Language

One of the biggest reasons that evangelical people might question my “salvation” is that while I love the Gospel and feel that I have a personal relationship with God, I believe that most other religions lead to God too. I have always believed this, even as a child growing up in a Baptist church. I guess I inherited this heretical idea from my mother, but I’ve developed my own explanations for it as I’ve gotten older.

It starts with my concept of God. God is the all-powerful force that created the universe and everything in it. When I speak of God, I often say “he,” but I don’t think of God as a personality with gender so much as an all-encompassing spiritual being. I believe that God is all that is in the world. Love, joy, peace, beauty, creativity, etc are all facets of God to me. I believe that God is more than any human can fully understand. What I believe about God is probably at least partly wrong, because he’s bigger than my capacity to comprehend, but that’s all right with me.

I believe that all civilizations have sensed something greater than themselves, and sought that something out. First they created words and names to communicate the spiritual ideas and experiences. All religions are languages. They were developed to contain and communicate the ideas people had about spirituality. Some civilizations came up with different names for the many aspects of our existence. The Greeks, for example attributed wisdom, sexuality, victory, death, aggression, motherhood, etc to separate gods and goddesses. The stories of the relationships that these deities had with humans and each other explain dynamics between the various motivations and forces in human life. Other societies deemed that there was only one power greater than us, or perhaps two. They also had stories to explain our relationship to that one force. Christianity has one God with many attributes, including (among other things) love, wisdom, fatherhood, peace. It also has a negative force of death, disobedience, aggression, rebellion, etc., and this force is called Satan.

Years ago, when I was first questioning the beliefs that I was brought up with, my friend Linus told me his theory of jars. I don’t know if it he heard it or read it somewhere, and chances are I’ve changed it some in the eight years since I’ve adopted it. God is like the ocean. Each group of people has wanted to understand this ocean, so they have taken a jar, and collected some of the water from the ocean into the jar. It is the same water in each jar, but as we examine the water, we tend to confuse the properties of the container with the properties of the water. One group insists that God is green, while another, with a mason jar, perhaps, declares that God is square.

I believe that the power of love and creativity and joy in this world is such that it would manifest itself to every group of people alive. I know that at least one religion (Buddhism) doesn’t even believe in a supreme deity, but from what I’ve read, Christianity and Buddhism still share a lot of truths. I have not studied much about various religions. For a long time I thought it would make more sense to practice one religion deeply than to only have a shallow understanding of several religions and still miss experiencing God’s presence with any depth. I have found lately though, that I have too much anger and disagreement with the churches I have belonged to, to continue practicing there. Now I am trying to strip my words to communicate with and about God down to those that I feel are really true for me. I will write more about that next time. It’s possible that I will end up looking into other religions to seek God, but it’s more likely that I will return to Christianity. I don’t think it’s necessarily more true than the others, but it is closer to my cultural background, so it is easier for me to fully understand and appreciate.