Who Is God?

 

Image by Briam Cute from Pixabay

Is there a god? Who is he and where did he come from? People have been asking that kind of questions for thousands of years. Do we have answers?

Things were happening, earthquakes, storms, rain, drought, illness, death. People began to wonder why and more importantly: What can we do about it? 

Some charlatans began to claim that they knew how to control these things and a new powerful priesthood was born. 

Sometimes they went too far and people resisted them. Jesus challenged the powerful priesthood in his time and paid the price.

In the 16th century, William Tyndale translated the Bible to English. Making the Bible accessible to the common people would reduce the monopoly the priests had on interpreting it for their own purposes, so they had him killed.

Admitting Copernicus’ claim that the earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, would be a blow to their credibility and therefore their position of power. It took more than a hundred years for his theory to be commonly accepted.

By the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson realized that the gospel writers had seriously embellished the story about Jesus, so he wrote his own version without the miracles.

Leo Tolstoy followed in his footsteps and was excommunicated for it.

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species really upset the fundamentalists’ and their creation theory. We have all heard about the Scopes trial, aka the monkey trial in 1925.

John Shelby Spong, an Episcopal bishop, began to talk about a God created by humans and Jesus as a revolutionary in his time. 

Even today, pastors around the globe continue to claim God created the universe, Jesus was his son and rose from the dead. Most of them know better, but they need the paycheck every month, so they preach what people want to hear. Christmas will never be the same without angels, shepherds or wise men. For decades, people, especially young people, have become disillusioned with the pretend God and joined the rank of the Nones. 

Jefferson, Tolstoy and Spong may have been the voices in the wilderness and today some brave pastors are beginning to tell the truth about God. God is within us (2 Corinthians 6:16-18), says Tolstory. God is the love and compassion that keeps us from destroying ourselves, each other and the planet we depend on so much.