In the Defense of God

There are many books on denying God, or to be more precise, promoting the atheistic philosophy of science worshipping.

This is all well as I suspect most of this fervor is directed against religion (which I am not fond of) and in generally Christianity that is based on a false doctrine. I am not anti-Christian, I am anti-religion. I consider the Christ story a most important mystical legend of the era. The reason being, the Christ legend is based on a premise of anti-clergy and anti-church. He mainly had gone up against the powers of His day, the clergy. I find the Christ story especially endearing in its main theme, “you do not need a priest or a rabbi or any intercessors to reach God”, and you only need to do what Christ did. And I do not mean the need to be crucified. This is a true and very liberating concept in the midst of the heavy hocus-pocus and dogma of clergy. These self-anointed men who think for you and tell you what to do and believe in, actually had altered the truth; cherry picked the bible source manuscript and even burned books and heretics (people who disagreed with them).

When Christ said and I paraphrase, “you can get to God through me”. He did not say, “I am God or you must worship me”. To me this quote means; we can ALL use the venue, the mechanism he had used and hence you can too can achieve even greater things than he has (this is also a quote in the Bible somewhere). It is all in the good book, look it up.

Unfortunately the flock either forgot to read or simply used selective comprehension from a very complex and allegorical text. The whole New Testament is a testimony that via love and sacrifice we can get to where Christ has gotten. It is all there for everybody, all you need to do is to follow Christ’s footsteps. But how did the church hierarchy interpret this? They claim we only have to worship Christ as God and the only begotten son of God! Then and only then we can go to the place, he dwells. So which is it? The Son of God or God, or perhaps both? I never could get this one straight… The Gnostic followers knew it better but of course history taught them a lesson, politics and spirituality do not mix well.

God is a different story altogether. The Abrahamic tradition uses God as an anthropomorphic deity which is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings. The implication of this anthropomorphic, personal God concept is that this is an entity that exists external from our realm; He dwells in a place called heaven, which is separate from our dwelling place, Earth. This philosophy is THE cause of much controversy and argument against the very existence of God.

Simple human reasoning cannot be shut down. The anthropomorphic God theory also suggests that God made all that is and has caused all events in human history. So the main argument against this anthropomorphic God is how a perfect and otherwise all powerful deity could create such an imperfect world? This, amongst other arguments is the main lynchpin of the atheistic philosophy.

There is a separation in the Abrahamic tradition of God. He lives in one place and we in another. This is somewhat of a puzzle. He also has human characteristics, I suspect because the human mind can easier deal with a deity that is like us, albeit more powerful. He gets angered and is vengeful and jealous. All these are signs of human weaknesses. It is not hard to see why so many people have trouble accepting and believing in such a phenomenon. This was my main dilemma since childhood. I refused to become an atheist like my father, but I could not, EVER accept this anthropomorphic deity. It just did not make any sense to me. For a while I thought perhaps nature was God. This was the old fashioned Pagan heritage surfacing in me. After all, historically, Paganism was a long and accepted tradition of nature worshipping. But nature does not make that much sense when you start looking up in the sky and stare that the magnitudes of stars, celestial bodies and vast distances in space. Our Earth is a spec of dust in the vastness of the known universe, so how can our environmental nature be the all encompassing godhead? When I looked at the exactness, the perfect choreography of ALL living things in nature, I could easily see God there, but we have not found life in outer space, and seemingly, as we know it, is alone. Nature could not be it. Instead, the Divine was everywhere, representing Itself in the orderliness of micro and macrocosms alike.

Things started to make more sense to me as I was learning about the Eastern philosophies and their version of God. There were many mystics who took it upon themselves to bring and translate these ideas to the West. This was like a fresh breath of air to many who were lost and trying to find answers that actually made sense.

The Hindu and Jewish traditions are the oldest religions in existence. I am talking about organized religions. All others are offshoots of these two. Buddhist and Jainism are the offshoot of Hindu tradition and Islam and Christianity are the offshoot of the Abrahamic (Jewish tradition).

