“What does it matter what I think about God?” 

Does it matter if one mentally ascents to the Trinity? Does it matter if I call him/her/it Yhwh, Allah, “the man upstairs”, “the big guy”, or “a higher power”? Does it matter if I think God is wonderful, kind, full of love, or a tyrant, a bully, or fictitious, make-believe, or a story weak people tell themselves to get over the rough spots?

I think many, many today believe that what our brains hold regarding the Almighty is insignificant, unimportant, and ought to be regarded that way publicly.

There is of course something to be said for this position. God is not directly accessible to our senses. Many religious traditions including my own hold to some sort of position that asserts our mental grasp on God is limited, cloudy and subject not only to our limited lifetime experiences but also to our own biases.

We are right to afford a degree of tolerance regarding people’s take on God, but I think it has gone beyond that point. I think when it comes to ideas about God as a culture we have assumed the best policy is “it doesn’t matter”.

Thought Crimes We Resist

While we practice a practical amnesty regarding opinions about God, we have decidedly different policies regarding other ideas, especially about other people. The Louie Giglio fracas  is a contemporary example. We clearly sanction people for thoughts of bigotry of various sorts.

We find peoples thoughts about other persons in the world to be dangerous, dangerous enough to apply different forms of social pressure and of sanction. The whole meme about loving haters is part of the play in all of this.

I’m not recommending that don’t use social pressure to influence thoughts about persons and ideas in society. We clearly have learned that part of creating a culture and a society involves trying to get people to embrace better ideas and to subtly influence them to discard other ideas. This thought economy is natural and good, but the God exclusion is noteworthy.

The Weightlessness of God

A quote from David Wells was posted and linked today regarding this very phenomenon.

“It is one of the defining marks of Our Time that God is now weightless. I do not mean by this that he is ethereal but rather that he has become unimportant. He rests upon the world so inconsequentially as not to be noticeable. He has lost his saliency for human life.

Those who assure the pollsters of their belief in God’s existence may nonetheless consider him less interesting than television, his commands less authoritative than their appetites for affluence and influence, his judgment no more awe-inspiring than the evening news, and his truth less compelling than the advertisers’ sweet fog of flattery and lies. That is weightlessness.”

–David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 88.

Our indifference regarding ideas about God is an example of it. God ideas are inconsequential we assume.

Thought Value in Relational Economics

During President Obama’s first time, while addressing congress a member of the House of Representatives yelled out “you lie” over comments the president was making about immigration reform.

Plenty of people call the President (any president) a liar, but to do it to his face is felt by all to be a separate sort of act. The context of doing so matters, which was why the incident was so noteworthy. Something deep within us understood the act as significant within our relational economy. We regularly say things “behind people’s backs”, even if this isn’t seen as a positive thing, but saying something to someone’s face, especially a negative comment, is seen differently.

People who live under totalitarian regimes of various sorts (governments, places of work, churches, schools, families) understand that persons have value and persons present have greater value.

It’s also a joke that we imagine God striking someone dead if they say or do something in a church.

Deep Belief Revealed in Action

Part of why we are so careful about how we publicly manage thinking about persons is because we know that thoughts work their way out into actions. Thought worlds have consequences in our public spaces.

Two interesting examples of this involve women. One in which women in atheist gatherings are complaining about sexual harassment by other atheists.  The other is what is going on in India regarding the recent gang rape that lead to the death of a woman. Many women dared not join the protest because of concern at how they would be treated even in the protest group.  We have indeed learned that thoughts matter, and so we deal with them as a society.

Where this leave us, of course, is the appreciation of how secular we have become. It would be nice to say that God is big enough to endure our misguided or even offensive thoughts about God, which is true, but I fear it is more the case that we simply, deeply don’t believe.

The Terrible Presence of God

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. Throughout the Bible one consistent thought is clear, God is someone who you should consider with great seriousness. Many other ancient cultures had similar thoughts. The Psalms notes “the fool says in his heart there is no god” which basically means “god does not see, god will not act.” Is this true? What do we believe?

One might have the temerity to call a President a liar to his face. The reason one might decide it would not be wise to do so is because that President will have ways of impeding your political future. Powerful people are treated with caution for real world reasons.

God is not treated as powerful because in the deep beliefs of our hearts we don’t believe it matters. This is a reality the Bible asserts we will regret.