If the question is “Why?” God may not always be the answer

I was a very curious child and would constantly ask my parents, “Why?” again and again. The… I was a very curious child and would constantly ask my parents, “Why?” again and again. The answer was always, “Because God made it that way.”

As I got older, the answers became much more varied, but there are some who still fall back on that same answer.

God, among other things, is a crutch.

God can help you out when you’re broken. My maternal grandmother died a few years ago, and I don’t think my mother would have been able to deal with the loss without the help of God.

God can sometimes answer the deep spiritual questions that we face in times of crisis. For some, God serves as a moral guideline. But as soon as you turn to organized religion or a book for how to resolve all issues and decide the outcome of all arguments, you are placing responsibility outside yourself. You are using the crutch to do the thinking for you, to make the important decisions in the place of your own rationality.

This would be fine if the clergy and the church were as pure as they tell everyone they are, but many are not, and there are some who use the name of God to control the minds of others, bending them toward hate — deceiving in the name of God.

I should mention first that almost every person I’ve ever talked to has found the Bible, the Torah and the Quran to be peaceful, non-violent and inspiring books.

Every excerpt from the gospel that I’ve read makes me think Jesus Christ was an all right dude, feeding the poor, healing the sick. I can get behind that. He’s a good guy to model yourself after, if you model yourself after anybody.

Still, the mentality of placing responsibility outside yourself, relegating your decision-making to something or someone other than you, makes it possible for people like Osama bin Laden to dictate what the “will of God” is for 17 lunatics. Likewise, putting your faith in religious leaders and their interpretations of what God would say has made it possible for people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to tell millions of otherwise sane people that homosexuality is a disease and AIDS is God’s cure. People will use the Bible as evidence that homosexuality is wrong, women are inferior or Darwinism is an evil theory. If people take word for word what someone else wrote or said as their core beliefs, they can be made to think just about anything.

It sets a dangerous precedent for people to believe basically anything they are told. Even if it is limited to a certain text — say, the Bible — it is still another person’s translation from Hebrew or Greek, usually manipulated for political reasons. If one would go so far as to read the Bible in its original language, it is still technically one man’s interpretation of what God told him or events that transpired.

If God gave humans intelligence and rationality, would he want us to squander those gifts?

I have been experimenting with different religions and going to churches of different sects of Christianity since I was 16. The one thing that I heard almost everywhere was that “God is in control of your life, but he makes bad things happen. We can’t explain why they happen because God is mysterious.”

No! Bad things happen, and they are caused by randomness or by other people, and we can fix the problem. Use rationality; use science. It’s like having someone die from a car accident and blaming ghosts instead of the other driver or the faulty brakes. Design better brakes; punish the other driver for their poor driving.

There are certain moral issues we have to deal with in life, and perhaps the Bible or your minister can help you realize a higher truth, but it is not the truth because it is said by them. Use your rationality, meet a gay person one-on-one and then decide if you think that person is evil, or use your own code of ethics to determine if a sexuality can be wrong or if Darwin was right. Decide if you want to base your life on science or in spirituality, and be consistent. Question yourself and the things that you took as assumptions, and question the people and things that tell you absolute certainties.

I still believe there are moral lessons to be learned from the Bible and other books like it, but there is evil mixed in with the good, bigotry mixed in with kindness, misogyny mixed in with charity and humility mixed in with human goodness. If the reader doesn’t use his own system of ethics and reasoning, he might be reading into something that’s not there, or using it as justification for hate.

I am not going to persecute worshippers of a religion; don’t worry, I never intended to. To each his own. Just know, I will not be participating in organized religion any time soon, and any decision I make on God, science, souls or the universe, I will make on my own.

Dan Masny does not want you to wholeheartedly believe the content of this column. E-mail your personal code of ethics to him at DMasny@gmail.com.