God 4.0: Practical Spirituality
Our ideas about God are out of date. Think about that for a second. Nowhere in any other field of human endeavour do we hold onto ideas that are fifteen hundred to three thousand years old.
It hasn’t always been like this. Throughout history as people have asked “What is God?” and as they’ve been exploring the idea, those ideas have changed, deepened and evolved.
The Evolution of God
There was a time when we believed the spirits of animals and the natural world were magical and protective forces, that version of God, what I call God 1.0, began to give way to God 2.0 when we started to give those spirits names: Thor God of lightening, Poseidon God of the sea. A God for everything you can imagine.
Eventually, from the cast of Godly characters, a head God emerged and that God began to replace all the others. Now there was only one God: God 3.0 and His name is Yawheh, Brahmin, Satnam, Jehovah…
The Move Away From God 3.0
It’s that view, God 3.0, that is our current view of God. The one who looks over His creation (because God 3.0 is almost always male), tinkers with it, listens to prayers, answers some.
It seems to me that books like Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great or Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and even the books that counter those books like Alister McGrath’s Dawkin’s God and John Polkinghorne’s Belief in God in an Age of Science are all debating the existence or non-existence of God 3.0.
What is God 4.0?
God 4.o is the combination of our religious ideas about God combined with some revolutionary ideas about God. It’s a view of God that embraces science. Above all God 4.0 allows room for ideas about God to be wrong.
God 4.0 is our drive to Harmony. It’s a drive we confuse and misuse. But at its core all human endeavours have yearned for that goal: to create harmony.
Throughout history, whenever an individual or country sought to gain at the cost of someone else they did so because they thought harmony for them and their people lay at the defeat of whoever they had in their sights. But, just like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, defeat that supposed foe and harmony is no closer. Yes, we can be mistaken about what brings us harmony. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have a drive to harmony. It just means how we try to achieve that harmony might create more discord than harmony.
The Need for Harmony
More than ever in our world we need a clear idea of what Harmony is and how we create it. With the rise of right wing populism in the West, and a sense of hope diminishing for many, we need a drive to real harmony more than ever. A harmony where our only yardstick is whether our actions bring universal benefit or harm. It’s a simple measure.
Real harmony connects us to God 4.0. It’s that harmony that changes the way we see the world, our place in it, and offers a yardstick for the way we choose to live. God 4.0 shows us no country is blessed; there is no concern about what we eat or drink and no view on how we dress or who we love.
In God 4.0 there is no justification for treating others badly. Nobody speaks on behalf of God 4.0 and no one can justify their actions with an ancient book.
That’s the vision and the hope of God 4.0. A practical spirituality.