How the Universe Got Its Spots--Father's Day Edition

Our Father, by whose name all fatherhood is known,

Who dost in love proclaim each family thine own,

Bless thou all parents, guarding well,

With constant love as sentinel,

The homes in which thy people dwell. (Hymn 296)

I've heard the certainty, and often the scorn, with which religious people like myself are criticized at times. Our God is simply an anthropomorphic being that can't possibly be real. He is just exactly what we want to justify and explain our choices, or the inevitable result of our communal brain chemistry. All this is perfectly clear from the history, anthropology, and psychology of religion, and there really is no other reasonable possibility. I've heard it, and I still think there is something greater. So I say:

I do not believe in an Anthropomorphic God. I believe there are aspects of God that are greater than I can imagine, even when I apply to him vague and grandiose superlatives like infinite and eternal. But I don't believe in a God who is unknowable.

I believe in Theomorphic Humans. All fatherhood partakes of a tiny piece of Godhood, and as we guard and guide our children with constant love, we honor the seed of God within us. We realize a tiny piece of our potential, and we feel for our children and our parents before us a taste of the love that binds our Father and Mother in Heaven to us.

So as I seek to know and understand the Gods that are before me, I feel a little like Janna Levin as she seeks to understand the universe of which she is a part:

[It] might seem limited, imposing our human perception to try to deduce the grandest cosmic code. But we are the product of this universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of this cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance. pp. 48-49 How the Universe Got Its Spots