What Actually is God?

A man lies in the road, his body is broken  after being hit head-on by a Jack and Jill ice-cream truck. As the light fades from his  life, the last thing he sees is an image of his favorite Cookies 'n Cream Cone. And then  there’s darkness, except somewhere in that darkness there’s a door slightly ajar with  a bright light shining through the crack.

He walks through the door and to his surprise  he’s surrounded by white fluffy clouds bathed in glorious sunshine. His ears are filled with  the most blissful music, a sound so pleasant he could listen to it for eternity. Then  suddenly he’s faced with giant pearl gates, and in front of them is a man holding a set  of keys.

“I am Saint Peter,” the man intones, “I hold the keys to the kingdom. ” Saint Peter then says, “Hold on a minute will you”, and he starts turning the pages  of what looks like some kind of unbelievably large directory. “Ok, you’re good to  go,” says Peter, and he opens the doors.

What the guy doesn’t know is that if he’d had  a black mark against his name in that book it would have a ride in the elevator down to hell. When the man is finally ensconced in his personal bit of heaven, the owner of the place  does a meet and greet. This man is God.

He’s larger than life and wears a wonderfully  lustrous white beard, reminding the guy of Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings movies. The End. Ok, so that’s not strictly a true story, but you  could say it’s based on stories that some of you might have heard at one point in your life.

The  idea of Saint Peter holding the keys to heaven and God having a really well-maintained white beard is  of course not believed by all Christians. In fact, it’s likely believed by only a few of them. Still, someone didn’t just come up with that idea because it sounds nice and works well  in Hollywood movies.

The idea of Saint Peter guarding the gates to heaven is usually credited  only with being part of Christian folklore. As you’ll see today, for many different  people God comes in all shapes and guises. So, first, let’s ask where this idea  came from of God living in the clouds.

Heaven for some is the place where God resides  for eternity, and for many Christians, that’s the place you go if you’ve lived a moral life. As for  the clouds, well, when you look at the history of hell you can connect it with an underworld, aka,  Hades or Hell. You still live there for eternity, but it’s a rotten place to live.

It’s dark  and depressing. This is from the bible, “The rich man also died and was buried.  In Hades, where he was being tormented.

” So, hell is often thought of to be dark, to  be full of flames, and generally polluted. Heaven on the other hand is the opposite, so  it makes sense that it’s up in the sky where it’s bright and full of white, fluffy clouds.  We’re not saying all Christians believe this, but the imagery just makes sense.

You can  find plenty of artists’ interpretations of heaven and it’s generally up in the sky. There’s also the fact that heaven is supposed to come to Earth, not the other way around.  Jesus spoke of establishing a new Jerusalm, though most Christians believe that this will  come about as the entire earth is rejuvenated- possibly re-created from scratch.

Or it could  simply be an allegory that 1st century Jews could easily imagine. Some scholars say  those early writers of Christianity didn’t talk about being zoomed up to heaven at all,  but heaven on Earth was certainly a real hope. When that happens, God will also dwell with the  humans, according to another part of the bible.

It’s complicated, very complicated. Some  Christians think that when they die they’ll be judged, but others will tell you that  at some point there will be a judgment day in the future for all souls, whether  part of the living or part of the dead. Jesus famously said this: “I am the resurrection and the life.

He who believes in me will live, even though he dies. ” So, that’s one concept of God, an entity who sits in the cloudy heavens and someone you  may meet if you’ve lived a wholesome life. That’s the God you might have learned about  in Sunday school, but in view of today’s show, it’s a pretty simplistic version of God.

There is the common narrative that God is the supremely powerful being. A being of  unimaginable intelligence that is everywhere and sees everything. If you believe  this, you can call yourself a theist.

There are folks that believe there’s a Supreme  Being who created everything but he’s a hands-off type of God, meaning he doesn’t mess with human  affairs. These people can call themselves deists. Then there are pantheists, who will tell  you God and the universe are the same thing.

Animists on the other hand believe God, or  spirits, are in all the things around us. There’s the Hindu religion. In that, you find  three main Gods.

