Here is the Anglican Church of Canada’s answer to the anti-theists: Jesus was the equivalent of an evolutionary misfit; far from God being infinite, he’s not even big; let’s try pantheism and worship the cosmos for a change.
That should appeal to Dawkins and Hitchens; I am expecting an imminent conversion.
[T]he bigger we try to make God, the more silly such a God sounds. If we want people to take God seriously, they are telling us, forget the idea of God as a very big person out there.
Like Charles Darwin, author of Origin of the Species, Dawkins is telling us that new kinds of animals are created when large numbers of normal animals die off. Misfits suddenly fit well and become the ancestors of a new normal. If life has arisen on other planets or anywhere in the universe, that process of death leading to new forms of life will be the way it happens.
But that sounds strangely like Christ. He was a misfit who insisted on fairness and dignity for all, including women, the diseased and social outcasts of all kinds. That sort of equality would never fit into the violent hierarchy of human empires, yet through his death, Christ became the ancestor of a whole new kind of human–the community founded in God’s kingdom of justice, the community that is a follower of The Way.
Rather than asking people to imagine a great Being in the sky, maybe we should be focusing on faith in Christ as a way to grasp the deepest mystery of life. What if our worship spoke to the realities of the cosmos, of life, that skeptics already know to be true?
Then, would our worship elicit hysterics or awe?
I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to feel the onset of a bout of hysterics; hysterical laughter, that is.
