| by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
( April 18, 2013, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) God has been described as everything from an impersonal life-force to a benevolent, personal, almighty creator. He has been called by many names, including: "Zeus," "Jupiter," "Brahma," "Allah," "Ra," "Odin," "Ashur," "Izanagi," "Viracocha," "Ahura Mazda," and "the Great Spirit" to name just a few. He's seen by some as "Mother Nature" and by others as "Father God”. God, however perceived, is a deity worshipped by followers of monotheistic and monolatrist religions. Believers in God regard their deity as the creator and ruler of the universe. Fundamental tenets of theology ascribe to God characteristics such as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, grace and divine simplicity. God is recognized by most believers as being incorporeal and the source of moral obligation. These beliefs, however founded, have not been empirically proven. However, the last quality – ascribing to God the concept of being the source of moral obligation and behavior - has some foundation in credibility, due to a study conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Their study revealed that priming people with spiritually stimulating words such as “divine”, “God” and “sacred” morally impelled them to be more generous.
The Study, which was published in October 2007 in the Journal of Psychological Science, primarily involved the testing of 125 participants who were required to unscramble sentences. After the tasks were completed they were all given 10 dollars each and the discretion to decide how much of it to give away to strangers. Most members of the group – at least sixty eight per cent -who worked on unscrambling religious sentences gave a major portion of the money away while most who worked on non religious sentences kept nearly all the money.
Deepak Chpra, in his best selling book “How to Know God” marvels at the fact that God remains popular even though one has yet to see God in person. Yet, the silence of God has been quite a contentious issue, seemingly affecting even a saintly figure such as Mother Theresa. The Montreal Gazette of Saturday September 8, 2007 published an article written by Bappa Majumdar of Reuters which stated that, according to her successor, that letters written by Mother Theresa which reveal that she sometimes doubted God surprised and then inspired many among her order. According to this article, the collection of Mother Theresa’s letters written to colleagues and superiors over a period of 66 years and compiled by an advocate of her sainthood, were published on 4 September 2007 under the title “Mother Theresa: Come be My Light”. Although the letters cover a wide range of subjects of interest to the holy nun, those that portray her as being disillusioned and tormented in her longing for God, and being repulsed by silence which led her to lose faith, love and zeal in her mission, are the most compelling and poignant.
The Gazette article also reports the comments of His Holiness Pope Benedict who had declared that Mother Theresa’s torment over the silence of God was not unusual. The Pope is quoted as having said impromptu : “All believers know about the silence of God”. “Even Mother Theresa, with all her charity and force of faith, suffered from the silence of God”.
God’s perceived silence is somewhat antithetical to the approach taken by Neale Donald Walsch in his book “Conversations with God” - a sequence of nine books. Each book is written as a dialogue in which Walsch asks questions and "God" answers. Walsch claims that these dialogues are truly inspired by God. In an interview with CNN’s Larry King on 7 April 2000, Walsch described God’s response to his despair saying that, at a low period in his life, Walsch wrote an angry letter to God asking questions about why his life wasn't working. After writing down all of his questions, he heard a voice over his right shoulder say: "Do you really want an answer to all these questions or are you just venting? As it transpires, although when he turned around he saw no one there, Walsch felt answers to his questions filling his mind and decided to write them down. The ensuing dialogue became the Conversations with God books.
At the interview, Walsch told King: “Larry, I heard a voice clearly as I am hearing now, right over my right shoulder, so clearly, I turned around and thought someone had come into the room. It was 4:30 in the morning, and the voice said, Neale, do you really want answers to all of these questions or are you just venting, and I can recall my response after I got over the shock of not finding anyone there, I thought, well, I am venting, but if you've got answers, I'd like know what they are. And with that, I received the answers to most of the most astonishing questions and the most extraordinary answers, and as they began coming to me and literally filling my mind, I thought I've got to write this down, and I found, fortunately, a yellow legal pad and a pen that had been left there on the coffee table from the day before.
In his first book, Walsch reports that God cautions the reader that words are not the truth, and therefore the reader must ultimately take what is being said and consult their own feelings to determine if they are in agreement with it. The voice of God points out this is true of any other book or words we come across. Though the books bear the title Conversations with God and the author introduces the first book by stating he is "taking dictation" from God, the voice of God in the trilogy explains that the dialogue is God speaking to everyone all the time. The question is not to whom does God talk, but who listens. This is clarified by the statement that God can communicate with you in the next song you hear, the next breeze that caresses your ear, the next conversation you overhear. "All these devices are mine. All these avenues are open to me. I will speak to you if you invite me."
