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あらすじ・解説
Many people want to find God. There are many books on the subject which promise to put you on the path to find Him. Most of religions of the world make the claim to make you one of His own.1 However, there are some people who want to find God without religion. They might say (and many do), “I’m spiritual, not religious.” They might not want to follow anyone’s guidance or rules. Or, as happens frequently, they have been hurt by a faith community in the past and want to now avoid it entirely. So is it possible? Can you find God without religion? In order to answer this question, let’s first look at who God is as well as the definition of religion. Who Is God? We have always believed in something other: a Creator God, a pantheon, even the desired end of “nothingness” in Buddhism is logically something beyond what we know. We have a sense of right, a belief that there is an absolute truth and order . . . a law . . . and by extension a Lawgiver. In order for there to be an absolute rightness and absolute justice, there must be One who is absolutely righteous, absolutely just, a perfect Being. Those Thomas Aquinas referred to as “virtuous pagans,” such as Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle, explored this concept long before the Christian church. Plato’s perfect forms were beyond matter and beyond space, the ultimate reality, and Aristotle believed in a perfect self-consciousness with a separate essence from the created world. But it was Anselm in the Middle Ages who set about to clarify and distinguish the God Christians worshiped from the pantheons surrounding them through the nature and quality of His Being. Anslem’s reasoning, which became known as the “ontological argument,” is that God is the maximally great being. He is the greatest thing that we can conceive of, beyond all other things. The second part of his argument for God is that as actual things are greater than our ideas of the thing, that if we can conceive of a maximally great being then there must be such a being because if He was not actual . . . then we would be able to conceive of something greater. This is a simplified form of his argument, and as an argument for the existence of God, I know this sounds a little circular . . . Philosophers love to debate it. However, for the purpose of this discussion, I just want to point out what we mean by God: He is the Greatest Thing, being absolutely perfect, all knowing, all powerful, absolutely just, and outside of space and time. That is God. If the thing you are searching for is something other than that . . . that isn’t God. How Should We Respond to God? Now that we have defined who God is, the Maximally Great Being, let’s think about what our interaction with Him should be. In our egalitarian Western culture, we have, for the most part, lost the concept of showing respect and honoring someone. As we are all equal, no one is deserving of more honor than another and, let’s be honest, pride factors into that as well. However, we do still honor what we perceive as “greatness,” it’s just usually not an authority figure and our perception is often shaped by very shallow reasons such as money or fame. But shallow or not, let’s use that as an example. Take an activity that you are involved in or follow and think of the absolute greatest person in that field, the all-time absolute best. So if you are into swimming, maybe Michael Phelps comes into your mind, basketball might be Michael Jordan, or painting might be Michelangelo. Imagine yourself having the opportunity to talk to them. How would you approach them? Would you barge into their room without knocking in your ratted out t-shirt and flip flops, with hair that hasn’t been brushed in days, smacking on gum and talking on the phone while standing in front of them? If they tried to critique your technique and give you guidance, would you bristle and begin to criticize and tell them the way they should be doing it? Of course not.