Questions and Faith: A Lethal or Vital Mix???

Part I

The mystery and the durability of God and religion is a puzzlement that will never go away.  There is something inside our brains that needs/wants to worship or believe in something outside ourselves in order for us to remain sane.  Even those who do not believe in a God find that they have to have some kind of theory or explanation about why things are the way they are; they feel the need articulate and defend this theory they believe in.  Their theory has become their God or religion.  This theory keeps them sane.  So, why do people believe in God or Gods or religion?  First, it is a matter of control and sanity.  We live in a world that is and seems terribly random.  Everyday things happen to us and within us that seem completely random and without meaning.  Some of these things can be nice and happy things; others could be difficult and painful things, still others can be aggravating and exasperating.  Do any of these things that happen to us matter?  The absurdity of these events would seem less crazy if we thought and trusted that somehow there is a God at the heart of the universe that is for us and not against us.  This God could be a force, an energy, a personal God, or a law of nature.  In any event, meaning is vital to keeping us sane. 

Even if a person says there is no God, that it is all in our minds, that we invented God and have forgotten that we did so, this person still has to meet the day and stay sane.  So, suppose this person looks at the nature of our lives, shrugs his shoulders and  says, ‘That’s life!  Even that is an explanation that he or she believes in, that life is like that.  That is the meaning, that is their God. A person trusts that their belief is the way life is and that the explanation they have provides all the meaning that is needed to meet the day.  That is their faith.  That is their religion.

All of our Gods and explanations in the end do not work on the ground as well as we would like them to, but despite that, we are willing to live with the difficult holes they leave for the sake of sanity.  Regardless of our various explanations, we seem to need all sorts of material helps in order to deal with the gaps in our various ways of meeting life each day.  We need our phones, televisions, music, art, lakes, oceans, mountains, sex, money, the approval and applause of others, a variety of pills and drugs, and anything else that helps us keep things together. All these things are fine in their place, but they are not ultimately helpful.

The Jewish and Christian biblical or religious scriptures were aware of our dilemma and called out our penchant for seeking ultimate material supports, “idolatry.”  Those texts are convinced that we can actually stay more sane and balanced by trusting a God we cannot see than by trusting the “trinkets”  that we can see.  Were they right?  To this day millions of people continue to think so and try to follow their prescription.  In the biblical book of Exodus we see a story about a golden calf that was tried as a substitute for the invisible God.  It did not work.  Why not?  I suspect because as aggravating, unreliable and remote as the invisible God was, the visible shiny object proved to be even more unreliable and ineffective.

So, I reassert, belief in something that a person may or may not call God, an explanation, a creed, a way of looking at or explaining the world such as science, these are all Gods that we trust to keep us together and sane to meet the day. 

But, one of the things that the scriptures knew was that believers had to be given the power of questions. Questions were not merely a way to assert human pride over God’s wisdom.  Questions were a way to try to understand what God was doing in the world.  God’s methodology was always seen as mysterious, problematic and difficult for humans to apprehend.  But this understanding was not intended to tell humans they were not allowed to explore, excavate, or try to understand what was going on.  Pride is the desire to be God; questioning God is the desire to understand God.  To understand does not mean to replace God but merely to remain sane in a world that seems to operate according to random calculations.  This problem of how God works in the world is not new but it remains a difficult if not impossible puzzle to unravel.