God and gods

My mind has been circling around a comprehensive discussion of religion-as-phenomenon. It could be framed as “why people choose to believe what they believe”, or “what is the basis of faith?”

I’m thinking about why the children of Israel wanted to make a golden calf, and what they did with it. (Background: They had been led by Moses, who was following God, out of slavery to the Egyptians. But Moses had been gone for more than a month – he was up in the mountain getting the commandments from God. So the children of Israel felt rudderless, and asked Aaron to make a god for them to worship.)

To me this points to the power of projection of the human mind, and man’s habit of externalizing the forces he believes to be governing him. If the Children of Israel were in a habit of looking to external forces to guide them – kings to rule them, war commanders to send them to battle – they might have closed off access to the notion that they, themselves, could determine the course of their lives. So in the absence of Moses to command them, they wanted something to project their allegiance to, so they could follow it. So they gave Aaron their jewelry to melt and make a calf. Symbolically, they put things they owned into it – they projected their own ideas, intentions, and motivations onto the calf.

The Bible’s main premise is that there is a God who is more than just the projection of the human mind. The Bible presents the appearing in consciousness of a creative force that teaches man the power of truth over treachery, the presence of a life-force beyond manipulation and might-makes-right. The Bible delineates a God who would always win in a contest between truth and illusion. And, as it comes clearer as the Bible history unfolds, it acquaints us with a God who is good.

In thinking about the gods of these times, there are many things to which people give away a sense of their own sovereignty. Genetics and chemical makeup get a lot of press, as do brain development, personality, diet, exercise, and economic background. People, in their efforts to define themselves, choose a whole raft of limitations, such that you would think they were defined by their constraints instead of their life-force. People in this culture don’t think of these limitations as gods, but they think of them as forces which control them, and which they can’t control, but which, through certain carefully performed actions, they may be able to appease.

What would be thought of one who said she doesn’t believe in these gods? She would be considered foolish, ignorant, in denial. But that is what people always encounter when they deny the prevailing gods. To deny the prevailing gods is a courageous stance, and a wilderness experience. It is to choose to be alone – to be outside the comfortable boxes. It is also to choose to be free.

Maybe when people choose not to believe in God, it is from this same desire for freedom – the desire to throw off anything that is a projection of power to something other than themselves. They put God into the category of all the other projections of the human mind, and they refuse to bow down to a force external to themselves.

I applaud this. I think it is a necessary step towards truth. But I think the next step is learning the nature of the power that remains – the power within one’s self. And on examination, I have found the power within myself to have discernable characteristics, and to be an unfailing fountain of strength, and to be something I can lean on for guidance. I find its characteristics to coincide with what in the Bible is called God. As Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.”