Myself, I love paradoxes. And man, the semantics of the word God is a very weird territory. I really liked some of the exchanges in part one of the Faith and Reason series. For example:

BILL MOYERS: I think the best arguments about God come from atheists.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes, there’s a famous, the great Spanish film director, Luis Bunuel, once teased his friends by saying that he wanted his epitaph on his tombstone to read: “Thank God I died an atheist.” And they were all so upset that he had to tell them he was just kidding.

His point about human beings and their search for the transcendent experience and trying to find a vocabulary for it was also interesting:

BILL MOYERS: I also have in my file something you told NEWSWEEK almost 15 years ago. You said quote, “To try and find the spiritual life without mentioning the name of God is a stupid thing to do.”

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yeah, it’s because we don’t have a vocabulary for it. You know, I mean if you look at the way in which our languages have developed so much of our sense of the transcendent, our sense of ourselves beyond our physical being is, has always been, expressed in religious terms. But it’s actually very hard to find the vocabulary to go in that direction. You know, what do we mean by the word soul for example if we’re not religious? And yet whether we’re religious or not, we have some relationship with that word. We think it means something, you know. And I’ve been trying all my life in a way to try and find a language to express our sense of what is not material, you know, without having recourse to the ready made ideas of religions.

Another of my favorite people who uses the word God is Joseph Campbell. His idea is that belief and faith get in the way of knowing God. My assumption here is that he is talking about a search for the truth, for a transcendent experience.

Karl Jung also had an experience with “God”. As a child, he tried to suppress an image that was trying to enter his consciousness. Finally, he let the image in. It was a picture of God sitting on his “throne” and letting loose a large turd which came down and smashed the Basel cathedral, shattering the roof and breaking the walls asunder. “God”, whatever that was in this case, was above His church and dogma. To me, this was similar to what Joseph Campbell was saying about belief and faith getting in the way of a search for the truth.

Personally, I am an atheist, and don’t like using the word God in a personal, open-minded search for the truth. Primarily, because it is so tainted by the dogmatic invisible sky daddy folks. When I was growing up, I had relatives who engaged in God-speak and Jeebus-speak so much, that it had me wondering, “WTF? What are they talking about? Who let them out of the asylum”? To each his own, but I’ll take another path, thanks.

Hilarious.