Creating a Better God

Perhaps the reason there are so many Atheists is because Atheism seems so plausible, that so many people see no clear signs of there being a God. But the real problem may be that they do not know what to look for, that their very conception of what God is or would be misleads them. They may not be looking in the right place, or they may not know what they are looking for, not realizing that they passed it over because they did not recognize it when they saw it, as in the expression “they would not know God if He were to bite them on the ass”. So we need to ask ourselves if there is another way of anticipating or visualizing God besides the traditional way. How might God be hiding from our expectations?

Well, first let’s look at our traditional way of conceiving of God? In the West God is envisioned as a collection of all positive absolutes – All Powerful, All Loving, All Knowing, and All Decisive, the Grand Being behind the notion that everything has meaning, and that everything has a purpose, and all is as it should be. Because of God we live in the ‘best of all possible world’s’. Rich people use such a notion of God to justify and entrench their privileges, while also concluding that God must have His reasons for hating the poor. The Poor themselves more often than not suppose God is either testing them with challenges or building their character by providing them with a kind of resistance training.

Well, such a God must be up against a huge barrage of constraints, because it seems clear enough to most people, that we live in a very complexly troubled world. If some people do seem blessed, then we can hardly determine any good reason for it, and those who are apparently under some curse, well, they too may seem all too blameless. And it had never been much better but had probably been even worse most of the time – an odd condition for the Best of All Possible World’s under the dominion of a Wise and Good God. So what is God’s problem?

First, let’s become clearer on what we suppose is the nature of God. Many spiritualist traditions envision God as ethereal and spiritual, and this in contradistinction to the idea that the World is material and basic. The early Christians, and the Greek Philosophers with their Platonic notions of the Logos, actually agreed on this issue, of God being Ethereal – made of the substance of thought and dreams.

Here is where we should apply some common sense. Here we need to ask ourselves what influences what. Does Thought influence Matter or does Matter influence Thought? Well, isn’t it easier to suppose that massive structures of gravitational electromagnetic clusters could more easily influence the vague nebulous Mists of the Ethereal then to believe that such insubstantial wisps of quasi-nothingness could affect the massive solids of the World? It seems likely we have been looking at this Theology completely backwards, seeing cause and effect in mirror image, supposing that the Spiritual was the Creative Element, indeed, that God, the Core of Spirit, was the Ultimate Creator, when, quite actually, the Spiritual has been the created product of the Material. It’s the substance which influences the spiritual and not the other way around. We’ve had it backwards.

I once read an amusing, if blasphemous, anecdote that goes back to perhaps the earliest Civilization, the Sumerian. It seems that one citizen had discerned a contradiction between all of the sacrifices to the Gods being asked of the public and the subservience to the Gods that was also being demanded. So there written on one of the small clay tablets was the thought that if God had to beg his food like a dog, then God should be whipped like a dog, and taught to do tricks for his dinner just like any other dog. Perhaps there is some truth here, although our Mesopotamian Friend hardly had presented much of an expansive argument. But lets stay with the metaphor for awhile, that is, comparing God with Man’s Best Friend. What if God really needed to be trained, cultivated, nourished – not being seen at his best unless treated as a cherished pet and given a certain degree of discipline and character formation?

Yes, God may consist in the Ethereal and Spiritual, but all of the real power may be with the Material, and if God ever attains to any significant power it is because this power had been imparted by the Material World. Indeed, the Vedas, the World’s most ancient Religious Literature, states clearly that God’s Power comes from Sacrifice – that it is Man that energizes God and not the other way around.

This may help us to better understand Religious History and our own Religious Current Events. When a Civilization can get together in a common prayer and a common religious Vision, then, in a sense, God becomes Solidified. With so many people thinking similarly, the Collective Consciousness crystallizes a God of the People’s Moral Consensus. God is a Collective Phenomena.

What happens when Barbarism and Individualism reigns? What happens when education breaks down and all unifying culture collapses in skepticism or just plain ignorance? Well, if there ever had been a God, then that God simply evaporates. Yes, each individual may have his own Religion and his own God, but without the Multiplier Effect of Common Communal Belief, then each person’s separate God is too small to matter. It is like a hundred thousand batteries that if wired together would out-surge a bolt of lightening bolt, but just one little single cell battery isn’t enough to run a toy.

But in Ages and Cultures that had a great degree of Religious Unity and Intensity, then a certain amount of Power was communicated into the Spirit World and that power became manifested in Saints, that found a way to tap into it, and Spiritual Apparitions which are probably to be best compared to condensations of Ethereal Substance or Flash Points. Or, if we are hesitant to attribute any quality of Matter to the Spirit, then we can limit these manifestations of Spirit to being phenomena of Consciousness – that these Divine Apparitions may consist in the quasi-substance of what we would otherwise call Delusion – the Substance of Dreams, of Visions, of Thought Itself.

Yes, yes, yes… it is objected that if something is not Material then it is not real. Science equates delusional phenomena with random and arbitrary nothingness. But if a phenomena contains elements of coherent order, substantial or not, then that very coherent order is in itself something of meaning which needs to be respected and understood. We need to have more respect for such Objective Experience, and so if a thousand people all have the very same experience, even if only subjective, even if dismissible as just a Common Delusion, or Collective Hallucination, then the reality of that consensus needs to be valued and appreciated, and if Science has not yet found the tools to quantify such a phenomena, then that is an indictment of Science, and not Religion. After all, Galileo would be the first condemn as silly any person who maintained that Empirical Phenomena was to be discounted only because an investigating Philosopher was unable to assemble a means of verification. Galileo invented the Telescope to make his Research quantifiably possible. Today’s scientists need to stop their endless bitching and invent the Telescope of the Spirit. So much consensus regarding empirical subjective experience cannot be random and of nothing.

But if we accept that the Spiritual is secondary to the Material then there are serious Theological consequences to such thinking. First, we can decide that the Polytheists were right, or more right then the Monotheists. The Truth is that there probably was a contest between competing Gods, between the Spiritual Visions of competing peoples. The Greatest God would be that God with the greatest total sum of collective intensity supporting it. Yes, at the very deepest level where ‘God’ becomes thoughtless and unmodified, consisting in pure unelaborated spirit, then ‘God’ would have a certain sameness. But also, at this level, God would be providentially useless, or worse than useless, as in the Buddhist sense of encouraging nihilism by rewarding the pursuit of absolutely nothing at all. Reject the World, and abandon Society and live in the Bliss of Pure Meditation on God. It is the Intellectual equivalent to drug abuse, or even continuous sex abuse. It leads to some people indulging in Nothingness while other people must take up the slack and work that much harder. Its simply not fair. Oh, which is the reason why the East argues about Karma… that the Lazy have earned the right to be lazy and that those who work hard for society must have a lot of bad Karma. Again, we see how the Rich and the Privileged are adept at finding arguments to justify themselves. We must remember that our Mesopotamian friend was right about the God he compared to a dog, that it is not worth feeding unless we can get some tricks out of Him. God must be useful. Religion must be useful. And People should be useful.

The same way in which particles of iron dust are lined up and made coherent by the invisible influence of a magnet, so we can envision so many individual people being made into a Coherent Civilization by means of God and Religion. In this sense we are comparing God to Electricity, and with this acknowledgement and qualification, that we are ourselves responsible for having to generate the Power and even the Form of God by our own efforts and moral intuitions. The more we can all agree in this Moral Vision, the more coherent our Collective God will be. The Ultimate Quality of our Civilization depends upon our Collective Vision of God.