Looking through the window

[First published 2005]

OMETIMES the Internet provides a kind of permeable window into other lives. I don't know how accurate that window is, but it's nonetheless interesting to observe.

I've been lurking in an online forum where atheists support and encourage each other in their lack of belief. They've had a number of things to say to each other about lack of faith, about people of faith, about where one finds strength, and a number of related issues. The thing I find most fascinating is that the overwhelming majority of atheists on this forum really do believe in God, or at least the concept of God. But they think of God as a bully or a rampant egotist, and therefore they refuse to believe in Him. Their feelings actually bear closer resemblance to a parent who has disowned a child, pretending that child is dead, than a person who has never had a child at all.

I know there are probably atheists who have a clearer, more structured concept of God than what I see in this forum -- people who came from a background of faith and who later discarded that faith in favor of materialism. But of those who are currently posting in the forum, the overwhelming majority seem to have a concept of God that is, to coin a phrase, proto-theistic. Their idea of who and what God is has not advanced much further than the teachings of early Roman Christianity -- a God who created everything ex nihilo, including our spirits, and who is therefore responsible for all the wrong choices we might make; a God who tries to bully us into worshiping Him and who offers as our ultimate consolation an eternity of like worship; a God who visits cruelties upon us, providing the primary source of our pain and anguish in life. All I can say is, if I believed in this same kind of simplistic concept of God, I'd probably be an atheist too.

The teachings of my faith paint a portrait of a God who is both easier to understand, and incredibly more complex of a personality, than what is reflected in the comments of the self-styled heathen in this forum. I wish I could find some way to tell them about the God I believe in and love -- a God who created spirit bodies to house our intelligences, which have always existed and have always had the agency to choose; a God who provided a way for us to gain physical bodies and to experience mortality for a season; a God who created a beautiful cosmos, filled with miracles, for us to explore and enjoy; a God who loves each of us intimately not only as we are now, but as we were truly meant to be; a God whose work and glory is to help us become like Him. But I think that to understand these things, you must practice a different way of seeing -- and at least part of that way of seeing involves dropping your learned prejudices and preconceived notions and hurts and angers against what you believe God is. Unfortunately, I can't make anyone do that. It has to come from inside.