Religions speak of God or Ultimate Reality as beyond description and beyond knowing. God's existence or non-existence cannot be proved nor can we prove that some ideas about God reflect God's character better than others (that's if God exists - isn't this life's central uncertainty?). However if God exists, God is ineffable, impossible for a human mind to grasp and comprehend. All we can do is construct our images, our symbols and our metaphors to convey what we guess God might be like. Over the centuries many ideas have been generated - some are good, others are repulsive. God remains mysterious, hidden and elusive. Indeed does not life itself contain the inexpressible?

Are we moving to an age when human beings will no longer think of themselves as Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhist, Hindus etc.? Perhaps people (whether they have a religious or a non-religious interpretation of life) will simply think of themselves as human beings and citizens of one global village who search for meaning and in doing so draw from a global resource of wisdom and spirituality to which religious and humanist traditions have contributed.

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Tribal Religion, Transcendent Religion

By: Eboo Patel
Washington Post, On Faith

There is a story about a Christian minister living abroad during World War II. His congregation sends him money so that he can return home for Christmas. When he doesn't come back, they ask him why. He says that he used the money to help a group of Jews escape Hitler's death camps and flee to safety.

"But they're not even Christian," writes one member of his congregation.

"Yes, I know," the minister responds. "But I am."

All religions have both types of people - the tribal and the transcendent. The tribal type see in the particular narratives of their tradition a narrowing of concern, and therefore care only about the people who look like them, talk like them and pray like them. 
The transcendent see in the same particularity a universalizing of care, and therefore focus their energies on all people, especially groups most in need, regardless of creed.   If tribal religion wins, it necessarily pits groups against one another based on identity, and it means that people like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are right - religion will destroy everything. 
If transcendent faith wins, it opens the possibility for different identity groups to use their particular narratives to articulate a collective vision that includes everybody. If that isn't the future, there will be no future.

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New York, USA - A new survey of U.S. adults who don't go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." But just as many (72%) also say the church is "full of hypocrites."

Indeed, 44% agree with the statement "Christians get on my nerves."

LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 "unchurched" adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

The survey defines "unchurched" as people who had not attended a religious service in a church, synagogue or mosque at any time in the past six months.

More than one in five (22%) of Americans say they never go to church, the highest ever recorded by the General Social Survey, conducted every two years by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. In 2004, the percentage was 17%.

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