God Who?: A Paradigm for Religious Tolerance and Global Peace

Preface

As we embark on this adventure together, I ask you to temporarily set aside long-held ideas and cherished beliefs you have about God and about religion in general.

Just temporarily!

Nothing in this book will challenge what you now believe.

To the contrary, what you now believe will be strengthened.

I ask only that you open your mind temporarily and allow me to take you on a journey to discover what others believe about God, so we can promote this paradigm for religious tolerance and global peace for the children!

Our goal is to promote religious tolerance as we examine together how others see God and religion without in any way challenging your beliefs or those of anyone else.

Instead of challenging the beliefs of others, this paradigm is quite the opposite.

Our paradigm is an exploration of what’s believed by all religious people occupying this tiny planet with us. We seek similarities in their core beliefs about God, rather than focusing on or arguing over their many differences outside those core beliefs about God.

Our paradigm is a search for truth about which there can be no disagreement, truth that promotes religious tolerance and in time, as we begin to see ourselves and others as members of our shared human race in desperate need of getting along with each other, a path toward global peace that will one day be a welcomed reality.

Please don’t change what you now believe.

Just open your mind to take a quick peek at what others believe.

To see clearly what others believe, please put your own beliefs on the proverbial shelf… just temporarily.

Nothing in this book will attack your beliefs or try to change them in any way.

Just set your mind on learning what others believe and, especially, the core beliefs about God that they all share in common with you and me, though the world does not yet know this undeniable truth!

This book will not challenge what you now believe.

I promise!

Our goal is to build a bridge toward religious tolerance and global peace by examining the core beliefs about God that form the core foundation of everyone’s religion, core beliefs we share already without yet realizing it.

The purpose of this book is to reveal what’s been hidden from you, your loved ones, and from our troubled world far too long.

There are too many bigoted barriers of opinion and viewpoint that divide mankind into warring factions, preventing our establishing and sharing a universal brotherhood that can foster global peace.

Indeed, it is only our bigoted barriers of opinion and viewpoint that trigger violence and war. Nothing else does!

If we can eliminate just one bigoted barrier, we will move mankind a step closer to the global peace too many sacrificed their lives for in our ignorant quest to achieve harmony by the wounds of war.

The oldest of those bigoted barriers, and the easiest to eliminate, is found in the varied opinions and viewpoints of religion. Those barriers disappear when we examine the core view of God shared by all the major religions on our planet and look more closely at a few root causes why so many disbelieve or believe in error.

We can all believe once we banish our religious bigotries and see the core view of God about which all religions agree.

We can look past our differences of opinion that interfere with our seeing God as others do and even our ability to see the God of our own religion more clearly.

Bigoted differences of religious opinion battle against our shared hope for establishing of a lasting global peace.

We need to discard all ideas perpetuating religious intolerance and hold tight to the truth of God and God alone.

The core truths of God shared by all religious people are presented in these pages, along with a few factors that prevent our seeing that we already share those core truths with all religious people.

To promote peace in a world populated by so many multitudes of varying opinions, we must set aside our own opinions temporarily, so we can take an honest, unbiased look at what others believe.

This should be self-evident.

Opinions, after all, are like noses. Everyone has one.

And, everyone holds to his or her own opinions with tenacity that tends to intolerance and builds those barriers we must tear down!

The power of this paradigm is that throughout the world with its many religions, the core beliefs about God are shared without the interference of opinion!

God is not a matter of opinion!

God is truth.

Truth that opens the door to global peace by terminating religious intolerance that persists in perpetuating trouble between nations, intolerance that is the root of war, intolerance that is the enemy of global peace and human happiness.

So, please set aside at least a few of your opinions for the moment and embark with me on this adventure to examine what’s within the hearts and minds of others who, in far too many places on our planet, are causing troubles for us all and promise devastating days ahead for our children and our children’s children if we do not act at once to build a bridge across the boundaries religious bigotries have created since the dawn of time, bigotries we must dispel.

They are impediments to peace.

Your beliefs will be strengthened by this process, not challenged in any way. Indeed, you will gain new appreciation of the core belief in God that now lies at the heart of your very own understanding.

You will have a clearer vision of God than you ever had before.

You will see your God through other eyes.

Same God!

Nothing in this book will challenge what you now believe.

