KNOWING GOD


Recently, US Army General William Boykin asserted that he believed "God had a hand in things: "God led me into the Delta Force. .... I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God .... Ladies and gentlemen, put your armor on and get into battle. God bless you. ..." Gen. Boykin, of course, is an extreme example. Even so, it's not a recent phenomenon, but he is an example of those who believe they know what God wants, what God thinks, what God wants us to do, to think, who God wants us to hate, and so on (never mind that his God is the same God as the enemy he's talking about).

It is not so much the claim itself that bothers me but rather the diminishing of God . God is beyond definition and most especially beyond the puny conjectures of human beings. I understand the political and social uses of "knowing what God wants" and "God spoke to me" but I do not understand "true believers" making the claim as they have nothing to gain but the repudiation of their faith.

If God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient and anything else God wants to be, it seems to me no mere human could ever figure out what's on God's mind, let alone God's wishes and desires, without direct communication from God. Which brings us to the second claim and most unprovable assertion. Taking folks who have claimed to have heard directly from or have spoken directly with God at his or her word, begs the question as to why God has left so many folks with so many different interpretations, instructions, experiences. It also begs the question as to whether or not it is really God speaking to these folks. Could be the Devil for all anyone knows.

A lot has been blamed on and accredited to God, more so to other gods, in varying degrees. But again, "how to do we know?" The answer is always, of course, "faith." But our faith is puny small, not up to the task of imagining an unknowable but omnipresent God. Make no mistake, I am not arguing that God does not exist (after all, it takes as much "faith" to deny God's existence as it does to argue that God does exist). I am arguing that NO ONE can claim to KNOW God or KNOW what God wants or wants us to do. It's ludicrous. Read the Old Testament and you'll see how many times humans fucked up in their relations with God.

Even the Bible, the "Word of God" is interpreted and written by human beings. Human beings have been known to spin the Bible to their own needs. They have lied, deceived, bribed, tortured and murdered in the name of their God. It absolves human behavior, much like Flip Wilson's "the Devil made me do it." Only it's spun into "God commanded me to save my fellow Americans from the ravages of the liberal left, the gays & lesbians, the fornicators and ex cederetas (sic)." Hell, even if the nefarious shit isn't true and their writings have no political agenda, they still fall short by way of defining God in human terms.

In fact, we do the same to the "lesser" beings in our lives. We assume that our pets have human-like emotions and we interpret their actions accordingly. But not even dogs have the self-awareness to react to stimuli they way we do. We admonish them as we would children and praise them the same way but they are not human children. Dog is Dog and God is God.

I pray to an unfathomable, unknowable, all-powerful God. (Notice I do not refer to God as Him or Her, because, Duh! Who knows.) I may ask God for something but I never "expect" it to happen. God did not kill any of my math teachers on the day before an exam. Not one girl in high school did the things that I prayed she would do when out on a date. I have yet to win the Pulitzer Prize. The reply, of course, is that God would never stoop to answering such prayers, let alone answer them in the positive. But that's precisely my point. Why do we pray to God expecting answers and why do we think we've gotten those answers in the language of our own previously held beliefs. Because we are small and we can not accept the fact that God may not be the father figure that folks have made God to be. We are nothing and know nothing in the presence of God.