God Is Not a Christian, Nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu...

God Dwells with Us, in Us, Around Us, as Us

Carlton Pearson

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781416585046
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

The author of The Gospel of Inclusion continues to rouse organized religion as he raises controversial issues and provides enlightening answers to the deepest questions about God and faith.What is God? Where is God? Who is the one true God? Questions such as these have driven a thousand human struggles, through war, terrorism, and oppression. Humanity has responded by branching off into multiple religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam—each one pitted against the other. But it doesn't have to be that way.In God Is Not a Christian, nor a Jew, Muslim, Hindu..., the provocative and acclaimed Bishop Carlton Pearson follows up on his celebrated first book, The Gospel of Inclusion, to tackle these questions and many more, exploring new ideas about God and faith and putting forth the stunning assertion that God belongs to no particular religion but is an ever-loving presence available to all. For these beliefs, Bishop Pearson lost his thriving Pentecostal ministry but was catapulted instead into a greater pulpit. His readership has grown through appearances on national television and an extensive speaking schedule. With the world in the midst of a holy war, there is no better time for the wisdom of Bishop Pearson to reach a global audience.Bishop Pearson's many loyal fans, along with new readers, will surely welcome this provocative and eye-opening exploration of a deeper faith, one that goes far beyond any fundamentalist way of thinking, be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, etc. Simply put, Bishop Pearson dares to tell the truth so many others are too afraid to face.

PART ONE

IT AIN’T NECESSARILY SO

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

—Benjamin Franklin

What I admire in Columbus is not his having discovered a world but his having gone to search for it on the faith of an opinion.

—A. Robert-Jacques Turgot,
French economist (1727–1781)

CHAPTER ONE

A CHURCH IN CRISIS

In Christianity, neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

Just who and what is God?

In many circles, that is not even a permissible question, and therein lies the crisis referred to in the title of this chapter. It seems to me that what I will call (with only the slightest irony) the “spiritual-industrial complex” has asked us to abdicate our minds in order to develop our souls. According to that way of thinking, intellect and spirit cannot coexist. They annihilate each other in the same way that water and metallic sodium, when combined, combust instantly and violently. Yet this same spiritual Mason-Dixon Line is also responsible for the bitter divide between science and the world of subjectivity, enlightenment, and consciousness. It is as if we are divided into two armed camps, each defending what it sees as the more important aspect of being human. And as Jesus said and Abraham Lincoln quoted, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Why are we on the spiritual side of this debate so opposed to questioning? Why do we demonize intellectual curiosity, scrutiny, scientific knowledge, and rational thinking? Is it because we fear exposure of our faith as unsupportable by fact in an age when fact occupies the pedestal where God once stood? That should not matter; faith is belief in the unseen, that which cannot be proved. Yet rather than deal with a changing world and the terrible consequences of the rift between faith and reason, many religious communities sequester themselves in an alternate reality where there are no questions, and all media, art, and culture reflect these simple ideas: Fundamentalists teach that God is good, God is everywhere, Jesus died for us, to avoid hell you must accept Him as your personal Lord and Savior, and so on. Many embrace conservative political views because such views stand for turning back the clock; a refusal to embrace unsettling changes in our social fabric, our sexual mores, and our environment. What some call faith is little less than a religion of denial and delusion.

In his Gospel, John is said to have written: “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” I define light as “higher consciousness.” Light has not only come, light has always been, but people refuse to acknowledge it, because their deeds or functioning ideologies are not only evil but also awkward and disingenuous.

This withdrawal from the world or reality achieves nothing except to make such faith communities at best irrelevant and at worst corrosive to the idea of bringing the worlds of faith and intellect together for the common good. How did we get here? How did a religion inspired by a man whose very purpose was to question the nature of the political and religious milieu into which He was born turn into something like a parent who doesn’t want to tell his child whether or not there is a Santa Claus? I think such things begin as all movements do: with one question left unanswered and its asker discouraged from asking again. Suppression of inquiry is like a disease. So as I examine the reasons why God is not a Christian, I’m going to ask some heretical questions.

AGAIN, WHO AND WHAT IS GOD?

God is like a mirror. The mirror never changes, but everybody who looks at it sees something different.

—Rabbi Harold Kushner

The God question is a complex one. The question of and the quest for God have existed as long as humankind has had the ability to look at the stars or the lightning and ask, “What does that light mean, and where does it come from?” The concepts of God, divinity, cosmic consciousness as the great mystery make more sense than the increasingly monstrous entity that our imaginations have concocted over the millennia. In fact, the God billions worship is a human creation that, we are taught, gave Its life in order to answer our endless quest for life’s meaning. We have created this child’s God, the white-bearded father living in the sky, in our own image rather than the other way around.

