A relationship with God
The language of god and musings about ego
I stumbled upon an interesting video published by (ap)atheist DarkMatter2525, who illustrates his epiphany in unifying the concepts of god and ego by observing the reactions of believers to scepticism.¹ Watching it for the first time, intuitively, it just seemed to fit. If you observe the behaviour of a believer whose faith is being even slightly impinged upon, it more or less fits the behaviour of someone being personally criticised.
The key object of this discourse begins with our definition of God in monotheism. In fact, I suspect it’s in the forgiving quality of our language that we discover the stage for this curious interplay between god and ego.
Religion is filled with these nebulous terms — good, evil, right, wrong, morality, etc.; and it’s very easy to find yourself in discussion about these terms without even having established them in the first place. For an atheist, these terms can be quite distinct (although some of them bear a relationship with each other). For a theist, all of these terms are relative to the mother lode of nebulous terms — God.
Even the most devout theist will tell you, in order to know god, there’s a process akin to establishing a relationship. There’s a deliberate deferment encouraged in conceptualising god beyond the very basic, abstract concept. As far as basic definitions go, “progenitor of all things” is about as much agreement as you’ll find among monotheists. You may be able to extract some masculinity and paternalism — but every bit of detail beyond that is built on personal interaction and guided by the hermeneutics of scripture that contribute to His character.
To take an example, the various sects of Christianity each describe a God that bears stark differences. The Catholic god is one who manifests bodily in the Eucharist and wine.² The god of Charismatic Christianity visits its believers through the direct channel of the Holy Spirit, where practices such as faith healing and glossolalia are animated by Him.³ Evangelicals tend to describe a more nurturing and nuanced God, whose divine hiddenness is tantamount to his deeply personal existence in mankind.⁴ Staunch conservatives are quick to highlight the biblical opinion on homosexuality and the natural order of living creatures, including women and their servitude to men⁵. Homosexuals of faith recognise a god who loves all of His creation despite their own creation being at odds with God’s opinion of their nature⁶; and just about every libertarian presentation of Christianity prefers the first creation account in Genesis to the second to avoid the inconvenient gender bias implicit in His creation of man and woman.⁷
From these templates, we’re told to “build a relationship with God”. There’s a wealth of genius in this language, but I‘d like to focus on the bearing that it might have for one’s own conceptualisation of god. To me it seems like an invitation to discover god for herself, in a gradual but personal revelation of His character. And this is where the failure of language and sheer pragmatism of assumption begins to take hold.
“God” remains this fantastically nebulous term, and when used in conversation, it’s pragmatic to simply assume we’re talking about the same concept when we encounter this word. It could be that my personal understanding of god is completely intractable with your own, and yet we treat these concepts as one and the same. The scriptural basis may be normative, but undeniably plagued by hermeneutics at every level of understanding.
Through this process we’re met with a pluralistic definition of god that shares some foundation in common parlance, but whose definition is only ever most complete relative to an individual (ego). The fidelity of one’s concept of god becomes deeply entangled in the believer's concept of It (god). The obvious question then becomes — where does one’s ego end, and god begin?
If there’s no intelligible boundary, then the two terms are logically describing the same thing. And right there is the genius of DarkMatter2525’s epiphany; and one that I feel is worth exploring. Before the atheists go celebrating the relative coherence of their own worldview, there are some implications that affect you too. If we’re convinced that god is an illusion, and we can logically conclude that god is indistinguishable from ego — well, that says a lot about our sense of self.
Footnotes
- DarkMatter2525’s The Real God: An Epiphany
https://youtu.be/-j8ZMMuu7MU - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossolalia
- http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unsystematictheology/2016/10/the-evangelical-relationship-with-god-from-an-anthropologists-point-of-view/ This actually captures the entire subject of this article, from a scientific perspective.
- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ephesians%205%3A22-33
- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+18%3A20-30
- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+2
