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Saturday, July 14, 2012


The Case For God



Yeah, I know…you’re thinking here is another rant by some religious fanatic.  Well, wait a minute and let me have a word with you and maybe you’ll feel differently. 

The case for God is as interesting to the atheist or agnostic as it is to anyone.  Consider this:  If you believe (sorry to offend you science types…just substitute “know” for believe) that the entire Universe was formed through natural processes involving the chemical and element soups in space over eons (the Hebrew word for day (yom) which also means era or eons if you will) to eventually form your beautiful blue eyes and enchanting smile, or your skill at shooting hoops, then you still have the essential problem of where did the elements and chemicals come from.  That implies something outside of natural processes…or put more simply…”the supernatural.”  Mind you, supernatural is not just some scientific process we don’t understand yet…it is something outside the laws of science.  So that leaves the atheist with the thorny problem of how did all that “stuff” get there in space to engender those natural processes other than our supernatural force or entity.  Oh, my gosh…you are forced to believe in something God-like outside of science and all human understanding!  There is no other choice.

Once you realize that you are stuck and have to believe in something that I’ll call God for want of a better word, you are smack dab in the middle of the even bigger controversy about what is the nature of God.  I suppose we can argue that he is dead now and we don’t need to worry, but an entity that can create something from nothing doesn’t strike me as highly susceptible to dying.  So let’s just side step that and leave that to the die-hards who stopped reading this when they saw the title.

What is the nature of God?  The ancient Aztecs and Mayans were believed to have felt that God was the neighborhood bad-ass who expected you to sacrifice humans in order to please him.  Wow!  Is that the nature of God?  Some Muslim sects want you to kill anyone who doesn’t believe as they do at the command of their God.  Is that really the nature of God?  Some feel God is pretty passive and just sitting back and watching all of us like you watch the evening news or your favorite football team.  I agree this is where our discussion gets more difficult and contains some conjecture, but to me it seems pretty simple.  Deep in our hearts we all know that it is better to be helpful rather than to insist on our own self-satisfaction at the expense of others.  Self-preservation, or me-first is ingrained in us to some extent for survival, but we know that extreme level of narcissism is as self-destructive as it is other-destructive in the end.  Just ask Saddam Hussein, John Edwards, Hasne Mubarek, Ted Bundy, or Aloph Hitler.  In its extreme it manifests as Atomic bombs, murder, rape, theft and other forms or self-centeredness that all of society condemns.  We know ultimately that “good” is preferable to “evil.”  Most of us have no trouble defining “evil” either.

So, is the nature of God good, or is it evil?  Since evil is destructive of the creation God fashioned, then I think it highly unlikely that he is evil.  Yes, I know, there are those in the world who built their Lego villages just to destroy them - or preferably the ones you built, just as there are those in the world right now who practice evil on a daily basis.  That only tells me that there is a force I’ll call “anti-God” alive and well in the world.  I’ll let you just think on that one for a while.)

So, with all that in mind, what is the nature of God?  I’ll postulate he is “good” in light of what I just wrote, and I’ll further postulate that since he is good that he works on a personal level with his creation to connect.  That’s a leap, but let’s go with it for a minute.  Let’s call this telepathic connection to God…here it comes, you knew it would…the Spirit or Soul.  I suspect that is one of the means that God makes it clear to us that good is preferable to evil (or other-centeredness versus narcissism.)  That is one of the reasons I believe he does communicate with us.

So, God exists and God communicates with us in some fashion.  Now all we have to do is figure out which “religion” correctly identifies him.  I won’t play Hollywood Squares or Deal or No Deal with you here.  It has to be the one that prefers cares about the creation he made, that communicates to us individually, and that prefers other-centeredness over narcissism.  

Hmmm…sounds a lot like Christianity to me.  And the big bonus is that Christianity says we get to continue our existence after we die with the force that created the universe…now how cool is that!  

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