Can God be defined?
From third through fifth grade, I attended an Episcopal school. For a time, I believed what I was taught about religion there. But I do remember wondering what God looked like, and I remember being told not to try to picture God.
My act of defiance in the fourth grade was to picture God as someone like Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in D.C.
Now, when someone asks a question such as "Do you believe in God?" I wonder exactly what they mean by "God". Few people seem comfortable talking about this, and even fewer seem willing to try and define God. The answers I've gotten seem hopelessly vague, as though even asking for a definition of the concept of God (let alone any proof) is offensive.
As an adult, I'm unclear on the concept. If by God one means there are things we don't understand, I'm certainly a believer. If one means by God something much more concrete, I'm less certain. There are spiritual processes within myself that I experience and understand to some extent. I have some sense of how all things and all people in particular are connected. But I'm still unclear on what people mean by God, no matter what their particular religion might - or might not- be.
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About G.
G. Randy Kasten is a civil litigation attorney with twenty-five years of experience and is the author of Just Trust Me: Finding the Truth in a World of Spin (Quest Books, September 2011)
His site is: GRKasten.com
Connections
defining
Yes, it is nebulous. Even as a believer, I have a sense, but not an image.
An interesting snippet I read some time ago-- the British believe that God is another Brit 30 feet tall.
You raise issues of concern
You raise issues of concern to any person given to thought and reflection.
Human beings, often pre-occupied with self and noting they are at the top of the evolutionary chain on earth, are prone to the self-deception (illusion) that they are an extraordinary phenomenon, veritable gods unto themselves with unlimited possibilities; whereas, from a more detached or objective point of view, in the larger context of the infinite cosmos, we human beings are less than mere specks inescapably part of an inscrutable and inexorable reality, in control of nothing cosmic and subject to instant extinction with only a flash of light if that to mark our demise.
Thus, without reliance on some faith system, we human beings find ourselves existentially in a state of complete uncertainty and anxiety, which explains why (in a variation of what I believe Voltaire once stated) even if God doesn't exist, we would invent one to serve our own purposes.
We do seem to want answers
We do seem to want answers for things we don't understand, and the way things that were poorly understood in the past (e.g. thunder and lightning) do seem to prove your point, and Voltaire's. Don't understand something? Create a God of it.
Maybe the question "Do you believe in God?" is more honestly and accurately phrased as "Do you believe in my God?"