Given the range of life experiences most adults go through, it is impossible for them to long cherish the images of God they developed at the Sunday School level, and which usually have remained static – unless they are prepared to deny what life’s experiences has taught them.

It is normal that we should outgrow our childish ideas of God, just as we evolve and outgrow every other idea we formed in childhood. This process is regarded as perfectly desirable in every area of life apparently except the area of religion. Somehow abandoning the naïve and sentimental God images of Sunday School tends to be frowned upon and regarded as somehow dangerous. The result is, many people feel the God they are "forced" to accept through religious peer pressure is far too small to do justice to the belief that ‘he’ is the one who produced the cosmos and is responsible for the whole mystery of life and death.

Most people’s image of God owes a lot to how they regarded their parents when they were growing up. This is all natural and well and good, provided the notions mature as we grow older. When Jesus advised us to become like ‘little children’ he was not putting a premium on human immaturity.

Guilt and fear are generated by having an over-bearing parent or authority figure prominent in our early lives. If we are afraid of this person, or worse still, guilty because we are afraid, our images of God will be colored by that experience, and this is something that is extremely hard to outgrow. If one can do a little reverse engineering on this issue, then the fact that so many Christian communions today seem to be centrally focused on arousing guilt and repentance would seem to imply that the great number of people who respond to this type of message are likely to have been victims of some overbearing authority figure or authoritarian code of conduct during their childhood.

It follows that such people will tend to estimate the value of their Christianity by the degree to which they can feel sadness, guilt and remorse for what their sins have done to God, and more particularly to Jesus, who is assumed to be more exposed to the vagaries of humanity through having come "down here" personally. This swing from the depths of guilt and remorse up to the heights of redemption and forgiveness, and back down again, is one of the most powerful engines of religion today, and likely to remain so.

Much has been made in the past of the idea of conscience as "the voice of God." It is one thing to ascribe some sort of moral discernment to conscience, but a very different and dangerous thing is to regard it as the voice of God. In the first place it would be unwise as nobody really wants to have much to do with a being modeled on the nagging, disturbing, probing and discomforting roles that conscience can play in our lives. Secondly, conscience is not a very reliable guide, for its dictates can vary considerably from one person to another, depending on one’s personality, training and upbringing. Certain standards and ways of behaving are taught in every society, and it is normal to feel a sense of guilt if these taboos and regulations are broken. However taboos change and vary from culture to culture. For example, in certain cultures in the recent past no guilt was felt for abandoning one’s parents to die in advanced age, and in another culture, female babies were regularly abandoned on garbage heaps. The whole point being, conscience is artificially induced, trained into us by the laws and mores of a particular society. What we hear as the voice of conscience is not the voice of God, but rather the voice of that culture’s upbringing.

People who are morbidly sensitive can have their lives turned into a living hell by an over-scrupulous conscience if they regard it as the voice of God speaking to them. On the other hand a person who is wise and callous in the ways of the world will never feel any such pangs, and it would be equally absurd to dignify such a convenient conscience as the voice of God either.

Generally speaking, the all-over picture of God that stems from these, and many similar images, is a negative one which just surrounds us with commands and prohibitions. The acceptance of this kind of God is bitter fruit, and it deprives one’s life of joy, spontaneity or color. Unfortunately, at times this can turn into some form of perverted masochistic sense of self which takes extreme gladness and delight in being broken and nothing in the sight of God. This is all too often a mainstay of faith for a significant proportion of religious believers today.

To be continued.

For a longer version of this article, go to Miceal Ledwith's website at hamburgeruniverse.com

Dr. Miceal Ledwith, L.Ph., L.D., D.D., LL.D. (h.c.) has been a Professor of Theology and University President of Maynooth College in Ireland, a member of the Vatican’s International Theological Commission, and has lectured extensively throughout Europe and North America. He has been a long-time member of the Ramtha School of Ancient Wisdom.