“God Talk Checklist,” which you’ll find below, is something I came up with for our Coming of Age group. The youth who are participating in the Coming of Age program will be writing a statement of religious identity to present during a worship service in the spring. So how do you get someone to come up with a statement of religious identity? Well, in our society, many people equate God and religion, so one good place to start figuring out your religious identity is to think about where you stand on the God question. That’s what the checklist is designed to do — get you thinking with some degree of precision about where you stand on the God question.
Because the youth and adults who were present tonight found this to be a useful tool for starting a conversation about the God question, so I thought I’d share it here. Remember that it’s designed to be used in a group setting, where you fill it out and share your responses with other people. The checklist starts below the jump.
“God Talk” checklist
This checklist is for you. Feel free to change the questions or the wording if you need to do so.
Part I
Circle any that are true for you. If you circle something, you’re not saying that’s something you actually believe — you’re just saying that you could not possibly conceive of believing in God if that statement were true.
Personally, I cannot believe in God if:
- if I have to believe that God is some guy with a white beard in the clouds
- if I have to believe that God can send people to hell after they die
- if I have to believe that God is three different beings all crammed into one being
- if I’m supposed to believe things that are just plain irrational or unreasonable
- if I have to believe that God is all-powerful, and yet still lets innocent children get hurt
- if I have to believe that God is pure goodness, and yet there is so much evil and hatred in the world
- if I have to believe that God is all-knowing, and yet God has not told us how to make the world a perfect place
Part II
Circle any that are true for you. If you circle something, you’re not saying that’s what you actually believe — you’re just saying that you could conceive of believing in God if that statement were true.
Personally, I could believe in God if:
- if God were a man with a white beard sitting on a cloud
- if God were a woman
- if God were something that gave me inner strength when I needed it
- if God personally answered all my prayers
- if God were the same thing as the scientific laws that run the universe
- if God preferred poor people, rather than people with enough to eat
- if God were Nature, animals and plants and everything else in the natural world
- if God included everything in the universe: all people, all animals, all the stars, everything
- if the word “God” really meant the highest and best of humanity
- if God means the same thing as love
Part III
1. Do you believe in God?
- (Yes)
- (No)
- (Maybe)
- (Don’t care)
2.
a. If you checked either “Yes” or “No,” in three or four sentences describe the God you do or do not believe in.
b. If you checked “Maybe”, describe both the God you can not believe in — and a God that you maybe could believe in if you thought it were true.
c. If you checked “Don’t care”, in three or four sentences describe what you think is the most important thing in the universe.
I am struck by the focus on “belief” in the above. I am uneasy about it because it seems to have an underlying assumption about the naturalness of “belief”, in the sense of “mentally assenting to the truth of something without proof” as a normal state of mind. Not until Section III question 2c do we start to get an out from that stance.
I found the list in Jennifer Michael Hecht’s “Doubt: A History” to be much more wide open:
The Scale of Doubt Quiz
1. Do you believe that a particular religious tradition hold accurate knowledge of the ultimate nature of reality and the purpose of human life?
2. Do you believe that some thinking being consciously made the universe?
3. Is there an identifiable force coursing through the universe, holding it together, or uniting all life-forms?
4. Could prayer be in any way effective, that is, doo you believe that such a being or force (as posited above) could ever be responsive to your thoughts or words?
5. Do you believe that this being or force can think or speak?
6. Do you believe this being has a memory or can make plans?
7. Does this force sometimes take human form?
8. Do you believe that the thinking part or animating force of a human being continues to exist after the body has died?
9. Do you believe that any part of a human being survives death, elsewhere or here on earth?
10. Do you believe that feelings about things should be admitted as evidence in establishing reality?
11. Do you believe that love and inner feelings of morality suggest that there is a world beyond that of biology, social patterns, and accident – i.e., a realm of higher meaning?
12. Do you believe that the world is not completely knowable by science?
13. If someone were to say, “The universe is nothing but an accidental pile of stuff, jostling around with no rhyme or reason, and all life on earth is but a tiny inconsequential speck of nothing, in a corner of space, existing in the blink of an eye never to be judged, noticed, or remembered,” would you say, “Now that’s going a bit far, that’s a big wrongheaded”?
Tom @ 1 — You write: “I am struck by the focus on ‘belief’ in the above.”
Yup. The point being, as it says in the introduction to the checklist, “in our society, many people equate God and religion.” Personally, I’m not at all interested in belief or doubt — personally I find that kind of ontological question boring. But I know that in most of U.S. society, people are not going to ask me in what way I’m religious, they’re going to say to me, “So what do you believe?”
I have to say, I don’t find the quiz you quote to be more wide open at all — it feels to me that it’s pushing me in one very specific direction, to wit, towards a variety of skeptical humanism or atheism. I am deliberately not trying to push the kids in one direction or another, I am trying to present them with a wide variety of theological options. My quiz attempts to present a series of questions that help them think about a wide variety of theological viewpoints, from feminist theology to liberation theology to atheism to deism to very traditional Christianity to classical Unitarianism to classical Universalism to panentheism to pantheism to religious humanism — and more. I’m trying very hard not to push them into either belief or non-belief, or even into the whole modernist belief/non-belief dichotomy.