Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugen 2023

The Concept of God in Different Religious Traditions
World religions and religious studies

God Is Complicated, Obviously: Thinking About the Divine Without Losing My Mind
—Or Why Religious Studies Feels Like Staring Directly Into the Sun for Too Long

God is either everywhere or nowhere, depending on who you ask—and asking is kind of the whole point. That’s the thing about world religions. They don’t just answer questions; they form entire ecosystems around the asking. But if you’ve ever taken a comparative religion class or gotten stuck in a Wikipedia spiral from “Hinduism” to “negative theology” to “apophatic mysticism,” you already know: the concept of God is not one neat noun. It’s a mess. A gorgeous, terrifying, unknowable mess that people have spent centuries trying to define, debate, paint on ceilings, or totally ignore.

And honestly? That’s what makes it interesting.

This isn’t going to be your bullet-pointed tour through “monotheism vs polytheism” like a dusty textbook trying to be chill. If you’re looking for neat rows of gods with clean moral hierarchies, go read a D&D manual. Religion isn’t a table of correspondences. It's more like a fever dream told in different accents—Islam’s breathless surrender, Hinduism’s cosmic dance, Christianity’s blood-soaked paradoxes, Buddhism’s loaded silence. And floating (or sinking) in the middle of all this is the question: what even is God?

Let’s just say: that depends.

“God” Is a Word That Misbehaves

I don’t trust the word “God.” It has the linguistic texture of overuse—like “love” or “freedom”—smoothed down by centuries of mouths saying it with vastly different intentions. In Judaism, God is so sacred you can’t even say the real name out loud (YHWH—try pronouncing that without a vowel). In Islam, God is Allah, which isn’t a name so much as a category-breaking isness. In Christianity, God is somehow a father, a son, and a ghost, which sounds like the beginning of a bad sitcom but is actually the cornerstone of Trinitarian theology.

And yet, people talk about God like He’s a Facebook profile. Likes justice, dislikes idolatry. Relationship status: complicated.

But let’s be real: most religious traditions aren’t talking about the same guy. They’re not even talking about a “guy” half the time. They’re talking about ultimate reality, about the ground of being, about consciousness with a capital C. But also, yeah, sometimes they are talking about a bearded man in the sky who throws lightning and gets moody when you eat shrimp on a Friday.

Language fails us. Of course it does. That’s kind of the point.

Christianity: The God Who Bleeds

If you grew up vaguely Western, God probably meant the Judeo-Christian one—emphasis on the Christian, let’s be honest. The God who becomes flesh, suffers, dies, resurrects. That’s Jesus, but also, apparently, God. It’s not a minor plot twist; it’s the theological equivalent of God writing Himself into the fanfiction. “The Word became flesh” is a wild sentence, theologically and grammatically.

And it’s dark. This isn’t a God who smiles gently from the clouds. This is a God who screams, bleeds, forgives, and—importantly—suffers. It’s divine pain elevated to the center of the story. If you’ve ever stared at a crucifix for too long, you know what I mean. There’s no clean moral in that image, no easy comfort. Just raw, physical vulnerability nailed into permanence.

Christianity is weird, and if it weren’t already a world religion, it would sound like a niche underground horror cult. Eat His body. Drink His blood. Accept this brutal execution as your redemption. I mean—who even talks like that anymore?

But the emotional stakes are high. Christianity doesn’t offer a God who fixes everything; it offers a God who joins you in the wreckage. That either breaks you open or makes you run screaming.

Or both.

Islam: The Unseeable Perfection

Where Christianity lets God get tangled in the human, Islam pulls the divine back into ungraspable clarity. There is no god but God. The statement is brutal in its simplicity. You cannot picture God. You cannot contain God. You submit.

Submission—Islam literally means it—isn’t about giving up; it’s about reorienting. God (Allah) is not to be trifled with. He’s merciful, yes, but He’s also incomprehensible. You don’t get to anthropomorphize Him into a grumpy dad or a cosmic boyfriend. He’s the One who creates out of nothing, who needs nothing, who is utterly, terrifyingly beyond.

There’s beauty in that. Also fear. Also awe. The Qur’an is full of this almost electric sense of scale. You are a speck. God is vast. Don’t forget it.

