God Is Not the Problem. Souls Are. A Brief Rant

Now I applaud those who point out the problems in painting a human face on the cosmos, and the rather worse difficulties in assigning a human-like personality directing the flow of events. When you do that and then you look at what actually happens in this world, it is hard to avoid the thought any humanesque deity is a pretty nasty piece of work.

I have a secondary quarrel when they insist only this divinity can be called God. For just about forever there have been other ways to engage the great sacred. Me, I have no quarrel with Spinoza’s God or any similar observation about the cosmos in which we live and breathe and from which we take our being. If you step away from the projection of human personality onto the whole you can get something rather amazing, powerful, frightening, and just plain awesome. That’s my God.

Me, I’ve got no argument with that deity. Or, with those who like to concentrate on the multiplicity of it all and call it the gods, at least so long as they see these deities as expressions of the natural.

With that caveat, one or many, boundless or pleroma, I find the universe is divine.

I don’t pray to it. Or, at least, I don’t expect an answer. It doesn’t work that way. All it offers is presence.

Within this presence meaning and meaningless burn away as human conceits.

All that is left is just this.

Which, I find quite enough, thank you.

Sometimes more than enough…

Deity isn’t the problem.

It is human beings hankering after living forever that’s the source of so much ill. And if people are of a mind to hector their fellow beings about bad thinking, well this is the place where the energy might be more useful.

We are constructs, flowing things, verbs, if you will.

We are woven out of events, and are moments in eternity.

Precious. No doubt.

But, passing things.

There is no part of us that isn’t part of the natural.

Only God, you can say, is eternal. And maybe not even the deity. But that isn’t our problem. Ours is clinging to our passingness as if it were permanent.

And, I think, those who think they live forever must deny their essential connection to this world.

While I have no problem with the word soul standing for a perspective or stance, when it becomes a passenger riding in the body, but not of it, then the bad begins to happen.

Then the body of the world is torn asunder.

Then meaning and meaninglessness are born.

And we begin to wander into byways that have no end.

Heaven.

Hell.

Reincarnation.

Wandering ever farther from our true home, our beginning, our sustenance, and our return.

Projections of human needs onto the cosmos. Meaning when there is none. And in recoiling, meaninglessness when there is none.

All to no good.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Indeed, the ills that follow that illusion of separation seem pretty close to endless.

This is the problem.