Faith And Illusion
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So how do we know that what we experience as "God" is not some self
induced illusion? I have had an encounter with what I believe to be God, yet I
still can't be sure that it really was. I have also had false experiences of
God that at the time I was certain were real. We humans are quite capable of,
and even good at, fooling ourselves into seeing and believing what we want to
be true even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. These self
induced illusions may sometimes actually produce positive results, yet that
still does not mean they were divine encounters.

The bottom line is that there is no way for us to be certain that what we
believe about God and experience of God are anything more than illusions
produced by our own desire to believe in them. The only way we humans have of
encountering God is through faith, yet we can place our faith in almost
anything we wish, and having done so, we can "see" whatever evidence we deem
necessary to prove to ourselves that whatever idea, image, or experience we
have placed our faith in is really God.

Here is an absurd example: a man is lying in a hospital bed, ill with some
nasty disease. The doctors have explained to him that he has this nasty
disease, and that all they can do about it is give him lots of medicines and
that in time he will probably recover, though that is not for certain. A
priest stops by his room one day, while he lay there suffering, and asks the
man if he believes on the mighty god "Door" and his blessed gift to this world,
his son "Door Knob". The man says that he does not. So the priest explains
to him all about the deep spiritual mystery and divine meaning of the god Door
and his blessed offspring Door Knob, and he asks the man if he can prove that
the divine power of these gods do NOT exist. Of course the man can't prove that
anything doesn't exist. So the priest suggests to the sick man that he just try
believing in Door/Knob for one week, really try, with an open mind, and that
if he will do so the power of Door/Knob will begin to heal him in just one week.

So the sick man tries it. After all, he really does want to get better, and he
can't prove that Door/Knob's power to heal doesn't exist. So he begins to pray
to the god Door/Knob every day for a week, and sure enough he does begin to
feel better; better even than the doctors led him to expect. And this
improvement is not a mystery, it's real. See, before meeting the priest, all
the sick man could do about his own disease was lay there and take the
doctor's medicines, and all he was thinking about was how much he was suffering.
And that tended to make the suffering seem worse than it already was. But after
the visit by the priest, he had something new and hopeful to focus his attention
and energy on, and that made the suffering seem less intense than it actually
was because he wasn't focussed on it. He was busy praying to Door/Knob and
anticipating feeling better. And just by doing so he really was feeling
better!

By the end of the week he is convinced that this god Door/Knob truly has the
power to heal him. Even the doctors have to admit that he does seem to look
and feel a lot better, and though he has to stay in bed a while longer and keep
taking their medicines, they feel more optimistic about his recovery, too,
because they can see that he has improved. When the priest returns at the end
of that first week, the man is all excited and wants to hear more about this
god Door/Knob and so the priest becomes excited as well. This man's
accelerated recovery is to the priest yet more proof that his wonderful god
Door/Knob is at work in the lives of people, healing them. So he enthusiastically
shares with the sick man his stories of how Door/Knob has healed many others,
and the sick man is even more convinced that he is being healed by divine power,
and so he feels even better still.

Eventually the sick man is fully healed of his disease, just as the priest
said he would be (the doctors only said he might be) and the man leaves the
hospital firmly convinced that he was healed by the god Door and his son Door
Knob, and he enthusiastically tells this to everyone he meets. He eventually
becomes a priest himself, and spends his life working with other sick people
in the hospitals, and he sees lots of people healed by his god. He also sees some
that are not healed, but his priest friend explained all that to him long ago. His
faith does not waver.

It wouldn't have mattered much what the object of this sick man's faith was.
What mattered is that to have faith in something outside of his concept of
reality gave him a hope and a course of action that he didn't have before. And
it was this faith in action that helped to heal him, or at least helped him to
feel better while he was healing. We could change the story so that the sick
man is not healed, and in fact his illness gets worse and he dies. Yet even in
this scenario, he would have felt better through it if he had this faith and
course of action. Though it's much harder to keep faith in a healing deity
when we are not seeming to be healed by it.

The point is that we "see" God where and how we want to see God. Even those
folks who worship a nasty spiteful, vengeful, violent image of God do so
because that's really the way they want God to be. They may claim otherwise,
but no one chooses to believe in a harmful God unless deep inside they wish to
do so. They're getting something they need from holding on to these dark
ideas. And this points up the real question that we should be concerned with when
discussing God. That is the question of what image of God we are choosing to
place our faith in, and why. What is the result of our believing in the god
"Door" that heals, rather than our believing in the god "Hammer" that punishes
our enemies? Often people have the same name for God, profess the same
religion, yet attribute distinctly different personalities to God. What is the
result in our lives of our choosing one personality for God over another? What
is the result of our refusing to accept that our ideas about God are not
really God, but just our ideas? What happens in our lives when we choose an image
of God that cannot tolerate any other images of God?

The question of who's God is real and who's isn't is a never ending question,
because it's an unanswerable question. Mostly I think we ask it as a way of
avoiding the real questions we should be asking ourselves about the images and
ideas of God that we choose to place our faith in. The real questions we need
to be asking are about us and about faith and about how we use faith in our
lives, not about God. God is a word that represents a human concept. How we
define that concept in our minds is our definition of God. And when we choose
to place our faith in that definition, it will likely result in a course of
action that we did not previously have. And we are responsible for those
actions. We can't just say these actions are "God's will" as if that excuses
us, because the God we are referring to is a concept in our own minds. This is
why it's really important that we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, and
why it's so horrible for a religion to imply that to question or doubt their
concepts of God is some sort of sin.

Does it really matter to me that God does not exist if my believing that God
exists improves me and how I live my life? Probably not. The proven need within
me to live with some concept of a loving God is far greater than my need to be
correct regarding the existence of that God. The fact is I'd rather be a better man,
and be wrong, than be a miserable man and be right. I believe that we as human
beings are more important than our ideas of truth are. Being is more important
than knowing.

To some degree our illusions are part of who we are. We can't escape them without
escaping the human condition, which is in effect, to die. Yet we need not be
slaves to these illusions, either. We can at least remain aware of the fact that
as human beings we are limited in our understanding of truth (God), and so are
inevitably given to illusions. And through this awareness we can become the
master of our illusions, rather than the victims or slaves of them. We can keep
in sight how our illusions are affecting us and those around us, and we can
dismiss them when they become harmful. Or we can augment them to be more
effective.

But we definately need to take responsibility for them, and stop pretending that
our illusions of God ARE actually God, and therefor are sacrosanct, untouchable, and
unquestionable. This is unhealthy and dangerous.

Peace,
Dave