The sermon this morning was addressing the question of who or what is God, and eventually came to the answer that God is (in my paraphrase) what makes us know that we're not alone. One thing I like about this approach is that it has room for the religious experiences of a variety of cultures. Pretty much every culture has had religious beliefs of some sort, and just about all of them have included an idea of the presence of Someone(s). So that idea gives me at least some space to assume that all these peoples have had authentic encounters with God.
Not that it's up to me to decide that anyway, but it is something I've struggled with as a Christian – if I really believe that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God, what does that mean for followers of other faiths or none at all? And like our deacon, I find this to be a personal question because there are people I care about who that question applies to (mostly pagan and atheist/agnostic in my world).
So the idea that these cultures and people have had the experience of someone other than the visible/human being present with them and that that's enough to at least start to claim an experience of God is comforting to me. On the other hand, some of the portrayals of God that have existed over time are problematic: vengeful deities calling for human sacrifice, whether from your tribe or that of your enemies; deities representing the darker sides of creation; deities you might try to appease but perhaps wouldn't really want to have with you – deities that might make you wish you were alone after all.
But on the other hand, some of that can surely be explained by the fact that humans in general have undergone a good deal of development in our theologies. We're not trying to find divine explanations for storms and sickness anymore, at least not as the primary explanation. (We can and do still wonder why God created a world in which such things happen). Without any other competing theory, the idea that crops fail because the gods are mad at you sounds like a reasonable enough possibility, and if it leads to the risk of scapegoating when the gods are angry, it also allows some feeling of control, of being able to do something about it. The pagans I know accept scientific explanations of the world as much as the Christians, Jews, and nonreligous people I know, and they're not looking to kill someone in order to placate their deities. (Granted, there doesn't quite seem to be a continuous tradition of pagan beliefs and practices from ancient times to the present day, but still...)
And of course, the followers of any religion can misinterpret. Christians are as guilty of that as anyone, and misinterpretation is about the kindest explanation that can be given for things like witch hunts or religious justification of slavery. So the fact that so many ancient religions called for violence might have had more to do with people and social situations than with whether God was speaking to them.
When reading “Radical Welcome,” I came across the idea that, although God's covenant with the Jews is most directly important to Christianity, it's quite possible that God covenanted with other peoples through out history. The footnote pointed to a book called “Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside,” so now that's on my ever-growing reading list. Maybe after reading that I'll have more to say.
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