What KIND of God Exists?

Good Morning! So, for sake of conversation, I am not a Christian but I have been around and in Christian space for over 20 years. I’m familar with the bible and scholarship around it but I am no expert. I study humans and have a background in psychology and mental health treatment. My perspectives are going to be from outside the circle of Christian ideas. If that’s okay, I would like to share some different angles.

You mention there is a strong case that some kind of “god” is the source of our intuitions of value and a standard for morality. There is a great deal of research that shows our moral compass is developed in early childhood – way before our brains are fully developed even to understand what god is or how it operates. We’re too busy getting our nursing needs met by our mums and being held all the time. Our moral compasses are developed based on how well we are treated by our families and communities. Keep in mind, humans as a species have big brained offspring that are born half cooked. Our species needs healthy pre-natal treatment and nourishment [less stress for mothers, lots of support for pregnancy, good nutrition, no violence or threatening, etc.] along with lots of communal care after birth. The ideal is holding babies 24/7 in an atmosphere of alloparenting [many people the child then forms attachments to versus a single mom isolated in a male dominated household]. Breastfed – we’re talking at least two years for optimal development of jaw bone and teeth structure along with the immune development and the constant touch. Violence is bad juju for children period. Lots of curiosity, play, and multi-aged playmates are part of the cycle of human development through those milestones. How we currently educate our children is pretty off from our nested normalness.

We have our own evolutionary track that was altered some hundreds of years ago. When I started digging into anthropology I discovered a new paradigm was emerging that looked at various forms of human communal construction on a continuum of dominance to partnership. Partnership oriented societies were the norm – they were peace normative, had low inequality, and no hierarchies of value – no hierarchies at all. They were collaborative. They centered on nurturing economies. These people tended to experience something called oceanic oneness – a deep connection to all life. In other words, they didn’t experience exile and separation that would be normative in dominance oriented societies that have the regular use of violence as part of social relating. In fact, in dominance societies, it’s normative to marry violence and love so profoundly that it rewires our minds and bodies. We get rigid, intolerant, survival brain reactivity as outcomes.

For instance, issues like sexism and racism all have links to attachment dysregulation in the research literature. Attachment is the psychology theory involving interactions mainly between mom and baby and how those interactions shape child development. There is some kind of attachment “test” that is so reliable it can predict an unborn child’s attachment style – to give you some idea. I can’t remember it’s name. AAI or AI. Brain fart! Ugh.

My point though, is reactive humans are not healthy well-balanced humans and there are intergenerational consequences for this at the genetic level [switching genes off and on]. It creates separation as the energy for development is given over to survival behavior that involves dominance. Given the fact the globe seems to be majority dominance oriented in some form or another with the regular use of violence, religious beliefs would form normalizing and attempting to account for this type of reality. It would appear that humans tilt toward evil – violence – and are sinful – for instance. The Old Testament is a dominance oriented set of social stories and “history.”

While it’s the majority thought among humans that we can’t be moral without a deity, the science is showing something else entirely. We don’t need a god to be healthy well-regulated humans in community. We do, however, need oceanic oneness and the deep sense of connection to all life. I think we do need spiritual realities and experiences. Some religions have this in place in some aspects although they may not qualify under a strict god definition – rather a life force connection. I’m weak in understanding on this angle so I won’t speak more about it.

When it comes to perceptions of divine experiences, there are a number of factors that play out – especially with perception. Culture shapes our perceptions and our understanding of the world around us. We are MORE LIKELY to shape our personal spiritual experiences into those cultural norms, especially if there is a dominate religion that uses violence to maintain its control and authority over entire groups of people. Confirmation bias is a big problem for people. The research on perception was pretty startling to me. It pretty much can blind us to what is actually right in front of us.

The other thing I would like to point out is about inspiration and the accounting for the contradictions, errors, and such in the bible by way of understanding “God” as an uncontrolling lover. Any data around inspiration is going to be weak. I’m not one to deny spiritual experiences, but inspiration is a doctrinal concept rooted as dogma. It has a specific, often power-ed dynamic purpose, to create a divine sort of order through at least the vehicle of authority. When I engage the bible, what I see is a LOT of trauma narrative. I see a narrative in contextual realities of land and a territorial God. Outside of the land means to be outside of the protection of the proper God in charge. The bible speaks about a repeating narrative of separation and exile due to disobedience. While I agree the bible is not univocal, it is a collective story that has been given power in a community of people. Critical scholarship has shown that aspects of the bible may not be inspired at all, but rather the normative use of religious power to establish monarchy and a national identity, as in the age of Josiah’s reforms. If we watch our present moment, there is similar action on the part of conservative and charismatic Christians to re-engage history in a way meaningful to them to deal with their internal issues of insecurity and disconnect. There is a total driving force of end time harvest and revival to bring Jesus back. It doesn’t matter that they are reading the Book of Revelation, for instance, outside of the context in which it was written. They claim to be having spiritual experiences that back up the activity of the present regime. Those spiritual experiences include warfare language and the cursing and demonizing of other people – pretty much what the bible represents on a lot of levels. They get their authority from those series of texts to justify their spiritual experiences.

The reality is, in a community with deep entanglement, stories of separation don’t make much sense because no one is exiled or separated. Salvatory needs only make sense in communities that are operating from stories that are about separation and exile. And given the texts in the bible reflect everything from the legitimatized and condoned existence of chattel slavery, hierarchies of value, stricter guidelines for the separation and different treatment of men and women in key areas [adultery and sexuality for instance], and a God that is reported to be pretty okay with ethnic cleansing, city wide sacrificial actions of killing as an offering to that God [“put to the ban”] and an obsession with purity and the use of other humans as vehicles for vengeance and punishment no matter how that impacts the development and harm to humans [creating further problems of trauma and dysfunction], my question would be why maintain the dogma of inspiration? What does that give you as a Christian group – because it’s going to meet a group’s needs on a particular set of fronts. It seems healthier to understand through the lens of some of your other statements with a caveat – that psychopaths and other less dysregulated self-righteous people have no trouble appealing to inspiration to get people to harm others. There are diverse stories and spiritual experiences and ways to understand them and our stories tell us a lot about ourselves- often times more than it tells us about the divine – if there is one. You don’t really need inspiration to find value in the stories and experiences of other people. I don’t – I get freaked out when people hold on to inspiration because it is too often used to justify continued violence toward other beings on the planet. I, however, agree there are spiritual experiences that inspire people and many people would call them “inspired.”

I would conclude here, that I have spiritual experiences but I do not exist within the framework of an organized religion. I would say that through those experiences I try to be open to being clocked by the experience rather than using the experience to affirm what I already believe. At this point, I sense deeper entanglement and connection with other beings the world over but would not say I believe in a god. I wouldn’t call myself an atheist – but I think humans in this hour often construct spiritual realities around the need for a god because it might be too scary to perceive a world without one – but love as I’ve experienced it, isn’t talking about half of what theologians have concerned themselves over time up til the present. In fact, it isn’t real concerned with a “god” anything – it isn’t necessary – deep connection and entanglement don’t need worship, offerings, or any such thing to measure a sense of love….it’s a pretty small sense of love to begin with. My experience though. I mean no culture war offense either as far as intention.

Best wishes to you on your continued journey!