When you finish the book, you will share the paradigm presented, be motivated to promote the purpose of the paradigm, and extend your hand of fellowship more freely to foreign peoples you don’t yet truly understand, teaching unbiased tolerance and promoting peace by tearing down unnecessary walls of division between us.

What you now believe will be stronger, for you will see God from new angles, new perspectives that you will readily embrace, new visions that will in no way obscure views you now have of God.

Your eyes will be opened to good things, liberating thoughts, new ways of worshipping God and receiving God’s counsel that you likely have not known nor yet begun to understand.

Where today you have small doubts, your doubts will fade away.

Your faith will be firmer.

You will know what other people believe about God and discover they believe the same as you!

You will discover how we can work together to promote religious tolerance and a lasting global peace.

Tolerance and peace between nations, tolerance and peace between diverse cultures, tolerance and peace between denominations and sects of religions blindly competing for preeminence.

You will learn the core truths all religions teach about the deity we westerners call God.

Robert Browning wrote, There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fullness; and around, wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, this perfect, clear perception that is truth.

God is truth, and deep within us all we know God as truth.

You will find there is wide room for agreement as we search for the core of what you now believe, the Eternal One that is and was and ever shall be, our benefactor, our life, our shared soul, our only hope, the sheet anchor of our faith.

Yet, as Joseph Conrad warned, The anchor is an emblem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse than the most fallacious of false hopes that ever lured men or nations into a sense of security.

The God we find in other religions is their hope as well as ours, a sure and certain anchor in the greatest storms of life.

Your God is the same God other religions also seek, though they seek in different ways, different viewpoints, strange practices, but all in an effort to understand age-old questions that have plagued mankind from the beginning of time, questions we can only begin to answer as we search for truth in God.

None of the particulars you’ve been taught by leaders of your own brand of religion will be changed in any way.

You will have a clearer view of the Eternal One at the core of all religious faiths and the impediments that stand in the way of our promoting religious tolerance and universal faith in God.

The same God in whom your faith and mine is firmly rooted.

The One and Only God.

The core of our shared faith.

The rock of our salvation.

The anchor of our hope.

We will penetrate to the foundation of what you already believe as we discover that others fix their faith on that same foundation!

We will push through the obscuring veils of private interpretations to discover indisputable truths of God and God’s nature, truths too often hidden by unimportant trappings and traditions, obscured by ritual practices, buried in superstitions, and confused by fables we teach young children to believe and so start their tiny lives on an uncertain spiritual footing.

God is the uncreated creator. All religions agree. Even your own!

It’s too easy to get caught up in doctrines, new-age theologies, and many other inconsequentials religion is heir to.

Some people are captivated by eschatology’s predictions of the future based only on private interpretations of sacred texts.

Others argue over matters of pure opinion that pretend to unmask life’s unknowables.

Many take sides in a host of religious debates just for the fun of arguing or to be seen by their peers as someone who is spiritually advanced, someone who can be trusted by an obedient following of mindless sheep too timid to think for themselves and thus unable to ever find the truth that is God.

Every religion is splintered by this incredible nonsense.

Meanwhile, children of our world endure constant catastrophes of war, famine, disease, hunger, and hopelessness that foments such tragedies as school shootings, mental suicide by drug abuse, or the increasing practice of decorating themselves with badges of tattoos that give them a false sense of individuality in a world that has no longer any room for children to express their true individuality and unique talents.

We are wounding our children and their children’s children as we continue this foolish religious competition that spills over into our many other spheres of life; our courts, our legislatures, our media, ourselves.

The nonsense must stop.

This paradigm offers a start toward putting it behind us.

Wisdom does not delight in divisive denominational debates that accomplish nothing other than to separate us when we most need to be united by bonds of love to promote the global peace we all desire, a world where intolerance is a thing of the past.

Truth is too often twisted by self-interested religious opinions.

We choose one religious leader over another because he¹ says what we want to hear, and in all the trappings of religious intolerance we lose sight of the sacred heart that should be religion’s primary goal, its number one guiding light, the heart each of us desperately needs within ourselves, guiding us to the truth by God’s still small voice, empowering us with love and wisdom we need to promote peace.

For the children’s sake let us work together to rid the world of all intolerance, starting with religion!

God is the same in every religion!

See past the outer trappings of your religion to find the core out of which all religions spring, the core of your religion, no matter what your religion may be if, indeed, you ascribe to any at all.

