Everything is God

Having spent the past two blog entries trying to explain why I do not subscribe to a God of organised religion, I thought i’d now make an argument for why I’m not an atheist in the sense that I cannot accept, unequivocally that a God does not or has never existed, on a philosophical level.

As explained in previous blogs, I reject Christianity on the basis that it attempts to explain the unexplainable. It has hijacked the idea of God for it’s own power and wealth needs. (Why would a God use a commandment up telling me to not worship false idols, instead of telling me, say, not to sexually abuse children? Is God jealous, or was it just a design on power by a few people three-four thousand years ago? I’m going to go with the latter) Christianity attempts to use simple language and human knowledge to justify something that is beyond simple language and human knowledge. It then attempts to set out rules and laws that run contrary to many of my own principles. For example, I reject being told that I must “love thy neighbour“. Love and acceptance cannot be willed or forced. Neither can belief in a God of Organised religion. I reject Catholicism because the very reason it is as powerful as it is, has nothing to do with it being ordained by the power of God, and everything to do with the largely ignored evils and atrocities it has committed over the past two thousand years. I reject Protestantism for much the same reason.
Christianity tends to contradict itself by suggesting on the one hand that by revealing certain “laws” set out by God, that the nature of God is therefore knowable by human kind. Yet, the God of Christianity is one of complete perfection whom transcends human understanding, which by definition, means he is unknowable in every way.

But rejecting Organised Religion in no way implies a rejection of the principle of God in its entirety.

The Benedictine Monk, Anselm, both impresses me and infuriates me. He infuriates me because he suggested that belief preceded reasoning, which is a cop-out for me. It can also be quite a dangerous idea. Reasoning should always precede belief when it comes to such important ideas that belong to such a powerful organisation like the Catholic Church. Belief without reasoning is at the very heart of the problems Catholicism has endured over the Centuries. The largely illiterate populations of European States during the 16th Century were content with belief without reasoning, and the 16th Century happened to be rife with religious war and struggle.
“Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand.” Anselm’s idea of “belief” in the eleventh century was a far cry from our understanding. For Anselm, belief means to resign oneself completely to the obedience of God, and with that obedience will come understanding. This, at first glance, sounds quite loose and unreasoned. But on a deeper level, Anselm is clearly referring to a state of meditation. Meditation is used across the World, spanning Continents and cultures, religions and races. Even Atheists meditate, it helps us gain a better understanding of ourselves and our issues. So, perhaps Anselm is loosely suggesting that to know oneself, is to know God, and since we are all interconnected by matter, by time, by space, by emotional response, by language, therefore to know oneself is to know everything, to know the eternal, and so by definition, everything is God.

Anselm also impresses me with his ontological argument of perfection. Anselm suggests that we all have an understanding of “good” and of “beauty” and of “perfect”. Those understandings, we use to base compare everything in life to. To Anselm, the very height of “good” or “perfect” is God. There must be a perfect perfection. Perfection must have an end point by it’s very nature, and that perfection, is therefore called God, because there is nothing greater than perfection. Anselm argued that to imagine the perfect Good is one thing, but for it to exist in reality would be greater than it existing purely in his mind, therefore, God must exist. It’s a convincing argument. But then, does God also become the perfect imperfection? The perfect evil? And also, surely the greatest creator, would be one that could create the universe, but not actually exist himself? That would be the ultimate perfection. Me painting a great work of art would be amazing, but me not existing, and yet managing to create a great work of art, would be better. And so by that logic, God doesn’t exist. Right?

