Day 1032: My God

92% of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, Pew survey finds

I am one of the 92%. God has always been with me, and I with God. God is such a meaningful, soul-gripping and peace-giving entity in my life that I cannot begin to explain this relationship to anyone else, much less myself. Hence the daily exploration of breathing in, examining and worshipping the all in the all.

Rarely, if ever, do I discuss my religious beliefs other than utilizing the convenient pigeonhole of Hindu. It’s not a lack of conviction or the inability for pedagogy, but an absence of zealotry and the unwavering belief that no two humans can experience anything in the same way, even God.  My husband’s notion of the divine is not mine, just as I do not expect our children to mimic their parents’ independent assessments and voyages in the physical and spiritual realms.  How may I externalize something this personal and so exclusively created by and for me?  Why should I trivialize it?  Some of it I’ll share with you, however, that I can put in words.  That:

• * God spoke to Moses, but didn’t speak to me,
• * Krishna imparted the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna on the battlefield as outlined in the Mahabharatha, but I haven’t seen the Vishwa Rupa Darshana, the universal form of the Lord, myself,
• * Jesus walked this earth a couple of millennia ago and that his words offer solace and opportunity for self-possession, but it is up to me to listen and act accordingly and every day,
• * the bhajans of M.S. Subbulakshmi and songs of the Sufis are threads which lead out of their mouths and into the tapestry of the metaphysical, that they offer a direct line to something unimaginably beautiful and terrible at once,
• * temples, churches, mosques and buildings of worship are great, laudable works of architecture, which are wholly useless if God does not live in the altar of your personal being.  As a very Hindu cousin wrote me recently, “I never buy pictures of God because I feel that God’s picture should be enshrined in your heart,”
• * vampires do not exist, Sasquatch does and ghosts may or may not,
• * I can see God in a microscopic section of rock and in the smiles of children,
• * a Bodhisattva, a Tzadik Hador, Kalki or a Kwisatz Haderach (for you Dune-ists) arrives every generation, but I wouldn’t know one if he or she walked up to me and said, “Hello,”
• * in truth, we are each our own Messiah.  No one else can be that for you or me,
• * God just is, in and as everything, even in the mundane, occasionally taking form and putting on airs, and
• * death isn’t the end.

These are some of my personal, quirky notions of the invisible and unexplainable.  They didn’t come to me all at once and I guarantee you that, as time passes, my mind will change about a few items in the above list because metamorphosis, like it or not, happens.  Again, these are my personal, quirky ideas.  Hence, I don’t vote with them and believe that a collection so personal is not open to public debate or enshrinement as someone else’s laws.  What right do I have to impose the iconoclastic or a syncretic messiah on you and you your own equally bizarre beliefs on me? 

Connecting all of this back to my own immediate reality as a scientist, my job then is not to discover The Way It Is and to make colleagues and students rote-memorize it.  Scientific research is a way to decipher a useful pattern in the noise and to share with others the tools with which to build their own patterns, notions and collections.  All while remembering that independent apprehensions of God do not have to make sense to everyone else, but that the results of scientific research do.

It is thus my strong hope that the result of the aforementioned Pew survey is not used as unspoken assent for the teaching of an individual’s or group’s religious beliefs in the classroom under the guise of Science. 

This post is not an attempt to speak truth to power because governmental and religious power structures don’t care about God, education or anything in between. They do not exist for the good or salvation of the public; the hoarding of money and POWER is their goal and they do it by plying the citizen with platitudes, cheap self-righteousness and a series of easy outs.  What I write is for those of us who fall for this, forgetting even the basics like, say, that the Lord is their shepherd, not those who speak in His name and forgetting that the path to heaven is highly unlikely to work this way. 

Therefore, write your representative and tell them not to keep our children down by passing SB 733, Louisiana Science Education Act.  Imparting intelligent design as science in the classroom does great disservice to God and our experiential lot in life as does a science that is static and not constantly open to possibility. Let us give our young ones, instead, the gift of wonder and the habit of life-long critical thought so that they may appreciate science and God in all of that possibility. 

Apologies to the one who thinks he or she has all of the physical or metaphysical answers to our existence. What we know at any given moment is but a placeholder, a stepping-stone, a blink of time’s eye.  On one hand, we are human. On the other, we are HUMAN. Pretending to have arrived in scientific and ecclesiastical arenas is a sorry form of humility, while not being imaginative enough to come to terms with the fact that our knowledge has limits is a slap to our magnificent intellect. No one wants us dumb and on our knees, not any decent human being and definitely not God.