God is!

Give up nothing of what you now believe while opening your heart and mind to the inescapable, unchallengeable truth that you are not alone at the core of what you now believe.

Look for God outside the man-made walls of religion that keep you in and everyone else out.

Understand what religion really is!

Religion is not God!

Religion is religion.

God is God.

Once you see God more clearly through the paradigm of this book that opens your eyes to the core of what others believe about God, you’ll transcend your religion’s trappings and traditions. You will appreciate the core belief about God all religions share and see that you also share that same core belief!

Eternal truth is always true, regardless of the peculiar viewpoints from which we each see it. And, we do all see it differently, while it obstinately remains Eternal truth.

God is not constrained by what any of us choose to believe.

We constrain ourselves by believing what we are taught to believe, refusing to look beyond what fallible humans proclaim as truth.

God remains God… no matter what we individually or corporately believe about God.

Only truth is true.

Nothing else is!

So, let’s begin.

Chapter One

Defining Reality

Atheists who say they don’t believe in God and agnostics who say they aren’t sure, have not yet considered the paradigm offered by this book and know little or nothing about what the many religions of this world hold as their core beliefs about God.

Atheists insist there is no God, yet secretly wish they were wrong and would happily abandon their rejection of God if only the core reality of God were explained to them in terms they could accept as reasonable.

This book does just that.

Agnostics claim they just aren’t sure if God is real, because the reality of God has never been explained to them in terms they can accept as reasonable.

This book makes belief in God reasonable.

As the Bhagavad Gita proclaims, That which is can never cease to be. That which is not will not exist. To see this truth of both is theirs who part essence from accident, substance from shadow.

To achieve our goal and promote religious tolerance, we’re going on a little word adventure into something that exists.

I will ask you to think about something.

It may seem a bit strange at first, but I promise it will be quite clear as you read on.

The something I want you to think about is IT.

IT is undefined at the moment but will soon be explained. You will be pleased with the explanation and what the explanation offers.

Just think about IT.

Ponder the word.

Two letters containing an amazing mystery you’re about to see, a mystery we’re about to unveil together, a mystery that will then no longer be a mystery but, instead, become a lasting truth to which you will hold fast with unflinching faith for the rest of your life.

No more wavering faith!

No more doubt!

IT is our launching pad toward religious tolerance and faith.

So, for the moment, just imagine there is such a thing as IT.

Now, consider the universe as IT.

The universe of stars and planets, daffodils and dynamite, bugs, trees, molecules, and mitochondria in every cell of our bodies.

Put all those things inside our IT.

We now have a start.

Now, let’s add the invisible laws that govern the behavior of all the things in our universe.

Scientists know the universe is ordered by fixed laws guiding stars and planets in their paths across our sky, causing trees to grow and turning liquid water into ice in winter or steam when heated on our stoves to brew a cup of tea.

There’s no debate about this. No room for doubt or disagreement.

All we know is governed by laws like gravity, magnetism, and the tendency of living things to keep on living as long as they can.

Within us and around us these laws are obeyed by things that make up what we call our natural world, the universe within us and the universe around us, outside us.

Everything from race car engines to the strange way microscopic amoeba oddly multiply by dividing their gooey little bodies into two separate gooey little bodies that, in a few hours, divide again and again ad infinitum, each new gooey little creature a separate organism with a gooey little mind of its own, the will to divide!

Our universe is ordered by natural laws controlling everything from that famous apple dropping from a tree on Isaac Newton’s head to tiny candles burning in a lonely Christmas window.

All is controlled by natural laws scientists seek to understand and quantify, natural laws that are predictable, natural laws that are so certain we depend on their constancy to send men to the moon, to probe distant planets, to look deep into the core of cancer cells, and to use giant electromagnetic machines to investigate the behavior of sub-atomic particles far too tiny to see.

Everything we know is guided and controlled by natural laws.

Scientists, atheists, priests, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, and every rational person on earth must agree!

There is no room for disagreement.

What’s true is true!

The universe around us and the biological functions within us are all governed and controlled by natural laws that seem constant in any given environment.

No room for dispute. On this we can and must agree. There is no room for belligerent intolerance.

Natural laws exist and do control the universe and all that’s in it.

This is not a religious issue open for doctrinal or denominational