God is for Sale

I have not purchased any of the gods that have been pitched to me. Many a good salesperson has attempted to thwart my own instincts and preached an eternal salvation/damnation proclamation in an effort to convince me that I must participate in this afterlife lottery... I still have not seen the list of winners.

From birth we are innocent of any stifling grip of religion - must have been all that evil placenta sin we were swimming in, in our primordial incubation that made us so baaaad. It is not until some fear instilled by parents or preachers or self-righteous "friends" urges us to cling to some delusion of knowledge about a "Spirit" greater than ourselves. An irrational basis of belief succors our dread of hellfire, quells that unease we experience when we try to perceive reality and the terrifying concept of our alone-ness in this dizzying world we sense. For what is reality outside of our own sensory story? We create our own world and it creates us - the internal acts upon the internal and the internal recreates the external in its own image.

From this conundrum we create a foggy collection of ideas about god. And ideas are funny creatures. We breathe life into them, are at first amused by this flesh of our flesh, but this fascination slowly curdles with the input of ego and erosion of time and mutates into a "truth". Eventually, our little plaything becomes a demon that filters our vision and dims the possibilities swarming around us...we become stagnant and, as is the nature of existence, project stagnation upon our environment.

The funny little he-man created by myth-makers over the eras is just that: a character in tragic comedy. A great jester of mankind, a great and ethereal full-bellied monster so gluttonous for amusement that it animates walking, talking clay molds and lets them sprawl about in freedom... lest they eat of that tree...then the real fun begins.

But hold on - do we not, when we create (perceive) god, assert that she is good, and as yin is with yang - we assume that this she=good has an equal and opposite she=bad... she sits and sneers over her cauldron of fire and brimstone, lending her gift of mayhem to her mirror brother/sister when his ego coerces him into toying with his man-beings. But wait - if this "good" created all, then it must have created "bad." So, either good is not so good (that is, murder and rape and incest must be good and we're just not equipped to understand why), or god is not so good. For if he was, he would not have in his power the ability to make "bad." And if we can agree that there are some good things and some bad things that happen, then it follows that if god is in everything, it must be neither good nor bad - it is neutral, purposeless, devoid of judgment, power and free-will.

Let's imagine that there is a god and she is all-powerful, all-knowing. Wouldn't that be a bore? But I digress in my silly human interpretations. Silly girl, god transcends desire. Why then, would he give a damn about humanity at all?

If we are to stick with our dogma of "beginnings," then god must have started somewhere, right? And then he must end at some point - right? If this is the case, then some thing came before god and so he cannot be all-powerful and everlasting. Or, either god always was and there is no such thing as time, or change, or metamorphosis - or it sprouted from nothing and is made of nothingness (for if it was an all-seeing all-knowing thing it would not have been nothing before it was something).

And if we are to erase all notions of time and change and metamorphosis, then we erase the bulk of our understanding, and thus cannot trust any perceived ideas at all. No evolution, no birth, no death, no oven timers, no alarm clocks...

So we see that this will not suffice. We think of things as rather linear, and sticking to this limited view, must assume that time is real and beginnings are real and kittens are real and the president is real and death is real - for we see these things in waking life. In line with this, we come again to notions of good and bad - for aren't these ideas and things just as "real" as money and marriage and media? Aren't they made real by the god of Law? And aren't laws a dictation of cultural agreement on "good" and "bad" things?

We arrive again to this perplexing realm of "good" and "bad", and aren't these always open to perception? The 9/11 attacks were a mission accomplished for god-fearing men. And to them, acting in the name of god was good - and so to them their actions were good. I presume one would be quite hard-pressed to find an American who sympathizes with this notion.

So, assuming that we have agreed in our perception of this thing being not good - or bad - then how can one justify the terrorist's adherence to good/god? I'm assuming the popular notion would be to assert that they did not believe in the "right" god. So then, who is the right god? The assembly of gods of Zoroastrianism? The Yahweh of ancient Israel? The sun god, or the fertility god, or the cancer god, or the toilet god of (fill in the blank) idolatry over the ages? No, I suppose that would not do. It must be, to this observer, the god reinvented by the Jews or by the Christians - the god stolen from previous ones and chiseled by eons of politics and ego and fear and self-righteousness into the Creator of all this chaos. But then, isn't that really the same god of the terrorists? One that holds its dominion over all others and proclaims the evil non-believers as damned sinners?

Or, you could disagree with me again and say no, that god is the benevolent one. But then we just come back to the problem of good and not-good, and to the nature of gods' existence - or lack thereof.

So it must be that cultures determine their own ideas of good and bad - their own foggy delusions of reality, and form their god accordingly. Thus god is a creation of man, and creates man in its image accordingly. That is, man creates this reality and imposes it upon himself and his generations so that this reality, in turn, forms him. And so, we are buying into a being beyond our comprehension (Sunday bible school tells us this) that has been created - or "interpreted by divine inspiration" by our very own human brethren (who may have or have not been induced to produce by the imaginary power of magic mushrooms, the lashes of the whip, or the splendors of virgin gold)... Essentially we doggedly believe in a thing that we ourselves say we cannot understand, and that we ourselves created - and have kept ourselves enslaved by this stifling idea of our own making (derived from and yet remains beyond our own comprehension - what a pickle!)

If you ask me, that's the only hell there is.