Lesson 2

God, Values, Beliefs, Astronomy

May 14^th Bayswater: Teaching Elders Herta Uhlherr, Renate Weber

Astronomy Alfred Klink

1. Welcome!

Submit homework and get out the preparation sheets for this lesson.

2. Prayer and Silence

Introduction:

Bible reading:  Find Ephesians 4:6 first person can read it out. (p 1519-1520)

‘One God and Father of all who is over all and through all, and in you all.

3. When the word ‘God’ is used what do you think or see?

Using the information gained on the prep sheets discuss how the Confirmands imagine God. (Brainstorm) Video of Star Wars 

4. History of religion

GOD - little word, big subject.

Important to remember - anything we humans say, think or imagine about God is not God; our necessarily limited ideas and words about ‘him’ may or may not point to ‘her’ reality. (Notice how ‘him’ and ‘her’ slant our thinking).

It is insightful to look at some of the history of humans’ notions of God/the gods. These ideas correlate with how they envisaged nature, their ‘scientific’ views (superstitions?). Our high-tech science and our present view of God/no God may be deemed equally primitive in the future!

Very abbreviated history of humans’ images of God.

Way back God was experienced as female; many goddesses had in common the Goddess as Mother and Giver of All, the source of all nature and life. Societies were matriarchal, peaceful and cooperative.

Polytheism: poly=many, theos/deus=god.

Gradually monotheism (one god) gained ascendancy. Old Testament Jehova/Jahwe, the one (male) god of the Israelites Society was now patriarchal and competitive, ruled by men; women had no say and no power any more. This belief system naturally has a powerful, authoritarian, often warlike and angry male god.

The ancient Greeks had a group of male and female gods, whose home was on Mt. Olympus (high up, like ‘heaven’). These deities had many human attributes – they were quarrelsome, jealous, competitive, tricky and unpredictable.

When Moses asked God’s name, he answered: I AM.

2000 years ago Jesus experienced God, in a new way as his loving Father – ‘I and the Father are one’. To the surprise and indignation of his patriarchal fellow Jews, he honoured women as well as men and had compassion for outcasts. In him we see a balance of head and heart.

The Christian Church founded by his apostles increasingly saw God as more abstract and outside of nature, in ‘heaven’. The 4^th C. dogma of the Trinity conceives of the godhead as 3 divine ‘persons’ in one, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Church became a powerful institution with political ambitions (e.g. the Holy Roman Empire).

The dreadful things done by Church leaders (e.g. Inquisition, burning ‘heretics’ who believed differently) do not mean God is evil. Many people make the mistake of not differentiating between God and what (often misguided, ignorant or power-hungry) humans do in his name. This distinction is basic and very important. Religion is not God.

Mysticism is a core tradition within all religions and is a positive and awesome experience of the mystery and miracle of being – clear and heightened consciousness, a sense of unity with all-there-is and love encompassing everything. A direct and immediate experience of ultimate reality, ‘God’, Truth.

After the Middle ages came the Renaissance (Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution – a new world view.

Descartes (1596-1650) pictured reality as divided into ‘mind/spirit’ and ‘matter’, and helped reduce nature to ‘resources’ for man’s use; spirit or the sacred was removed from the daily world. Newton (1642-1727) envisaged the universe as mechanical clockwork created by a divine engineer/clockmaker long ago and no longer involved – God as first cause, before and outside of nature. Science split into many individual disciplines looking for the basic (tiny) building blocks of life, with no one looking at the big picture. Human reason (‘head’) became the highest value for rationalists and humanists and God was declared to be dead (became invisible because people sought science and reason left no room for him). Mystical or spiritual experience just didn’t seem an option, or was thought crazy. Most of Western Society is dominated by this thinking now.

5. Comparative Religions asks what do you know about other religions? Are there similarities differences? Name some religions: do they have a God?  Where do they worship what do you know about it?

Comparing religions

6. Questions about faith, God and religion.

Indigenous peoples feel part of a spirit-filled wider reality beyond the physical/material world and hold the earth and nature sacred. (e.g. American Indians, Aborigines ‘Dreaming’). In the West, Rudolf Steiner (first part of 20^th C), ‘the scientist of the invisible’, ‘saw’ a vast vision of an evolving cosmos suffused and sustained by a hierarchy of spiritual powers.

When divorced from a wider reality than daily materialistic concerns, the human soul/spirit/’heart’ feels restless, empty and alienated. This deep, probably unconscious yearning for something more and meaningful is hard wired into us. Not having a connection with God lies at the bottom of so much angry and destructive behaviour today. (Who cares? Nothing matters!)

Clearly, to become whole (healed, ‘saved’) we need once more to bring ‘head’ and ‘heart’ together.

