Godstuff

1.That there is no other reality beyond the one we can experience with our senses or through the current state of our burgeoning technologies seems highly unreasonable to me. In fact, it seems silly.

2.That the accumulated richness of our individual experience would wink out of existence upon death and become valueless, is, according to everything I understand about the conservation of energy, highly improbable if not impossible.

3.That the sum total of all things adds up to no more than a pile of rocks, a few of which are on fire, is too short a leap for me to make – it’s more like sitting down. It makes more sense to me that it all adds up to an aware entity that interacts with its less aware component parts in ways beyond our understanding.

4.That any human being – myself in particular – can speak with authority as to the nature and intentions of this entity is something I reject. That there is such an entity, and that it may in fact have intentions, is unknowable; how we each may feel about the possiblilty of its existence is personal, and these feelings should not be governed by other human beings. Attempts to explain them, like this, are part of human nature, and so are attempts to codify these feelings into a structure, the shape of which some humans try to imitate so they can then have lives shaped similarly. But to take a structure based on feelings and impose it on others always leads to the violent death of human beings. Although there is always something of worth that millions can gain from them, prophets who claim to be in possession of the one true way to a satisfactory afterlife can and have posed a mortally dangerous threat to the earthbound lives of those millions.

I find it very difficult to ask God for things in the way that I was taught as a child. Do I believe God is going to take away my illness when he turned an entirely deaf ear to the six million Jews who went into the gas chambers? – Karen Armstrong

I'm wired to believe in God the Designer. I can't possibly believe that the sum of all things is nothing more than a collection of dumb rocks. It's a living collection, this “all that is,” quite smart, and we interact with it whether we want to or not because we are a part of all that is. Its direction is positive – a flow toward transformation and renewal – and when we ask it for help, that's the same as aligning ourselves with its direction, so of course God recognizes the petitioner as someone trying to join him. God seems to ignore prayers, but it may be that you cannnot have the renewal you seek without transformation first.

A Jewish grandmother is watching her grandchild playing on the beach when a huge wave comes and takes him out to sea. She pleads, “Please, God, save my only grandson. I beg of you, bring him back.” And a big wave comes and washes the boy back onto the beach, good as new. She looks up to heaven and says, “He had a hat!” – Myron Cohen

Here’s a story I heard. It makes sense to me.

A long time ago (or now, if you’re a theoretical physicist), there was just God. I don’t know where he was; location wasn’t – and isn’t – an issue. God dreamed. Of us. Of planets and grass and stars and ear mites. He loved this dream and fervently desired to make real the inhabitants of his dream. How could he do this? Well, he had to explode, separating all these dream pieces from himself. It was a dilemma, but he capitulated to his love of us and did it. Boom. We and everything else are pieces of him. We’re his bloody guts, hallelujah. Now we dream of reuniting with Him as he once dreamed of us. A big circle. Whee!