The purpose of religion isn’t to show us God, but to incarcerate God in a controllable concept, one that would benefit that religion. That’s how it’s worked since Constantine; it is human nature, and religion is a human enterprise. I’m not saying that all religion is evil, or even bad. Those that teach hate, injustice, and cruelty as part of their process of incarcerating God are. Those that teach love, justice, and encouragement are good, but limit God to keep him contained within their traditions. Kindergarten is good for its purpose, but it can become a liability after more than a year.

I spent more than half my life in religion. Maybe it helped at first, but the God it tamed and chained to a stake in the ground was too small. The best mystery, but a manufactured emotional experience. The problem with the one-book system of Luther is that the Bible is a Bronze Age vestige and, while profitable for some things, such as teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, by itself, it has God confined to a Bronze Age zoo. It has to, because Bronze Age men wrote it, living in a cosmos limited to dozens of miles and what the naked eye could see. Even when we make the Bible our idol, or a book of magic, it doesn’t help, yet reduces God to an even simpler actor.

The other book, of Augustine and Aquinas, that is creation itself, sets God free. When I discovered it, my life, my relationship with God, was forever changed. When I studied biochemistry, cosmology, relativity, then quantum mechanics, and finally string theory, my mind was completely blown. The size and mystery of God are beyond what mere human language can define, and religion is impotent to explain.

I worked hard to create two Sunday school classes to gently introduce science (the study of the truth about creation); both times the only feedback I received was a man who scolded me, saying in a snarl, “Mike, we don’t find God in science… God finds us.” I felt as if I had thrown my pearls before the swine.

My relationship with God is incredibly beautiful right now due to my studies of science, not in spite of them. Being forced into isolation for three years, due to my cancer and the COVID pandemic, took me to meditative places far beyond what I thought was possible. This is the way I am, but I feel forced to give this all up in order to participate in religion, and that choice is one of the most stressful things in my life. My Bronze Age God of my evangelical days is a hamster on a wheel, a God who found me parking spaces, a God who was so insecure that he had to hate certain people groups and spew wars, cultural and real.

If you are like-minded with me, I encourage you to begin with a Christian book, Return of the God Hypothesis, followed by a book written by a true seeker of truth, an agnostic in title who knows more about the character of God than the greatest monk who ever lived, Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe.

For those for whom this sounds strange, and who have no interest in studying creation to learn more about the creator, I only beg you, plead with you, to give up your competitive piety long enough to allow us to exist in your religious institutions. Don’t force those who ask questions out of your churches. If you keep doing this, your pews will be empty before long. We do not see ourselves as superior to you; please don’t do that to us. If we have to choose between you and the wild God we’ve found… we will go with the feral.

Respectfully,

Mike