Over the past 50 years, the new cosmology has provided a totally new way to ‘see’ things with the exciting possibility of integrating the 15-billion-year development of the entire cosmos with a creation story that helps us understand life and man’s place in a wider reality. Unlike the fundamentalist Creationists’ literal belief in the Genesis creation myth, the new cosmology the Big Bang, evolution, quantum theory and the latest scientific insights and a new way to imagine ‘the Force’. For the first time in 300 years, scientists and theologians can communicate and share in the wonder and mystery of the sheer astonishing creativity that keeps creating a mind-boggling variety where no two things are the same!!

So what words can we use to point to what God might be?

God is NOT a person, entity, male or female (all finite; God is in-finite).

God simply IS – a mystery beyond human explanation. ‘He’ IS existence, or Being –‘I AM’. He is both the original and continuous breathtakingly creative energy through which everything in the universe emerges from nothing. He can be experienced in awe and wonder – a sense of Presence; Reality; the Force, Power, Energy, the Life-force, the ‘Ground of Being’.

  A useful notion is panentheism – the belief that the God-being includes and penetrates the whole universe, including us, so that every part exists in Him, but also (as against pantheism) that His being is more than, and is not exhausted by the universe. God is both immanent (in everything) and transcendent (beyond, more than everything).

Supernatural theism (God outside and before nature) and pantheism (which restricts God-being into nature) are both untenable. (Paul Brockelmann, Cosmology and Creation).

It makes sense to think of nature as alive and unfolding, as worthy of our reverence and care. Everything is linked and interdependent on and in the creative energy of God.

The Bible says we are made in the image of God. This new creation story, similarly suggests that humans are an image of the cosmic reality which created us and are one with it, co-creators in the bringing about of ‘the kingdom of advancing life’ (R.W. Burhoe), a dynamic, evolving, living process we can participate in responsibly.

The idea of a Templer is that we are aware that creative God-being is within us. The key is not what I have, but what I AM. And what I am determines how I live and that we are linked to God/energy  

7. What is the Role of Religion?

We have discovered that there are many religions and that they have things in common and some differences. What is religion about? It is about BIG, DEEP questions.

Why, how, where, what? Who am I? Where do we come from? Why do we exist?

• Why is there anything at all? There may have been nothing, no thing at all so why do things exist instead of there being nothing?

• Where has everything come from? (The big bang theory?)

• Are people like us especially important?  Are we more valuable than stones, trees or animals, cabbages, cats or moths?

• Do our lives have special meaning?  Or are we here today -gone tomorrow like plants and animals.

• How should I live? Should I be good? Or should I live just how I want to live?

• When I die what happens to me? Is that the end or will part of me keep on living. How, where?

• Why do people suffer from illness and disease? Why do people hurt other people or even themselves? Why are there cyclones tsunamis, bushfires and earthquakes?

• Is this world we live in the only world there is? Or is there another quite different world beyond this world? Are there beings in that other world- spirits, gods, angels- quite different to the beings in this world? Are there parallel universes?

What is the purpose of everything? Is there a reason for things happening?

Is this a good world or a bad world or one that is neither good nor bad?

Religions try to give answers to these big and deep questions often by using stories, to try to explain why things exist, whether our lives have meaning, how we should live, how we can cope with suffering, evil, death. People study and adopt religions or form their own belief systems, because they want to find answers to all these big questions

8. The questions we ask about faith and God and religion reflect our way of seeing God.

A very useful description of how the human brain responds to what we call ‘God’ is found in Deepak Chopra’s book How to know GOD – The Soul’s Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries.¹ Chopra describes seven ways (or stages) of how the human brain can perceive God, the beliefs and values of each stage and the qualities God has for the person at that stage

Chopra’s model of reality is a ‘sandwich’

The middle element is new – it implies that there is a zone where God and humans meet on common ground.

There are seven such responses hardwired into the brain:

  9. Values dilemma.

Divide the group into threes give out the dilemma sheet.

 You left the school grounds with two of your friends at lunchtime without permission. A teacher saw three students but only recognised you. You are told you will be put on detention unless you give your friends’ names.

What could you do? What should you do? What would you do? Who or what influences you the most?

There is a Leunig poem about truth; it comes from Michael Leunig’s ‘Common Prayer Collection’ (Collins Dove, 1993)

‘In order to be truthful

We must do more than speak the truth.

We must also hear the truth 

 We must also receive truth  

We must also act upon truth   

We must also search for truth

The difficult truth.

Within us and around us.

We must devote ourselves to truth.

Otherwise we are dishonest

And our lives a mistaken. God grant us the strength and courage to be truthful.

Amen.’ 

(If there is time)

10. How do you experience God? How else can God be experienced?