Humblism

Humblist Principles for a
Relationship with God

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Part 1

At some point in our lives most of us attempt to work out what our position is with regard to God, religion and the spiritual world in general. For some this is easy, and for others it is harder. For me this has been an ongoing process for many years. I've decided to write down my conclusions and my thought processes, partly in case they might be of use to someone else taking this journey, but more importantly so that I can reference them myself in future for my own spiritual guidance.

So to get started, let me say from the outset that I choose to believe in God. I have no greater insight into whether God really exists or not than most, but I like the comfort of believing in something that brings everything together into a collective whole. When times are hard it's nice to be able to turn to someone or something and say “can you help?”

Having chosen to believe in God I had to work out what my relationship to God would be. This could have been simple. I could have simply followed the religion that was closest to my front door. But is that the right one to choose? Most religions seem to say that they are the only route to God, and choosing the wrong one presumably means that the relationship I'm seeking with God won't materialise! And, in my opinion, many religions have been responsible for what I consider to be many evil acts and atrocities, and I didn't want the God that I wanted to believe in to be associated with such acts.

So I needed to think deeper about God.

I've concluded that God is big. Very big. Really too big for us to understand. Most religions attempt to say what God is and what God is not. How a life should be lived according to God and how a life should not be lived. I think one of the problems of religions is that they attempt to give answers when possibly the human spirit hasn't matured enough to provide such answers. I'm prepared to believe that our understanding of God is in proportion to how big our planet is in relation to the Universe itself; very, very tiny.

As a result, none of us can profess to have a truly deep understanding of God and so no one's opinion is significantly more informed than anyone else's.

This is down to our human limitations. While it is true that our understanding of the world around us has increased significantly since we were floating around as single celled creatures in the ocean, we still have a very long way to go. Therefore we should be prepared to accept that, like an adult trying to explain something complex to a child, however brilliant God may be, our limitations currently prevent us from fully understanding what God is saying. Admittedly prophets may have had a greater insight into God, but they were still in turn limited by the human limitations of the rest of us, and so, despite their brilliance, they will in turn not have been able to fully describe the nature of God.

In short, when attempting to say what God does or does not want us to do, we need to admit that we don't have all the answers, if any. To do otherwise would be arrogant, pretentious, and disrespectful of the true awesomeness of God. We need a large amount of humility. We need to be humble.

Over time, as we humans improve, we will no doubt understand God better. But we have a long way to go.

For example, we often try to describe what God looks like. But I think it is truly beyond us to understand the form of God at the moment. Whether God is one entity, many entities that combine as a sort of united committee, or possibly many entities, is too big a question for us to grapple with at this time in our development. And using the notions of Him or Her when applied to God is making assumptions that are well beyond what we are capable of making at this time.

I sometimes imagine what two computers would say when trying to work out what their creator was like. Based on what we humans often come up with, they would conclude that their creators had really fast multi-core processors, maybe a whole array of discs and a hyper speed internet connection. Obviously they are wide off the mark, but most likely no further from the mark than we humans are when trying to describe God.

We need to be prepared to accept that God is God, and whatever God is, that's about as far as we can go with our current development. And as long as we can engage in a dialogue with God, that's actually all we need to know!

In the same way that it is difficult to know the nature of God, it is often difficult for us to know what God wants us to do, and how God wants us to do it. That's why we have so many religions. And why I've had to spend so long working out how I should relate to God.

And I've concluded that God is not too bothered about how we relate to God. As we know, there are a number of religions. And a number of religions have split into different factions, such as the Catholic/Protestant, and Sunni/Shi'a. At first you have to wonder why God allows these splits. Surely they undermine the credibility of God. If there was one thing that was important to God, surely it should be how we relate to God. But then the penny drops; God isn't bothered about the details of how we relate to God. The important thing is that we do relate to God. The details of “How” we relate to God is unimportant.

I like to capture this by saying “There are many ways to say Thank You.” Just in English you can say “Thank You”, “Thanks”, “Cheers”, “I really appreciate that.” And then there are the ways to say Thank You in all the other languages of the world, such “Merci”, Danke” and so on. None of them is more correct than any of the others, and all of them are valid. What is important is the feeling from the heart. How that feeling is expressed is unimportant.

This does not mean that we should give up Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism and so on. But if God does not mind how we worship God, then we should not mind how our fellow humans worship God. We should unite in that we do worship God rather than dividing over the way we worship God.

