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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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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