From The Negative To The Affirmative*
My first three confessions told you what I think God is not. And the understanding of God as a metaphor segues the conversation into what I have come to believe that God is.
I now know God to be the Source of regenerative power available to me and everyone else on this planet. This is the power that allows you to see things from the side of the large lens of the telescope. It is not that your life becomes insignificant. Rather, your life is seen in the context of the Greater Whole. This unleashes the Life Force, which is the power of being itself and is also Love, that maximizes your own individual life.
I say this all from experience. Based on life experience, my mind told me that I had nothing to live for during my darkest seasons. It was my very stark reality. But I used reason to surmise that history accounts for people, past and present, who have overcome greater odds than I had and they found peace and happiness.
Next, I stepped out in faith that life could be different and better. In the space between reason and faith, I believe the power that I call God activated and ushered me into a new way of being. For the first time in my life, as a forty-year-old woman, I knew that I was Loved and that I have the capacity to Love all people as part of our One Human Family.
Unleash your Super Power.
Western Christianity has commonly characterized this power as an anthropomorphic God and science has sought to trace its origins to the biochemicals in the brain. These two disciplines can duke it out all they want but here is what I know: Religion and science ultimately seek to uncover the same truth: Ultimate Reality. I can’t buy into the superfluous, antiquated trappings of worshipping a contrived personification of God. Nor does the knowledge of biochemicals assist me when the conundrums of being human entrap me.
There are vastly more educated people than me in both disciplines who can articulate their arguments. It may be that one day scientists discover the origin of such power in the neurology of our brains. It may be that this power is sourced from another dimension of the universe that humans have yet to identify. In the meantime, I have become content not needing to know exactly where this Source originates. But I know that it exists and works when one yields to it.
* BONUS BEYOND THE BOOK GEEK MATERIAL
The fancy term for pontificating what God is not is apophatic theology. This contrasts with cataphatic theology, which seeks to affirm what God is. Apophatic theology is closely akin to mysticism, which I personally relate most to. Most religions have a mystical tradition and they all ultimately lead to the same place that ironically could be interpreted as atheism.
Cataphatic theology, on the other hand, has gone next-level since the mid-1980s in the United States with the courtship and eventual marriage of Evangelicals to the Republican party. These folks claim to know what Jesus (God in their minds) eats for breakfast, not to mention that he obviously would vote a straight-party ticket for the GOP.
American None nonreligious secular spirituality nones exvangelical
This blog piece is an excerpt from Chapter 1: Confessions of an American None: A Credo of Sorts. It is the shortest confession I make in the entire book.
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