Imagine God (7/19/07)
by Dean Hartwell
Many Christians and members of other religions tell us how God is. They speak of an almighty, all-knowing God who created the heaven and earth and who will save us only if we obey him.
Going through the Bible, we get the official word on God. He created Adam and Eve, but when they failed to obey his orders, he labeled them sinners and stuck the label on the rest of us.
He chose a group of people as his own but made them wait forty years to get to the "Promised Land" because some of them sinned too much. In spite of his constant presence before the Israelites, some of them preferred worshipping idols instead!
He accepted slavery and asked for the sacrifice of animals to please him. He allowed families to sell their daughters away! Children who talked back to their parents (who likewise demanded obedience) got executed under Old Testament Law.
Eventually, God drifted off and let the Israelites tend to their own affairs for the most part. Some of the Israeli prophets supposedly predicted the coming of the Son of God, Jesus.
The story continues in the New Testament, where Jesus spoke to crowds about the Kingdom of God. He said that people must be "born-again" to enter it. He warned that God the Father will punish everyone eternally for their sins unless they acknowledge the son after his resurrection from the dead. Thus, the saying "None come to the Father except through the Son."
If the Bible had reported that there had been no resurrection, perhaps some other religion would have arisen to fill the void. The Bible gives the story, written years after its supposed occurrence, of Jesus rising into heaven as proof that he was the son of God.
After chapters of letter writers like Paul warning people of hell for disobedient people, the Revelation makes for a grand finale. Jesus makes his return not as a peacemaker ("Turn the Other Cheek") but as a warrior who destroys the non-believers. They all go to hell while the believers rule Earth for 1,000 years before going to heaven.
The Bible is some piece of work. The faces of God and Jesus change throughout the Scriptures, but the message is always the same: believe in their perfection and divinity or burn forever.
It is time we stopped talking about how God is and start talking about how he ought to be. In effect, we could re-write the Bible into something more inspirational.
The real God did not make us to be sinners, wrong from the moment of our birth. He may not have created us at all, from what we now know about science (a real God would also have no problem with people learning about the universe).
The real God does not choose favorites from among the people or accept the enslavement of anyone. He should instead literally be the two things that matter more than anything in this world: truth and love.
The real God did not create a hell to punish people. Consider that many of the world's people are already in hell because of their circumstances, such as people who are not accepted simply because of who they are. God should instead love everyone equally. A world in which everyone at least got along would be the real heaven.
The rest is really up to us. We could wonder why anyone would believe that God hates anyone. We could also ask why we need anyone to die on our behalf. If there were a son of God, why would he come back to fight? He could instead go all over the world and talk to people who can't live side-by-side with one another and persuade them to resolve disputes peacefully.
And if there really is a heaven in which hate-mongers actually go, could hell really be any worse?