Brahma, the creator of the universe. Vishnu, the preserver of the universe,  and Shiva, the destroyer. Some people say there are 330 million Hindu Gods, although we found  Hindu scholars who say that this is a myth.

In short, it’s all about how a certain word is  translated. It can be translated as “million” or “supreme”. If it’s supreme, that would  mean 33 supreme Gods, not 33 million.

Still, to talk about those Gods we’d need a  lot of time, so we’ll leave them alone today. Back to the Abrahamic God, that of Christianity,  Islam, and Judaism. Here you could say there are three main beliefs.

One is that God sees all  humans as equal and he wants to give of all them his unconditional love. Another belief is that  God will give you his love, but you’ll have to work for it. Another is that some folks have  done certain things on Earth and so are pretty much irredeemable.

They won’t get to heaven. Jehovah's Witnesses fall into this category. These believers in God will tell you that a  reckoning is coming, called Armageddon.

Some of them have likely knocked on your house door  from time to time and told you about this. Their belief is that there’s still a chance you can be  accepted into God’s Kingdom when the time comes. Often they carry around with them magazines,  sometimes featuring pictures of smiling humans walking through green pastures with equally  contented wild animals.

In the background, the world burns. You can make the choice, let  Jehovah into your life and hang out with lions in the fields, or don’t and live within  the fire and rubble of a broken world. Their God isn’t such a tolerant one.

God can be very judgmental but he can also embrace your faults. What your faults are might depend  on who you talk to about God. God might always be the all-powerful supreme being for believers,  but his modus operandi not everyone can agree on.

In fact, you could say the disagreements have  caused a few arguments along the centuries. But what about that guy with the  long, white beard and white hair? Why does God look like the recent Noam Chomsky?

Well, some people might hold the belief that such a God exists, but it’s more likely people will  tell you that God is more like an energy field, or perhaps something that we just cannot imagine.  Because we can’t imagine what God would look like, we had to make something up. In Christian art,  many centuries ago, God appeared only as a hand, but as time went on, he was more exposed.

Think about it. If you’re going to try and personify the supreme being, something that  put together this thing we call the universe, you are going to make him look serious. A goofy  God, or a God whose white robes were askew, would just not do him justice.

A God  with acne scars would also not do the job. We’re not being facetious here.  God was painted symbolistically perfect.

It couldn’t have been any other way. As you’ll  find out, trying to depict God at all, even in all his grandness, is an insult to some people. Ok, so there’s the Christian doctrine of the holy trinity, which is the Father,  the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This doctrine says that the three are  separate entities but they are actually the same in substance and essence. It’s  called “Trinitarianism”. Then there are people that believe in God as one entity and  that falls under the belief of “Unitarianism”.

For them, Jesus was mortal. There’s  “Binitarianism”, too, meaning a dualistic God. We’re not just splitting hairs here, either,  these beliefs have divided people for centuries.

You also have “Transcendentalism”, which in short  means not everything can be explained with the senses. Using our intuition and imagination,  we can transcend the world of facts. The person most associated with the movement was a guy named  Ralph Waldo Emerson.

He once said this, “The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears  with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. ” He thought God was in everything, including in  every human, something we’ll come back to later. Emerson was a preacher in a church at one point in  his life, but as one person put it, later the only member of his church was himself.

Meaning, his  beliefs were his own, although he didn’t doubt the existence of God. To put it lightly, he wouldn’t  have been keen on certain evangelistic campaigns. God for Emerson was something to be  found in nature and self-discovery.

God wasn’t something that could speak through  someone on the TV for vast amounts of money. So, when humans created a human image of God  they went with an old, but not too old, man. God could never be frail, of course.

Humans  could have chosen a woman, so why not? Well, God isn’t supposed to have a gender, but the  masculine has mostly been used throughout history when God is mentioned. “The Father” is one  example.

There are some very female-centric portrayals of God in the Bible, but due to  his dualistic nature this is probably not to be unexpected. Sadly, the truth is that the world  of the Old Testament was a very patriarchal one, so of course God was male in people’s minds. There’s also this from the bible: “Let us make man in our image, after our  likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the  livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.

” If God made humans in his own image, then does that mean God should look like  us? And which one of us, because it’s not as if we all look the same down here. Could God  look like a cross between a Sumo wrestler and Kim Kardashian?

