It's weird how the idea of 'god' saturates our culture. You can hardly turn around without running into it. Although many people claim not to be Christians, they all have the same 'Christianized' view of 'god'.
Take Stargate, one of my favorite TV series. The main bad guys in the show were alien parasites that took over human bodies and pretended to be the gods of ancient mythologies. Except that every time they talk about what a 'god' is, it isn't pagan at all. They talk about gods knowing everything, worshipers being astonished when their gods make mistakes, and judging where the soul goes for eternity. All of these are decidedly Judeo-Christian ideas. Gods of various pantheons were often tricked and deceived into making mistakes, didn't pay that much attention to what happened to humans after death, and even died. Yeah. So if Apophis can be killed that makes him less of a god? How? Osiris was killed and is forever stuck in the underworld of the dead.
It is funny how things that have nothing do to with Christianity and are even adamantly anti-Christian show the influence of two-thousand years of monotheism. Everyone knows what 'god' is like, so much so that we can't get away from the idea even when portraying non-Christian deities.
If this is true, then why do we need to evangelize? If everyone knows who and what God is, why are so few people Christians? What has happened that everyone knows about god yet wants nothing to do with him?
As much as the world assumes it knows about God, there is even more it doesn't know. The popular picture of God as the perfect, all-powerful being who judges the good and the bad is just the tip of the iceberg. It is only one aspect of an infinitely complex being. We glance sideways at God, hurry past, barely pause to look. Maybe we get a good image, maybe a bad one, based on our one hurried glance. We rarely pause to delve deeper, rarely seek to question and explore what that presence, that person, that fable or myth is really about.
If we stopped to look at who and what God really is, we might be surprised. We might find that the judge doesn't actually care that much about judgement; he'd rather rehabilitate. We might find that the perfect one who never makes mistakes will take our opinion into consideration, even change his mind. We might find that the person who made the world and made us like him lets US plan the next step. We might begin to participate in creation, we might begin to take care of what we've been given, we might begin to live like we were meant to. And if we do all of that, we might begin to see that this myth, this fable, this stereo-type of a god is indeed false, but there's something beyond that is bigger and better and REAL.
We might learn that the gods of polytheism are really extensions of ourselves. We might even realize that the current popular idea of a god is, too. It reflects our culture, our society, who WE are. What you think of god is defined by what you think of the world.
Is it possible to step back from ourselves, to step away from our culture and our habits and our pre-conceived notions and actually meet a God who existed before us and outside of us? A God who created us in HIS OWN image instead of us creating him in ours? Is it possible to see beyond the hokum and twaddle and trappings of religion and discover truth? Can we ever take off the lenses that obscure our vision, the lenses of culture and self, and see what is real?
If we can't, we can never truly encounter the creator of the universe, the one who fashioned love and hate, the one who made sun and rain, the one who created joy and pain. That Wild Thing who is far more (and somtimes far less) than we ever imagined.
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