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A GOD THAT FITS IN A HUMAN
HEAD They're in the
middle of a bonafide religious happening down in in Alabama.
Specifically, a controversy surrounding an Alabama judge who
one day decided to display a two-ton stone monolith depicting
the mythology of a couple of very specific religions. It was
displayed with reverence and protected by velvet ropes, and was
The problem with God is usually not God, but God‘s interpreters. The only container we have to hold our ideas of god is our head, and although the head-size of some of the religious can be prodigious, it'll never be big enough to encompass God. Yet over and over, believers do ...try to contain God that is. They tailor God: a little snip at god's compassion, a large tuck in universal love, a huge hunk out of his/her creativity, hack off a galaxy-sized piece of cosmic intelligence... pretty soon you have a God that'll fit inside a human head. An example of what I'm talking about was an incident at the demonstration being held by supporters of Judge Roy Moore, chief Judge of the Alabama Supreme Court (now suspended for defying a court order to remove his monument to the Ten Commandments from the state court house lobby). There was a Creationism vs. Evolution debate going on in the crowd when Donald Ely, a pro-creationist Pastor said to a man who made a lonely stand for science, "We came from an earthworm? Son, you're lost." What I want to know is, if God could create the entire universe out of nothing, what's so hard to believe about God evolving a human from an earthworm? How do we know, maybe that’s the best way to do it? Such people always have God working in a diminished capacity. They think God must be as stunted as they are. Pastor Donald Ely could not imagine a God who might do such a thing. But what does Pastor Ely know about God, really? He’s incarcerated his god in a book. Unfortunately, small ideas of god are as old as the Ten Commandments themselves. When Moses came down from the mountain with God's commands the bible tells us he was stupefied to find his followers worshiping a golden calf. Their tiny idea of God had them idolizing a cow. Moses was so ripped he went off on the Isrealites, threw the commandments down shattering them, and had to go back up and tap the Lord for a replacement set. Moses obviously believed that misdirected reverence was a bad thing. In a story in the Washington Post (8/26/03) we learn that "Moore told a cheering crowd he is up against those who 'are offended at looking at God's words.' " But that's not what we're offended at. We're offended at an arrogance that presumes special knowledge of God, then flaunts that presumption in the face of the rest of us. Whether or not the words in any book are God's or not, only god knows, the rest is guesswork. In remarks to the press trying to elevate their position, the pro-commandment demonstrators, compared themselves to Dr. Martin Luther King, who did some real religious work in Alabama many years ago. But Taylor Branch, a Pulitzer-prize winning biographer of King wouldn't have it. Summing up his view about the Alabama scene he said, "This is about a rock. And the whole episode is actually the most glaring example I've ever seen of idolatry." With all due respect to the greats in the field, the crux of theology is, if you can't inflate yourself to God's size, deflate God to your own. It's much more comfortable to construct intellectual arguments about God, or idolize a book or a rock than to do the hard work of God's will as expressed succintly by Jesus: Love your neighbor as yourself. And, adding for emphasis (as if addressing confused Judge Roy Moore himself), the wise rabbi said, This is the whole of the Law ...in a nutshell. In the end, established religion is not much more than a convenience of scale. In fact Judge Moore would have done better to erect a statue of little Mother Teresa in the court-house. She had an immense idea of the divine, and a more evolved sense of God's law. |
apparently sanctioned
by government. The problem is, Judge Roy Moore had not set up
his altar in his living room next to the tv, or on his front
lawn, or even on church property. He placed it in the community's
face, in the precise area where (supposedly) blind justice is
meted out by the state daily to members of all religions and
atheists as well. He put it in the lobby of a court-house, to
be specific, and he did it under cover of night, as if he knew
he was doing something wrong.