The God Effect – Chapter 1 (rev. 2212)
Inside Out
It is probably more common than not for people to look at spirituality as a very personal matter. It starts by looking inside themselves and figuring that religion came from other people doing the same thing. What this means, is that everything about spirituality and God would be a manmade thing. Everything about religion would come from the imaginations of people. If that were true but God were still out there, real and reachable, the connection to Him would have to be all about how much energy a person uses in order to make religion mean anything. 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. In the end, in order to be fulfilled, a person would be locked into rituals and rules of conduct and the idea that the most important thing is for the good to outweigh the bad.
For anyone looking at this kind of religion from the outside, religion would be as much about psychology and weakness as anything else. Worst of all, it looks very hypocritical when religious people or their churches seem to be breaking the rules that they themselves made.
So, in the end, all the responsibility for spirituality and being religious has to rest on the shoulders of each person because there is no one outside of them, bigger than them, to carry a load.
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 real choice. If we or other people didn’t make up religion, it has to have come from the outside. It must have been given and powered from somewhere or someone else. In other words, knowing about God does not come through rituals and rules, but instead from outside of us.
Think about the effect of the kind of thinking that says that 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.
There are softer possibilities. That is to make God all about love, to make love His most important quality. But the danger with this is that He becomes little 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 hurt. 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 or people to try to hold God accountable for the evils that 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 at least untrustworthy if not unrighteous.
But the truth is, God has to be much more holy, compassionate, majestic, and wise than what all of those images of Him give Him credit for. If it is possible to see the deeper 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 anyone who claims to know Him and be under Him are among all people to be the most pitied. 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
We are taught at an early age that almost everything about life depends on what happens around us, the way we are brought up, genetics and what life dumps on us. Ideas like this have an effect in a couple of ways. For one thing, it becomes easy to have peace without having to take the 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 you stop and think about it, even good and bad don’t end up having a lot of meaning. Whatever importance they do have, can be taken care of according to the need of the moment because that is all that matters – the moment.
How many times have we heard someone say, “ That’s just the way I am” or “I can’t help it”? Aren’t those kinds of excuses really just a way to do whatever comes naturally while at the same time trying to look helpless? Again, if we are just lumps of flesh and bone, molded by a world that we cannot control, why not try to do whatever you wish and at the same time enjoy the benefits of being a victim of circumstances?
No matter how we choose to understand ourselves or the world around us, everything is rooted in the God effect – in spiritual things, whether we recognize it or not. 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 are looking 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 is so important to know who God is and how He affects everything from a soul to the whole universe.