Tragedies like
Hurricane Sandy, tornadoes in the Midwest and the Newtown shootings test
people's faith and belief system. When it is perceived that God fails to
intervene in human suffering, the acceptance of doubt arises. For centuries, God's failure to perform/protect
has been blamed on worshippers. Sin,
temptation, human frailty, the seduction of evil - a whole range of faults
belonging to us rather than God. Even in an age that is much less strict in
matters of religion, "What did I do wrong?" or “why me” is a thought
that lurks in our minds.
What if we erase the slate and look clearly at the
situation. Something terrible happens, people suffer, they implore God for
help, but no help comes. If such a thing occurred when a house caught fire and
the fire trucks never came, naturally the blame would fall on those who are
assigned to rescue us. Is it fair to apply the same standard to a God who fails
to show up?
The atheist position on this question is both simple and
certain. God doesn't show up because he doesn't exist. But the rest of us are
likely to feel mixed emotions. When you look at yourself and ask where you
stand on the God issue, you are almost certainly in one of the following
situations:
◦ Unbelief: You don’t
accept that God is real, and your unbelief is expressed by living as if God
makes no difference.
◦ Faith: You hope that God is real, and your hope is
expressed as faith.
◦ Knowledge: You have no doubt that God is real, and
therefore you live as if God is always present.
When someone becomes a spiritual seeker, they want to move
from unbelief to knowledge. The path is by no means clear, however. Yet without
actual knowledge of God, no one can settle a basic question like "Should
God be relied upon to heal suffering or divert disasters?" Short of true
knowledge, you either shrug God off for being useless in the everyday world or
you take on faith that his infinite wisdom reaches beyond our limited
perspective - in other words, suffering fits into the divine plan.
Let’s say that you recognize yourself in one of these three
states of unbelief, faith, and knowledge. It’s quite all right if they are
jumbled and you have passing moments of each. What feels like a muddle could
actually be a path. Unbelief can lead to faith and faith to true knowledge.
This holds true for many other things in life, only we don't use religious
terms for it. When you learn to ride a bike, or roller-skate, or how to be in
love, uncertainty dominates at first, then you begin to believe that you're
getting somewhere, and finally you know that you are there.
Atheists base their unbelief on
evolution. In reality they don't believe that spirituality can evolve. They are
stuck on one note - religion is a primitive throwback - which makes no sense on
any level. The history of civilization is paralleled by the evolution of
religious thought. Thomas Aquinas and the Buddha weren't exactly sitting around
a fire chipping at arrow heads, but militant atheists make their unbelief look
like "progress."
If there is a path to God, we are asking the big questions
while in a muddled state; with clarity, these questions may have credible
answers. Certainly a secular age isn't going to back pedal and return to
dogmatic faith. At the same time, spiritual experiences are natural and
universal; they have always existed and still do, which means that God is
available, if he exists. (For the moment I'll use the conventional
"he," although the deity has no gender and shouldn't been seen in the
image of a human being).
God is hidden somewhere, as a presence, in all three
situations, whether as a negative (the deity you are fleeing from when you walk
away from organized religion) or as a positive (a higher reality that you
aspire to). Being faintly present isn’t the same as being truly important, much
less the most important thing in existence. If it was possible to make God real
again, I think everyone would agree to try.
Article by
Deepak Chopra part 1 of 5 in the SF Gate Chronicle
