God amnesia

The Bishop of Rome, while recently in Spain, called upon gathered people to remember God because it seems to him that we've all forgotten the Diety. Presumalbly this insight is predicated by empty churches, church coffers, and increasing demands for accountability and transparancy of the institution he leads and of himself from all quarters of the world. Amnesia indeed.  Time for a look in the mirror.

However, this blog is not about Catholic bashing. Or Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Pantheist, Agnostic, or Athiest bashing for that matter.  It is, perhaps, a good place and a good question with which to launch this blog:

A Diety:  the entire question, issue, perceived and interpreted reality thereof.

A Diety for many is "something/someone...out there" and for others a/the Diety is not only transcendent but also immanent - even tangible. And everything or nothing in between.  If there is such a belief spectrum in the perception of a Diety, a truly personal and properly subjective insight no different from or less important than one's core concept of "ego" and successful transition to adulthood, then is it not only proper and fitting that we are able to ask such a fundamental question: who/what are you, God?

I don't claim to have an anwer. I only realize that I can no longer accept the Diety I was brought up to believe in or, yes...construe or fashion into my own image and likeness,  for most of my life. Any kind of betrayal is cruel but it can also be liberating for those willing to stand up, dust themselves off and move on. Perhaps the Deity too.

Perhaps the Diety that has been forgotten is the very one fabricated and evangelized by religious clergypeople and designated religious representatives and institutions/traditions from around the world that turn out, en masse, to have eschewed the core needs that brought people to them in the first place and to have then exploited those needs into the self-aggrandising, fairly warpped views of the world, people, the environment etc. that we've recently come to see.  We've all seen that institutions, traditions and personnel are not what one might objectively consider "trustworthy" or ethical by any commonly used measuring indicia.

The veil in the temple has indeed been torn asunder and, like the Wizard of Oz, the magnum voce emanating from behind it has been found to be little better than a voiceover.

Take away the rituals, smoke, mirrors, chants, trances, human need to belong someplace, self-appointed hierarchies of the elect, the chosen, the saved, the people of the book and infidels (ya gotta have infidels in order to make the self-sacrifice pay off), the need to feel good and valued by someone/something when you can't get it anywhere else and ask yourself....who is this god that has been contrived by me, us, larger religious denominations, or whose visage has been shaken by those we call prophets?