I would argue that we are debating the idea of God in very much the wrong way. We are trying to prove the existence of a Being much like ourselves; who can consciously communicate and direct from the comfort of his cloud in the sky. That he can listen to prayer and intervene in the World. I think that’s wrong. I blame Organised Religion for that.
I think the idea of God needs to change. To have created a universe out of nothing suggests a creator that we give human attributes too. But, creating out of nothing, means that “nothing” is separate from God, and so that puts humanity at a great distance from God. We are not a part of God, God is not a part of us. Just as if we create a clock, we cannot suddenly become a part of that clock, and direct that clock to be whatever we so wish. But even if a God did create the universe ex nihilo, then, we must ask, who created the creator? If we take the Organised Religion route, we must say that before existence there must have a been non-existence. Which means God must have jumped into existence, at the moment of creation, unless he existed in non-existence, and if he did indeed exist in non-existence (a state in which nothing exists) then by definition, he didn’t exist. So, in order to change from a state of non-existence into a state of existence, something must have started his existence, which means there is something greater than the creator of everything, because something created the creator primarily. Still with me?

But, going with Anselm’s theory, the greatest perfection, in my rather skewed subjective analysis of the situation, would be a Being that could exist when existence itself does not exist. Does this prove the existence of God? No, but it is a far better argument than the one given by most Christians….. “God exists, because the Bible says so”.

What if the universe had no beginning? What if the big bang was simply one in an endless line of big bangs? What if there was no Aristotelian Prime Mover, because there was no need for a Prime Mover? We slowly come to the conclusion, that existence itself is bound together. We are all part of the same conclusion. Matter, energy, time, wisdom, and space, are all interconnected. Which, I think Thomas Aquinas was suggesting, when he noted that God is the immutable, God is the perfection, and God is the infinite. He wasn’t suggesting there is a man in the sky who has all the makings that we traditionally associate with a God of Organised Religion. When he spoke of the nature of Jesus, he wasn’t suggesting that a God one day decided to put his son on Earth. He was suggesting that the “son of God” was simply the result of the hard and desperate times. Humanity created Jesus. In the same way that every generation has a person stand up against the natural order; that person would not have the same influence if the natural order was perfectly acceptable. Therefore, Jesus was simply a man who stood up against the accepted Roman order. The son of God, simply means, the son of everything. It was inevitable, for Aquinas, that eventually a man would want to fight back against Roman powers. Aquinas, the great Philosophy of Christian tradition, was suggesting that because everything is interconnected to everything else, therefore everything is God.

Slavery of the mind

Carrying on from yesterdays blog on Evolution, I thought i’d use this blog to attempt to verbalise my rather ineffable understanding of life.
I do not believe in any organised religion. That much is plainly obvious. However, some of my favourite philosophers throughout history, are the Christian philosophers over time. St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, to name a few. “Thinking Christians” as I like to call them. I find that the religion that has come to dominate the Western World – Christianity – has been rather oppressive and dangerous throughout it’s history. I understand that for the individual, spirituality can be an uplifting and comforting experience, which I advocate fully. I cannot though, understand why something that happens to have billions of subscribers, is considered “respectable” simply because it has billions of subscribers. People tend to blindly believe, without question. I find it somewhat arrogant. On a philosophical level, I cannot accept Organised Religion, and here is why…..

Humanity is limited to our very narrow understanding of the Universe. We can never overcome that narrow perspective, because the reason Humanity is limited is not due to an easily corrected ignorance, but instead down to what Descartes in his First Meditation noted as our senses. To see, hear, smell, touch, and taste is all we have. How arrogant of Humanity to think that whatever exists to those five sense is all that exists. We seem to put “God” into the category of the five senses. We give him human characteristics; love, wrath, expectation. All human concepts. How arrogant of us.

What if there is more? And if there is more, we cannot possibly comprehend it, because we are far too limited, and yet Organised Religion believes that the entire nature of life and the Universe, can be explained, in a 2000 year old book; a book that doesn’t actually mention Evolution or dinosaurs (you’d think it would). We are enslaving our own minds by the very nature of Organised Religion. When in actuality, the man who happens to know the Bible by heart, is no more knowledgeable than the man who calls himself Atheist. Both rather dogmatic systems of belief, mean nothing, we are all Agnostic.