The God to whom I was introduced as a child was basically a Jewish one: male, fatherly, Anglo-European, bearded, angrily loving, judgmental, righteously indignant, and frighteningly powerful, not to mention present everywhere and all-knowing. In trying to make sense of this God, man has continued to manufacture and manipulate images of this perceived deity. The images have changed over the centuries, based on the mood of the times. During kind times when harvests were abundant and peace reigned (admittedly rare in the ancient world), God was benevolent. When plague and famine killed millions, God was portrayed as enraged and vengeful.

To this day, this emotionally infantile God remains in power, a fear-based aberration produced by fevered imaginations, promoted by those who understand how such a deity can be used to gain and consolidate power over believers, and protected by flocks of billions who refuse to question their damning God for fear of their own damnation—or out of an even greater immediate terror of social and cultural isolation. But I argue that it is precisely this image of God—an infantile, simplistic, ridiculous notion of the sublime power that underlies the world—that is destroying civil religion, fueling the rage of the “angry atheist” movement, and pitting science against the spiritual at a time when we should be using every tool within reach to discover what it means to be human—and divinely human at that.

TO SAVE GOD

Interestingly, the Greek word for God, theo, is where we get our English words the, thee, this, thou, and so forth. It is also the source of the word theory. A theory is a speculative idea suggested to explain an observation. Theories must be proven before they can be considered scientific. However, it’s always been my opinion that since we can’t prove scientifically that God exists, then neither can we prove scientifically that He or it doesn’t. That means the question of God doesn’t meet philosopher Karl Popper’s famous requirement that scientific inquiry means an idea can be proven false, so the issue of faith is beyond science. It is a matter of subjective experience and personal revelation, perhaps more than observation. However, science itself is a kind of God and may indeed be proof of divinity, depending how one defines or divines it. It seems to at the very least suggest supreme intelligence or order.

Lately, I’m not sure that proving or disproving God is even important. What seems important to me is that most people— billions of them—believe in a God and that superficial differences in the nature and pronouncements of that God (the content of the “owner’s manual,” as it were) are the spark and gasoline for much of the global conflict that has consumed the planet for thousands of years, before the Crusades and the Hundred Years War to the modern jihadi movement. In his book Conversations with God, Neale Donald Walsch says that all behaviors are based on belief systems and that we can never hope to change behaviors until we understand the beliefs that underlie them. That is my goal with this book.

What you believe or are convinced of, you are convicted by. Both the words convince and convict are derivatives of the Latin word convincere. Vincere means “to conquer” in Latin. In other words, whatever you believe has victory over you. You are conquered by what you are convinced is true. We are all victims of and convicted by what we believe and, in often awkward ways, of what others believe. I say this because our lives are shaped in great part by the core religious beliefs of others; they have much to say about our politics, our morals, our societal institutions, and, of course, whether and why we go to war. Those who say that faith and religion are irrelevant to modern life are mistaken; like it or not, they are extremely relevant, and it is worth spending some time and thought examining the reasons why narrow differences in how religious creeds interpret the reality or edicts of their deities fuel differences that in turn power the wheels of war, terrorism, oppression, and hatred. If we allow them to, they could also spark love, compassion, tolerance, and global brotherhood. Most religions have, somewhere in them, a capacity to inspire human grace and greatness in ways they rarely fully allow.

I take issue with the position of the neoatheist crowd that says faith is an obsolete remnant of mankind’s past that needs to be jettisoned as we would lop off a vestigial tail. However, I agree that the largely unquestioned concepts that underlie most of the world’s faith traditions must be questioned and the fundamental assumptions of our spiritual lives revised if we are to survive this new session of turmoil and global change. Faith must evolve. God must evolve. Man must be the means of its re interpretation. As God saved us, it’s now up to us—as if it were possible—to save God. If you ask, save God from what and for what, my answer is, from superstitious mischaracterization and superficial misrepresentations. God is too important to too many for us to make It out to be something so vengeful, derogatory, and paranoid as many perceive Him to be. We’ll deal with this more throughout the book.

WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY

Albert Einstein once remarked, “No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it.” I think he meant that it takes different people to solve a problem created by others, but I believe that once we transform our own consciousnesses, we can indeed gain the perspective so vital to healing the wounds in the body of Christianity and perhaps its sibling faiths, Islam and Judaism, as well as others when and where needed. What is needed is a mutual “stepping back” and a brutal reexamination of the so-called truths of Christianity from the perspective not of a traditional believer but someone encountering faith for the first time. From that clarifying, terrifying, dizzying perch, Christianity, the religion of my birth that I have loved all my life, has some deep, staggering dysfunctions—and in the eyes of millions of Christians themselves, has itself become the problem.

