thinktoomuch.net

This post is addressed to those that think they are atheists.

Prepare yourselves, I don’t know your context, and you don’t know mine, so you will be prone to misunderstanding. I will also be shouting instructions here, not saying “I think this” and “I think that”, because it’s time for action. It is “spiritual warfare”. If you are not ready for this, come back some other time.

UPDATE: please “ignore” the rest of this post. This was an interesting roller-coaster. This was my story. My story is finished. My story is over. Because the future is more interesting still. The future… look to the future, not the past. I saw this. I heard this. A voice whispered in my hear “careful!” - And the prophecy was confirmed by Tim Mills. Bless his soul. I cannot delete pingbacks/tags once I’ve made them, eh… Oh well.

Why do the religious people distrust you? Because they do not understand you. When you say you do not believe in God, what they hear, is “I am not a human”. Trust me on this, I’ve been there. I understand it. As does Karen Armstrong. Check Wikipedia.

You keep telling everyone God does not exist. The reason you say this, is because you have been brainwashed by the evangelicals that you have heard. They don’t know what God is. The dictionary? The dictionary does not know what God is. The important thing to note: God exists by definition. “You must believe in God” means something else than what you think it means.

Why is God dead? God is dead because we have encased God in modernistic terms. We have made “God” a label. We think “God is the creator of the universe”. By that definition, I understand why you call yourselves atheists. I did to. I’m now a post-atheist, post-theist. I have found God. Let me tell you where he is.

God is a pre-modernistic notion, God exists in the realm that is not defined by modernistic labels. This is why I ask you to drop all axioms that make you conclude “God does not exist”. Once you have done that, you may be able to hear what I’m about to say:

God is meaning in life.
God is our morality.
God is compassion.
God is love.
God is inquisitiveness.
God is mystery, the mystery of the universe.
God is everything we cannot pen down with modernistic rationalistic terms and words.
God is our very irrationality, and you should know very well that we are irrational beings. We are emotional. Irrationality is not incompatible with rationality. Getting in touch with your messiness, your imperfections, your emotions, the emotions that will rule you when your life is threatened. That, that is what we call God.
God is a catch-all for the human condition, a pre-modernistic concept that is extremely useful to describe the uniqueness that is the human condition, the clash between our conscious rationality and our subconscious animal instincts. If we deny our emotion and animal instincts, we are no longer human.

The theist cannot live in a purely rational world, for the theist experienced what it means to be human. And he calls the experience God. If you tell him he cannot have rationality and God, he chooses to rather be a human, because he likes being a human. That is what he hears. Forget what you think the words you use, mean.

The point thus, stop killing God. Stop putting God in a supernatural box, and then prove that the supernatural does not exist. Combining the axioms “God exists” with “the supernatural does not” only serves to say “God is not supernatural”. Given a certain definition of supernatural. Set God free, let God be the pre-modernistic emotional side of humanity. Then God can become alive again, can flesh out, and no longer be just a zombie, with modernism having stripped it of all its flesh. Modernism has stripped God of what God was, because modernism gave new words to the muscles, the heart, the organs. The new modernistic, individual words, would be “compassion, love, ethics, meaning, wonder, experience, joy, sorrow, pain, jealousy, cruelty, honesty, suffering”…

Everything.

To know God? That is simply to be in touch with your own humanity. Knowing that you are a tiny little spec on a tiny blue dot.

So, there you go. Get rid of the fallacy of perfect meaning of words. Cross-culturally, that causes us to fly into buildings, for we do not use words in the same way. Realise and accept that you, too, you also believe in God. You don’t believe in the same God that some Christians believe in, maybe, but you do believe in something. You believe in love, compassion, inquisitiveness, communication, exploration?

Please call that God. Let us take back God, and put God back in the pre-modern context, where God is beautiful. Taken in that context, the whole Bible makes sense and is beautiful, no longer some weird archaic text that makes no sense. It becomes a book full of truths about the human spirit and the paradox that is our existence. Our existence, life, the universe and everything? It’s really a joke (in the humorous sense, not the absurd sense). See the humour in our existence. Read Douglas Adams. And call the pre-modernistic God, God.

Then we can talk again. Then you can tell the theists that God is bigger than the book they worship. The covers they put on the collection of stories that describe God, our walk through life, our human condition in pre-modernistic context, that is the coffin that buries God. God is bigger than that. God is everything. God encompasses science as well. Thus, we can be bitten by snakes, and not die, for science is also God, with a God big enough to include science, we can say God has given us anti-venom. As a sign. As a proof that this is the real gospel. I challenge any takers to a snake-venom duel. I shall have anti-venom. Whose God will be bigger? Yours? Or mine? I bet mine is bigger, for mine can use science. You can join us, or you can lose.

Human inspiration, human passion, human humour, call it God, for that is what God is.

If this does not make sense to you, you have more baggage than you can deal with right now. Drop your baggage some time and come read this again. And again. And again. Until you understand what it is that I’m trying to say.

Assuming a theist is stupid, is bad for communication. Accepting that he knows something about being human that you don’t, and you can learn from him. The label “theist” and “atheist” is not meaningful. Dealing in such labels, “deist”, “pantheist”, “panentheist”, “pandeist”, all those labels, those labels all kill God, for God is “bigger” than that. Kill God, and you kill humanity. For God is that very thing that is found within humanity, that makes us human, that very paradox that is our nature. And if you don’t understand this, replace “God” with “Foo”, and read this all again, for you have too much baggage attached to “God”.