It is not just extra sensory limits that hamper our understanding of “everything“, it also extends to our five sense. Closer to home.
A man who I see walking through Leicester City Centre every so often, sits on the bench in the middle of the City Centre, and often talks to himself about how he’s the king of England. Sometimes, he has a trumpet. People stare at him, as if he’s mad. How could a sane commoner actually believe that he’s the King of England? He must be mad right? He is Camus’ Outsider, is he not?
As Descartes points out, whilst we presume to accept everything that our senses perceive as real, to be real, we are daily deceived by our senses. We fall asleep, we dream, and whilst we dream, we believe everything our senses are telling us to be real. If during our dream, we see Elvis riding on the back of a donkey, in Ancient Rome, our dream counterpart does not think “I must be dreaming“, we simply accept it as truth. In fact, there have been times when I’ve woken up from a dream, and it has taken a few seconds for me to realise it was just a dream. For those few seconds, am I considered mad?

So what is to say that we are not dreaming now? Or at the very least, that our senses are not deceiving us in some awful way? Why do we trust our senses when we are “awake“? How do you know for certain that you’re not dreaming right this second? What is the difference between us sleeping and dreaming, and the man in the street calling himself the King, other than the fact that one of us has our eyes closed? Surely there is no real difference? We are both being deceived by our rather devious senses. We are both “mad” at different times. And so with that being said, how can one presume to know anything? To claim to understand the nature of God, and the Universe is to claim an arrogance and a level of knowing far beyond that of Humanity in general. To attempt to understand anything whatsoever in life, we must question everything; every belief, every tradition, every custom, every level of authority, everything anybody has ever told you.

Language plays a gigantic role in limiting human knowledge and experience. Language reflects just how constrained humanity is. We cannot adequately explain feelings, especially given just how personal emotions truly are. I cannot describe the beauty of love, because the beauty of love to me is simply a feeling, whose very aura is deeply ineffable. In the same way that I cannot explain the colour blue. And so language constrains us. Given the obvious constrains of language, how are we to use such a limited medium of communication in order to describe the infinite? It is simply not possible. And yet we arrogantly attempt it; Organised Religion.

Your perceptions and the impressions that your senses give you are yours only. Your experiences and your subsequent system of values and morals, are yours only. If I were to call myself Christian, my system of values would strongly contradict those of Christianity. I have, for example, no problem or issue with homosexuality, gay marriage, gay adoption, or even abortion. No amount of threatening me with a rather bleak and conservative bigoted God is going to change my system of values. And anyway, if God truly is perfect, and “knows all“, he knew before I was born, that I’d have a system of values, due to the experiences my family have had and my natural surroundings that I had no control over, and that seem to contradict everything that the God of Christianity stands for.

The Right to Love

August 27th 2009 will mark the one year anniversary of the death of Dorothy Martin. Mrs Martin was a pioneer for lesbian rights, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality throughout the 1960s and 1970s across America. Dorothy Martin died two months after fulfilling the dream of her fifty year relationship with girlfriend Phyllis Lyon, by marrying in June 2008, in California. They should be commended for their work. Anti-discrimination laws, the right for a gay lady or gentleman to visit a loved one in hospital, work place regulations in support of gay rights, society as a whole owes both Lyon and Martin a great debt for their courage and their relentless fighting.
I cannot think of a more pro-marriage fight, than that put up by Dorothy Martin and Phyllis Lyon.

Currently, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Iowa all allow same sex marriage. Vermont is soon to follow on September 1st 2009, and Maine will join that list of States on September 14th 2009. And whilst I welcome the right of the State to provide it’s own definition of marriage ahead of the Federal Government, I’d suggest further that it is the individual’s right to decide what is and isn’t acceptable. It is not the State’s legislature who decide the arrangement of love. If you do not think homosexual couples should be allowed to be married, then simply don’t attend a gay wedding. Legally consenting couples, whether straight or gay have a right to express their love for each other via a ceremony of vows and commitment. It has the business of no one else. It does not impact your daily life. It does not undermine “traditional marriage” (a subject I shall come on to later).

