Who Needs God? - Softcover

Harold S. Kushner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671715003 ISBN 13: 9780671715007

Publisher: SIMON SCHUSTER (TRADE DIVISION), 1990

Synopsis

Fillling a need for connetion, joy and community. Rabbi Kushner shares a path to faith that offers new sources of comfort and strength for all of us. Powerful, provocative and persuasive.

About this title

About the Author:

Harold Kushner has been a rabbi for more than thirty years. His bestselling books have helped millions of people find in faith a source of help for coping with life's problems.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1

Does God Really Make A Difference?

"I Don't Believe In Organized Religion."

Paul was a child of the sixties, with his long hair and casual dress. It was one morning in the early 1970s that he sat opposite me in my study. He had called to ask to see me during his college vacation, more as a favor to his father, an active member of my synagogue, than out of any expectation that I would change his mind.

He told me, "I believe in God. I believe in being kind to people, treating them right, not hurting them. I believe in trying to make the world a better place. But I don't see why you need churches and synagogues, fancy buildings that are always looking for money. I don't see why you need professional clergy (nothing personal, Rabbi), prayer books, organized services, rules and rituals that nobody understands. I don't see why you need so many different religions, all arguing with each other. Why isn't it enough just to tell everybody to be nice to each other?"

He and I spoke for about an hour. I told him that some people can create lives of holiness all by themselves, the way Mozart could create immortal music without taking piano lessons, but that most of us need a structure and the company of other people to do it. I spoke to him of the need for community, that even if he didn't need organized religion, he should feel the obligation to maintain it for the people who did. (I restrained myself from telling him that if he didn't like organized religion, he had come to the right place; our synagogue was so disorganized it didn't deserve that description.) I spoke of the time-tested wisdom of a tradition thousands of years old, and urged him to accept what it had learned rather than dwell on its mistakes. Paul spoke of how boring his religious education had been when he was a child, how meaningless he found the services he attended with his parents whenever he was home, and how his science and psychology courses at school had helped him to understand why people living in less enlightened times might have needed religion, and why we no longer need it today.

After an hour, we parted cordially. Paul went back to school. Ultimately, he got married, got a haircut, moved to another state, and has become moderately active in a synagogue there, more, I suspect, as a return to his father's example than as a result of anything I told him that morning. I don't know if he ever thinks about the conversation we had that day. I think of it often.

This book is written for Paul, the bright, idealistic young man who asked why we need more than the commandment to be nice to each other. It is written for the young woman from a religiously committed home who went off to college and wrote a paper for her freshman English class on why religion harms more people than it helps. It is written for the man and woman from different religious backgrounds who fall in love and can't understand why religion is a source of conflict in their lives rather than a source of joy and inspiration. And it is written for all the intelligent, thoughtful people I have met in my travels -- journalists, radio talk-show hosts, strangers who struck up a conversation with me on a plane -- who had trouble believing that religion could be important to somebody in the twentieth century. This book is written for all the people who don't know that they are religious -- good, honest, caring people who dismiss their local church or synagogue as irrelevant to their lives or find their way to it only at times of emergency or family celebration. (A neighbor once told me, "I think of your synagogue the way I think of Massachusetts General Hospital. I'm glad my life is stable enough that I don't need it often, but when I need it, I'm glad there is a good one around.") Should these same good people feel vaguely lonely, disconnected, unfulfilled, confused by the hard choices they are called on to make in today's world, they will probably never understand the connection between that vague sense of unease and the absence of religion in their lives.

Recent years have not been kind to the cause of organized religion. Prominent religious personalities have been found to be just as vulnerable to sexual and financial temptations as the rest of us. We read about the very comfortable lifestyles of leading clergymen, or of the corrupt business practices of wealthy donors whom religious organizations have seen fit to honor, and we begin to worry that the dollars in the collection plate are tainted both by the source they come from and by the uses to which they will be put. Churches and synagogues have too often been breeding grounds for hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and small-mindedness instead of being fountains of charity and piety. No wonder that religion has lost its central place in the lives of so many Americans, becoming just one more leisure-time activity, competing for whatever time and energy we have left over after we have done the "important" things in our lives, attracting mostly people who need or enjoy "that sort of thing" and dismissed casually by the rest of us. Even those people who have rediscovered religion in recent years and have given themselves totally to it have not always done much to advance its cause. Their enthusiasm often expresses itself in a fundamentalism bordering on fanaticism, a dogmatism that makes others uncomfortable, an unseemly arrogance in presuming to speak in God's name and condemning anyone who disagrees with them.

In fact, the past few centuries have not been kind to the cause of organized religion. It may have begun with Copernicus and Galileo discovering that the earth was not the center of the universe -- that the sun did not revolve around it -- and that the Biblical description of the cosmos was inaccurate. Then Darwin taught that human beings evolved from more primitive animals by a blind, morally neutral process of evolution over a period of millions of years. Finally Freud came along and took away our cherished belief that our rational minds made us different from other creatures.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked by the enthronement of Science, the objective search for truth that could be tested and verified, in place of Faith, which came more and more to be seen as fairy tales and wishful thinking. Religion, we were told, was an effort to understand and control the unknown, and as more and more became known about how the world worked, the domain of religion grew smaller and smaller.

At the end of the Book of Job, God confronts those who would challenge Him by saying, "Do you know who fixed [the earth's dimensions], or measured it with a line?...Do you know the seasons when the mountain goats give birth? Can you mark the time when the hinds calve?" (Job 38:5, 39:1) But modern man has found ways to measure the earth. He has studied the mating habits of the wild goat, and even intervened to keep it from becoming an endangered species. Are those grounds for being less impressed with God than our ancestors were?

To make matters worse, spokesmen for organized religion tried to challenge the scientific discoveries of Galileo, Darwin, Freud, and others, asking the faithful, "Which side are you on?" I have heard otherwise intelligent people tell me that, when God created the world six thousand years ago, along with the mountains and rivers He created dinosaur fossils (not dinosaurs). Why? For no reason except to test the faith of people who would one day live in a scientific age. Would they believe in revealed Scripture or in the misleading results of carbon-14 dating? To the embarrassment of those religious spokesmen (and, they would assure us, to the dismay of God as well), modern men and women have overwhelmingly chosen truth over orthodoxy, and have learned to see religion as the enemy of hones

About this edition

• Publisher: SIMON SCHUSTER (TRADE DIVISION)
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0671715003
• ISBN 13: 9780671715007
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224