This piece is likely to be contentious, so I sent it out to a small circle of trusted friends for comment. True, they are my friends, so likely to be on my side. But I’m talking people of integrity and I am comfortable with their evaluation…
Beautiful. Wouldn’t change anything. JC
I found this fascinating and the underlying truth raised my mood substantially. Should be available in schools across the country! MB
I like it – you argue your points well. It’ll be interesting to see what response you get to its broad publication. PD
So, is God just a joke? Richard Dawkins thinks so. He wrote a book called The God Delusion, which is about the most arrogant, distasteful and mistaken attack on people’s beliefs and traditional values I have read to date.
He joins an army of pseudo-scientific reductionist nerds (read: idiots) who think they have proved that God does not exist. Science cannot prove anything does not exist. Period. The most it can do is fail to prove that something does exist. They have no God-detector apparatus, so how would they know?
Suppose you were on a hunt 200 years ago, to prove that radio waves are nonsense. You could “prove” that easily. Nothing happens, there is no known effect, you can’t see, touch or feel radio waves; ergo, there is no such thing.
People who believed in radio waves (at that time) you would call or consider stupid, primitive, superstitious or at best uneducated.
But as we all know, radio waves do exist and once we have a worthwhile means of tuning into them, we can enjoy the programs!
Now that’s just a logical line of argument—a thread of thought. I don’t want you to think that I buy into any of the current models of God (or gods). Dear me no.
I share with Dawkins a mockery of the supposed attributes of what ought to be the embodiment of Divine Love. Instead, what are we offered?
The God of the Bible (Old Testament) is a contradictory, jealous, vengeful, petty-minded, misogynistic bully, with anger management issues. He is supposed to have created us in his image. Well, that makes him a real bozo, doesn’t it? He has all the human follies and weaknesses he has given to us. But maybe we invented HIM in our own image? Same thing. The Biblical God is frankly obnoxious and dysfunctional. I couldn’t like him, never mind love him. My aspirations are to do better, not emulate behaviors and attitudes of his stripe.
But then, maybe the Biblical God doesn’t actually exist? Frankly, I hope not! We are supposed to be God-fearing (which is ridiculous) yet, admittedly, this model portrays something to be scared of! If such an unpredictable entity was human, we would easily diagnose borderline personality or maybe bipolar (swings hot and cold). He could even be a danger to the public.
The late George Carlin had a wonderfully funny take on this; you can find it on YouTube. [search: George Carlin God loves you]
“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an Invisible Man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the Invisible Man has a special list of 10 things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these 10 things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever, till the end of time…” and then Carlin adds with a wry smile, “But he loves you!”
Naturally, this sounds absurd, because it is! Yet billions of people are stuck with this model of the Divine! The so-called Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam and, of course, Judaism) all share acceptance of the Old Testament stories and fables. I’m talking here tales of murder, incest, betrayal, adultery, onanism, bestiality, prostitution, genital mutilation, fellatio, rape, infanticide and the like.
Even cannibalism! In Leviticus 26:29; God describes how he will punish people by making them eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters.
Still don’t believe me? Consider this; God’s instructions for a battle in Numbers 31:17-18:
“Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”
Seriously? Now what would soldiers want with little virgins, huh? It makes you shudder.
Here’s a bit more inspiration from God:
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones (Psalm 137:9).
A psalm, for goodness sake! I mean this is one sick book.
As one online commentator (user name: Murdoch5) remarked on the use of the Bible to swear in Joe Biden at his inauguration, in Jan 2021:
“Out of all the books you choose, the Bible must be one of the worst examples of a text on which you swear an oath. Can anyone think of another collection of stories that demonstrates worse morals, ethics and which lacks any basis for system of right and wrong that could be used by a just society?”
There are scores of websites pointing out the deficiencies of The Bible as a spiritual resource, if you want to delve further!
The point is I’m talking here about the state we call God. It is proper rhetoric to discredit references to an evil and disruptive model of God that is not valid in this day and age. It’s not just me being cranky or confrontational. It’s being rational.