The Defence Of Marriage Act is quite clearly anti-homosexual. I’m not entirely sure what Marriage needs defending from? It’s a thriving business as far as i’m aware. The Defence of Marriage Act, is simply a bigoted few, denying the rights of a section of society, that simply doesn’t conform to the narrow minded Republican view of what is decent and correct. It is indefensible that Congress simply assumes it has the moral authority to decide who should and shouldn’t be recognised as “married”. I’m unsure why same sex marriage is even a question any more, why it’s even debated. It is surely for the two people in any relationship, to decide if they want to take a vow of devotion or not? It is the jurisdiction of politicians on any side of the political divide to decide. As “rights” and as “freedom” goes, the freedom to fall in love and to commit to whomever you so wish, is one of the most basic rights any of us is entitled to, without being punished or alienated.

A rather vicious little group, ironically named “Alliance for Marriage” in 2001 announced it’s intention to create an Amendment to the Constitution that would have ultimately destroyed the right of homosexual couples to be married, whilst alienating them further, as they were sub human. The Amendment was referred to as “The Federal Marriage Amendment“. It would have meant that every State would be forced to recognise, the description of the FMA, which happened to be “SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.” A nasty little piece of discriminatory legislation.

In short, the Amendment would have been a step backward, for diversity, tolerance, acceptance and difference. The homosexual community is not an alien race hell bent on destroying America. The homosexual community is no different to the heterosexual community, other than possessing a different preference when it comes to love. They are the Police officials who keep you safe, doctors who keep you alive, fire fighters who save you from burning to death, teachers who prepare your children for the future, they are the Oscar Wilde’s, and the Leonardo Da Vinci’s. It is simply a case of personal preference when it comes to love. Banning same sex marriage is as ridiculous a notion to me, as banning marriage between those with different coloured eyes or hair. It makes no sense. The Federal Marriage Act was a disgusting piece of legislation. The Federal Bigotry Act would have certainly been a more apt name. The Constitution is not a tool for discrimination.

Shockingly, Gallup reports that 40% of people asked, believe Homosexuality itself (not gay marriage) should not be legal. 40% of people asked would like to criminalise people, purely for being gay.

In order to pass into law, and become a Constitutional Amendment, the proposal had to attract the votes of two thirds of each House, and ratification by three fourths of the States. On July 18th 2006, a vote took place in the U.S House of Representatives, and failed by 236 yea to 187 nay votes. It needed 290 votes to pass the House. Whilst I welcome it’s failure, 236 yeas is slightly worrying, for perhaps the World’s most powerful and apparently “free” nation. The deeply held bigoted attitudes still in force.

The Constitution of the United States thankfully possesses the clause, Article IV, Section 1, which states quite unequivocally “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” States are required, by the Constitution, to recognise the marriage rights of those who were married in other States. George Bush, said at the time “A constitutional amendment will put a decision that is critical to American families and American society in the hands of the American people“. A statement that is quite frankly regressive, and a product of the eight years of the Presidency of Bush – fear. Why is it “critical to American families and American society” that same sex marriage be banned? Given the past eight years, i’d suggest that letting Texans run for President is critical not just to American society, but Global society as a whole. George Bush would have decided that because he doesn’t approve of the relationship between Dorothy Martin and Phyllis Lyon, that it is therefore “un-American” by the standards of the Constitutional Amendment, he shamefully backed. For the 21st Century, I cannot believe an Amendment was even discussed.

Ex Republican Congressman, Richard Curtis voted against banning discrimination against Homosexuals, he also voted against domestic partnerships for Homosexual couples. In 2007, Curtis (who is married and has two daughters, and is very very anti-gay rights) was forced to resign his position, because he was found to have dressed in women’s clothes, and had sex with a male gay porn model named Cody Castagna, in a hotel room, in Washington. A smile was brought to my face when I read this story.

