Sunday, May 1, 2016

Does your God live in a box?


Rather than being a water tight, air tight, precisely engineered box, maybe books like the Bible (or Book of Mormon, or Quran, or Torah, etc...)are just introductions, insights into God and belief in God. Because, if we operate under the assumption that God is only what we read in the scriptures--never mind all of the pretzel twisting those words have gone through over millennia--we run the risk of limiting God, both who/what God is, and what God is capable of. How many times has God been limited, because someone insisted that some passage in Leviticus is literal, and exact, and means precisely only that which is written, and then understood, after however many translations, in whatever language?
This isn't to suggest that the scriptures don't have value. They absolutely do, in my opinion. But do we see them for what they are, or do we make them into a brick of solid, immovable "truths", with which to beat ourselves and others over the head?
The best advice I think I've ever been given, with regards to God and a belief in God was this: Don't put God in a box.

P.S. "Any belief system tends to narrow the mind."
--BYU BIO professor, during a panel discussion titled "Teaching Evolution in Utah," given at UVU, 2014.--
(Sorry--I can't recall what his name was, but I was there in the audience.)

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