Some philosophical stuff about God because I don't even understand words anymore (thanks, Lauren)

 I wanted to offer a point for discussion about Lauren's God, which is the following: why does Lauren call her God "God"? 

Here's my reasoning for asking this. The one constant feature of Lauren's bolded writing at the start of each passage is that "God is change". Lauren also acknowledges that most people around her have Gods that are represented as father figures or even just as some sort of being. I think most people would agree that the mental image of a God is much more likely of some sort of humanoid form rather than something so hard to visualize as the concept of change, which can't even be described as an entity. So why does it make sense to Lauren to call something so different by the same name?

Here are some potential answers I have to offer:

1. "God" is the starting point for Lauren's thought. What I mean is that perhaps all of this thinking about the forces affecting the human experience that Lauren has done was originally centered around figuring out what God is and means. That would mean that Lauren took it for granted that a "God" exists, and then set about to define this "God".

2. "God" makes sense as the name for this because it replaces other people's notion of a God. If Lauren's religious beliefs were built around, for example, worshiping change, we could conceivably assume that there might also be a human-like, fatherly God in the mix there. This example falls apart because Lauren doesn't worship at all, but the idea of replacement remains.

3. Certain qualities of other people's "God" and Lauren's "God" are actually the same, and it is upon these commonalities that Lauren bases her usage of the word "God". For instance, at the end of chapter 3 when we see the passage Lauren "keeps coming back to", we learn that she believes "God is power". This makes me think back to how I imagine the belief in gods started in the first place - things happened, and people wondered how and why, and imagined that some power made them happen. A human God is much easier to visualize, but one raw, deep element of the God Lauren's family knows is power - omnipotence, more precisely. 

But then, can we say "Power is God"? Can we say "Change is God"? More importantly than whether or not we can say these things: are they consistent with Lauren's beliefs?

Comments

  1. L. MoffittApril 16, 2021 at 7:18 AM

    Wow, this gave me so much to think about. It's a simple but potent question: why does she call God "God," anyway, since her vision is so very different from typical connotations of the bearded old man in the sky or whatever? And that three-word sentence "God is change" suggests SO much, as you discuss. By calling God "God," she's not eliminating historical ideology; she acknowledges it, but she also incorporates her own concept of God as change.

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