And yet, despite the abstractness, Islam’s concept of God feels intimate. He is closer than your jugular vein, says the Qur’an. Which sounds like either a comfort or a threat, depending on your mood. Or maybe both. Again.

Hinduism: So Many Gods, So Much Godness

Now we pivot to polytheism, which is a misleading word here. Hinduism is not just a carnival of colorful gods and mythological chaos (though, yes, there’s a lot of that). At its philosophical core, Hinduism also presents Brahman—not a god among gods, but the source, the infinite, the unmanifest reality behind everything.

This is a religion where God is both one and many. You have Krishna—the trickster-lover-philosopher. You have Kali—violent, terrifying, maternal. You have Shiva—dancer and destroyer, meditative and wild. And all of them are, in a sense, masks of Brahman. Divine cosplay, if you will.

Honestly, Hinduism’s relationship to God is so layered it makes Western theology look like finger painting. There's an ecstatic messiness to it—a willingness to let contradictions live side by side. God is both personal and impersonal, embodied and beyond embodiment, indifferent and lovingly obsessed with your soul.

Which, same.

Buddhism: God Optional (But Reality Is Still Wild)

Let’s get this out of the way: Buddhism doesn’t technically have a God. At least not the capital-G kind. No creator, no cosmic judge. But before you celebrate its “rationality” or slap it on a meditation app, slow down. Buddhism is not secularism with incense.

What it offers instead of God is something sneakier: a deep metaphysical framework about the nature of reality itself. Samsara. Nirvana. Emptiness. Enlightenment. And while Buddha isn’t divine in the way Jesus or Krishna might be, the way people relate to him emotionally is kind of… god-adjacent.

More than that, Buddhism doesn’t ask “Who is God?” so much as “Who are you, really?” And then it slowly erases every answer you give.

It’s a spiritual version of that meme where someone asks if you’re okay and you answer, “Yeah, just unpacking the illusion of self while detaching from the cycle of rebirth, you?”

So no, Buddhism doesn’t have a God. But it still wrestles with the same massive themes—suffering, transcendence, the ultimate nature of being—with the volume turned way down and the stakes impossibly high.

Judaism: The God Who Argues Back

Judaism, honestly, is the one that makes God feel the most alive. Not because He’s more powerful or more visible, but because He shows up in relationship. Messy, ongoing, painful relationship. He promises, He breaks, He relents, He argues. This is not the serene God of philosophical abstraction. This is the God of Exodus and exile, of desert monologues and whispered hope.

In Jewish tradition, arguing with God isn’t sacrilege—it’s tradition. Abraham bargains. Moses talks back. Job yells. The whole thing feels more like a long-term marriage than blind obedience.

There’s a starkness to the Jewish God. No Trinity, no incarnations, no statues. Just words. Laws. Promises. Absences. And yet, that absence often becomes its own kind of presence.

To believe in this God is to wrestle. Sometimes literally. Ask Jacob.

So, What Is God? (And Why Should I Care?)

Here’s the wild part: all these traditions are “talking about God,” but they’re barely in the same conversation. God as cosmic energy. God as personal savior. God as impersonal law. God as silence. God as explosion.

And yet, despite the contradictions—or maybe because of them—something emerges: the human urge to name what cannot be named. To shape meaning out of the unbearable immensity of being. That’s what religious studies actually studies. Not just doctrines and dates, but the emotional heat at the center of our metaphysical longings.

When we talk about God, we’re not just talking about belief systems. We’re talking about how cultures metabolize grief, hope, violence, ecstasy, power, loss. We’re talking about the way a concept can fracture into a thousand forms and still feel like it’s pointing at the same impossible center.

God is the original Rorschach test. People see love. Judgment. Absence. Infinity. A man. A mother. A light. A void. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything.

And maybe that’s the point.

This Isn’t a Conclusion

I’m not trying to tie this up. You can’t. The divine doesn’t fit inside a Google doc.

But here’s what stays with me: The God of the world’s religions is never just a concept. He, She, It, They—whatever pronoun you want to stab at—is a pressure point in the human imagination. A presence you argue with. A silence you feel judged by. A rhythm in the background of your life, even if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool atheist who only ever prays on airplanes.

And in an age of algorithms and collapsing attention spans, that longing—the one that reaches toward something bigger, scarier, holier—still pulses under the surface. The language shifts. The symbols glitch. But the question stays.

What is God?

Let’s keep asking.