coemgen said:
How can one not believe in God?
i used to think this, and i still want to. i know it's kind of a cheesy movie, but i find the Matthew McConahey (however you spell it) character in "Contact" kind of inspiring. i used to have arguments with much more atheistic friends -- i would argue that feelings of joy, of sadness, of love, or the rapturous appreciation of a sunset, the ocean, how mountains make beauty out of distance, or when i hear unspeakably gorgeous music like "fake plastic trees" or the segue into "streets" or the almost mystical connection one can craete while in the sweaty heat of sex were evidence of God.
i don't anymore.
i think they're evidence of the heights to which humanity can achieve when we allow ourselves to access the potential within all of us. you could call that God. or you could call it something else. at the end of the day, we don't know what it is, and instead of labeling it, i'd rather let it wash over me and enjoy it and appreciate it rather than store it away as proof of something.
and i am also reminded by the fact that, for all these wonderful things, we have war, genocide, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, and a tractor trailer who changes lanes and swerves a bit too much into another lane causing the mother in the minivan with kids to break and swerve and skid on the slick pavement and send the car head-over-heels into the divider and killing her.
if there is a god, if there is a love and logic to everything that happens, i reject such a love and logic that is expressed by notions of "when bad things happen, we should love god more." garbage, i say. to me, any God who would willingly torture his children, so to speak, through unspeakable natural disasters, horrible accidents, or whatever, especially if this is some sort of perverted test of faith, is abhorrent. would any parent kill a child's pet to teach him about death? should you believe your parent even when you know, in your heart, that s/he is utterly wrong? i cannot imagine God would want us to surrender our powers of rationality and free will and free thought whenever he asks us to accept the unacceptable.
for every high, there is a low; for all the beauty, there is ugliness. we cannot have one without the other, and to me, this balances out into an amoral world. there's nothing in that sunset but what you put there. there's nothing in the opening organ of "streets" but what i put in there. while we are not masters of our own destiny (that's left up to chance and chaos), we are masters of the meaning we reap from the world we're in.
i see no proof of God. i see no proof for the absence of God.
but i do think i understand, better, what i used to interpret as proof of God, and while the world is colder, harsher, and i live in fear of how life changes on a dime when that tractor trailer swerves on 95 South on a rainy Tuesday morning, i am more acutely alive, aware, and appreciative of what little time i have. abandoning my notions of God has made the highs higher, and the lows lower. all i have i have created with my own bare hands. but they remain mine and mine only as i -- the royal "i," we all do this -- forge meaning from chaos.
and then we die.
I said I believe in the Christian God. What does that have to do w/ who I love? I don't believe in a Muslim god or a Hindu god and I don't believe in a god that's just a supreme being out there in space...that doesn't mean I dislike or hate those people....The thread is about gods, not who we love, but whatever, judge away...
