For the next few weeks, HuffPost will be hosting an array of respondents -- including spiritual leaders, world leaders, personalities and celebrities -- who are asked to fill in the blank to the statement: God is...
The series will lead up to and accompany the November 13 opening of the upcoming documentary Oh My God?
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I have been on an intense journey over the last three years and it has now come time to share that journey with the world -- and with you. There was something that I just couldn't put together in my head. In an age of communication -- this wonderful blog for example -- the world has become smaller and smaller. Technology has shrunk us, yet mankind has exercised actions and reactions over the past few years that are frankly impossible to understand. And some of these actions have been nothing short of evil and a lot of them have been in God's name.
I became frustrated. There seems to be such a childish, schoolyard mentality that permeates our world -- I call it the "My God Is greater than your God syndrome;" where you have grown men flying airplanes into buildings shouting "God is Great"; where you have the leader of the free world telling the BBC in 2003 that he invaded Iraq because God told him to; where you have the constitution of a country (Iran) that dictates its supreme leader is God's representative on earth; where you have young men and women blowing themselves up (and innocent others) to buy a place into heaven. None of these concepts made any sense to me, so I thought it was about time someone went around the world and asked people what this entity that goes by the name of God means to people. That person became me. I made a film of the answers, and that film is now being released on the 13th November. It is called Oh My God?
We have many wonderful interviewees and over the course of the next few weeks, we have invited them -- and I hope you out there -- to comment on this entity that goes by the name of God. It is a simple invitation: "GOD IS ............" Please fill in the blank.
I am just asking questions. It is up to the audience and readers to come to a conclusion, but by asking simple questions, we get many answers and through those answers we can create a discussion, and from that discussion we can learn to understand how others live and understand what they believe in -- and by doing this perhaps we, as I have found, can learn that we are much more united on this planet than we are divided.
We are primitive organisms on a big rock in a scary vacuum, driven by fear and desperately trying to find something to hold onto. What I believe to be true is that by holding onto something -- whatever it is -- we don't have to push others away just because they don't believe in the same things we do.