True, this is not easy. But for the sake of our belief in God – and ourselves – we should try. We need to be humble and recognise that as humans our understanding of God is limited and will be for a long time to come.

But that doesn't mean that we have to stop practising our chosen religion for in many cases they are the best way we know how to worship, and thank, God. So while our religion might be the 'right' religion for us, we should not consider the religions that our fellow humans follow as any less 'right' than our own. Just different.

So we need to accept our limitations in our ability to understand the true nature of God and be humble. By being humble, we become Humblist Christians, Humblist Muslims, Humblist Jews, or Humblist followers of whichever religion we adopt.

Part 2

I said earlier that I was struggling to decide which religion I should adopt. As I mentioned, this is not because I feel they are wrong in some way. It's more the case that because they all have equal validity I couldn't decide which one to follow!

This presents the problem of how I should conduct my relationship with God. I've written this section primarily for my own purposes, as a way of documenting my beliefs at this time. While much of it is very personal, I think there are some ideas that someone of any religion can share and that's why I've chosen to include it here. If you find any ideas here that are helpful to you, please feel free to pick and choose them as you like.

But before I start, let me state categorically that I'm not putting forward a new religion here and I'm not putting myself forward as some kind of prophet. While in some respects it would be nice to be a prophet and be able to help people, I am under no illusion that such a role is well beyond what I am capable. Even with God's help I would fall well short. True, it would be nice to heal the sick, but I have to be honest and say that if I was that determined to help the sick, I would have studied to become a doctor! I also, perhaps because I'm a coward, value my privacy and enjoy being able to go about my daily affairs as an anonymous individual within the crowd. Being a prophet wouldn't allow that.

So how do I have a relationship with God? I think the first thing is to start a conversation with God; to pray if you like. But how should I pray? I'm not really sure of the mechanics of it; whether I should be sitting, laying down or whatever. What I do think is important is not to present God with a list of demands when praying and then immediately revert to your daily business. Don't just say I want this, this and this to happen, and then immediately return to your daily life. Instead ask for help and guidance that enables you to achieve what you want. For example, don't just pray and say, “Please God, give me a big house.” Instead, pray that God can help you work out how you can get a big house.

The second important thing, the really important thing, is to give God a chance to answer! Once you've said your piece, just stop talking and listen. Wait to see what God has to say. You may find that God doesn't give you a direct answer. For example, in the above case God may suggest you get a new job. You may then find that you need to pray to ask what sort of job you should get or how you should find such a job. Thus you end up with a dialogue with God. As such, look upon God as a coach, a teacher, or even a parent; not as a servant who is there to do your bidding.

This raises the question, “why doesn't God just do as we want?” I think it's because God wants to see us grow and develop. We are God's creation, along with all the other animals, plants, mountains and the rest of the universe. It's one thing to create something that's static and inanimate, but, as any parent knows, it's a far greater thing to have a part in creating something that can evolve and develop in its own way, and that you can interact with. And I think that that's God's plan for us.

This does touch upon the creationism versus evolution debate. I have no greater insight into the true answer to this than anybody else, but if I was a God I think I would put in place the process of evolution as this is much more interesting than just creating what you want and then having it (fairly) statically persist forever. Watching things evolve and develop, is a far greater adventure. And it's not like the enormous time scales required for evolution to take place can be a problem for God. Indeed, quite the opposite. The time-scales talked about by creationists seem to box in and under estimate the true awesomeness of God. It seems like a reflection of the limitations of our human ancestors than the true breadth of the glory of God. Accepting that we humans are limited, and we can not fully understand all that is God, I can imagine a dialogue of how this limited timespan may have come about,:

“So God, please tell me how the Earth was created.”

“Well, 4 billion years ago I created...”

“4 billion! That sounds like a big number.”

“Yes it is. Anyway, 4 billion years ago...”

“Is it bigger than 40?”

“Oh yes, much bigger than 40. So, ...”

“Is it bigger than 4 hundred?”

“Yes, much bigger than that. But it's really not that important. 4...”

“Is it bigger than 4 thousand?”

“It's not that important.”

“So we can say 4 thousand years ago?”

“Yes, if you like.”

