It’s easy to be impressed by the bible if you’ve never read Shakespeare or Milton. It’s easy to be impressed by the bible if you’ve never read Spenser or Whitman. Hell, compare the majority of the Psalms to Dickinson or Shelley or Tennyson and you can’t help but wonder why God was such a bad poet. If God dictated the bible, you have to wonder why Shakespeare was a significantly better writer than God, as was were Tolstoy and Tolkien. As a mythologist, Tolkien is head and shoulders above the bible. Read Job and you can’t help but wonder why Dinesen was a better fabulist than God. If the bible is infallible, you have to wonder why so much of it disagrees with actual science. Hell, you have to wonder why so much of it has been disproven by actual science.

A quick survey of world mythology demonstrates that biblical tales are neither unique nor uniquely beautiful. Spend some time reading the Mahabharata and you realize that the bible’s stories of war and conquest are down right boring by comparison. Read the Popol Vuh and you realize they’re not all that imaginative. Read the Kalevala and you see a mythological cycle far more mature than the Bible’s weird, open ended visions of universal death and destruction sometime in the as yet unspecified but very soon future.

It’s difficult to read the bible and not be horrified by the portrait of God as a jealous, sociopath who thinks genocide is okay, who orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac “just cause” and then at the last minute says, “Just kidding.” It’s difficult not to wonder at a god who gladly floods the whole earth and kills untold numbers of humans and animals to satisfy some sort of lust for absolute obedience. It’s difficult to worship a god who blithely allows his “chosen people” to suffer war, conquest, deportation, starvation and untold deaths because they don’t burn their offerings just right. What sort of God is okay with Tamar seducing her father in law just to get a child, with Lot’s daughters getting him drunk and sleeping with him so they can be mothers, but has just destroyed a whole bunch of cities cause some men liked dick? What sort of god is sets up some insane scenario in which that God incarnates as human, then to satisfy god’s own blood lust lets himself be murdered on a cross in the name of foirgiveness? What kind of whack job sociopath God requires that god’s self be sacrificed in the name of appeasing god’s self? Why go through all the rigamarole? If you’re an all powerful God, just give the damn forgiveness and get it over with? Why go plod through the steps? If god needed to incarnate as human and die to understand the human experience, maybe god isn’t so all knowing after all? And, if god, as human, needed humans to kill him, then maybe god wasn’t so effectively all powerful after all.

Religion, faith, and all that are frankly irrational. They can possess great beauty, and as the Right Reverend John Shelby Spong likes to say, they aren’t true but they are Truth. The realm of emotion, of mind, of dreams, religion speaks to realities of human experience that are immeasurable. Though, as we learn more about the mind and the way it works, we are beginning to see that much of what we experience – love, hate, fear, passion – are all functions of the chemistry of the mind. The religious mind works differently than the irreligious one. I believe it was Sartre who talked about the “god shaped hole” in the human animal. The more we learn about the way the mind works, the more we understand the human experience and the human animal. The mysteries of the human mind are being unlocked each and every day and as they are, the realm over which god has dominion shrinks smaller and samller.

The practices of faith have no effect on the outside world. Prayer doesn’t do a damn thing to cure disease. How many trillions of prayers have been offered over the centuries for cures that never came? For salvation that never arrived? Statistically, you’re more likely to experience spontaneous remission of cancer while sitting at home than you are to be healed by visiting Lourdes. You’re actually more likely to be killed on the way to Lourdes than you are to be healed at Lourdes.

At the end of the day, then, how do I reconcile the above with my deep satisfaction in my church membership? Well, to be honest, I’m not sure I do beyond saying: Credo consolans. I love my church because I love the people there and seeing them once a week makes my life better. Knowing that I live in a community that is truly an extended family makes me a happier healthier person and at some level I’m willing to accept that we use god as an excuse to love another into being better people.

In the final analysis, most of the god stuff is ludicrous, irrational and very possibly harmful. A person who lives strictly according to the bible would be a threat to the safety of the community. But church – an intentional community which sustains and cares for its members – is to me valuable. We are social animals and we are better for living in community with each other.