What/Who is God?

Ben Shapiro: “He's my man. Creator of the universe. The provider of moral foundation in the Bible. If you live by the Bible you'll be freer of sin. He sets the moral standard, and the further away from it you go the more things crumble.”

Nietzsche: “God is dead”.

Alan Watts: “Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

There are many ideas of what God is. Here I want describe what God is to me. It's difficult, because each sentence could be expanded on in conversation. Additionally, I want to share some of the key themes in some of my “favorite” religions to give context to what I have arrived at. In our modern Western world, with New Atheism and a religious group called the “Nones”, being the fastest growing religious groups, God is a hot topic. After all, Nietzsche proclaimed in the 19th century that “God is dead”. He meant that the old anthropomorphic deity of Christianity had become outdated in modern times. Our society doesn't seem to know what to do anymore with the “man in the clouds” kind of God. I've come a long way from being a Pentecostal Christian, to Atheist, to Christian again, to Atheist Again, to finally a Panthiestic kind of Agnosticism.

What is God to me?

God is everything. It is a He. It is a She. It's the thoughts you are having reading this sentence. The state of your consciousness right now. It's the reason you are interested in reading this. It's, at it's most basic level, quantum particles. And at it's most complex, consciousness. It has an entropic tendency in physics, and a counter-entropic pattern in the evolution of planets, solar systems, and life. It's the ideal and the worst case scenario. It's the reason we want the ideal and not the worst case scenario. It's all, but it's one. It's everything, and it's only the specific thing. It's known when you do the right things, as benevolent, and malevolent when you do wrong. It exists at many levels. There's the uroboric unconscious self begetting Being. And there's the differentiated conscious individual who sees the opposing properties in life and splits the world up into many images and words. It's every experience, and memory, and thought of the future that you have ever and will ever have, and then everyone else's, and every animals. It's the belief that god doesn't exist in an atheist too. Hahaha It's hiding in people who feel themselves totally separate from the world and God. Religious experiences are mergings of our souls with the collective, or with our evolutionary potential, the spirit of the father/mother in our culture. It's consciousness but also unconsciousness. It's the material world, which is in such a way to create consciousness. It can birth new beings out of its Being. It's a spirit of the metaperson. An Ideal. All the successful people who mated to make you and I. The conception of that way of living, and the interactions we have with others while faithful to that conception we have faith in, that animate our spirit where two or more is gathered. It's the potential we haven't yet attained. It's the process by which Becoming occurs in our lives.

Christianity's God:

Strongly anthropomorphic, There's the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This God, in three persons, is separate from the universe, is beyond time, and has infinite power. He created the universe and made mankind about six thousand years ago. The first people, Adam and Eve, were trusted to take care of the Garden of Eden, when they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then their eyes were opened, and they saw that they were naked. As a punishment, they were exiled and death and suffering entered the world. Women were cursed with the pain of childbirth and subservience to men. And Men were cursed with the toils of work. Sin entered the world through Adam and Eve. All of us come from these two figures, and we are all sinners (we miss the mark). Humankind's relationship to God ever since has been one of prayer and worship. The spirit of the Father is benevolent as long as you align yourself with Him in the right relationship. You must ask for forgiveness of your sins, change your ways, and never lose faith in the sacrifice that Jesus, God's son, made by dying on the cross. This sacrificed made it possible for God to have a relationship with us again, instead of sacrificing animals to relieve us of our sins. Christianity believes in a heaven and a hell. God lives in heaven in perfect bliss with his deceased followers, while Satan rules hell, where those that don't believe or follow God go when they die.

Hinduism's God:

In Hinduism, there are many manifestations of the one Being, the Brahman. Hinduism is kind of the religion of all religions. The goal, ultimately, is to merge with the Brahman and realize that the Atman, your core soul or self, is identical with the Brahman. It's like the modern scientific saying goes, “we are all stardust”. Accept the Hindus aren't reductionist. They believe in a supreme soul that contains all souls. All of the universe and of humanity, is the drama of the Godhead playing many parts and getting lost from itself. The fix, is to find yourself in the Brahman, as a manifestation of the universe. There are three paths. Karma Yoga. Jnana Yoga. And Bhakti Yoga. Karma yoga means living in the world of cause and effect to work out your salvation from karma. It's consciously purifying your actions. Jnana yoga is the quickest path, the path of wisdom, and is mostly intellectual. Bhakti yoga uses divine worship to accomplish enlightenment. Christianity would be included here as a form of yoga. And Christ would be seen as a manifestation of the Brahman.

In hinduism and Buddhism below, there is the belief in reincarnation. All of us have lived a near infinite number of lives already which we don't remember, where we have acted in ways that produced the karma that makes our lives the way they are today. Sounds like biological and cultural evolution?

Buddhisms' non-self:

Buddhism doesn't believe in a God. Some would even say it isn't a religion, but a philosophy. In Buddhism, there isn't always a supernatural element to the practice. When it is supernatural, in the case of the Buddhas who have incarnated beyond our world of space and time, the Buddha's aren't thought of being God necessarily. They are beings like you and me, who have achieved a level of enlightenment enough that they have gone to a new plane of existence. In Zen Buddhism, the Buddha mind is quite different.

Buddhists take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the fully enlightened one; the Dharma, the teachings expounded by the Buddha; the Sangha, the monastic order of Buddhism that practice the Dharma. These three seem to correspond with God the Father, as in Buddha, Dharma, as in the Word or the Logos or the scripture, and Sangha, the Church and the spirit that animates it, the Holy Spirit. This may not be so, but it's interesting, and they fulfill more or less the same functions.

The Buddha mind, in Zen, is the state of your experience from a first person perspective. Everything your consciousness does happens on it's own, and you do it, at the same time. There is the saying, not two, and not one. But a negation of both of them. It's not dualism or monism. It's something else. A state beyond both. A spontaneous place of being where free will neither exists or doesn't exist. It's beyond opposites. But it isn't one thing. It's the sound of one hand clapping. Emptiness and the concept of nothing is a significant philosophy in Buddhism. An example is that of a car. A car is a thing that is nothing. That is, you can take a car apart one piece at a time and ask, "Is this a car?". Once you get to the last piece, you would not call it a car. When did it stop being a car. In this sense, the car is dependent on it's basis of designation (its parts).

Another idea is inter-being. This is a Zen concept that refers to how everything is connected. Everything is nothing. And nothing is everything. Nothing is required for something to exist. A cloud is an ocean, in the sense that the ocean changes into a cloud. And the cloud is also tea, because the rain is in our tea. Everything inter-is. And is empty of self existence.

Religious Naturalism's Universe:

Everything is the Universe. All is cause and effect. Our universe was born billions of years ago. The matter that makes up the Universe ultimately came together to make stars, planets, and solar systems. Then life began to self replicate and became complex enough that human psyche's were able to ponder their own origins. The big bang and evolutionary theory are powerhouse theories that shape the way we look at the Universe and ourselves. There's a reason why we are the way we are, because our lives are the product of causes that shaped our neurophysiology. The goal of life here isn't entirely straight forward. Some say you can create your own meaning, deciding for yourself what is right and wrong, while others believe that meaning is inherently manifest in the Universe, right and wrong can be scientifically and morally deduced from observing human behavior and studying evolutionary biology.

I believe in God as Mother Nature and Father Culture. Our development via evolution was from the mother to the father. From natural impulses to cultural existence. When we get with our nature, we wake up from separateness. When we get with culture, we grow up into individuality. Not one and not two. We are nature. But we're nature in disguise as individuals fighting battles that matter. So there are two layers to life. A twofold path. The spiritual one, and the worldly one. Both are necessary.