A Reflection of God

Anonymous wrote in response to my post "God is Good, All the Time": "If the Bible is not a reflection of God, what is? How are we to learn about who He is? You see, I have just as many questions for Christians as you do and am interested to know where you stand with God. Thanks for respecting my anonymity!"

I wish I had answers for you, but I know far more about what God isn’t than what He is. But this is a very short version of how I feel now. Remember, your opinion is every bit as valid and important as anyone’s, including mine.

You want a reflection of God? Look in a mirror!

One of the strongest spiritual experiences of my life was looking into my daughter’s eyes and getting the overwhelming feeling that I was staring into the eyes of God. I’m not alone in this feeling. Listen to Eric Clapton’s "My Father’s Eyes", a song he wrote after his son drowned at age 4. God doesn’t reside in some distant holy place, unable to co-exist with sinners. He is inside every one of us.

Read the "Conversations with God" series by Neale Walsh. I do not totally agree with the books, but the concept of God presented there is the most logical I have found. It offers by far the most reasonable explanation of why there is evil in the world, and why so many people have strong feelings about prior lives.

You want to learn about who He is? Look around you. Study science. Learn about the universe. My dad always said that the more we know about our world, the closer we are to God. God and science can not conflict. Ironically, the more scientists learn about the building blocks of matter, the more spiritual science becomes.

Faith is an attempt to spiritually grasp what we do not understand about our physical world. That means that religion must change and adapt to survive, as we are learning more about our physical world all the time. This is a message from Bishop Spong, and may explain why Christianity as a percentage of the world population is dropping about 1 percent per year.

The bible attempts to explain what man didn’t understand at the time it was written. In the bible, the earth is held up by pillars, the sky is a big dome with water behind it, and stars are so small that they can fall to earth. Man didn’t know about fossils, dinosaurs, or carbon-dating, so a 6 day creation 6,000 years ago did not conflict with what was known at the time. Since God created the universe, you would think that the bible would reflect some of his creation knowledge. It does not. It's not His Word. The mental gymnastics that a conservative Christian will go through to mesh the bible with today’s science can be quite entertaining.

As much as fundamentalists try to discredit evolution, it is evolving, if you will, into a perfect explanation for how the world and us came to be. Does that rule out God? Absolutely not! Evolution explains how we evolved, not how life got started. Other than the contradictory and nonsensical book of Genesis, there is no reason not to believe evolution is a tool that God created and used to make you and me. And unlike many Christians that think they are crap only worthy of God’s love because God murdered his own son to blind himself, I think God did a fine job with us. Just the way we are. When I think about all the people I love in the world, it is not in spite of their faults, it is because of them. I have no desire to spend eternity with former human beings that have been stripped of everything that made them human. God wasn’t stupid. God didn’t screw up. God made each one of us exactly the way He wanted to.

I love God, I love myself, and I love you, Anonymous, just the way you are.