It seems the American Right is unwilling to move forward. Although, that’s nothing new.

In 1924, the Virginia Legislature passed a law entitled “The Racial Integrity Act” which made interracial marriage illegal. The idea, was to kill off any It was not until 1967, in the case of Loving V Virginia, that the United States Supreme Court overturned the ruling, when interracial couple Mildred and Richard Loving were sentenced to a year in Jail, simply for marrying. They worked tirelessly to overturn the Racial Integrity Act and were successful in 1967. To us here in 2009, the entire idea of blocking interracial marriage, is abhorrent. The Judge presiding over the case of the Loving’s, which sentenced them to a year in Prison, is quoted as saying:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Religion. Of course it’s Religion. Whenever someone feels the need to discriminate, or impose bigoted judgements on others, they tend to use the Bible to help justify the unjustifiable. As with the Lovings case, the fundamental argument against same-sex marriage, comes from the frankly ridiculous religious notion that traditional marriage is between a man and a woman, and nothing more. It sounds as if the Bible is strict and straight forward in it’s proposals on marriage. It simply isn’t. It is therefore perplexing as to why those with such deeply held Christian principles of the Religious Right, are wasting their time focusing on same sex marriage, when they should also be focusing on Biblical insistances they otherwise tend to pretend don’t exist?
1 Corinthians 11:8-9, which states “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; 9neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” is pretty straight forward in suggesting that women should exist simple to serve men. Can I expect a “Role Of Women in Society Act“?
David is admired, by Christendom, and so perhaps those with such strong opinions against Gay marriage from a Religious stand point, could help introduce legislation to allow polygamy, because as 2 Samuel 5:13 quite clearly states, the role model that is David “…took him more concubines and wives out of Jerusalem, after he was come from Hebron: and there were yet sons and daughters born to David.“
I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before those guardians of all that is moral and decent in the World, over at “Alliance for Marriage” really do themselves proud by truly sticking to what the Bible says of family life, especially in relation to Genesis 19:31-32, which says:
“One day the older daughter said to the younger, “Our father is old, and there is no man around here to lie with us, as is the custom all over the earth. 32 Let’s get our father to drink wine and then lie with him and preserve our family line through our father.”
Only recently has marriage started to become more about love, than strengthening family ties. Nobles throughout 16th Century Europe would almost invoke Exodus 21:7, by “selling” their daughters into prominent Catholic families, to strengthen relations. A great example of this, would be of Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, who was set aside to marry Arthur Tudor, the son of Henry VII of England, purely to strengthen the claim of the Tudor’s to the throne of England due to Isabella’s Royal English ancestry. This wasn’t a match made out of love. Neither was Catherine’s subsequent marriage to Arthur’s brother Henry, who of course became the tyrant, Henry VIII. Love and marriage (whilst a fantastic Sinatra song) did not go together like “a horse and carriage“, until very very recently. “Tradition” is irrelevant.

Opponents of same-sex marriage suggest that homosexuality is unnatural and damaging to society. No it isn’t. Religious intolerance though, now that’s damaging to society. Wars, death, torture, inability to accept the diversity of humanity, is so disastrously detrimental to the future of society, to blame homosexuality is pathetic at best and shockingly ignorant at worst. And surely it is not unnatural to disagree in principle with Aquinas’ teachings on the theory of Natural Law. It is surely unnatural though, to repress your desires and your very human needs, just to suit the narrow minded, homophobic views of a few bigoted individuals and their pretty damn evil God. Religion, is far more unnatural.

I’m not entirely sure that dogmatic Religious nonsense is to blame though. I’d suggest that homophobia comes is simply an illogical prejudice, and that the Bible is purely used to apply justification for such ridiculous prejudices. The Bible is nothing more than a tool to advance individual bigotry.

If the opponents of same-sex marriage could give me legitimate reasons why homosexual couples, in loving relationships, should not be allowed to marry, i’m more than willing to debate this with you.