The God i Dont Believe in

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Juan Arias

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Before my book The God I Dont Believe In came out as a book, it was the subject of an article that appeared with great scandal on the front page of the now defunct Madrid evening paper Pueblo. It has been more than 40 years since then. Those were the hard times of the Franco dictatorship, with censorship of the newspapers. On that occasion, they must have thought that it was something religious and certainly let it pass, without reading it. In the end it was object of scandal for them because the then Archbishop Morcillo of Madrid called and read me the riot act. How did I dare say, it had to be asked, that one should not believe in the God that condemns to hell, or in the God who doesnt need human beings, or in the God who loves pain, or in the God that the rich are not scared of, etc.? There were 99 false images of God that helped many to think in that cave-like atmosphere of dictatorial Spain. For example, a young married couple wrote me saying that they were atheistic but they had cut out my article so that, if one day their two small children decided to believe, they would do so in a God incapable of condemning sexuality. 40 years ago now, the title of that one article gave life to my first book, published in Assisi by Cittadella Editrice. I was opposed to them publishing it. I was just a bit older than 30 and nobody knew me in Italy. The book nevertheless has been the most translated of my books. It is out in more than ten languages, among them in Korean and Indonesian. Today, when I see that the book continues to be published in several countries, I ask myself why. The now deceased Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, told me that it was a fruit of the Vatican II Council that had done away with some negative images of the God of fear. Perhaps today other new negative images of God should be added to that catalogue. In 40 years, things have changed much, but I believe that the hope in a God that does not condemn continues to

live in many hearts, in the God of compassion understood etymologically: the God that suffers alongside humanity; in the God of pardon, the God that loves our clay, our miseries, like a mother. In the God that is interested in our Planet Earth, in all the disinherited of the world; in all the humiliated; in all the outcasts. Today, while agnosticism grows, curiously, the search for a different image of Godone without labelsalso grows, for a God whom the modern human being, like Job of the Bible, can get upset with call to account, and, like Jesus on the cross, even cry out to for having abandoned humanity to its destiny. It is not God that is in crisis. It is those false images of God that we have kneaded into our narrow vision of mystery, of divinity, a sterile faith now incapable of moving mountains. Vatican II removed many of the false images of God. It came to defend the view that the blame for atheism in the world was due to the distortions that we believers had made of God and Gods son, Jesus. Still, nevertheless, there are many to unmask. Still we maintain a certain paternalism and a certain religion of power in relation to the figure of God. Key words of the Christian message have ended up prostituted. Even the formidable word mercy that Jesus, following Hosea, preferred to sacrifices, has lost its force because it has been interpreted as code for power in reference to God. It is He who pitied humanity because He is the merciful one, superior in his kindness. Jesus thought of mercy, however, like in the modern term solidarity. In this way, the key of mercy is not the kindness of God towards the human being whom God aids, but that we human beings need to be in solidarity with others, not because we are superior to those to whom we offer our compassion, but because we are equal in dignity, all brothers and sisters of a same race, struck in the image of the Creator. Nobody is superior to anybody else in the

Translated by Michael Dougherty

The author, a well-known correspondent of El Pas, wrote an article with this title more than 40 years ago that was so successful that it was turned it into a book which was translated into ten languages, and continues to be reissued. It expressed a leap in the religious consciousness of society at the time of the Second Vatican Council.

compassionate logic of Jesus. If one is considered superior in some form, he must wash the feet of others, so that it stays evident that nobody is superior to anybody else. The same happens with the word pardon. Whoever pardons is placed over the one pardoned. Again it is about a relation of power. Jesus, on the cross, gives a magnificent example of how to pardon without humiliating, without feeling superior: Pardon them, because they do not know what they do. He does not pardon them, placing himself above those that crucified him, but he excuses them: they did not know what they were doing and therefore they do not need to be pardoned. John XXIII also in his will affirmed that he did not need to pardon anybody, because he had never felt offended by anybody.

This is the sublimity of love. There are new faces of God that are harder to reject, at least as a concept, even by agnostics or atheists. They can help us in our modern worldstill stirred by the eternal law of violence, envies, mutual hatreds, and ambitionsto find rest on the friendly beach of a God distinct from how God has always been presented to us. God is not the God of lawswhose Sabbath Jesus attackednor the bureaucratic God of Canon law, but the God that demands nothing more and nothing less from human beings than to be faithful to the voice of their own conscience, which, certainly, is more severe and demanding than all the laws promulgated by humans. As the convert Cardinal Newman said: It is better to be wrong following your own conscience than to be right going against it.

The God I Dont Believe In (Juan Arias) I will never believe in: The God who deadens earthly reform and gives only hope for the future life. The God of those who believe that they love Him becauThe God who surprises man in a sin of weakness. se they love no one. The God who condemns material things. The God who thinks war is good. The God who loves pain. The God of those that want the priest to sprinkle the The God who flashes a red light against human joys. whitewashed sepulchres of their dirty deals with The God who is a magician and sorcerer. holy water. The God who makes himself feared or does not allow The God who would deny humans the freedom to sin. people to talk informally to him. The God who makes Himself the monopoly of a church, The God who lacks forgiveness for any sin. The God who accepts and endorses everything that the a race, a culture, or a caste. priests say about him. The God who plays at condemning. The God who puts the law before conscience. The God who sends people to hell. The God incapable of forgiving what many men condemn. The God that prefers purity to love. The God who cannot find Himself in the eyes of a child The God incapable of understanding that children will or a pretty woman or a mother who cries. always get themselves dirty and be forgetful. The God wedded to politics. The God who demands that if a man is to believe he The God who will annihilate our flesh eternally instead must give up being a man. of resurrecting it. The God who is not feared by the rich at whose doors The God who will accept as a friend anyone who goes lie hunger and misery. through this world without making anybody happy. The God who is adored by those who go to mass and The God who, embracing humans here on earth, doesnt yet go on stealing and slandering. communicate to them the joy and happiness of all The God who isnt able to find anything of His goodhuman loves put together. ness, His essence, wherever love exists, no matter The God who would not have become truly human with how mistaken it may be. The God who condemns sexuality. all its consequences. The God for whom it is as sinful to enjoy the sight of a The God in whom I cannot hope against all hope. pair of pretty legs as to slander and rob ones neigYes, my God is ... the other God. hbor or abuse ones power to get ahead. q
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