Is Believing in God an Antiquated Concept?

What happened to the message of God? Did it entirely fall out of fashion to believe in God? Why is it so hard for people to believe in the concept of religion and God? These are questions more and more church leaders are asking themselves when they face empty pews and an aging church congregation. And many churches are trying to rework their approach of inviting people into their church communities and to teach them their religious beliefs. How does God, any god, fit in our lives? How can there still be governing and guidance by religious teachings? Is religion, is God, an antiquated concept?

Religious leaders of any denomination used to have it fairly easy, put the fear of god or god(s) into people and they will come. In ancient times many phenomenons were attributed to a happy or unhappy god. Thunder, lightening, solar and lunar eclipses, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, storms, any disaster, you name it, a vengeful god was behind it. Similarly, anything good only happened because people followed the doctrine of their religion. If you happen to come about a streak of bad luck ... well, you have been wavering in your believes and god is testing you.

Therefore, the best way to go about it in those times was to do whatever the religious leader said or doom would follow. This makes the job of a religious leader rather easy. All that was needed was eloquence with the ability to get the message across with a strong conviction. And of course it did help quite a bit to get everybody involved to make a doubtful person look like an outcast. And who wants to be an outcast?

Over the centuries scientific progress has explained many of the phenomenons, even provided an explanation on how the universe was created. This leaves us with the question of what kind of godly involvement has been left in our lives. If anything and everything that happens or has happened can be explained away, how does God, any god, still come in? Is there even such a figure?

Nowadays many people have lost their religious belief, their true belief in God. So many occurrences, which have been attributed to God, have been explained by science as a natural reaction of things. And it is common understanding there will be a scientific explanation for anything that does not have one as of now. God did not really do all those things, negative or positive. Why should we belief a god exists at all?

At this point you can take the flipside, too. Why shouldn't we belief? God is indeed a matter of belief. One cannot see God or touch God. There is no solid proof a god exists in any form, just gospel, unless of course you are part of one of those religious groups, who believe in 'living gods'. However, in accordance with most religious believes one will only know if a god really exists once one has passed away or crossed over. And conveniently, none of the religions I know off allow for the dead to reconnect with the living, other than in the myths and stories surrounding their teachings. Thus, none of the dead will be able to tell the living whether the dead have truly found after death what the respective religion has taught him or her.

One has to trust the stories, the gospels, and the myths, which have been handed down from generation to generation. And how reliable are those? Most of those stories were around before the written word. How much did each storyteller change to make things more interesting? How much got lost in translation, even after the first stories were put down on paper? Nobody really knows and it is doubtful anybody alive ever will know. After all this, the scientific truths, the knowledge of stories, gospels, and myths, not being in their original form, how believable is any religious teaching today? And how believable is it that anybody in all of history has ever seen God, any god? With all of this knowledge, shouldn't a religious concept of a god be cast aside as 'outdated' and 'antiquated'?

Many people think so, because they find it hard to find God in their life. They are unwilling to open their hearts and minds to the possibility. Where is God? How can one experience God?

I had a teacher in religious education (mandatory in German public schools; atheists take ethics classes), who tried to explain a timely concept of God to us group of teenagers with growing doubts about God and religion. He started with a scientific approach to the bible. He told us to accept the fact that alterations have possibly been made. However, he also told us to look at the bible stories like we would approach fairy tales, not the modern Disney versions, who all end nicely, but at the original versions, which at times can be harsh and gruesome.

Those fairy tales are told to children to instill morals in them. They learn the correct moral behavior by listening to their favorite hero. Eventually they are old enough to know it's just a tale, but the teachings and morals the story conveyed stayed with them. Similarly, the bible teaches morals and proper social behavior, except the belief is that not society, but God told us to behave this way. Even if one believes the stories have been embellished and altered, just like Disney altered the fairy tales to make them less gruesome, the core of each story and the moral it teaches remains. It's a concept people have lived by for thousands of years.

Now of course, one could believe some people in ancient times decided without any godly input to put together some sort of code of behavior, which was put in story form to easier teach the concepts to the people of the time. Or one could believe that God influenced them to hand down his teachings. Which again comes down to whether one believes in God. The same teacher then proceeded to take all the scientific evidence provide a natural chain of reaction behind the wonders and occurrences of the bible teachings. Go ahead and believe in the 'Big Bang' theory of the creation of the universe. Go ahead and look into how scientists believe this 'Big Bang' happened. You will still be able to find God behind it. Things got somehow set into motion, didn't they?

Therefore, somehow at the root of it, there can still be a god, and every religion can still find a way around the scientific explanations to find a godly action at the root. Still, in a society, where we rather believe what we can see, touch, and scientifically proof, believing in God is a difficult thing to do, especially, if one only can find the truth at the end of the journey called life. You can choose to believe and live by the teachings and the behavior, which is expected of you, or you can choose not to do so. Even if you do not believe in God, you can still choose to live by the teachings and the behavior, which has commonly become expected of a 'good' citizen anyway as defined by the laws of our society, or you can choose not to do so. At the end, if there is nothing, how much did you really lose, if you chose to live by the rules? But how much more do you have to lose, if you chose not to live by the rules and there really is a god or some other sort of afterlife?

This is something everybody has to decide for himself or herself. I for myself know, that I can 'experience' God, when I do good things, show good behavior. Many might say it's just the religious belief ingrained in me, when I grew up. However, the feeling I get, the warmth I feel, the lightness, for me that's a godly feeling, my way of experiencing god. I prefer that over the bad feeling I get, when I hurt a person however unintentional it might have been. For me there is a God, somewhere ... somewhere all around us. For me God is not 'outdated' or believing in God and 'antiquated' concept.

However, if religious teachings do not quickly adapt and portray a different concept of God, there might be more and more disbelievers. The concept of 'believing in God and religion' might indeed become 'outdated' and 'antiquated'.