Let’s argue some more about God.

by Vic Shayne
author
Consciousness: The Potentiality of All Existence: Exploring reality and belief as a subjective experience

The argument over God is ages-old. And over the last couple of decades the argument has ramped up to include now-famous personalities like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Deepak Chopra, and many others. Each side feels that the other is full of crap and deluded. But we aren’t getting anywhere at all with such discussions. The argument has been going on for millennia and there’s no clear victor.

What is the point of arguing about the existence of God, anyway? It’s like a bunch of people standing next to a lake and arguing over how it feels like to be in it, yet none of them bother to even dip their toe into the water.

Professionals who don’t know what their talking about
Every weekend, rabbis, priests, ministers, and their lot pontificate on God’s grace, power, potential, and glory. But what do they really know? They are just repeating what they have learned, and they seem to be rationalizing that everything that happens is the work of God. By their definition, God is the great puppeteer and everyone else is a puppet. They never use such terms, though, but this is what their beliefs amount to.

Is there a God as you are conceiving it? Find out.

It is a big assumption or supposition to say that there is a God who exists that lords over all people and all things — especially if you don’t know. The problem is that this is a secondhand idea, so why fret over it? The question is: Can you really know for yourself? And, have you ever tried to find out?

Observe
Everything begins with you.

If you were to sincerely and persistently observe reality by yourself, without the interference of others or your preconditioned mind, then you would find something interesting. You would find that the person you take yourself to be does not really exist. It is built upon conditioned ideas, memories, associations, and identifications. The one you call “I” or “me” is the egoic self that is only an accretion of beliefs. IF you were to observe yourself very deeply, this would lead to the next question, “If I am not this egoic self, then what, or who, am I?”

You would find that when the idea of this egoic self dissolves, there is something else to uncover. It is a Self (capital “S”) that governs all thought, life, action, destruction, creation, and movement. As existence, this is what you are. And this is what everyone is. People have given this great movement of life a name; they have called it God. However, they have also invested it with human qualities of good and evil. And so they fear it and love it.

Conflicted people create a conflicted image of God
The idea of God creates great conflict, confusion, and argument. It is because the average human being is too caught up in his/her own egoic state that there is a need to rely on an idea that someone is watching over them and controlling life. This “someone” is God, an anthropomorphized version of consciousness.

God kills the wicked and rewards the faithful. So God is a killer. But wait, God is also beneficent? God loves everyone. God creates killer storms, but spares some people. So God is a selective killer. You can see why some people have said that God seems to be sociopathic. David Allen, writing for the Richard Dawkins Foundation, wrote, “God is probably the greatest serial killer of all time. He kills without conscience. He kills children too young to have formed evil intent. He selects his victims on racial grounds or because they don’t worship and adore him. He kills animals and plants en masse. Again a sure sign of a serial killer who lacks empathy or a conscience. This is not an entity that should be used as a role model for morality or ethical behavior.”

You can see how God gets such a bad rap. But let’s get back to who is inventing this idea that is called God, and why…

We can break this down into very simple terms: The egoic sense of self says, “Life is too complicated, confusing, chaotic, unstable, unpredictable, and frightening, so there must be a God who protects us, defends us, tells us what is right or wrong, rewards or punishes us, and tells us what to do.”

Consciousness is a better word
There is no God out there. God is you and everything else, if you want to use this well-worn word. A better word might be “consciousness.” God is a metaphor for consciousness. When you take a metaphor literally it makes no sense at all; it is absurd. Both atheists and religious people do this. The religious person takes God as a literal being with all sorts of attributes, and the atheist considers God as a ridiculous belief without any evidence or foundation. As Joseph Campbell used to say, when you take metaphors to be literal, you complete miss the point.

Consciousness is the totality of all that is. It is the movement of life, and embodies all the complements, dichotomies, and opposites. It is thought, action, creation, destruction, phenomena, nature, bodies, and the rest of what exists within existence.

Find out for yourself
What is most important — at least to some people — is to find out whether any of this is true — God, consciousness, or the idea of you. To do so begins with you, if you have the desire and the courage to face yourself without judgment or rationalization. You have to probe the depths of this sense of “me” to find out if it really exists at all. To do this you have to leave behind all your thoughts, ideas, associations, memories, and knowledge. Just take a very close look until you see what there is. It may take weeks, a year, years, or a lifetime. But if you don’t do this, then all you are left with are ideas borne of secondhand knowledge.