For the Hindu, their God is ParaBrahman[1], which is the unspeakable and unexplainable. ParaBrahman is not even an entity. The very idea of trying to explain ParaBrahman will lesser or limit its magnitude. So they chose to leave it alone. They do not write or speak about it too much, instead, it is alive and well in their own consciousness.

The charming Indian greeting, the Namaste, is greeting the divine in you. Whenever you do see this greeting, this means that your greeter acknowledges the divine and God IN YOU. This gesture symbolizes the huge difference in the view of God in the East. There is no division, no boundary of the Divine and man. It is all one. Their view of God is a transcendental God that has no emotion or human characteristics. It is decidedly not anthropomorphic. We cannot blame or assign responsibility to human events, nor can we assume that prayers will be answered or rejected.

There is God in all of us. We all have a slice of the Divine and this is called our higher self. When we are in need of help or guidance we can always depend on our higher self to be there. It is always there for you, you only need to accept and acknowledge it. So searching or seeking is not advisable as everything you need is already yours. Self-realization, or I rather use the term self-actualization, is needed. Here and now is the moment. Once you desire God, search for God and you not find Him, it will be always in the future, hence you are moving away from what IT IS. Be aware of this and go for the moment. Then you will instantly be with God. This is an important occult truth. “The Power of Now” as many mystics and writers alluded to it. [2]

I will tell you the real reason for this. As transcendental God is infinity, this infinity permeated our own finite existence, but paradoxically our illusionary reality is finite and perishable. God (infinity) has no concept of time and space. When we dwell in concepts that require a future time such as desire then we are actually moving away from the true reality. Desire always includes the future. There is no future or past, it is only NOW.

You can look it at this way; reality is vertical, human thinking of time and space; the illusion of this world is horizontal. When you fall in to the falsehoods of this world you always think horizontally. Desire is horizontal thinking. Infinity is vertical. It is NOW! Do not move away from it by false thinking.

Meditation on God, infinity and oneness must always be vertical. This is the secret.

God is REAL, all else is an illusion…

When my daughter awakens from deep sleep she is usually unaware of her surroundings for quite some time. She still thinks the she is in the dream that she was having before waking. Dreaming and being awake is not distinguishable to this child. Her dream was very real and she might still think that in her awakened state this dream is continuing.

This is a simple illustration of what the Hindus call, Maya. Maya is a Sanskrit word and in the West it is mistakenly thought of as the illusion of the world, but the proper meaning of Maya is the confusion of what is real and what is not.

The explanation of Maya is also approachable from the subject/object relationship of perception based reality.

According to this school of thought; in the fabric of the universe, no event takes place unless someone is able to observe it. So, if a tree falls in the forest far away from any inhabitants did that event make a sound? This is a hypothetical question of course and there is no right or wrong answer to it. Of course if there is an event that nobody is able to perceive, a ripple in the ocean or felling of an old tree; while there is nobody to observe what happens, that event is a non-event. To make a sound there must be others around with sensory receptors. Sound is only created when one can listen.

This philosophical question can lead us further in understanding reality and why some would claim that we actually live in a word based on illusions. The movie “The Matrix” is an elegant and sophisticated metaphysical story based on an artificial reality fabricated by computers.

The world is in a constant state of flux. It is based on the ebb and flow of life and death. Time in this world is represented not as a horizontal or linear line but more as a spiral. It is cyclical.

One life ends and it becomes nourishment or substance to another. Nothing is wasted nothing is lost. This temporary nature of our existence is the other reason many consider it an illusion. Do you ever think of your childhood memories and all of a sudden they seem like a dream. They did happen in the past, you were witness to that, but after some time has passed these real events now seem unreal, they have became a dream, an illusion.

[2] Eckhart Tolle wrote this book but the concepts and ideas are not his. Others long before Tolle have written about the concept of NOW.