Sunday, April 24, 2011

Some Thoughts About God, the Universe, Man, and Religion

A universe so grand.



A universe that in all likelihood mirrors, in perhaps but a small way, the magnificent creative force, power, or being that we, mere puny creatures on a lump of rock floating in a sea of Dark Energy and Dark Matter filling the space of a vast universe that may itself be only a piece of a greater unseen UNIVERSE, call God. Such a tiny word that is supposed to somehow capture the awesome grandeur and power of something we cannot imagine; and in our limited attempts to do so, create multiple ideas of, which themselves are limited by our limited human capabilities. Yet, we puny creatures fight each other to the death, for nothing more than power and bragging rights, in order to prove or enforce our view, which we call religion, of what that God MIGHT be. We think our limited conception of the unimaginable has sufficient value to hate, to maim, and to kill our fellow creatures, who share with us such a brief conscious instant. From the theist to the atheist to the antitheist; from the fundamental Christian to the Catholic to the Muslim to the Jew we fight, having the audacity to think our view is somehow absolutely right. And we support our views by relying on some fantasy or assumption. The athiest or naturalist calls their assumption a 'model'—it starts with another assumption that only natural laws and forces operate in the world and that nothing exists beyond the natural world which must be observable, understandable, knowable, or testable; then proceeds to justify itself with the belief that a scientific theory is testable making it preferable to a revelatory belief without dealing with the simple fact that many theories may never be amenable to testing. The believer calls their fantasy or assumption 'revelation', which itself is based on a book we know as the Bible, which was written by men over a period of little more than a millenium, and edited, by men, in a process that involved politics no different from those that we see in our government, and are disgusted by.

It would seem to me that in his quest to make the unknowable somehow 'knowable', man prefers dogma and ritual as a poor substitute for simple wonder; for accepting that he can only but imagine something that he can never know; and for accepting that there is in fact something he can never know. In his need and craving to make the unknowable 'knowable', so he can avoid accepting his own limitations, man prefers to hate, to maim, and to kill his fellow man and to ignore the TRUE message being brought, not only by Jesus, but also by the prophets Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, and Jeremiah and by countless others. It's all such folly.

My quest has brought me to an understanding, to an acceptance, that I must redefine who or what I see God as being to allow for the vast amount of knowledge that is not known and in some cases cannot ever be known. My view of God today is far more deistic and is not definitive, is not tied to any of our preconceived notions, and focuses on the wonder aspects of what God could be as the ultimate Creator and First Cause. I'm talking about an all inclusive rather than an all exclusive view of God. I have concluded that God as known to man is a man made invention (the word 'god' itself is a human invention or contrivance) arising out of man's intense need to describe, within the capacity for his understanding, something that is both unlimited and limitless and therefore not definable. Man has included and excluded, as fit his needs and fears, certain concepts and qualities into his definition of God. I'd even go so far as to say that concepts like violence and chaos are human contrivances to describe something that humans fear and dislike and are in fact threatening to human life; but are manifested throughout the universe and are but PART of God's reflection.

For me, God is Wonder. I can say no more, because I truly know no more, and I really don't need to know any more about something that is beyond my ken. My limited understanding of the universe provides me with some limited idea of God. That is all that I am capable of, and I am content with that. That is my creed. That is my belief. Everything else, including that which possesses supportable though inconclusive evidence and especially that which has no verifiable support, is merely possible, but may be improbable.

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