Your God Is Too Big.

By the year 2010 C.E., Adam had got rather confused about God. 

Having begun by being powerless against nature, he had worshiped power, and imagined a king great enough to confound his irrelevance in the universe.

Having a fear of oppression, he had worshiped the power of self-sacrificial love.

Having conceived great civilizations and having seen them crumble, he imagined perfect justice and stability.

"Oh, fuck it," he said.  "Let's just get All Being And Whatever Is Bigger Than All Being on the table and get it over with."  So he worshiped that, and its monstrosity hung over Adam's head demanding, "...of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, you must not eat, for in the day you eat of it, I shall surely die."

And there for a little while, Adam blinked, because All That Was was a little dark at times, and the world was loaded up with death, and Adam looked at the Very Bigness of God and wondered in his secret heart, "WTF?"

But having always at his throat the presence of death, he kissed the feet of Life, and worshiped, and worshiped, and begged it not to desert him.

And having lost all desire in the shadow of God's Great Bigness, he set god up as an idol and worshiped him, not a thing that Is, but a phantom.

Poor Adam.  Poor little Humankind.  

For all that he worshiped taps lightly at the door of his heart, and when he opens, in it comes, and sups with him, and he with it, a living thing, beautiful and gentle and filled with grace.

But he has preferred the thing that he tells himself Is, but which is not and never was.

-- Book of Otter

Stephen Clark neatly describes what he thinks (and I think) is exactly the wrong way to go about talking about God:

I am exasperated by people who treat God as if He were Superyeti, a creature that might or might not exist, might or might not be worshipful. "God", like cognate terms in any of the mainstream monotheistic religions, including theistic Hinduism, does not refer simply to an imagined Director of Megabig Incorporated, Cosmic Engineers. There is clearly no way of proving that there is no such entity, or that there never will be, but its existence need have no more religious significance than any of the superior beings encountered in Star Trek. If it claimed "divine status" most mainstream monotheists would reckon it deranged (or diabolical)!

Putting it a little more simply (?), religion by the  has got the thing the wrong way around.

You don't worship What You Know Is There.

You worship what is good.  You worship what you desperately long for and need.

It's sometimes thought that you can or should  "only worship the greatest thing that is."  Okay, fair enough: start with being.  Being is good, and there's nothing bigger that you know of.

But recognize that you worship cancer, tidal waves, the sun going out.  I'm good with it if you are.  But let's not get confused over things like "Providence": these are difficulties we make for ourselves by worshiping the Very Big God.  Job knew it.  I know it.  You know it.

I think though that many scriptures begin from another place: the worship of the thing that is good, not the thing that is huge and that you hope is good.  You know it is there.  You believe it is good.  You want it to reign forever and ever.

With luck, your belief that it is there makes it so.

With the greatest luck ever, maybe it's got powers you never dreamed of until your belief sweeps before it mountains and oceans and stars like so much dust into a pan that you sift for diamonds and gold.