My God

Some say there is one God.

Some say three.

Some say thirty-three million.

Some say a force, not a person.

Some say there is none at all.

I’m not here to say who’s right. Every one of these positions has been argued by people far more equipped than I am to argue them, and none of those arguments has settled anything in several thousand years of trying. I’m here to say something smaller: what I found when I stopped trying to referee the argument, and asked what I actually believed instead.

Start by taking things away. Take away a god who steps in to fix things. Take away a god who rewards the good and punishes the bad. Take away a god who keeps score at all. What’s left isn’t nothing. An unintervening maker isn’t new — it’s close to what deism proposed three centuries ago. Acting without expecting anything back isn’t new either — it’s close to what the Bhagavad Gita calls nishkama karma, action without attachment to its fruit. Neither is the plain idea that some things are yours to carry and some things aren’t — that’s most of what Stoicism is. None of these pieces are mine. Putting them together, in this order, for myself, is.

So this is where the sources end and my own formulation begins.

He exists. I exist. He made me — I don’t know how, and it doesn’t matter — and his only directive is the existence he gave me: to live. Not to live well, not to live right. Just to live. It comes with everything living implies: the freedom to choose, and the weight of what follows those choices.

He is busy — not elsewhere, not distracted, just unavailable for the job of watching. He doesn’t judge. He doesn’t keep track. Good, bad, ugly — that’s mine to carry, not his to weigh. He doesn’t ask for an offering from me. He doesn’t watch what I do. He did his job. Now I do mine.

Other people find judgment, ritual, and accountability real and necessary in their own belief. This isn’t an argument that they’re wrong — it’s just not where I ended up.

This isn’t proof of anything, and it isn’t what God is. It’s the God I can live with. Believing there’s a maker is what keeps this a belief in God at all; that he isn’t checking my work is just the kind of maker I’ve decided he is.

What’s left to me is the plain stuff: what I choose, what I do, and what comes of it. Not everything that happens to me. Just what’s mine.

Sources

• Bhagavad Gītā 2.47, trans. Kashinath Trimbak Telang, The Bhagavadgītā, Sacred Books of the East, vol. 8 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882)
• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1794)
• Epictetus, Enchiridion, opening line (“Of things, some are in our power, and others not”), trans. Elizabeth Carter (1758)