Question 211: What do atheists who criticize religions get wrong about the Eternal God?
The prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Matt Dillahunty, Michael Schermer, and the late Christopher Hitchens have plenty of ammunition to attack the false beliefs and hypocritical actions of religious people. Certain verses in the Bible, the Quran, and other religious scriptures would seem to indicate that God is not a good God, a fair God, or even an intelligent God.
Christians who try to defend the God of the Old Testament have to twist their arguments into an inedible, totally complicated pretzel. The Quran also has indefensible verses. An explanation such as “God’s ways are higher than man’s ways so we can’t understand,” falls flatter than a smashed pancake.
The God presented in the Abrahamic religions is a straw god, a tribal god who, at times, seems to rise to the status of a universal god because of the multiple authors of the Old Testament books. Still, in the overall view, he doesn’t measure up. He is a patriarchal god who favors certain tribes over others.
In the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Taoism, God is a universal supreme Creator who loves everyone. Everything is part of the Creator’s consciousness. The Creator God can be shown as a female or male deity or have no gender at all. This God has given free will to all self-aware beings who have been individualized out of yet within the Creator’s consciousness.
The free will beings, all of us, have contributed to the creation. The first created beings laid the basic matrix of our universe. From the beginning of time, creation has been stepped down from the greatest of beings to the elemental beings who make up the physicality of the universe. Our Creator came out of the timeless Allness as did the Creators of all other universes.
Atheists who want to know the truth of creation must go through a rigorous self-examination if they want to know the truth of a Spirit Consciousness that has created everything out of its own consciousness. The Indian sage Patanjali has outlined an eight-step method for the realization of truth. The first step is to learn how to behave–how to live with love, compassion, and forgiveness. After anchoring ourselves in the basic goodness and decency of right behavior, we master our bodies with mind power, right diet, exercise, and then we can sit to meditate on the deeper truths. Certain techniques are used to regulate the breath, interiorize the mind, and shut down the senses. This takes practice as people may meditate for years before they make a breakthrough into the realms of Spirit.
If an atheist or skeptic merely criticizes the false ideas of God presented in some religions, that is no great accomplishment. Anyone can do that. The unscientific claims of religionists can be easily debunked. Perhaps that needs to be done, but we all have to answer to our own higher consciousness. Do we know who we truly are? This is not just a materialistic universe. Active, loving Spirit creates and sustains this universe.
************************************************************
“In the transcendental state, God spins out his dreams of ideational,(causal), astral, and physical universes. The physical cosmos, with its many “island universes” floating in the eternal void, is encircled by a nimbus of radiant energy that melts away into the larger astral world. The astral cosmos is a grander manifestation of creation than the physical and runs through and beyond the latter…the causal universe is the womb of creation. In the causal universe, God’s finest creative forces of consciousness, and highly evolved beings with their intuitive processes, objectify universes from subtle divine thought forces…” –Paramahansa Yogananda (In the Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita.)
