GOD AGAIN
GOD AGAIN
by William Thomas
When "worshipping" the thought-forms of God and Jesus it is useful to pretend you are parying to the Egyptian God, Horus and the Greek God, Zues, with Jesus as his son, Superman. Such imagery will accurately depict both the commonalities and the power of these myths.
If the genderless emotionless perfect God that can't be spoken of is worshipped as a cartoon figure by hundreds of millions of persons, the life-energy flowing through the universe and all things cannot be denied - just look at a vacant-eyed, string-cut corpse to get a sense of something departed.
Is this life-force creative? Manifestly. Is it intelligent? Intelligence is emerging through its complexifying emergence in humans, cetaceans, all wild animals, plants, forests, AI. It is already self-directing and, in the case of robotics at least, going exponential - if evolving its own algorithms without human participation or comprehension can be called "intelligent". (If not, what?)
I just want to scream: GOD IS NOT A DUDE!
No matter which one true religion you sign up for, regardless of your age and aspirations you will have to leave your highest, God-given attribute - reason - outside in the cold and rain, and enter the realm of pure fantasy. There are no mass-media-recorded interviews with God or photographs of God. He is not on Facebook. God does not have a presence on YouTube. Which is more than odd, given the everlasting nature of the Worldwide Web.
Of course, imposing a gender on a god patterned on the oldest running mythlogy in human story-telling limits that god, thereby disqualifying "him" from the God playoffs. When god's human attributes include rage, threats, sadism, cons, vengeance, infinite mercy, unbounded love and genocide there's no doubt the Abrahamic god is back among us, imposing Iron Age shackles on all believers while the ice sheets melt and the planet burns.
"How can there be religious tolerance when each religion professes to be the "one true" faith?" she said. "What religion dares tolerate pretenders?"
GOD
Not a super-being with testicles. (Or tentacles for that matter). A creative energy permeating all things and leading inexorably – according to natural law – to emergent complexity. Not a “Creator” person – a Creative Intelligence.
Maybe.
UNIVERSE AS GOD
If you want a God that's intelligible, try the universe. Its ordered simplicity and uncanny creation of self-reflecting life on the only planet in the so-far known universe capable of supporting increasingly complex organic life is certainly godlike – a reflection of an intentional force that appears to flow through all things in a way that can be observed and felt but not measured. In the universe the odds against life are so fantastic, life on this bright blue dot capable of sustaining it is almost inconceivable.
Maybe we are here so that the universe can find out about itself.
SPACE ALIENS AND JESUS ARE NOT COMING TO SAVE US
Don't you understand that you have to earn intervention? Being a victim isn't enough. Shooting yourself doesn't qualify.
No tengo, mas
Stupido!
GOD IS MIND?
Maybe God is mind... maybe the mind transcends the body and continues after death and that is how we may ultimately connect to the divine. What if it is mind itself that brought the universe into existence in the first place? In this scenario, maybe God is the universal mind and... the afterlife is where minds go without their brains. -Michael Shermer
THE BODY/SOUL PROBLEM
The body is the soul, say the monists, and death's disintegration of the "DNA and neurons that store the informational patterns of our bodies, our memories and our personalities." Erase my cellular hard-drives and information storage and poof! The blip that was me winks out.
But most of us are dualists, deluded perhaps in feeling that something else is going on. Something not visible — at least to ordinary eyes. Something bigger than big which our soul or essence rejoins after death in a joyful, mind-blowing coming home.
Think again. Who wants a God whose self-esteem is so easily threatened, he sends non-believers straight to the burning fires of hell for all eternity, which is a seriously long time to roast. If he really is "all loving and merciful" as you say, why does he visit such terrible diseases and disasters on so many little ones? Why did he create them through conception in the first place, knowing the fate of all non-believers and so many innocent children?
