The God Code

I read Gregg Braden's God Code recently. In spite of all the good things I have heard about it, it was a disappointment. Why? Well, because of all the good I heard about it, it was not what I expected.

Here's the thing: when I professed to be a Christian, I spent 20 plus years studying all the proofs, Biblical and extra-biblical that what I professed was right. I spent hours synthesizing all that I read so that it fit within the narrow lens of evangelical Christian theology. All of that reading; all of that thinking; all of that synthesizing has left me exhausted, frustrated, and perhaps even bitter. When it comes down to it, in the end, I believe whatever I believe in my heart, not all the volumes of stuff that tell me what I should believe and why I should believe it.

Sadly, The God Code struck me as just another synthesis; another synthetic justification for believing something. Braden takes about one-hundred-and-fifty pages to synthesize the connection between the tetragrammaton (Name of God) and the elements of air, water, and fire, to DNA and our humanity.

Let me make it clear, I am fully convinced that we all carry the spark of the Divine; we are all derived from the Divine Mystery, the Source. I am fully convinced of it. Even so, I'm not so sure that I would take on the task of trying to say that our DNA is derived from the written name of God, especially since that name in the form of the tetragammaton is found only in middle-eastern literature. It is a stretch.

Listen, God, the Divine One, the Great Mystery, however you wish to name the Creator of all that is and is not, is what It is, and what It created is part of what It is. Why waste 150 pages to link it to something like a written name?

Well, Braden goes on to speculate that if everyone just realized that we are made up of the stuff in the Divine Name, that we would see the world in a different light and we would treat each other like we need to treat anything that is of the Divine. Wars would end, exploitation of our Earth would end, etc.

OK, let's explain this to the radical way-out extremists of any religion, while they cut off our infidel heads supposedly in the name of this Creator. As much as I love and respect Gregg Braden and the work that he does, I think some how he lost touch with the reality of how unreasonable we, "man the wise," can be. Isn't that so tragically ironic?