Chapter 1 – The God Effect
Inside Out
People look at spirituality as a personal matter. They believe it begins by looking inside themselves and figure that religion came from other people doing the same thing. They see everything about spirituality and God as man-made. Everything about religion must have come from someone’s imagination. They believe religious devotion depends entirely on the energy people put into it. Things like living a good life or being able to measure up to whatever the religion demanded – doing religion would have to be the only way to know spiritual things. To be fulfilled, a person would need to strictly follow rituals and rules, focusing on doing good to outweigh the bad.
For anyone looking at this kind of religion from the outside, it would be as much about psychology and weakness as anything else. Worst of all, it appears hypocritical when religious people or their churches break the rules they made.
They believe spirituality is a personal responsibility, that there is no higher power to rely on.
Outside In
If there is such a thing as a soul, there must be another way to get beyond made-up religion. Looking outside of ourselves is the only other choice. If we or other people didn’t make up religion, it has to have come from the outside. An outside source must have given and powered it. If that is true, knowing about God does not come through rituals and rules, but from outside of us.
Think about the effect of the kind of thinking that says what we know about being spiritual people depends completely on what God lets us understand about how to do spiritual things. It means that the normal tendency to want to be in control runs headlong into control by somebody else. The practical result is that, for many people, their view of God makes Him look judgmental and out of reach.
The softer possibility is to make God all about love, to make love His most important quality. But the danger with this is that He becomes hardly more than a pillow to cry on or a way for a person’s shortcomings to be smoothed over. After all, if God is only about love, how could He ever be severe or make judgments about human beings? He would simply have to tolerate all but the worst of the worst evil among us.
And what about those who are in pain, those who have cried out to God for help for themselves or others they love, only to feel like they’re unheard and/or abandoned? They feel abandoned at the times when they’re the most vulnerable. It’s not unusual for people to hold God accountable for the evils they have suffered in this life and to believe that because He didn’t fix it, He doesn’t care. For these folks, God is not loving, possibly not even very powerful. For them, He is untrustworthy if not unrighteous.
God is much more holy, compassionate, majestic, and wise than what all of those images of Him give Him credit for. If it is possible to get a better picture, the first place to start is with what it means for God to be God. If He can’t or won’t act like God, then the people who claim to trust Him must appear the most pitiable. So, from a practical point of view, the question is, does what you understand about who God is match what is real?
The God Effect
I learned at an early age that almost everything in life depended on my environment, upbringing, genetics, and circumstances. Ideas like this have an effect in a couple of ways. For one thing, it becomes easy to have peace without taking responsibility for anything. After all, how can people be responsible for how they think or act if they have been molded by things beyond their control? If I stop and think about it, even good and bad don’t have a lot of meaning. We can handle whatever importance they have as the moment demands, since only the moment matters.
How many times have I heard someone say, “That’s just the way I am,” or “I can’t help it”? Aren’t those kinds of excuses a way to do whatever comes naturally, while still trying to look helpless? Since we can’t control everything, why not enjoy life and embrace our circumstances?
Spiritual things, the God effect, ground everything, regardless of how we choose to understand ourselves or the world. That is exactly why every person, no matter who they are, is more than just a body. That is why it is so important to understand that there is no way to be a whole person without our souls being part of what we look for. The God Effect gives life, and everything we do meaning, because without Him, everything is just a bundle of atoms and energy with no forever value or purpose.
That’s why it’s so important to know who God is and how He affects everything from a soul to the entire universe.