Teach the Controversy: Question Belief!
Where Does God Live? Lies or Picture Language?
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, July 30, 1999
September 2004
Lies or Picture Language?
A little girl had seen pictures of the astronauts orbiting the earth and clearly wondered about what she had been taught in religious instruction lessons. She asked her mother, “Where does God live?” Modern clergy are in a bind here too. They tell us that “picture language” has to be used to make hard concepts understandable. So, we tell our children that God lives in heaven and that heaven is in the sky. Whence the source of the little girl’s puzzlement. She could see the astronauts in their spacesuits orbiting the earth but could see no sign of God.
Sophisticated adults know it is only picture language, so they do not expect to see God in space, even if they are Christians. Christians nowadays know that God is in some other dimension. He created space and time, the four dimensions we know, so He must live in another one, though this must be a new truth because it does not appear in the Holy Book of God’s infallible word. It is another compromise with science.
What though of the “picture language?” Our evangelical auntie tells us we cannot expect the picture language of one generation to extend into the next. It is not a view Christians used to have. Formerly their picture language was to last forever. Now they mean that they will keep getting found out by science and having to find new gaps for their God and new picture language to describe them.
“Going up to heaven is no more than a convenient metaphor”, insists our auntie. But it is a metaphor that has lasted for a very long time without being called one until now. The reason is that it was never thought of as being a metaphor until science made discoveries that made it one. Heaven is the sky. God lives in heaven because the Christian and Jewish God called Yehouah was a sky and a storm god. Most of the high gods of antiquity were the same. Zeus, who is Jupiter, was the sky. Yehouah, like Zeus, was the sky god and the god of all the things that happened in the sky that seemed mysterious and inexplicable—clouds, storms, lightning, meteors, sun, moon, planets. Some of the others were gods in their own right, and heaven, that is the sky, became the place where all gods met in council, even gods of the earth and the underworld.
It follows that evangelists are lying when they tell us that heaven is only picture language for children. It represents ancient beliefs that were accepted of Yehouah and other gods until science proved otherwise. What was formerly believed, the “old truth”, is false and now the evangelists lie to explain it.
Our evangelists always bragg that their self-appointed task—when they are amateur clappies—or their job appointed by God’s Holy Ghost—if they are professional ones—is to tell the truth about God and Jesus. This “truth” unfortunately varies from time to time, place to place and minister to minister. It is a protean truth. They explain, “It is because our view of the world is changing.” But it is changing because science is finding real truths about the world and the plastic truth of Christianity has to change its shape to fit. So, they tell us, “It is proof Christianity is a living faith.” Maybe, but it also proves that it will take on any guise in the interest of self-preservation. It is all things to all men.
Christians tell us they are expressing the same eternal truths in different ways, but even this is untrue. It is not an eternal truth that God lives in heaven. For it to be an eternal truth, heaven has to be redefined from being the vault of the sky above us to being unknown and unseen dimensions elsewhere. Christian truth is forever true because it is whatever Christians want it to be. Christianity overcame the crisis of Darwinism by redefining creation. God did not create us directly but He created the process that led to us, so He created us still, but indirectly. Voila! Who will be the first evangelist to tell us that heaven is in another dimension? Doubtless someone has done it already.
Why also would God have wanted to use a cruel and wasteful method like evolution to make species, when he could have done it directly with no savagery and starvation, as they used to believe? The question will bring out a whole host more new truths from the evangelists, getting increasingly tied up in their excuses.