When I say God is not a Christian, I am also implying that Christianity in its present form and function is less godly or virtuous. It has, over the centuries, become increasingly gaudy and ghastly. Racism, bigotry, sexism, elitism, arrogance, and ignorance have become its hallmarks, whether you’re looking at the horrific child abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church or the attack politics of the religious right and its obnoxious hypocrisy. As I have moved freely among non-Christians as well as many of the opposing factions within Christianity, I have been confronted with the reality of the statement “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This is not a new problem. It goes back centuries, yet at the same time has shaped our modern age. The originators of Communism (Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Moses Hess) were Jews and were no doubt influenced at least somewhat by their religious and cultural mores. Adolf Hitler was recorded as saying to one of his generals, “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so,” and “My feeling as a Christian leads me to be a fighter for my Lord and Savior. It leads me to the man who, at one time lonely and with only a few followers, recognized the Jews for what they were and called on men to fight against them … As a Christian, I owe something to my own people.” Der Führer also used the famous temple scene of Jesus driving out the “brood of vipers” as a motivation for his evil—never mind that his statement was a venomous twisting of Jesus’ words and intentions. Jesus’ opponents were the Romans and the Pharisees, not the devout Jewish laity of the time.

In her book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold, Acharya S writes, “Whether or not Hitler was a ‘true’ Christian is debatable, as he also reputedly considered Christianity a Jewish invention and part of the conspiracy for world domination. Additionally, his paternal grandmother was allegedly Jewish. But Hitler himself was raised Catholic, and was very much impressed with the power of the church hierarchy. He pandered to it and used it and religion as a weapon. All during his regime, Hitler worked closely with the Catholic Church, quashing thousands of lawsuits against it and exchanging large sums of money with it.”

No, it’s not fair to condemn Christianity on the basis of brutal and inhuman acts committed by a man who, had he not had religion to excuse his crimes, would have found some other jus tification. However, it is a hallmark of the “faith motivated” that many religious zealots use the “will of God” or the “inerrant” proclamations of a sacred book to justify thoughts and acts that range from the embarrassing to the horrifying. Is this a fault inherent in faith or in the faithful? I submit that it is both. On one hand, human beings appear to have a need, at this point in our evolution, to exert power over others using whatever justification they can find that will sway others to their cause. As Hitler did, those who would bend the plowshare of religion into a sword would doubtless do the same with skin color, language differences, ethnic origins, or sexual orientation. The need for power and allies always finds a way. The use of religion always comes in handy in facilitating such viciousness.

But going deeper, religious belief itself, in its current form, breeds separation. We see God as outside of ourselves, and by engaging in different threads of belief, we endorse differing “brands” of God. There’s the God of Christianity, the Allah of Islam, the Yahweh of Judaism, the polytheistic Godhead of Hinduism, and many more. This naturally creates an us-versus-them mentality in what becomes armed religious camps—made worse by what we have already spoken of, that the claims of religion cannot be disproven. If you insist that your God told you to blow yourself up in a Jerusalem marketplace, no one can plausibly gainsay you. How would I know, especially if I believe in the kind of God who does kill, maim, and murder those He doesn’t like or approve of?

Changing human nature is perhaps the only more daunting task than changing the nature of organized religion, and it’s one I will not take on in these pages. However, as we realize that “church in crisis” equals “world in crisis,” we see that we must take action in another essential arena: transforming the global perception of God and faith so that the Divine cannot exist as a context for intolerance, violence, and hatred. Our mission, my friends, is to make it so apparent that God would never condone the evils done today in His name that when a pastor suggests that God wants the congregation to support legislation that denies basic rights to women, homosexuals, or so-called undocumented aliens, even a child would be able to stand up in church and confidently say, “No, He doesn’t want that at all!”

But it’s hard to get there from here. To reach that point, we must radically transform our entire culture’s perception of God, perhaps beginning with gender. Since God is beyond the concept of gender, despite the traditions that insist God is male, I think I will point out the ridiculousness of attaching gender bias to a cosmic being by referring to God as She for a while. If you find that repulsive or unacceptable, then all the more reason for you to labor through it. The problem would be you, not the reference.

THE KINGDOM OF HUMANS

Many Americans and other Westerners equate Christianity with love, compassion, integrity, and generosity, and, in fact, it’s amazing how ecumenical we claim to be regarding other faiths. A Newsweek piece by Steven Waldman presented the evidence for this:

One of the central tenets of evangelical Christianity is that to be saved—to earn admission into heaven—you must accept Jesus Christ as your savior. Yet 68% of “born again” or “evangelical” Christians say that a “good person who isn’t of your religious faith” can gain salvation, according to a new Newsweek/Beliefnet poll.

This is pretty amazing. Evangelicals are among the most churchgoing and religiously attentive people in the United States, and one of the ideas they’re most li...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• AFTERWORD
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY