What is God?
The higher power must be universal
One of the biggest problems I have with religion is the exclusionary claims people make that their faith is uniquely right. I’m grateful for the wisdom that Christianity and other traditions contain, but I can’t get past the fact that they’re essentially saying that other belief systems don’t have “the truth” in the way they do.
Some will argue that at least the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions are referencing the same God. But the foundation of Christianity is accepting Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior. Islam, on the other hand, explicitly rejects Christ’s divinity and the Trinity (Surah 5:72). Even so, I’m sure many Christians, Muslims, and Jews would still claim to be worshipping the same God. But at that point, are they even talking about their religion’s God, or something universal that transcends these traditions?
This is not an argument for relativism. This is an argument for the improbability of religious exclusivity. To paraphrase what Sam Harris recently explained on the Triggernometry podcast: whatever the deepest possible truths are about consciousness, good versus evil, and what happens after death, they would not be confined to one specific religion. To believe otherwise is to think that an isolated group of people thousands of years ago got everything perfectly correct, and everyone else got it wrong. What is the probability of that? Intellectual honesty forces anyone to admit that it is tiny.
Yet the Bible repeatedly makes this claim. John 3:18 says, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Galatians 1:8-9 says, “If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let them be under God’s curse!” Acts 4:12 says, “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved.”
If we take these passages from the Bible at face value, without appealing to C.S. Lewis or any later apologetics, the implication seems to be that salvation is reserved for followers of Christ in a way that excludes most of the humans who have ever lived. So all the loving and ethical people who follow Hinduism and Buddhism—as well as agnostics and atheists, of course—appear to be doomed for an eternity in hell. They are not saved. Again, I’m sure many Christians would disagree with this, but this is just another example of the Bible making me uncomfortable when I take it for what it says.
Notwithstanding obvious exceptions from history, we can confidently say that Christianity tends to make people behave exceptionally kindly, and encourages a strong resilience to the challenges of life, along with an inspiring moral character. But when it comes to taking certain ideas from the Holy Book to their logical conclusion, some of it can be profoundly disturbing.
However, rejecting religious exclusivity does not mean rejecting the divine altogether. I just prioritize wide reading and personal experiences over received dogma. And my own spiritual experiences of overwhelming awe and love often leave me feeling sure that there is something very real about the Divine.
Relatedly, I’ve been reading The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, and it is aligning with some deep intuitions I have because of my experiences. My understanding of the book’s main idea is that there is a “Divine Ground” that the mystics of every great religion have experienced, and indeed anyone can experience through a number of ways. Ethical behavior, community service, psychedelics, art, fasting, meditation, prayer, unconditional love, or perhaps some combination of those acts. The book is not saying that every religion is equally valid or that they are all saying the same thing. Again, it is clear that they are not, as even just a brief scan of the major religions’ primary texts will reveal.
What the book is saying, however, is that there are religious experiences that transcend specific faiths. This idea brings to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant. People of any religion might feel a different part of the elephant’s body and draw their own conclusions about what it is. They will interpret it through their own geographic, linguistic, and cultural biases. But fundamentally, it is the same thing. It is the Divine. What that even is or even means, I don’t know.
What I do know is that it feels like God is real when I’m in a flow state and forget about everything else in the world. It feels like God is real when I’m listening to music and get goosebumps and all the hair on my arms stand up. It feels like God is real when I lock eyes with my girlfriend and she smiles that beautiful smile of hers. It feels like God is real when I can’t breathe because I’m laughing so hard with my friends. It feels like God is real when I think about my childhood and the unconditional love I share with my family. It feels like God is real when I contemplate the sheer improbability and the strangeness of existence. It feels like God is real when my throat gets heavy and tears of joy swell up in my eyes.
But my gut continues to tell me that feelings like this are not limited to one particular, parochial faith, but rather, come from a universal force that is much grander, and much more mysterious.