Years ago, I was sitting in a Starbucks when a gentlemen at the next table engaged me in conversation. After a few pleasantries, and discovering he was originally from Florida, he asked what I was working on.
“My Master’s Thesis in Religious Studies.”
That’s when he closed his eyes and shook his head. Having seen this many times before, I knew my reply struck a nerve.
“I left the foolishness of Religion long ago.”
He then proceeds to tell me about his upbringing in one of those megachurches his family attended. Growing up, he was always told that if he wanted something, he had to pray for it, and if he didn’t get it—he wasn’t praying hard enough.
Now it was my turn to close my eyes and shake my head.
I have always been extremely skeptical of those megachurches. I have absolutely no time for this stupid idea of the “Prosperity Gospel” (God will reward you with riches if you donate enough money) and I certainly have serious issues with so-called ‘faith healers.’
This gentlemen I was speaking to is the end result of that horrid Theology, which essentially boils God down to this:
A genie that grants wishes if you wish hard enough and appease it with praise.
I told him that if I grew up with that kind of understanding of God and Religion, I would’ve walked away as well. However, there are much better understandings out there and the one I appreciate the most was outlined by a philosopher named Baruch Spinoza.
In coming to my own understanding of faith, it dawned on me that if I’m going to believe in a creator of the universe, something so unbelievable massive and beautiful that we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s out there, I’m going to need a bigger God than what I was taught.
Enter Spinoza who presents God as the sum of all the natural laws of the universe and the substance of which it is all made of, rejecting the idea that God is some identity or creator just waiting around to intervene for some humans on a single planet who want a new pair of shoes.
To understand the natural world, essentially, is to understand God. “God or Nature” being the operative quote.
There is a lot more to it (and it’s very unfortunate his philosophy has often been ignored for hundreds of years), but it was a beautiful summation of an idea I was after. Some atheists have even expressed that if they were to believe in a god, it would be Spinoza’s.
However, if you were to press me even further, I think that now… in the twenty first century… we should just stop using the word ‘god’ all together.
We have much better language available.