The God Paradox
Then there is the God paradox: God created the world; the world is full of bad stuff; ergo God creates bad stuff as well as good things.
It leads to the nonsense of irrationality whereby people believe they were saved or rescued by God’s hand. But when bad things happen—like tsunamis, earthquakes and tornadoes—that’s not God’s fault! He didn’t do it. What? That is just logical rubbish.
Sorry but I am sticking with rationality for this piece. I’m not doing romance, tradition, sentiment or emotion. If God is the master hand, he has a wicked sense of humor when it comes to killing hundreds of thousands, even millions, of innocent people just going about their business. And for no apparent reason—just whim.
But of course I don’t believe that. We can postulate a better model for God, surely. I can do better than all the religions of earth, just by using common sense and a questioning mind set!
So What Is The Truth Here?
Shorn of all mysticism, prejudice and romance: God is a presence, not an entity, person or being, as such. It is something within us all, we are in it, we ARE it. It is us.
“In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God…” So begins the lovely gospel according to John (my favorite).
Let’s shift this starter proposition to: suppose consciousness came first. Then it gets very interesting very quickly! In the beginning there was no matter, energy, space or time, just consciousness. Therefore consciousness is timeless and without limit. Woa!! That’s getting too exciting too fast, I think. But you can handle it!
Just be logical… please. If there is no time, then consciousness is unlimited. It is immortal. It cannot UN-be. Therefore it cannot die.
No time. Now that could be scary. Orthodox thinkers suppose, based on silly science (the Big Bang), that the universe is just 13 billion years old, so that is a meaningless estimate. But time (as we know it) had a beginning somewhere. But where? The real history of your place in the world could go back billions, trillions, squillions, gazillions of years! What does it matter, really. It’s just numbers. And time they say is just an illusion.
This early consciousness, or proto-consciousness to sound scholarly, I call Primal Consciousness. It’s up to you whether you call this God, O My God, Wow! Yikes! Or whatever. Just remember, if it’s there, or ever was, it’s still there. It’s timeless remember, by definition (just keeping you up to speed here).
Being logical, other things follow. If consciousness was there first, then it is the source of the material universe. We put it there. That’s exactly what quantum physics has been saying and why some find it hard to swallow. The British Empiricist philosophers of the 18th century expressed the same conclusion: things exist only because they are perceived to exist.
The old trope about the tree falling in the forest and is there a sound if no-one is there to hear it? becomes: what tree?
It also follows that our conscious Being enfolds everything. I love that word enfold. To me, in my writings, that means we ARE love; not that we give or get love, or that we even DO love. It means we ARE love. Love is our Being!
From that we can extrapolate to a living, loving universe. The material world is within us, not the other way round. Stars, planets and creatures are all inside your mind. Consciousness is everywhere and soaked into the physical. There is no universe without love and light. It is woven into the fabric of things.
Of course the reductionist scientists would argue consciousness couldn’t have been there first, because it requires physical structures, such as a brain, a computer or even a robot form to be conscious. But that’s psychopathological science. There is no evidence whatever to accept that such a supposition is true. What’s more, logically speaking, such evidence could never be adduced!
If we accept that Primal Consciousness (which you could call God, if that works for you) was there first and we are of the same nature (non-material Being but with thoughts, perceptions and purposes) then we created, or co-created, the world.
This logical “God” is not as nasty or daft as the Bible one and I doubt it took a convenient seven days, or that fatigue was a factor on the seventh day! These are just silly human values added to what could be a great Creation story.
Real Primal Consciousness would, by these precepts, be infinitely powerful, all-knowing, loving, eternal and omni-present (immanent). It would be a huge and unstoppable creative force… except that it wouldn’t be a force, it would be a presence.
Hey, have you noticed: we are coming full circle and starting to sound a bit “biblical”, if you’ll excuse the expression!
But there is one important question hanging from all this: when, where and why did we individuate or separate from Primal Consciousness? Well, that’s another story and I’ll tackle it some day soon!
Copyright C 2024 by Keith Scott-Mumby. Creator of Supernoetics
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED