God

Since starting this blog I have focused on Trump and politics in America. Today I would like to move on to one of my pet ideas. This idea is unproven but over the last fifteen years it has stayed with me and the more I read the more likely it seems to be true.

One of the problems and powers of religion is the belief in God. This belief is unshakable even in the face of NO proof. No matter what anyone says there is simply to evidence that God or any god exists. So why do people believe so strongly?

Let's start with the book The Spiritual Life of Children by Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist. He interviewed a number of young children about their view of god and some drew pictures for him. Most of the pictures were of the face only, and if there were arms and legs they were small. Have children seen God? Maybe pictures of Jesus on the walls in childcare in churches. But I think the image comes from somewhere else: it is their memory of their parents face. Today I read an article about whether one remembers ones birth. There were no clear answers but to me the answer is clearly yes. We remember our birth and our first years but not in words, only in images and feelings. When we are born we have no context for anything, no language, nothing to compare one image with any other. But the first thing we see is our mother's face. And we see it up close.

In the sixties, the neonatologists Klaus and Fanaroff theorized that the 'en face' position - face to face between mother and child - during the first hour after birth, was important for security and later happiness in life. Some studies failed to find any correlation but the idea is interesting. Babies spend hours looking into the faces of their mother and father, aunt and uncles. They seldom see them from afar, with arms and legs, until they are older and language is beginning to get implanted. These first years are mostly in the 'en face' years. The face they are seeing is the face of their God, the entity that meets all their needs, feeds them, keeps them safe, keeps them comfortable, and loves them: 'God the father.

We know that this happens in other animals who don't have speech and it is called imprinting. In that critical time period that Klaus and Fanaroff described in the first few hours of life we imprint on the face of our parents. Later in life that powerful connection is labeled the God connection. It will never go away. I am an atheist and I have it. I have that strong feeling that there is someone out there, in spite of the evidence to the contrary. I like to think that my slow thinking mind has overcome my intuition in this case, my fast thinking mind. But, as I've told my religious friends, I'd love to able to 'believe'. Just give me some evidence. And there will never be any. God does exist. It is your parent upon who you imprinted before you could name her or him. That powerful connection has gotten transferred by the religious community to an imaginary entity, one with a long history, from Isis, to Zeus, to God. There is a great power in believe and it comes from our need to survive, to connect to someone who can feed and shelter us until we are old enough to take care of ourselves.

If anyone has any evidence to support or disprove this theory I would hear it.