributes inspired the widespread worship of female deities such as India’s Kali,
Shakti, and Prakriti, and later through pagan influences in Rome, Christianity’s Mary.
About two hundred years after the Maccabean uprising against the threat of Hellenization to
their political and religious independence, the Hebrew culture spawned a new and more
personal image of God—Jesus Christ. Messianic Jews, influenced both by the prophetic
promise of a king who would lead the Hebrews to political victory and by the Greek idea of a
demiurge, or intermediary between God and the world, considered themselves heirs to God’s
promises to Israel yet unbound to the injunctions of Mosaic Law. Like the Omnipotent Father
ideal developed by the Hebrews, the Jesus image satisfied people’s needs for a unifying,
defining, and exclusionary worldview; it also held the dual promise of an end of times and
eternal life. With the emergence of Jesus, God’s word was made flesh.
Seekers challenging this answer to What is God? would detect a lack of historical authenticity in
how the life of Jesus Christ is portrayed in the New Testament. The Gospels, which depict the
tribulation, death, and resurrection of Jesus, are neither eyewitness accounts nor solely
fact-based chronicles that might have been handed down through generations. Instead, they
more closely resemble Greek dramas and legends from The Egyptian Book of the Dead.
The narrative about Jesus recorded between the middle of the first century and the fourth
century in the Gospel of Matthew seems actually to have been written for enactment. Like the
Greek dramas, it is rich with improbabilities; compresses events into a narrow time-frame to fit a
series of scenes, a structure that allows for only minimal detail; and contains numerous
incongruities. According to Matthew, after the Last Supper, Jesus and his disciples go into the
wilderness for the night. As his disciples sleep, Jesus begins to pray. We are told that no one
hears his words, yet they are revealed to the reader. While praying, Jesus is captured by a
multitude and brought before the high priest of the Jews, as well as other scribes and elders.
Little explanation is given for this sudden nighttime gathering of religious leaders and false
witnesses during Passover, when men were usually with their families, or for the lapse in time
between any of these scenes. Then witnesses come and testify that Jesus spoke of the
destruction of the temple. It is unclear where they suddenly came from. The priests judge Jesus
guilty of blasphemy for failing to deny claims that he was the anticipated Messiah, and the
evening ends with Peter denying his companionship with Jesus. But due to gaps in the story
line, the reader is not told why Judas’s betrayal could not wait until morning or about Jesus’s
experiences between this trial before the Jews and the one before the Romans; there is no word
about Pilate’s readiness to see Jesus and pass judgment; and no mention is made of
preparations for the Crucifixion, which takes place immediately afterward. Because of their
drama-oriented presentation, Matthew’s writings yield only a sketchy depiction of events that
loses credibility as a historical account.
Probing further, a truth seeker will find inconsistencies in the Gospel of Matthew that suggest
the image of God it portrays is based partially on expectations of the people living at the time.
Matthew shows in Jesus’s genealogy that his father, Joseph, was descended from David—a
lineage conforming with the Hebrew understanding that the coming Messiah would be a
descendant of King David of ancient Israel. Elsewhere he states that Mary was impregnated by
the Holy Spirit. Thus, instead of choosing between Jesus being the scion of David and the Son
of God, Matthew incorporates both ideas, despite their incongruity. This contradiction, among
others, gives the impression that Matthew’s depiction of the life of Jesus was influenced by
Hebrew expectations.
Though Matthew gives Jesus the status of Son of God, to the Jews of Jesus’s time all prophets
were called sons of God—a title that did not imply virgin birth. It was perhaps because Matthew
wanted to “sell” Jesus’s divine stature to the Roman people that he portrayed Jesus as the child
of a god, just as the heroes and deities of the Hellenistic world were children of gods. Thus,
Matthew also fulfilled the religious expectations prevalent outside of the Hebrew tradition.
He seems to have accomplished this partly through intricate embroidery. Jesus was known as a
Nazarene, implying he had been born in Nazareth. But Matthew, writing predominantly for the
Hebrews, and Luke, oriented more toward a Greek audience, concocted elaborate and
contradictory schemes to introduce Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace—in keeping with an
interpretation of the Hebrew Bible’s prediction that the coming Messiah would be born in
Bethlehem.
Matthew reached his intended audience through apparent mistranslation as well. Quoting Isaiah
7:14 in the Hebrew Bible1 and loosely interpreting it as a prediction of Jesus’s birth, Matthew
writes: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son” (1:23).2 However, the original passage
makes no reference to a virgin but simply reads, “Behold, the young woman is with child, and
she shall bear a son” (7:14). If the young woman described seven hundred years before Jesus’s
birth had been a virgin, the Hebrew scribes of Isaiah’s time would have noted this detail since a
virgin birth would have been miraculous sign from God to them as well. Not only does Matthew,
writing in Greek, subvert the Hebrew Bible, but compilers of the King James Bible later
mistranslated the Isaiah text to agree with Matthew’s description of events. By contrast, Mark
and John, who were writing with different agendas for a general Roman readership, do not
account for the virgin birth at all.
Further, Matthew 21:5, quoting Zechariah 9:9, describes Jesus as riding two animals at once,
an ass and a colt. However, Zechariah 9:9, read according to the rules of biblical Hebrew
grammar, refers to only one animal, calling it by two different names. In this case the
mistranslation in Matthew’s story makes it evident that his writings, which are today regarded as
the word of God, manufactured events in Jesus’s life from incompetent translations of the
Hebrew Bible.
Such inconsistencies, inventions, and mistranslations underscore the observation that the
image of God portrayed in the New Testament is unquestionably fictional. On the one hand, this
informs us that the centuries-old beliefs based on these stories have little historical foundation.
On the other hand, it illuminates the means by which stories about the life of Jesus captured the
imagination of readers and audiences of the New Testament drama. With the stories of Jesus
and his message seeking to satisfy the messianic expectations of the Hebrews and the heroic
requirements of the Romans, an adulterated image of God—personified in the ideal of Jesus
Christ—was conceived. Consequently, a historical Jesus if he existed is largely unknown, while
Jesus Christ is comparable in stature to the mythic gods of ancient Greece and Egypt.
The next major image of God, given fresh theological importance six hundred years after the
stories of Jesus began to take shape, was Allah, who mirrored back to the Arab world its
receptivity to absolute monotheism and the rigorous rejection of false gods, idolatry, and
sensual living. For years Arabs had expected that a prophet of Allah would come to deliver a
sacred scripture of their own. They considered themselves descendants of Abraham, along with
the Jews, and they knew and unquestioningly believed in the stories of the Hebrew Bible and
the New Testament, often weaving in colorful variations; but they were acutely aware that these
scriptures were not of their people. Flocking in hordes to poets who, supposedly under the
influence of spirits, would speak mysteriously of the future, intoning through rhythm and rhyme,
they became intoxicated with thoughts of demons, possession, and soothsayers. And while
these tribal people, like the ancient Hebrews, did not believe in an eternal afterlife, their disbelief
prompted hedonism, possibly due to the lack of a formal religious law they could embrace. In
short, the Arab world was ripe for a miraculous sign that the God of Abraham would take notice
of them and fulfill their need for religious structure, pride in their spiritual worth, and freedom
from the many gods, goddesses, and spirits that vied for their attention.
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