Does God exist? Who has the "right" idea about God? These questions have been debated as long as anyone can remember, and even longer, and that does not look likely to change anytime soon. This bothers me. While I enjoy a healthy debate, unfortunately it too often ends up being destructive and even violent. It's just so unnecessary.
I was not brought up religious. Occasionally our family attended a Unitarian-Universalist church, but until later in life I had no idea what that meant. But for some reason I remained interested in religion and wondered why we didn't go to church anymore. In my teens I discovered an Indian spiritual guru named Ajaib Singh, who prescribed an ethical way of life, including the vegetarian diet, and a form of transcendental meditation as a way of getting closer to God. At that point I assumed I knew what God was, and that everyone believed in him. Any differences of opinion could surely be worked out, couldn't they?
I'm so grateful to my Mom and Dad for allowing me to forge my own spiritual path. As a result, I've been open to doing a lot of reading, and been open to listening to new points of view. Not everyone has that. At times, I think it would have been nice to have a firm, unquestioning belief, an answer to the question "what's going to happen to me when I die?" But I feel that I am so much richer and freer for being allowed to develop my own ideas.
So, do I think God exists? My simple answer to that is yes--it's not even a matter of belief. Now, whether there is an actual supernatural being who controls everything, I don't know. But it is self-evident that God exists as an idea, a very powerful idea, which exists, at least, in people's minds. I once heard someone coin the term "linguistic phenomenon," not specifically to describe God, but I think it fits very well. In the Christian Bible, the Gospel of John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." So it occurred to me that God is right under our nose, in the language we speak. The "Word," as used in the Gospel of John, is not some mystical concept that can't be defined--it's something so mundane that we don't even think about it.
If you don't believe me, consider this: just look at all things that human beings have invented (or created). What do all those things have in common? They all started out as ideas, which were expressed in words. Sometimes ideas are so new that new words have to be invented. So what I'm saying is, words are human being's access to the creative power, which is often attributed to a supernatural God. Just imagine what's possible when two people with similar ideas get together and start talking. It could be, "Oh, that's cool, I didn't think about that; what about this?"(the ideas evolved!) And all of a sudden you have things, like cars and airplanes, that once would have been considered miraculous, but now seem mundane. That's the creative power of God at work.
Even though I don't see evidence for the supernatural, God is still a useful concept for me. I use it kind of as a representative term for all the "good stuff" in life, To me, these things are, truth, beauty, love, peace, creativity, brotherhood--the list could go on. And how did I come to these conclusions? I've had the good fortune to meet many people from different areas of the world. When I met them, instead of trying to convince other people of my ideas, I inquired about theirs, and got to look at things from someone else's angle of vision. When I do that, the reaction from the other person is never hatred or violence..It's always friendly, lighthearted, and I find relatedness, and the experience the feeling that we aren't all that different, after all.
