I think that it is very important to realize that most of us probably have some truly stupid ways of thinking about God, especially when we have to deal with life’s challenges. The word Stupid, which comes from Latin, means stop. Our ideas about God may have simply stopped growing, stopped maturing, stopped developing, and now seem stupid in the commonplace meaning of the word. The ideas we were spoon-fed as children we may now gag on as adults. The ideas that fired our imagination and inspired our reverence may now seem laughable. God may seem like little more than a human invention so cluttered with absurdities that He’s barely recognizable.

Even the truest believers have been plagued by doubts. Real doubts. Healthy doubts. Doubts that come from trying to approach God as whole people – doubts that come from trying to reconcile their intelligence and their sense of reason with what they learned about God in Sunday school.

For others, however, there may not have been a struggle. God has simply become too unbelievable to believe. But if you talk to these atheists and ask them why they can’t believe, you very quickly see the real problem.

Atheists seldom reject God – a credible God, that is. More often, they reject some stupid way of thinking about God. Some idea so ridiculous it isn’t worth believing. Some idea that causes so much personal guilt it is better off discarded. And rightly so.

For them, and indeed for all of us, the question is not if there is, or could be, a God, but what kind of god is God? What sort of God do we believe in? What kind of God is worthy of belief? Often we’ve pushed aside our confusion. In an attempt to feel whole, we’ve brushed it under a rug, written it off as mystery.

Most of the time we can get away with it, and our stupid ways of thinking go unnoticed. But many times we are confronted quite abruptly by our stupid ways of thinking. There is a senseless death; then the idea that God is perfectly good seems senseless. A woman is raped; then the stupid idea that God is male becomes poison. Divorce becomes a necessity; then a lifetime of faith is thrown into jeopardy. A child is diagnosed with cancer; where is a compassionate God? Indeed, life crises and faith crises always seem to go hand in hand.

Too frequently you hear when a person is facing a particularly difficult crisis, How could a loving God allow this to happen? Frequently we hear when people are confronted with very difficult challenges, Why is God punishing me? This reveals a stupid way of thinking about God. Is it not stupid to think that God is some Supreme Being just waiting to catch us doing something wrong so that He can punish us?