God Without a Gender or Agenda

Some who know me think I’m an atheist. The truth is I didn’t stop believing in God, I just stopped believing in the God I grew up with. You know, the one with a Y chromosome and a vast, eternal plan.

By the time I turned 30, reality had pretty well demolished the fiction that my experiences were the result of anyone’s wise plan, male or otherwise. By then I knew that anyone with a Y chromosome wouldn’t make a plan. He would just look at whatever occurred and claim it had been his intent all along. Does that mean my God is a woman? Of course not. If my God were a woman, she would have had a plan. She’d have created a world of under-represented males earning sub-par wages and pushing 8-pound babies out through their penises — and that clearly didn’t happen.

So, if my God has no gender and no agenda, how do I explain what happens in the world? Stochasticity.

Stochasticity is “a condition lacking any plan or predictability.” Synonyms include “haphazardness” and “randomness.” It means that when a tsunami swallows up one of my loved ones, my God is as surprised and heart-broken as I am, weeps like a girl and shouts, “I hate when that happens!”

I’m more at peace believing in this God than in “The Man with a Plan” I grew up with. I can accept a loved one being swept away by a random, unpredictable event. No one to blame, no one to beseech, no desperate promises to keep if my loved one washes up alive later. That works for me. On the other hand, if I thought some all-knowing, all-loving entity had the power to keep the tsunami from happening, but didn’t — or worse, saved someone else’s loved one because they spent more time on their knees than I did — well…no. If I am made in the image and likeness of God, then we both sob and ask “Why?” when a child dies of cancer. We both wish we could end world hunger. We both would have lost faith inside the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

I stopped believing in the God I grew up with a long time ago and I’ve even forgiven him. He couldn’t help it. Like me, he is a victim of his creators, a creature of their imaginations.

I have been far better able to accept the vicissitudes of life since I began believing in a god who doesn’t follow a plan, a god who can’t control or change what happens, a god whose job may simply be to help me get through life’s stochasticity. A god who doesn’t play God.

Wise Ask: Is your God the same one you grew up with?
Share your answer below.