God’s Multiple Personalities

Let’s say I have two friends, one named Cosmo and one named King.

Cosmo and King are both very rich and powerful guys. Cosmo is a bit of a recluse, living on the top of a distant mountain. His affairs are managed by a huge network of people who don’t really have too much contact with the boss, save the occasional memo.

King on the other hand is hands-on all the way. He lives in the city and gets down and dirty in his business. He’s kind of strict and the employees work very hard, always trying to stay on his good side.

Now what if I told you that Cosmo and King were the exact same person?

“No way!” you would say, “That’s not possible unless the guy’s got some kind of multiple personality disorder in which case he sounds like he could use a little therapy.”

This is the same response I have when people talk to me about God. Paul Froese and Christopher Bader have a piece about this on HuffPost:

In our book, America’s Four Gods: What We Say about God and What That Says about Us, we demonstrate that Americans can be divided into four distinct categories of believers. For purposes of this brief essay, we only discuss two groups of believers — those which most closely reflect our political party divisions. They are believers in an Authoritative God, who tend to be overwhelmingly Republican, and believers in a Distant God, who tend to be largely Democrat.

…Believers in an Authoritative God view God as rigid in His [sic] (these believers tend to think of God as male) moral judgments and very clear in His demand for our obedience. The Republican Party platform attracts believers of an Authoritative God for logical reasons, especially when considering how conservatives adopt a stance of moral absolutism in their opposition to abortion, gay marriage and gays in the military. For these believers, God has laid out what is immoral and our leaders should do likewise.

This gets to the very root of my non-theism. Everyone has his or her own version of God. When we talk about God in our society we’re usually talking past each other because some people are talking about Cosmo and others are talking about King. Yet they’re all pretending that it’s possible for him to be the same exact person.

You know where silliness like this is permitted? In fiction. God is a product of the human imagination so the deity comes off as anything one imagines it to be. This is why proofs of God’s existence are so useless. Most of the time no one knows which god a person is talking about.

I used to go to interfaith clergy meetings where everyone would nod piously and agree that Yahweh (whom the Jews would only call Adonai or Hashem), Allah and Christ were all different words for the one true god we all believe in. What a bunch of baloney! Even the followers of each of these gods can’t agree on what they are. This is not surprising considering the findings of Froese and Bader. Deities are projections of our own desires and personalities.

(P.S. Some people have asked me why I sometimes capitalize the word god and sometimes I don’t. I only capitalize it when it refers to God used as a kind of name, rather than the generic deity. To make this work I alway substitute the name Sneezy and the word dwarf. If Sneezy fits, then I capitalize. If dwarf would fit, then I don’t.)