Polytheism? The Hindus believe in the same God. Yes, the same God, that is within all of us. Their understanding of that God is just a polytheistic one, while the creationist has a “divine hand that intervenes” understanding of God, and the atheist has a “don’t need a supernatural creator” God. These labels divide God into tiny little bits, and cause confusion and misunderstanding.

OK, now I will log off from the internet and finish my thesis. When I come back, I can answer questions and explain the pre-modernistic notion in more depth. Ask anything you want. Ask why the Christians say Jesus died for their sins. Ask why the Muslims say “There is no God but Allah” (aka claiming monotheism). My experience is mostly with the Christian meme complex. I can try to answer most of those questions. If I don’t have answers for the questions in the other meme complexes yet, I will go look for them. Often it is less important to have the answers, than to have the right questions. This is why Jesus used parables, to spread the right questions, to get the people thinking. Go look at some of the Buddhist traditions, that I know nothing about, but my friends do. Go find God in everything, for God is in everything. If you disagree, you have the wrong definition of God.

With faith, you can move mountains, because you wield the power of God. I hear God tells me you must start thinking for yourselves. God says you were given minds, that you might think. To not accept that gift, is to deny God. To not accept the gift of rational thinking, is to deny the holy spirit, and it is unforgivable.

So, did God really tell me this? Well, I felt inspired while writing this post. So who knows? Maybe I’m a false prophet. That is why you need to start thinking. And if you question my prophetic language, please question your own leader’s prophetic language as well. We all have God in us, and only together, united in our diverse understandings of our God concepts, can we find peace.

To wield this power effectively yourself, you would need to understand God. You would need to know God. You would need to seek God. You would need to know the scriptures that define God within a particular culture, and particularly its pre-modern context. Within that culture, you can work magic. And that magic can be used for evil. And some leaders realise this, consciously or subconsciously. And that is why we have people flying into buildings.

God belongs to all of us. Take God back. God is too powerful to be left to only one or two individuals with enough Charisma to send people on suicide bombing missions.

Remember that every person has a different concept of God than every other person. These are the differences you must respect. These differences are “everyone has other goals in life”, or “everyone is driven by something else”. If your life is driven by alcohol, then alcohol is your God. If your life is driven by compassion, then compassion is your God. Jesus was supposed to be an incarnation of compassion, not a Zombie. A living, loving reality found in each of us. Not a zombie. Zombies eat brains. Compassion brings peace. Which Jesus do you worship? Destigmatise the name “Jesus”, realise he was fully human, with an X and a Y chromosome, and you live a happier life.

Creeds? Formalised creeds kill God. Why? Because it forces everyone to have the same idea of God. That kills God, because we will never have the same ideas. We are diverse, we are unique. God is diverse, God is unique. God is a mirror of humanity. Your God tells me something about you, for your God is that thing that drives you.

So why did we create creeds and destroy God? Because we did not know how to deal with the diversity. The answer is embracing diversity, understanding diversity, appreciating diversity, appreciating God, for God is diversity. Let us not make the same mistake. Let us learn how to live together in diverse harmony, as a chaotic result of a chaotic process, that shows “intelligence” emerge from complete chaos. (Because yes, the paradox, we are intelligent.) Causality was not an important concept in the pre-modern era.

Theory of religious fundamentalism

Karen Armstrong has advanced a counter-intuitive theory of religious fundamentalism [citation needed], key to understanding the movements as they emerged in the late fifteenth and twentieth centuries:

Central to her reading of history is the notion that premodern cultures possessed two complementary and indispensable ways of thinking, speaking and knowing: mythos and logos. Mythos was concerned with meaning; it “provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal” [4]. Logos, on the other hand, dealt with practical matters. It forged ahead, elaborating on old insights, mastering the environment, and creating fresh and new things. Armstrong argues that modern Western society has lost the sense of mythos and enshrined logos as its foundation. Mythical narratives and the rituals and meanings attached to them have ceded authority to that which is rational, pragmatic and scientific - but which does not assuage human pain or sorrow, and cannot answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. However, far from embarking on a wholesale rejection of the modern emphasis in favour of the old balance, the author contends, religious fundamentalists unwittingly turn the mythos of their faith into logos. Fundamentalism is a child of modernity, and fundamentalists are fundamentally modern.

I don’t know who called this theory counter-intuitive. It seems completely intuitive to me. Is evolution counter-intuitive?

Once we all have God again, we can let the dust settle, and continue with our science and our rational thinking, in conjunction with the realisation that we are humans. Primates. With survival instincts that overrule our rational minds. With “God”, redefined, to mean what it used to mean. We must accept that paradox, or be doomed to hell.

Tag: Bad Astronomy, The Friendly Humanist. The Friendly Atheist. The Memeing of Life. de-conversion. Real Live Preacher. Psychohistorian. And everyone else that reads this post and thinks it is True. Not factual, True. There is a difference between Facts and Truth.

Let’s see if my God can change the world. Wouldn’t that be a sign?