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Tuesday, July 5th, 2005

Whose God Is It, Anyway?

I’ve been thinking a lot about religion lately. The more I watch the fight between extreme, paranoid fundamentalist religions and…well, normal people, the more I think the various conflicts over the years all boil down to one crucial issue:

Who owns God?

Or, more precisely, who control access to connections with the divine power, the numinous aspect of life? Can indivuals, normal people, experience the numinous directly? Or must their always be some sort of intermediary, some sort of priest or shaman or such who communicates with the divine and then comes back to tell the rest of us poor slobs about it?

Most Christian denominations believe in some level of separation between God and individuals–at least subconsciusly. Some denominations have a bigger wall between you and God than others. This was one of the main complaints agains the Catholic Church during the middle ages: individuals were forced to use priests as a go-between for everything, and this too often devolved led to corruption, oppression, and persecution.

But many of the Protestant denominations still fell into this same trap. And, oddly enough, it often seems that many evangelical groups and fundamentalist groups, even though they claim to focus on “building a personal relationship with Jesus”, actually have the strictest separation.

Think about it. If you can just talk to God directly, why do you need to read the Bible literally? Actually, why would you need the Bible at all? Why would you hang your hat–and your faith–on the credibility of unnamed men who wrote down their own version of events they’d only heard about–and did it over 1500 years ago in a language you don’t know? If you have a question about something, why would you ever want to do anything other than go straight to the source for the answer?

And, most importantly, if you have ever once really felt something that you could only describe as the presence of God, how could any external force–be it gays or secularists or feminists or Satanists or pagans or whatever–ever change that experience for you?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 5th, 2005 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Whose God Is It, Anyway?”

  1. Yaoi Huntress Earth Says:
    July 10th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    I know what you mean. You should check out Neale Donald Walsch’s stuff which has the crazy idea that God was never separate from us to begin with.

  2. Daniel Says:
    September 30th, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Whose God Is It, Anyway?, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.

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