I wonder how many humans have had the courage to ask themselves the question “what if this idea of GOD is more than anyone could possibly imagine?’ No, not a mystery, but far more than any of the simplistic and often contradictory edicts that religions doctrines convey to assure the sanctity of some social order that proctors of those dogmas assert. And thus, ALL religions and even science and atheism too, in declaring a side on the exist vs. non-exist spectrum, were actually both mistaken?
My own belief is that whatever the universe is, I affectionately call it TUG (TAO, Universe, GOD), with all the apparent forces acting upon us, and all of human nature as intricate but also irrational meeting in a continual vortex called “personal reality” has absolutely little or no purpose to consider “God’s Will”. When, in actuality, we are always making the decisions to operate from our own will.
My assertion is simple: Whatever GOD is, it is WAY Bigger than any explanation we’ve come up with. So for that large group of people who assert that they use God as their “guiding force” I say that they are BS’ing themselves. Why? Not because I don’t believe that an overarching intelligence or force is in play, but by claiming deference to it what they are actually shirking their own culpability for their attitudes and their actions. Ironically, virtually every Western religion has rules against blasphemy and heresy, yet when a person claims they are getting their guidance from the Almighty, or Spirit, or the Divine, and then spells out those edicts, very often stretching the meaning of their doctrines; that person has engaged in the both Cardinal sins! It is only ignorance of the very definitions of these two precepts, and the hubris most people display when wanting to take refuge for the consequences of their actions, that they do so.
Whether an Islamic extremist, a Christian Fundamentalist, or Orthodox Jewish Zionist, they all invoke a supreme authority to blanketly justify that which is often hateful bigotry and acts of heinous cruelty. So much for a God of love and mercy, eh? I am repulsed when I hear such people pinning their personal accountability on GOD, when it is their own cowardice and fear acted out upon others. I laugh, with a bitter bile in my throat, when I hear these assholes declare themselves as righteous, and their religion so much more “TRUE” than their “evil” enemy; since each is aping the other with the exact same behavior just declaring the other wrong. Childish! And often deadly.
Our race is at a crossroads where such squabbles are pointless for God’s sake. Often, evoking God as justification, power-brokers have raped the Earth, declared war on those who didn’t deserve it, overtaken the needs of the less powerful like those who labor, third world citizens, or animals – many now driven to extinction. And we keep up the pretense! It is they, those power-brokers and we the passive hoards who put up with their antics, and not a God of anyone’s religion, that will have invited the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. (War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death.) The 1% earn lots of profit from War. George Orwell pointed that out to us in his prophetic novel 1984. If Earth’s soils fertility collapses because of over-farming and pesticides it will lead to starvation, disease, biological toxicity and all end up in the lap of Death. We are on that trajectory now! Let’s stop making “God’s Will” the cop-out for our own bad behavior. Yet Reverend Thomas Malthus an amateur economist and sociologist would have been the prophet we could look to for the results of those actions.
God didn’t do this to us, we did! We can also make different choices. It is time to take back our power to choose and subsequently act with the same creative power as the technological gods we have evolved into. The choice is ours. Whatever God is, it is simply watching to see what we do next.