WHO OR WHAT IS OUR GOD?
The Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition’s creation myth connects our archetypal sin with the desire to be like god. The serpent tempts Eve to eat the fruit saying, “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil [emphasis added].” In the story harmony and well-being are disrupted by humanity’s desire to be divine. After their transgression Adam and Eve deny the reality of their limitations. They blame another rather than acknowledge their human need for continuous growth. A few chapters later, in the story of “The Tower of Babel,” the Book of Genesis again relates our broken condition with our desire to elevate ourselves to the level of god.
Being like god takes the form of operating as though we are the center of the universe, possessing the power to judge and define who is good and who is evil, who is valuable and who is expendable. As gods we think that we are above others and that their lives are less important than ours. Gods also expect to control others and their world. The need for control includes an expectation that we should get what we want from the people whom we encounter, which leads us to treat them as expendable objects. Adam and Eve’s choice to operate as gods is followed by an archetypal story detailing the mythical birth of violence, when their son Cain kills his brother Abel. In killing his brother, Cain puts himself above Abel, decides Abel’s life is less important than his own, and claims the capacity to determine when and how his brother will die. Cain’s act of violence is an exercise of god-like control.
The human expectation of control might explain the appeal of the materialism that drives our consumer society. The belief that material possessions, which are within our control, bring meaning, happiness, and contentment helps us to feel secure. Our attitude toward people is often oriented toward utility, objectification, and a desire to control. It has been observed that we often “love things and use people.” In his famous “Men and Women for Others” speech, the Jesuit leader, Pedro Arrupe, contended that ego leads us to objectify others. He observed that, “Starting from our individual sins of egoism, we become exploiters of others, dehumanizing them and ourselves in the process, and hardening the process into a structure of society.” Similarly, Martin Luther King, Jr. drew attention to the relationship between materialism and dehumanization, proclaiming:
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
There is no hope for peace, equality, contentment, and genuine respect when our drive to possess and control is unrecognized and unquestioned.
Beyond leading us to objectify and devalue others, our sub-conscious assumption that we are the center of the universe requires that we endlessly distract ourselves from reality. Reality confronts us with the fact that, while we can and should take control of who we are, what we do, and how we relate to reality, there is much that we cannot control. We cannot control that we will die. We cannot control the weather, other people, natural disasters, illnesses, where we are born, or whether people like us. Some people try to accumulate enough wealth to feel that their interests are ensured and their happiness is guaranteed. If you have ever seen an episode of the celebrity documentary series, E! True Hollywood Story, perhaps you have recognized that eventually the drugs, parties, “beautiful people,” mansions, and wealth are not enough to bring peace and contentment to our cultural icons. About forty minutes into every episode the fairy tale is interrupted by an ominous voice that foreshadows a tragic turn in the story (usually something involving addiction, depression, and/or suicide).
In some ways these Hollywood stories parallel the story of Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha) whose father tried to shield him from the uncomfortable nature of reality with all the distraction that money could buy in order to control his son’s future. In spite of all the father’s resources and efforts, the task proves impossible, and Siddhārtha discovers reality, specifically the reality of suffering. The father’s effort to shield him is reflective of an understandable, universal tendency to try to shield ourselves and those we love from hurt and ensure that our loved ones make the decisions which we believe are in their interests. Unfortunately, efforts to distract ourselves and our loved ones from the reality that existence involves suffering are never fully effective.
Once we distract ourselves from reality, we shift from an open to a closed perspective, turning inward in a mode of self-preservation. We shouldn’t be surprised that when Adam and Eve try to escape their human limitations and become “like gods,” they recognize that they are naked; after all, their lens is now focused on themselves. They still “believe” in god, but they have placed their interests first, orienting their lives to-ward and focusing their attention on themselves. This shift to self-centeredness precipitates their departure from the experience of well-being found in “paradise” and their arrival in a world of suffering.
Although Adam and Eve intentionally chose the role of god, in real life this rarely occurs as a conscious decision. Part of acting like we are the center of the universe is assuming that we are always virtuous. As a result it is nearly impossible and seemingly pointless for us to consider the possibility that our religious, philosophical, economic, or political sensibilities are built on a foundation of self-interest. As the center of universe, we assume we are good; we know that good people don’t think they are god; therefore, we “know” that whatever we think, it is not that we are god.
Popular Christian thinking about Jesus enables this convenient and self-serving approach. Making belief in Jesus’ divinity the primary element of faith is much more compatible with a personal sense of divinity because a belief can be compartmentalized. Believers can affirm Jesus’ divine identity while ignoring his message, just as Adam and Eve continued to believe in god while focusing on what they wanted. The Gospel’s radical call to follow, to submit, to change, and to listen requires a disconcerting leap of faith. By focusing all attention on faith in Jesus’ divinity, believers sometimes avoid the self-awareness that would keep them mindful of humanities personal and social tendencies toward ego and the Gospel’s challenge to struggle to transform these tendencies. When Christian belief ignores Jesus’ call to radical conversion and his model of attentiveness to the marginalized other, faith in Jesus as the sole path to salvation can be a great compliment to the subconscious god-complex. It provides believers with a sense of superiority (over “non-believers”), assures them of their immortality, encourages a feeling of self-righteousness, and allows believers to bypass simple lessons that mortality teaches us (i.e. we are not the center of the universe because the universe will go on existing after we die, and, ultimately, we are not in control).
Jesus didn’t seem interested in making himself the focus of other people’s attention. In the story of the temptation after his baptism, Jesus refuses to be made the center by resisting the temptation to root his identity in the self-serving qualities of power, wealth, or popularity. A repeated device in the Gospels called “the Messianic secret” sees Jesus perform a miracle and then ask that no one be told. The Gospels seem to suggest that miracles attributed to Jesus were not performed to focus attention on him but reflected the reality that Jesus’ attention was focused on alleviating the suffering of others. The most concentrated collection of Jesus’ teachings, the Sermon on the Mount, is not a theological reflection on the identity of Jesus but a reflection on what humans should be and a challenge to work toward Jesus’ radically unconventional vision, the Kingdom of God. If he is to be affirmed as god incarnate by his followers, surely he points to a very different god than the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good god often presented by the monotheistic traditions. Jesus acted as though he was not the center of the universe. His god is very different than the one we imitate when trapped in our egos or the one we create to validate our self-centeredness.
If Jesus’ message wasn’t centered on himself, what was his message? Among other things he was calling for a conversion that Christians describe as Agape love (love as self-gift). Agape is not unlike what Buddhists call Anatta (selflessness) and Muslims call Islam (peaceful submission). All these states rep-resent an overcoming of self-centeredness. The Christian call to conversion asks believers to follow Jesus by dying to self-centeredness and ego, taking up their crosses, and being re-born as loving people.
Science has increasingly confronted us with the fact that we, as individuals and as a species, are not the center of the universe, even pointing to the possibility that we could make our planet uninhabitable for our own species. Science can be problematic because the answers we discover cannot be controlled by our preferences. I wonder if part of the developed world’s periodic resistance to science is the fact that science supports Jesus’ call to de-center ourselves, a call that we have frequently downplayed, perhaps because it is incompatible with ego’s need to feel separate, special, and above. Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker highlight this scientific development in their book Journey of the Universe:
“The five-hundred-year” enterprise of modern Western science has also been concerned with identifying the center of the universe, and this effort has led to a series of “de-centerings.” We have learned that our former ideas concerning the center were not the full story. Perhaps the most famous contribution to de-centering the human world was when we discovered that the Earth was not the moving center of things, but was rather in motion around the Sun…. Within a few centuries, our ongoing investigation led to the realization that although the Sun, indeed, was the center of the solar system, it was not the center of the universe. In 1918 Harlow Shapley provided evidence indicating that the Sun was moving in a great ellipse around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. This de-centering process was carried still further when Edwin Hubble and others, in the 1920s, discovered that the Milky Way was not the central galaxy of the universe. Rather our Milky Way is just one galaxy in a universe filled with galaxies [over a hundred billion].
Jesus invites his listeners to change how they see. As gods our focus will remain centered on ourselves and we won’t see clearly. The words and actions of Jesus challenge us to disavow the apparent virtues of power, certainty, and assumed benevolence that are so often attributed to god. In fact he models the rejection of these characteristics and assumptions that often serve our selfish tendencies.