Most religious scholars will  point out that Adam, a man, was created first, and Eve, a woman, was created out of Adam’s  rib, so technically God should look like Adam. Again, it is complicated, but it’s generally  thought that God making man in his own image isn’t to be taken literally. Some people say what  it means is humans have some higher faculties than other animals and so are closer to God.

We  have consciousness and the ability to understand the concept of God. We also have free will,  which in all of the Abrahamic religions is the quality that only man and God share. Rabbits  and raccoons didn’t get bestowed with this.

That’s perhaps what the “own image” thing means. Still, this part of the bible is one of the other reasons why the world is full of artifacts in  which God is depicted as a wise old man with a nice beard who can fire lightning from  his fingers. In actual fact, many or even most believers in God will tell you they don’t  know what God looks like and would never even attempt to guess.

To them, God is more like a  power, something we little guys won’t properly understand while living our lives out down here.  Given that the early Christian church, which would later go on to produce most of the images  of God that we see, was very Greek-oriented, it’s likey that the image of Zeus was simply  supplanted to become that of God in artwork. Why we humanized God is another complicated  subject.

Some theorists say that when man and woman started dominating nature they got  some grand ideas. We started making God in our own image. As one person wrote, humans  are just wired to want to see the divine.

Maybe an invisible God didn’t work for the  church, and we guess that a visible one motivated the church’s followers to keep believing. Nonetheless, throughout history, there are those that have said we should never even try and  depict an image of God. This is what the Christian monk John of Damascus said many centuries ago: “If we attempt to make an image of the invisible God, this would be sinful indeed.

It is impossible  to portray one who is without body: invisible, uncircumscribed and without form. ” This monk wrote a lot about the nature of God and what he said was of importance for hundreds  of years to come. He said God was unchangeable, immutable, passionless; he said God is the  creator and he will last forever.

He has no beginning and no end. He “transcends  all thought and comprehension” and God is neither male nor female. God can’t have  gender since God has no body to speak of.

Obviously, things changed because after the  14th century we started seeing paintings of God. Maybe the one you have all seen is  Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”. It’s a wonderful work of art, but you  won’t find many serious theologians that will tell you that’s what God looks like.

Ok, you don’t have to believe in the existence of the Ark of the Covenant or any of the biblical  stories for that matter to believe in God. To some people, the stories of the bible  are lessons to be learned, allegories of humanity. Maybe these people believe in God,  but they also believe that God is ineffable, meaning something that can’t be expressed  in words or shouldn’t be expressed in words.

You’ll find plenty of scientists that  will tell you science can’t rule out God. Science hasn’t gotten to the bottom of the  mystery of the universe and it hasn’t explained what consciousness is, so there’s room for God,  according to some people. A German philosopher once famously said, “God is dead”.

What he  meant by that was the enlightenment with all its new ideas and scientific discoveries  had put an end to people believing in God. There are some people today that say we  should quit our belief in a holy higher power, but there are many others that believe we need  God in our lives, even if that God is just a belief in something above and beyond humanity  – something to help us achieve a higher state of being. Without this, they say, we are at  risk of becoming nihilists, or worse, bored.

Even if a man with a white beard didn’t  create this sometimes unfathomable universe, perhaps just to believe that there’s  some great meaning to the universe that we humans cannot comprehend is enough. Was the universe just a happy accident or was there some orchestration going on?  Scientists have attempted to explain the improbability of things turning out the  way they are regarding life on Earth, and the numbers are a bit confusing. 

One person said the probability is way, way smaller than winning a huge lottery  jackpot every day for more days than the universe has actually been in existence.  Yep, that’s hard to get your head around. This unknowable truth to some people is proof of  God, or it at least means you can’t count out God.

When one scientist was asked if scientists  could believe in God and science at the same time he answered, “Why not? ” Which didn’t  mean yes, but he was asking someone to prove emphatically that God immutably doesn’t  exist. That’s impossible to do right now.

Perhaps you’ll find out all the  answers when you die… God knows. Now you need to watch, “The Origin Of  Evil: The Devil. ” Or, have a look at.

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