Who is God? What is real truth? All I know is my own experience

By David McElroy · January 20, 2017

Who speaks for God? Who has the knowledge, wisdom and authority to say, “In the name of God, this is The Truth”?

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that this week, but few people would find my thoughts satisfying. That’s because people want certainty. They want to say, “This is who God is and what happens after death,” or they want to say, “There is no god and nothing exists outside of the physical world.”

And whatever people believe about God, most of them are eager to tell you that you ought to believe what they believe — or else you’re a sinner or you’re a fool.

How can we even talk about what’s true and what’s not? Everything we believe is built on subjective experience and assumptions. Some of those assumptions are shared with others, but very few of them are specifically defined.

You’re not in my head and heart — and I’m not in yours — so we have very little way of truly understanding the core of what other people believe or experience. In fact, the evidence suggests our minds are so complex that there isn’t even a unitary “me” inside each of us with anything approaching consistency of belief. Some of the parts of our brains literally can’t communicate with certain other parts — and those parts frequently have different needs and wants.

(I can’t even prove anything outside my consciousness exists. I believe the world that I subjectively experience exists in an objective way, but I acknowledge that’s an unproven, fundamental assumption in me. If nobody else exists, my writing is merely me talking to myself and then making up responses from imaginary people.)

For those of us who are certain there is more to reality than just the shared experience of the physical world, how do we determine what we believe?

For almost everybody, the specifics of this belief — which we label theology as a broad category — are driven by culture. We listen to people who say they’re certain, but if you question them, you find they are merely building on assumptions which have been taught to them by others. That doesn’t necessarily mean everything they say is wrong, but a model of truth based on nothing more than “someone told me this often enough that I believed it” isn’t very compelling.

When I was younger, I believed what I was taught theologically and I found it difficult to question the conclusions I was given. These specific words written thousands of years ago are inerrant truth. When there are apparent contradictions in the words, we will find questionable ways to avoid the contradictions. When the words say one thing is true but we do something else today, we ignore that. When we act in ways completely contrary to what the words order us to do, we ignore that, too. And when we make up new rules to add ourselves — saying that the words of the text justify our rules — we pretend that our words have the same authority as we’ve been told to give to the text.

The failure to confront this reality about where our view of truth comes from leaves many Christian young people with nothing to stand on when they finally start asking obvious questions. This leads many, many sincere people — who just want to know the truth — to abandon their faith after they discover that the people who spouted platitudes to them have no intellectual integrity or spiritual depth.

Today, I trust only my own experience of truth, knowing that I can be wrong and also knowing that “I don’t know” is the only honest answer I can give to many questions. I continue seeking God. I continue trying to understand my relationship with God. I continue to reflect on the history and wisdom which a lot of people seeking God have shared in the past.

But I don’t claim to speak for God. I don’t claim to know all Truth.

When I share thoughts and feelings with you, I know that I am simply sharing my experiences, my insights and my conclusions — and I try not to allow my pride to assert anything beyond that.

It seems to me that I can allow my conclusions about truth to be driven by group culture and tradition or by my own experiences and subjective interpretation. Neither is perfect. Neither can lead me to any systematic theology which I can know is The Truth. I can never claim to speak for God — and I suggest you run away from anybody who claims to speak for God.

I’m trying my best to understand what I experience of God and then I sometimes try to share that experience with others. For me, doing that is profound — far more sacred than when I was simply repeating shallow systematic theology from others — but I know it will never make most people happy.

Human beings want certainty. And that’s why so many people — ranging from atheists to fundamentalists — are so eager to say, “This is the truth and you are wrong if you don’t believe what I tell you to believe.”

There’s a lot I don’t know, but I know that I experience a Loving Spirit who I call God. I don’t have any interest in arguing about theology. I don’t have any interest in making it an intellectual game. I’m just interested in sharing a journey of love with others who are just as eager as I am to understand the Spirit from which we came.

I want to experience the love of God and reflect the love of God in this world as well as I possibly can — but please understand that I do not claim to speak for Almighty God.

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Spring always reminds me how glorious blue skies and green leaves can be. When I was in the second grade, Mrs. Arnold chastised me for using those colors together. She said they didn’t match. Mrs. Arnold had very specific rules about which colors could be used together. We couldn’t deviate from her rules. When I used green and blue together in one of my class drawings, she forced me to do it over, since she said those colors shouldn’t be used together. I was a polite and obedient child, but I asked her why they didn’t match — since God used them together in nature. She was exasperated and told me to follow her rules. So when I see glorious beauty which mixes green and blue — such as this photo I took just outside my office Friday afternoon — it always reminds me of Mrs. Arnold. It reminds me that she was wrong. And it’s a good reminder for us all. There are established rules about a lot of things. Many of those are good rules. But if an expert tells you something and you know he’s wrong, you might need to take a chance. He might be just as mistaken as Mrs. Arnold was.

In the coming months and years, we’re going to need inventive and productive people pursuing things that matter. We’re going to need smart and self-directed men and women who will find ideas and create enterprises that will help bypass the political class and build a new and better society. But everything I see in media right now seems geared toward telling people how to entertain and amuse themselves. The stories are full of advice about what to binge on Netflix and what games you should be playing while you’re stuck at home. We desperately need to ignore this advice and be looking toward building new futures instead. Being passive consumers got us where we are today. It’s time that we reclaim our former role — the one that made this country wealthy — as productive and free people who build far more than we consume. This could be a great opportunity for those who will take it. Turn off Netflix. Put down the video game controller. We need new ideas, new achievements, new goals — not more coach potatoes. This is the time to be thinking and creating and planning for the future that you and I both want.

The better I know myself, the more I realize that my core fault — and the source of many other failings in me — is that of believing on a deep level that everyone and everything in my world must be perfect, especially me. If I had seen any of this in myself as recently as 10 years ago, I would have dismissed it as a small failing that showed up only every now and then, but I now see it as the wellspring from which my other sins are born. It’s such an insidious belief — and one that can look on the surface like a reasonable desire to be good and right — that it’s hard to acknowledge it as the inner cancer it is. But until I understood this, it was always going to be impossible for me to get over my deep shame about my imperfection or to accept the love of another person, because she is bound to be flawed, too.

If it’s not yet spring where you are, you can at least enjoy 60 seconds of spring in the South with me. This was just outside my office late Thursday afternoon. Don’t you need a relaxing break today? See it on YouTube by clicking here.

It pays to be nice to the employees at Walmart — and everywhere else, for that matter. I was just in Walmart to buy some kitty litter when one of the employees called me over with a conspiratorial tone: “Hey, David, do you need some toilet paper?” she almost whispered. She had found a giant package hidden somewhere and she said she had been saving it for someone she really liked. So I’m the proud new owner of 24 additional mega rolls of toilet paper, which are worth something like $748 on the black market. On a more serious note, be good to people when you have a chance, as this employee was for me. And remember that people remember the way you treat them. I wouldn’t have treated this woman and her co-workers a bit differently in the past if I’d known she would someday do me this small favor, but there are benefits to treating people well, even if that’s not your purpose. Be good to each other.

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