This is of course complete fabrication, but if nothing else it does give some illustration of how God might have to adapt a message in order that we can have a dialogue with God. And it does hold out the hope, that, over time, we will improve and be in a better position to understand what God has to say to us, in much the same way that as a child grows he or she can better understand what adults say to them in response to the questions they ask.

I do find the analogy of the child/parent (or child/teacher) very insightful and I do feel that this echoes many aspects of our relationship with God. There is joy in watching how a child develops and learns. There is joy in seeing how a child could do something one day that they couldn't do the day before. And I can only hope that God feels similar joy when looking at us.

And like a parent has to give a child freedom to experiment and experience life for themselves, even in the knowledge that they may occasionally hurt themselves as a result of what they are doing, God gives us freedom knowing that although in the short term it maybe painful and difficult, in the long term it is in our best interest.

Admittedly some of the purpose in a parent allowing their child the freedom to grow is so that the child can survive when the parent dies. God on the other hand will always be there, and does have the option to remove all suffering if God thought it was appropriate. So why doesn't God do this?

I think this is because God has created us to be very adaptive creatures. Something is only joyous because it is exceptionally good. And by “exceptionally good” I mean it is an exception that it is good. If it was good all the time, then it would cease to be joyous. It would just be ordinary and possibly get a boring. Hence by removing suffering (and sadness and all such other emotions) God would also be removing joy, and I don't think many of us would take that trade if given the choice.

At the extremes of this, some people seem to suffer excessively, and others die before their time. Why does God allow this? I don't know the true answer to this, but it is a reminder that there are no guarantees in this life, and that we can't take it for granted. If we want to achieve something then we had better start thinking about it today, rather than just putting it off to sometime in the future. Otherwise we would drift through life, and when our time was up we would have nothing of merit to look back on. And perhaps as a result those of us that do not die early, or do not have extreme suffering benefit from those who do.

But making those decisions about who should live and who should die must be truly awful. It's like a general who sends soldiers into a battle knowing that many of them won't return, but it is for the greater good. And I believe God makes those decisions not because they are easy, but they are the best for the greater good. Just remember those heroes that died or suffer so that we may make the most of our lives. In many respects they have died or suffer so that we might live.

One problem with our greater understanding of the universe is that we have chased out the places where God might “live”. No longer can we look skyward and really say God lives there, in the heavens. But science has suggested some alternatives. Theories such as string theory suggest that the universe is not made up of just the three dimensions that we see, plus a time dimension, but may in fact have a many as 11 dimensions. I don't understand all the implications of these various theories, but it does open the way to a place where God can exist, without being seen. The really exciting thing is that it allows God to be really close to us. It allows some other really exciting things as well.

If you're not familiar with thinking about worlds containing a different numbers of dimensions, it helps to think of a world that exists entirely on a piece of paper. Ignoring time, this is a two dimensional world. In such a world anybody can effectively look left, right, forwards or backwards, but not up or down. If you used a three dimensional cone to pierce a hole through the paper anybody living in the world would see a circle or some kind of oval appear, but wouldn't be able to see that it was made by a cone. (The Flatland story describes such as world.)

Now imagine a 10 cm square within this two dimensional world. It would be quite possible for another object to be just above it (or below it), by just a few fractions of a millimetre, and the square wouldn't even know it was there! In fact the other object would even be nearer to the square than the square's left side was to its right side! In this analogy I would be the square (although I live in a three dimensional world) and God would be the other object, being extremely close while I still wasn't directly aware of God being there. But I can imagine God being that close to me, and all of the rest of the universe.

Imagine now taking something like a 3 pronged fork and piercing the prongs through the piece of paper. To the square living in the two dimensional world three separate objects would appear. But we know that they are all part of the same object. If you broke off one of the fork's prongs, the square would think that the other two prongs were unaffected. But we know otherwise. So in our three dimensional world, while we appear separate and isolated, we may all be interconnected in another dimension. And not just connected to other humans, but to the other animals, plants, mountains and every other aspect of the universe. So when we harm someone else, or something else, we may well be harming ourselves due to the way we are all interconnected.

Lastly, one problem of developing your own relationship with God rather than following an already established religion is that you don't have the framework of principles to guide you through your life. Without the centuries to develop such a system I've had to look for something simpler. And it seems to capture the essence of many religions. That is to “love thy neighbour.” By “love”, I mean to respect, help, listen to. Especially “listen to”, particularly before making any judgement about them.

Above all... Be Tolerant. Be Humble. Be a Humblist.