God the Father
Father’s Day was recently and so I thought about the alleged “Holy Father” himself, God. Aside from other roles for their deity of choice, Christians also claim that their imaginary god holds the role of father.
It seems that society has changed the way we view the responsibilities of a father. It wasn’t long ago that the role of the father was to be a bread-winner and a strict disciplinarian. Fathers were expected to be distant and to provide the “tough love.” In some households those are still the roles that a father is expected to take. But in most of modern society both parents are the bread-winners and strict discipline and tough love has been replaced with nurturing understanding. While discipline is still in the household, parents no longer beat their children or whip them at the slightest sign of disobedience.
The image of God the Father on the other hand hasn’t changed. The Biblical view of God is still as the strict disciplinarian who we are all expected to obey without question or else! Or else what? Or else God will send us to Hell where we will be tortured for all eternity.
Cognitive linguist George Lakoff talks about how this very issue influences our politics in his books, “Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think” and “Don’t Think of an Elephant.”
In any case, while God is seen as the father, humans are seen as the children of God. In a strange way, I kind of like this metaphor because in the last 2000 years humans have grown up. We are no longer children and have become adults ourselves. When we were children, we looked at our parents with amazement and dogmatically believed that they were perfect. We saw our father as all powerful and capable of protecting us against any and all threats. But then as we grew up, we started to be able to protect ourselves and we started to think for ourselves. Sometime we would even disagree with our fathers. Sometimes we were wrong, but sometimes we were right.
As we grew up, it became clear to us that our father wasn’t all-powerful, nor was he all-knowing and he certainly wasn’t always right. So if we are to take the analogy of God the father to its logical conclusion, it becomes clear that the God of the Bible isn’t all those things either.
Besides, the idea that as a species we are growing up is a very liberating idea. It is an idea which we should really think about and consider. What kind of adult with humanity be? How can we as individuals shape our collective growth?
I think this metaphor of God the father is someway helps make the case against Christian belief and in favor of a more science oriented world-view. Even if we were to believe in the God of the Bible, it is clear from this metaphor that we can’t stay children forever and we must make our own way in the world. It is time to leave home and say good-bye to daddy.
Filed under: god the father, Religion
