My alter ego Patrick Hannigan meditates on the "spiritual but not religious" trope:
The ragtop was down, the radio played “Drift Away,” and the sky was baby blue over the raked edge of my windshield, but a sand-in-my-shoe comment I’d seen a few hours before kept me from singing backup for Dobie Gray. “This world is too big for one god.” That’s what it said under “Religious Views” on the Facebook page in my head.As we know, if we know only one thing in this life, it takes a whole lot of existential angst to keep a man from singing backup to "Drift Away."
I know the man who said that, though not well. I wish he had said something I could agree with, like “God is too big for any one religion” (not a problem unless you think religion is for boxing God in rather than for listening to what He says).
Still, I find myself drawn to the “big world, small god” comment. Its author and I graduated within a year of each other from the same Catholic high school in Hawaii where Brother Stanich was a master of Socratic dialog, and Brother Maloney taught Latin while suffering excuses like “Bruddah! I cannot translate da kine! I got scoliosis!”
With that in common, I’m in no position to tell Facebook Guy that my karma ran over his dogma. But it’s hard to keep from asking whether he lingered too long in the cul-de-sac shared by professional throat-clearers who make a living from the premise that all religions are more or less equal. However he came by that “big planet, small god” point of view, it must be challenged, and there’s no better place to start than with astronomy: Earth is not big when compared to other worlds. Many things about Earth are special, but by galactic standards, our planet checks in with average mass at best. On a beach patrolled by giants like Jupiter and Saturn, Earth would get sand kicked in its face. If this world really were bigger than any one god, then Mr. Facebook Philosopher would only have transposed the question about whether God could make a rock heavier than He could lift into a new key, and there’s no harmonic convergence or sense there, either.
The idea that "This world is too big for one god" shares all of the trendy, self-important, slogan posing as deep thought that sets my teeth on edge when I hear "spiritual but not religious." What it says is that the sloganeer has never done the hard work of thinking about a God who is love and who is infinite in that He knows no limits and whose will keeps everything we know in existence at every moment and who knows things not from the outside "looking down from heaven," but from the inside because His knowledge is our existence and if He stops knowing us then we cease to exist. This world is not too big for that God, albeit it is too big for the god of the liberal theologians for whom god is a feeeling or a social welfare community organizer.
Small gods, small people.
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