“Tell me about the god you don’t believe in?”  Another question I have been asked. Frankly, this one is rather lame. If I am feeling cheeky I might describe my favorite fantasy. I am a mythology slut after all.

“If I chose to believe in divinity,” I explain to them. “I chose to believe in a female god – a goddess. The feminine has all the raw, creative and destructive power as the masculine.  She has the same bloodlusts, hormone lusts, but she is a true creator of life. Her womb is the portal through which we must all enter this theater of pain called earth. She nurtures and heals too.”

If they aren’t slack jawed or stammering moronically with globs of spittle catching in the corner of their mouths, I continue my heresy.

“The masculine spills blood, judges and when he isn’t doing that he is ejaculating heedlessly all over the place. The masculine dominates; he conquers. The feminine seduces; she creates and she persuades. “

Generally this is as far as I get. But, every now and again a hearty theist missionary hoping to save my immortal soul will urge me to press on.

The goddess is a perfect being of celestial light. She has long red, flaming hair and one eye is a crystalline blue like the deepest sea and the other is a piercing emerald green. Her breasts are small and perfect and she gives me succor from them. Between her long sinewy legs I find rest. She embraces me in her love and passion and she wraps me in wings of gossamer to shield me from the onslaught of the world. She dries my tears and shares my joy. This is my goddess.”

I once wrote a short fantasy story about this goddess. But, then I realize its fantasy and I don’t live my life by it. It’s hard to get the theist to examine the god they believe in. They can’t fathom that god is a concept that exists in their mind. Five people sitting side by side in a pew on Sunday morning, reciting the same creed, hearing the same sermon and drawing inspiration from the same scriptures are not going to conceive of god in exactly the same way. God is problematic. It is nearly a meaningless word. This caused liberal theologians such as Paul Tillich to conceive of god more as “the ground of being,” whatever the hell that really means, rather than a deity easily anthropomorphized.