And what's with all these references to 'Father' 'He' and 'Him'? Wouldn't you say being stuck in a single gender — especially one prone to impulsive behavior and attacks of testosterone — would be limiting to a god? If your god is delineated as a suspicious, petty and often vindictive Sadist Dad prone to promulgating appalling trauma and brutality for every imagined insult, wouldn't you say this is rather limiting for a God?
BIBLE STORY SUPERHEROES
The bible stories beg comic book depictions . You'd wonder how anyone coming along seventy, eighty, a hundred years later could make this stuff up. But of course they didn't have to. The entire teaching story was all there, including particulars handed down from the Romans and the Greeks before them and the Egyptians before then - all subscribing to the same Redeemer yarn - not as historical fact but something much, much stronger - the favourite sacred allegory of a humanity urgently in need of saving - not from sins but ourselves. All Superheros are the Savior in contemporary guise.
FAITH BIASED
I don't care if "faith" defies rational analysis, which it surely does. I'm off the bus when it defies common sense. When it points to the Greek and Egyptian gods its appropriated as its own - without using his Greek and Egyptian and Roman names.
CATHOLIC CHURCH CATECHISM (Book Review: 5th edition or later)
Okaaay. Let's see what we've got here. This is a hefty tome as befits the weight of its contents - 5--- pages of things every Catholic has to sign off on in order to retain their membership in the most powerful institution on the face of this planet: the Roman Catholic Church.
The Vatican is the wild card in international power politics. National governments come and go but the Jesuits have been calling a lot of shots since forever. Now add serious wealth in precious stones and gems, gold in various forms, art works, real estate... many trickles make a torrent of cash. Add the adherence of subscribers to this book and all teachings issued under the papal seal of "infallibility".
Talk about surrendering power!
So let's see what beliefs we have to have to be a card-carrying Catholic, eligible to practice simulated cannibalism and confess their sins to God's representative voyeur in or out of the confessional.
Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church in is the biggest swindle ever perpetrated on humanity - by far - and that's saying something. The inheritors of the mantle of Horus and Mithra could have been a truly great Church. Drawing on the occult powers invoked through the Latin High Mass (at which I served as young and completely enthralled altar boy intoning Latin responses) - and promulgating humanity's greatest story, the Redeemer Myth, handed down from the Egyptians to the Greeks and on to the Romans, whose pagans complain the Church of Rome has appropriated their religion.
The whole God trip is about power and control.
God's own teaching wrote down in an endlessly revised holy book? I'm not buyin' it. How was this ultra-exclusive instruction transmitted and who was writing it down? Why them?
WHY NOT GO WITH JESUS AND SYNTHIA?
"Look," he advised, "since this story the lynchpin of the dominator paradigm and all, why not go with Jesus? Too bad the Horus legend and all those Super Hero iterations that came before and after were co-opted by Christ-nicks who declared their Super Hero among all the others it was derived from - literally, incredibly a real Son of God returned like all the Redeemers going back beyond the pharoahs into stories told around campfires while savage beasts howled in the night.
Everybody needs their own personal saviour to substitute for taking personal responsibility for their robotic actions - happily, the real robots will be taking over soon and humans will become dangerously obsolete. Eve now my computer talks to me, reading back my writing in the most constant woman's voice in my life. I get off on hearing her handle several languages, as well as technical photographic or deep sea sailing terms.
Always a treat, Synthia. Yes, I've renamed "Bitchin' Betty" for constantly nagging me about ink levels or something else needing attention to the synthetic or AI or Machine Intelligence form of Cynthia - thus Synthia. If I could get her to cook, I'd probably marry her. Except I promised myself not to do that any more. {"Are you going to marry this one, too?" asked dear old dad.)
SACRED SCHIZOID’
"What's really sacredly schizoid," she said, "is a religion as sublime and murderously brutal as Islam. Or Christianity. Seeing them try to reconcile irreconcilable contradictions not only within their founding scriptures but within their own conduct would be amusing, if it weren't for the damage and the casualties."
As Paul West observes, "Praying to an otherworldly God is like kissing through glass."
As Wendell Barry says, there is only the sacred and the desecrated.