Reverse-Engineering God

I’ve been reverse-engineering God for a few months now, but really I’ve been working on this project for my entire thinking existence, going back to when I was a kid and I studied the bible for Sunday school and to compete in a Church of Christ youth event called bible bowl. Recently, though, I’ve made a few breakthroughs, which I expressed in a post called “The Voice of God”. That piece happened because a handful of threads started to coalesce in my thinking. One of these is simply clearing away as much of my previous filters as possible and just looking at the universe for what it is, from my limited vantage point as a talking ape. When I did that, I ended up noticing quite clearly that God doesn’t care. Next, it strikes me that the proper, most resilient, most powerful response to that is humor, and that humor doesn’t make any sense otherwise. Humor seems to tap into God’s universal nature. Thirdly, I wrote that God plays dice, a reference to Einstein’s dislike for the the probabilities of quantum theory. Quantum theory seems to be telling us that there’s a certain element of chance in the fabric of things, something Einstein did not like. He wanted an orderly and predictable physics. I didn’t base my acceptance of this element of chance as a facet of God because I’m good at quantum mechanics, because I most certainly don’t understand it at all, but instead it came from my noticing that things do sometimes happen that defy the odds, and that humans create their own games of chance to utilize this function of reality. It’s one component of the three that I’m least sure about.

The second thread comes from the dissolution of a relationship with a woman who adamantly practiced moralistic therapeutic deism, which she called Christianity, but actually MTD has no real link to historical Christianity. Think about it as a sort of American-style neo-religion with all the consumerist hedonism grafted onto it, plus popular feel-good psychology. I would study this woman like a biologist taking field notes to try to understand what was making her tick and go in for this shit, because this church-life was a centerpiece of her existence. I attended Church with her a few times, and I found it apalling what they did there, in a base-level gut-level way. It just rubbed me wrong. It was the brand of Christianity I had long avoided, the hands-waving saccharine me-me-me stuff soaked in syrupy and mauldlin Jesus-rock and a overt fake-smiling fraudulence. It served her basic needs somehow. Personality-wise, she was shallow, vain, and completely incurious about the world she inhabited. She existed not as a rational creature, but as an emotional animal; everything about her first-hand experience was filtered through her emotional states, how it made her feel, and these states were in perfect harmony with her Christianity filter. A blog post I wrote titled “The Rhetorics of Christian Revival”, published here in 2022, but which I wrote in 2021, arose from my studying that woman and her church-life.

Let me pause here and give the five characteristics of moralistic therapeutic deism or MTD:

1. A God exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

You’ll notice that each of these five characteristics of MTD is wrong to varying degrees and for different reasons. The first one is defied by first-hand experience. The second one pretends that God wants something from humans. The third one is stupid on it’s face. Happiness is not a realistic goal because it is an emotional state. The fourth one highlights the self-centered consumerist hedonism exactly, that God is only good when one needs something from him, as if humans can petition God to be their own personal wish-granting genie. The last one again defies first-hand experience about death.

I’m going to come back to this later, but suffice it to say here that I claimed in my “The Voice of God” post that Christianity was a false religion, and I stand by that claim, but I need to add caveats based on what I can say is true right now that it is this bastardized version called MTD that I am talking about, and it isn’t actually Christianity at all. I need some time to investigate historical Christianity a little more deeply. As of this writing, I can’t tell you with precision how it isn’t Christianity, just that it isn’t. Bigger picture, though, is that we have a real truth problem here, that God is Truth, and that systems which conceal or obfuscate truth, or that stymie truth-seeking are divorced from God. What I wonder is if Christianity was always divorced from truth, and that’s a question I’m going to look into going forward.