I think about the idea of God sometimes but -- because I can't imagine that God would be involved in all this petty, deadly human drama, and because I think it's pointless to speculate too much on something inaccessible -- I don't waste much time imagining how God might think.
My best guess is that if there is a God, He/She/It is a creator, like a scientist whose field is finding the essence of creation, a Genesis formula so perfectly balanced that it yields every possible world and form of existence, each struggling to survive, in the hope of finding things unimaginable to God.
But after setting off each experimental blast (Big Bang to us), God just watches as the green mold battles the purple mold in the Petri dish.
The idea that a being with the power to create worlds would stoop to support "the righteous" -- churches that hate women (take your pick) or fundamentalists who'd happily fry anyone who doesn't agree with their totalitarian, imperialist dreams (from the GOP's religious right to Al Qaeda) -- is laughable.
I never cease to be amazed at the hubris that makes people who promote ignorance and hate think God would want to hang out in heaven with them -- listening to them complain about heathens and swap stories about their favorite smitings -- for all eternity. The only thing in it for God would be the joy of watching them squirm, in between their tiresome bouts of kissing Its ass, as they try to figure out how to ask for the virgin brides or whatever other grand prize they believe they've earned.
It's insulting -- they think God is a deadly, deluded, self-serving asshole just like they are!
At any rate, maybe it's the onset of senility, or just wishful thinking (a popular form of belief), but it's occurred to me lately that the "love" people talk about in relation to God likely comes from the sense that God could not give us the glimmers of beauty we see -- in between all the torture, boredom, and explosions -- unless God understood how we would feel.
But that's just touchy-feely sentiment; sure, an all-powerful being might have feelings, but It's likely to have a huge amount of ambition too, to understand and transcend Its own existence. And what more ambitious program could there be than re-creating the same dilemma you find yourself in, in an infinite number of possible worlds, to see how the beings in those worlds deal with your dilemma?
It's like throwing technology at a problem on a grand scale.
The dilemma I'm talking about is "individual freedom" -- that thing human history seems to seek. Those of us lucky enough to be free -- to decide what we will be -- are cursed with the desire to construct Meaning in place of the simplifying motives of responsibility and brute survival.
We become puny alternative copies of God, and feel the burden God might feel: If you can be anything, what do you want to be? The burden is not following commandments, it's making up your own commandments when your conscience can imagine the weight of worlds hanging on your ability to find the balance point between all the opposed forces of motivating passion, cold logic, and a chaotic existence shared by countless souls traveling their own brute or sublime trajectories. You need to find the balance point that allows all those worlds to flourish in your absence, so you can rise above your own world and begin to understand it.
I'm just imagining what it would feel like to be lifted one level up, outside this universe, and look down. And it reminds me of something I've felt for a long time, that has taken on personal meaning: That the whole point of human existence, the long climb from the caves, with the rest-stops of civilization in between the erasing, barbarian raids, with periods that give us the luxury of individual freedom and the ability to add to the scaffold of knowledge, to climb up out of our puny selves... the whole point is to continue climbing to the stars, then up past them, out of this collapsing universe into the world that wraps it, and -- if, passing through that singularity, that rebirth, we retain anything of what we learned -- start climbing up out of that world too.
So there's the thought: When we have the luxury of freedom we share God's dilemma. And if I was an idiot who thought he could comprehend the mind of God, I'd guess that we are being used to help God climb up out of whatever layer of the cosmic onion He/She/It is now stuck in!
So the whole point of our individual and collective journey, and God's, is to climb up out of our world so we can look down and apprehend what we just left -- so we can understand, at least for a moment.
