Edg, just for fun I'll make one post about the God thang, and then drop it. It's clear that you have strong feelings about this, and clear also that you are an even more long-winded writer than I am, so I think that out of compassion one post on this subject is all that either of us should impose upon this august forum. :-)
> Like God, today's masses sure love their gory > movies, right? So, it's God dream, and, like us, > He too can conjure up a dark tale -- you know, > for entertainment's sake. Like when God and Satan > diddled bigtime with Job. When God and Satan took > decades to see how miserable they could get Job > to be, see if he had a breaking point, well, > classic drama, right? Funzies! (By the way, "God" > is a word I use more for the Absolute than for a > manifest personage.) Good place to start. Did you notice that in the above you are talking about God in the Third Person? As if He/She/It is *separate* from yourself, or even your Self? *God* has weird taste in entertainment, not *you*. *God* and *Satan* fucked with Job, not *you*. Even if one disguises the belief in a sentient God by calling it the Absolute, I think the real issue comes down to whether one conceives of the Absolute and the Relative as *separate*. I do not. I conceive of these two sides of life as two sides of the same coin. I have no need for the concept of a sentient God, one with a "plan" for the universe. For me, and for many Buddhists, the universe works *just fine* as Operating System, an interplay of karma and free will. Nothing else would be necessary to describe everything we see around us in creation. Therefore, taking an Occam's Razor approach to the issue, if nothing but karma and free will are *necessary* to run things, why postulate a Sentience With A Plan *that* runs them? The Absolute is just the "silent side" of me, my self, my Self. The Relative is the "active side" of me, my self, my Self. Just as I don't think of the Absolute as "separate" from the Relative, I don't think of the notion of God (if there were one) as separate from *me*, the deeper Self. The problems you seem to have with the existence of evil and Bad Things in the world are *all* described in the Third Person, as if some *separate* entity from your Self was the one being evil. In my view, it's ME that we're talking about. The existence of Bad Things in the world are merely ME. In coming to some accept- ance of these things, I have to come to an acceptance of that aspect of my Self. > God is the one Who has the choice, right? Wrong. (In my opinion, of course...not "wrong" as in "You're wrong and I'm right." I don't deal in such shit.) Each of us, as individual aspects of Self, has *every one* of the choices you ascribe only to God. I don't believe for an instant that we are mere actors in a play written by a thug named God who has bizarre taste in entertainment. *We* create the world, and create *all* of it -- the "good" parts and the "bad" parts, the glories and the horrors. When trying to come to grip with those horrors, I do so because they are aspects of my Self, not the senile amusements of some deity who is separate from my Self. In coming to grips with the glories, same thing. > But, your next thought, you're waiting for God to give that > to you, right? Wrong. (Same "in my opinion" caveat...your mileage may vary.) "My" thoughts, the ideas that pop up in the mind of this self that is part of a larger Self, are the thoughts and ideas *of* that self/Self. Again, I have no sense of separateness between Absolute and Relative, between "God" and "me." If you do, I wish you well with that one. > Don't have to be a Hindu to see the end of time coming. Just be > a true-believer-physicist. At the end of the universe's life, at > heat death, as you sit in your ringside seat, waiting for the > last photon to decay into virtuosity... This is the argument that, in my opinion, most "drives" the belief system of the God freak. It's basically the result of linear thinking, and the belief that there must have been a "first creation" or Creation. I don't believe that. I believe more in the Buddhist idea that there has never *been* a "first creation." The universe is, has always been, and will always be. There has never been a moment in all of eternity in which both Absolute and Relative did not coexist. The "Big Bang" that scien- tists believe in was just one tiny exhalation in a much larger series of in-breaths and out-breaths. And if there was never a "first creation," one has no need to ponder the notion of a Creator. The universe can be conceived of as an eternal Operating System, the interaction of the eternal force of karma and the equally eternal force of free will. *All* of the things we see around us could have been created by those two forces interacting, without the need for a God, much less the need for a God With A Plan. > ...we're all as dutiful as ventriloquists' dummies, right? I don't believe that. I believe instead that I am *very much* the doer, and that as such I bear full responsibility for my actions. I find that a lot of God freaks essentially want the opposite, they want *desperately* to be "not the doer," so that they don't have to feel any responsibility for the Bad Things in the world, much less the Bad Things they do in their tiny corner of that world. "The Bad Things are *God's* problem, not mine." Well, for me, there is no difference. Self is just a larger, silent aspect of my self. There is no difference between the Absolute side of me and the Relative side of me. If there are Bad Things in the world, they are *my* Bad Things, *my* doing. And I'm OK with that. I wish you well with your path in life, and hope that you find one in which you and your God can walk that path side by side, not as separate as you seem to be in your writings so far. Me, I'll just keep walking my own path by mySelf. I assume we'll end up in pretty much the same place, no matter what *either* of us believes. Unc
