The word “God” is perhaps the most dangerous word in the English language. I can’t think of another word that so completely makes a room full of people believe they are sharing the same beliefs when, in fact, every person in the room means something different.
I do not believe the symbol “God” is essential to the life of reverence. When people do use that word, it seems to me, the symbol “God” usually refers either to one’s own quest for love or one’s own pursuit of power.
If some some people in this culture use the word “God” to refer to an imagined white male on a golden throne, their religion may consist of little more than a theological mask for the sins of racism, sexism and classism. Religion that worships God as power may simply lift national and cultural injustices to a divine status.
But if, by “God” one means a personification of the tie that binds us ALL together, the word can give emotional texture to an abstract idea of unity. If one finds the sacred, not the the crafted idols of theology, but in the living faces of imperfect and struggling people, and in the frenzied pulse of nature, then the symbol “God” can be a poetic representation of the felt “heart” of a life lived in love.
What is important in any symbol is not the image it conjures in our heads, but the experience of reverence and interconnectedness it reveals in our hearts. The iconoclastic destruction of our religious images is almost as important to the life of love as is the creativity that crafts religious imagery in the first place.