BIGGER THAN GOD II
16 June 2004

Dear -----,

Interesting column today. I paused over one little passage, which I am glad you included because I was thinking about the topic. "God created people to be free," you wrote.

In my last e-mail I put forth the idea that people have freedom thrust upon them by the way their brains work overtime at complicating things and throwing up all sorts of ideas, alternatives, hopes, dreams and fears. Myriad possibilities require endless judgment, choice and action — or just a gut sense of what to do. And we call that freedom. We can say we're "created" to be free or "doomed" to be free or that "freedom follows function" in regards our mental and emotional architecture.

BELIEF STATEMENT

I also said earlier that a phrase like, "God created people to be free" is a belief statement that springs from and is validated only within the system it references, which is to point out that any person, owing to his innate ability to change his mind (or for his mind to change itself), can realize tomorrow that he no longer believes that statement; and therefore the human freedom you reference is larger than any belief system or all of them put together ... even if some belief system tries to turn around and take credit for freedom with phrases like, "God created people to be free."   

In short, "freedom" — as shorthand for saying, "the mind has a mind of its own" — means views can change radically overnight without our conscious approval. I think people are in or out of religion depending on whether they find that fearful or fascinating.

MAPS

This leads to the map analogy. The way people sometimes deal with the mind's myriad alternatives is to follow a belief system, which helps them sort through the chaos of choices. Religion becomes a guidance system, a map of the territory, that tells people, "If you go this way you will be safe, but if you wander into this area, you'll be lost."

To say that freedom comes from God is like trying to fold the landscape back into the map; or if you will, it's like saying that the map is projecting the whole, glorious landscape from a set of intricate marks on paper. At any rate, it's dangerously backward to think that the map is the source of the reality it purports to describe, yes? And, of course, it's dangerously thought provoking to think that it's not.

BIGGER THAN "GOD"

So I concluded in the earlier e-mail that freedom is bigger than "God." You will note that "God" has quotation marks around it to signify that when anyone uses the word he or she is speaking from a set of descriptions as mandated by a specific system. Which is to say, the "God" you reference is different from the "God" Bill Benedict references is different from the "God" Roy Graham references is different from the "God" Bill Chronister references is different from the "God" Joe Hanak references is different from the "God" the Mormon missionaries who visited here referenced in May.

Your "God" brought Mary to Heaven and gave her a special role in helping humanity; Benedict's "God" endows him with the superhuman faith-healing powers but did not elevate Mary to any special status; Roy's "God" was reveled to Muhammad in a cave; Chronister's "God" is still keeping his covenant with his chosen people; Joe's "God" is still refining and defining him/her/itself. The Mormons' "God" visited Joseph Smith in upstate New York and told him all existing religions were built on false doctrines.

I suppose this would indicate that, psychologically speaking, the map does project the landscape, except it offends our sense of reality to think that so many views can be projected on one little planet and one set of world circumstances, yes? And so we are thrown back into profoundly interesting uncertainty in regards belief systems and truth claims — or at least some of us are.

CHANGING HATS

As a Catholic you may be required to say that, "God created people to be free" (without quotation marks around "God"), but is it possible to step outside that mindset for a moment and understand what I am trying to point at when I say, "Freedom is Bigger than 'God?'" I am asking you to be a philosopher-psychologist and a Catholic at the same time, but maybe that's not possible.

Nevertheless, I am curious as to your views on freedom and belief as presented in this new incarnation. I would be interested to see you fold the landscape back into the map without resorting to "just because."

Jon

POSTSCRIPT

This approach doesn't address God without quotation marks or whether such a thing could exist or if it would be a source or product of freedom. And how do we describe that which is beyond description? Admittedly, the Hindus did a pretty good job pointing this out and built the world's oldest religion in the process. So, I offer a tip of the hat to them.

FROM ENCARTA

"Various schools have contributed to Hindu thought, each school with a different emphasis. The school known as Vedanta has been the standard form of intellectual Hinduism. According to Vedanta, the highest aim of existence is the realization of the identity or union of the individual's innermost self (Atman) with the ultimate reality. Although Vedanta states that this ultimate reality is beyond name, the word Brahman is used to refer to it.

"Whether this ultimate reality is itself ultimately without distinguishing attributes (nirguna) or with personal attributes (saguna) has been a subject of extensive debate among Hindu scholars. To be ultimate, Brahman must transcend all limiting attributes, such as name, gender, form, and features. But how can the human mind, with its limitations, conceive of this transcendent reality?"

Since human comprehension requires a more personal reality with attributes and characteristics, Hinduism offers more than 330 million gods to choose from. Or if you can get your head around Brahman, you can stick with that.

I am not sure if our exploration of freedom points at a nameless transcendent, at the profound complexities of human physiology and psychology ... or simply that our ability to complicate things continuously outstrips our ability to understand them — that the mystery we make is ultimately bigger than we are: that certainty is always pretend.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761555715/Hinduism.html

BIGGER THAN GOD • BIGGER THAN GOD II • MARCUS BORG • THE FOG OF WAR • THE FAILURE OF JUDGMENT • LINCOLN • PASCAL • POPPER