A friend of mine recently gave me a book titled "Divinity of Doubt: The God Question." The author, Vincent Bugliosi, offers reasonable critiques of famous religious thinkers as well as critical assessments of popular atheist writers. He challenges organized religion’s certain response to the question, “Is there a personal, creator god?” Like Bugliosi I don’t believe this is a question that anyone can conclusively answer in this life. It will always be a matter of faith; however, while reading this book I found myself thinking that there is a more important question to contemplate.
One can argue that we all have a god. Every person’s life is oriented toward something that provides meaning and direction. A person’s god is what comes first in that person’s life. This should lead us to ask, “What/who is our god?” Practically, there are only two answers to this question. Either we are our own god (our lives are oriented toward ourselves), or our god is something beyond ourselves (our lives are oriented toward something bigger than ourselves — anything smaller would be at our service). Martin Luther King, Jr. implied this when he said, “I submit to you a [person] is not fit to live who has not found something for which he will die.” When we are stuck on ourselves, we likely will not give our lives for anything unless we believe it might serve us, perhaps in an after-life.
Please do not assume that this establishes a simplistic dichotomy where the bad atheists and agnostics believe that they are god and the good Jewish, Hindu, Christian, and Muslim believers worship something bigger than themselves. After the Salvadoran military murdered the other six priests from his community for standing with the poor of El Salvador, Jon Sobrino, SJ remarked:
"The world cannot simply be split into good and bad humans, Christians and democrats on the one hand, and communists and atheists on the other. [The Western world] refuses to realize that the dividing line in humanity is idolatry, which is present everywhere, among so-called communists and so-called democrats, so-called believers and so-called unbelievers."
History demonstrates that there is no nation or religion, no political or economic system, no community or lifestyle, no philosophy or ideology that has been immune from corruption. There is no identity we can choose that will guarantee we were, are, and always will be in the right.
Desires to divide and demonize are inadequate, as there is good and bad on every side and in every person. Sobrino indicates that even religion’s most treasured dividing line, belief and unbelief, cannot be correlated with good and bad. There are self-oriented believers and other-oriented non-believers. There are non-believers who contribute to a better world and believers who create suffering for their brothers and sisters in the pursuit of their own interests. Idolatry exists when people stop searching and questioning. It exists when the orientation of people’s lives prevents them from seeing and valuing the other and allows them to overlook the suffering of others.
The gods that we profess belief in are not necessarily the same as the gods our lives are oriented toward. In other words, we may claim our lives are dedicated to a specific deity, but our lives may indicate that other realities, especially self-interest, supersede our religious convictions. There are countless examples of god serving the interests of believers. Such a history should lead us to question who believers’ real god was in these moments and what was the real direction of their lives. The god they “believed in” may have been at the service of their true god, their personal and group preferences, though they likely would never have considered this possibility.
While possessing significant social implications, the question posed and grappled with in this book is also a personal question: “Am I my own god?” It is a question that underlies my own struggles. I invite all readers to ask themselves this same question but caution them to not be too hard on themselves if the answer is “yes,” or “sometimes.” This is one of humanity’s most basic struggles.
If you recognize that you sometimes think and act as though you are more important than other people and are the center of universe (god), this awareness is something to be celebrated. Seeing a problem is the first step in dealing with it. The recognition represents a victory for clear vision and self-awareness. Sadly, our religions’ tendencies to assure us of our rightness, at times, might prevent the honesty needed to see the real orientation of our lives. Perhaps religions sell better when they endorse our assumptions than when they lead us to question ourselves and our direction.
The tradition of identifying ego as a significant source of humanity’s problems transcends religious, cultural, political, and ethnic boundaries. Many of our wisdom traditions offer insights that can help us respond to this basic struggle in a healthy way. Great thinkers from Gandhi, to Jesus, to the Buddha, to Helen Keller, to Einstein have identified self-centeredness as one of the basic hurdles on the road to human well-being. Einstein acknowledged our tendency to view ourselves as the separated center of the universe and challenged us to overcome it, observing:
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Einstein’s prescription is not unlike the prescription of many religious thinkers. He challenges us to recognize we are not separate from everyone and everything else; therefore, we must go beyond self-centeredness in order to recognize our connectedness to each other and the whole universe. Einstein and the wisdom traditions agree that recognizing we are not the godly focus of the universe will serve our world and free us.