God's (and Religion's) Role in the World

This is partly in response to this diary in which Insidious wrote about how he/she thinks religion is a "defense mechanism" against reality.

Let me being by saying that I don't necessarily disagree with this, although I think in this case it's pretty crudely worded. Religion can be one of many lenses through which people see the world. It's a way of explaining the unexplainable, giving meaning to the meaningless and lending structure to the chaos that is existence. I think that we all seek to do these things in our own way. Whether we choose a lens that we commonly agree is "religion" or not, these are things that everyone thinks about and even the idea that there is no explanation, no meaning and no structure to life is a valid way of dealing with these questions.

I'm going to restate here an analogy that I read in Scott Adams' e-book God's Debris. I don't know where he got this analogy but it's one that I find particularly apt. I'm also not going to stick to his stating of it, but restate it my own way.

Imagine that a group of small children are standing outside an enormous old church with huge stained-glass windows. They approach one of the windows and all stand up on their tip-toes to peer through. If you were to ask them to describe what they see, you might hear "well, I can see all the pews and the aisle in between and the podium the minister stands behind...and everything's so green."

Another child chimes in: "I see the pews, and the aisle and the podium, but you're wrong about the green, everything's red."

A third child: "Well I see everything you're seeing, but it's neither green nor red -- it's all blue!"

They are all able to accurately describe to contents of the building, but disagree on the color because they're only able to look through one pane of colored glass at a time.

I think, to some extent, that the human experience of religion is somewhat similar. We're able to agree on the content of our world -- mountains, trees, the sky, the stars, the oceans, etc. -- but we all see different meaning or, if you will, a different "color." In my view, this is what religion is to people: the "color" in which they see the world. The other things that arise from religion (community, etc.) are not unique to religion in general, but a product of a common way of looking at things.

When people try so hard to make other people agree with the way that they see the world, that's when we have problems. However, backing away from the window, you would see all of those shards of colored glass as the masterpiece they are in their own right.