The question is: Is an unseen God communicating to us through all these media? Aimee Moiso of the Presbyterian Church (USA), a student at San Francisco Theological Seminary in California says: “I may never meet anyone who's heard God speak through a burning bush. And I doubt I'll come across someone who's survived being swallowed by a fish. But even in our everyday encounters we have the opportunity to be reminded of the infinite ways our infinite God speaks and to be enriched by them”. This is consistent with Walsch’s report of what God tells him :”God does not reveal Godself to Godself from or through outward observation, but through inward experience. And when inward experience has revealed Godself, outward observation is not necessary. And if outward observation is necessary, inward experience is not possible”. Again, answering the question posed by Walsch whether God is creator and decider of all things in life, God answers: “If you believe that God is the creator and decider of all things in your life, you are mistaken. God is the observer, not the creator, and God stands ready to assist you in living your life, but not in the way you might expect.” This statement is seemingly contradictory to what Deepak Chopra says in his book “How to Know God” when he says that there is no doubt that God has all the power, which he jealously guards (at page 67). However, in the next page Chopra states that in describing God, we could say that God is sovereign; omnipotent; just; the answerer of all prayers; impartial; rational; and organized into rules, all of which are totally consistent with the God of Walsch’s world.
The next question with regard to God’s silence is the one which most atheists ask: why does God, if God is omnipotent and good, let bad things happen to good people?. Prometheus in his “Socrates and Jesus” reports (fictionally of course) of a conversation between Socrates and Jesus where Socrates asks the same question. Socrates asks Jesus why, if God created everything, and if he is good, he created famine, disease and war. Jesus replies that it is not God’s work but the work of Satan. This is of course the classic “good forces versus the forces of evil:” theory. However, Harold S. Kushner, author of “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” says in his book “The Lord is My Shepherd” that in interpreting Psalm 23 which begins with “The Lord is my Shepard, I shall not want…for thou art with me…” One has to note that the primary message of the Twenty Third Psalm is not that bad things will never happen to us. It is that we will not have to face those bad things alone.
Rabbi Kushner also says that religion is first and foremost a source of community( the word religion comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind together” as in the word ligament and that religion binds people together to deal with life’s joyous and sorrowful moments. He points out further that faith in God is pre-eminently an issue of morality. This view meshes well with the view of Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy of McGill University who, in his book “A Secular Age” posits the theory that although we live in a secular world, the present age is inherently conflicted as a result of our intense disquiet with our state of unbelief which often goes undiagnosed. For Taylor, the only way to heal our fractured world is by reconnecting to the spiritual life and rediscovering an intimate connection with the divine.
With regard to what God’s role is in helping us at our times of need and suffering, God answers to Walsch’s question as to why God allows so much suffering in the world, with: “I have put an end to it. You simply refuse to use the tools I have given you with which to realize that. You see, suffering has nothing to do with events, but with one’s reaction to them…I have given you the tools with which to respond and react to events in a way which reduces – in fact eliminates - pain, but you have not used them”. One wonders here whether the discussion is about the application of wisdom in eliminating suffering. If this were the case, God would be the voice that silently, without demonstration, guides us in the cause and effect process of Buddhism which is the ultimate in intellectual introspection.
The venerable Dr Walpola Rahula in his erudite thesis “What the Buddha Taught” says: “The theory of Karma should not be confused with so-called “moral justice” or “reward and punishment”. The idea of moral justice, or reward or punishment, arises out of the conception of a supreme being, a God, who sits in judgment, who is a law giver and who decides what is right and wrong. The term “justice” is ambiguous and dangerous and in its name more harm than good is done to humanity. The theory of Karma is the theory of cause and effect, of action and reaction. It is a natural law which has nothing to do with the idea of justice or reward and punishment”.
Indeed this could be a synergic convergence of one and the same wisdom. The profound, irrefutable wisdom of the Buddhist doctrine of cause and effect, with the spiritual generosity of a God which rests in our intellect guiding our morality with the tools of wisdom given to us. Both doctrines tell us that it is we who guide our destiny. Therein lies the silence of God.
I believe that, in the ultimate analysis, the concept of God reflects intellect and good community values which cannot be killed. In other words, God is the guiding light of our intellect. One cannot exist without the other. I can only conclude by reproducing my translation of G.B. Senanayake’s poem “Deviyan Mereema” (Slaughter of God) as follows:
Thinking that intellect was my friend
I lay in wait one day
and slay my God
The giant that is my intellect
is taking huge steps in the dark behind me
and I hear but, I cannot walk
anymore without doubt
I get up by myself
because there is no longer my God
I could not bear it any longer
So I set out to find
the golden body of my God
by the Maple tree on the way
" My Lord please rise like before
and protect me" I begged
But my God does not awake
because my intellect
is sneering behind me
I cannot kill my intellect
he will never leave me
 God has been described as everything from an impers...){kind=link}