Nothin' But a Good Time

Notes from a Reluctant Deist Part V

God sucks. He’s jealous, vindictive, insecure, and narcissistic. Worse, he doesn’t seem to care a fig about our suffering. We’re told He loves us but you’d be hard-pressed to find much evidence of that love in Bakhmut, Ukraine these days. Or in the pediatric cancer ward. Or among the victims of everyday horrors like sexual abuse, domestic violence, or hunger. We’re told that we can’t understand God’s reasons for this constant deluge of misery, but we should place our faith in Him nonetheless because to turn our backs on Him will only result in a far worse outcome for our eternal souls. Just worship the one delivering our abasement and all will be well. I mean, that’s the talk of an abuser. God is neither fair or just and gives little evidence of being particularly loving - why would any of us choose to live in subservience to such a colossal dickhead?

That’s the God I was raised with. Despite growing up in a secular household, it’s impossible to grow up in America without getting to know that guy. Our society is drenched in the blood of Christ who, somehow, is the son of God and also is God and also died for my sins for reasons that have never made a lick of sense to me.

I’m Jewish by birth and still consider myself Jewish. The Torah features an equally inexplicable god terrorizing his people, choosing sides in battles, sending his first human creations into exile, and just generally being kind of a tyrant. He’s more like an alcoholic than a deity, sometimes gentle and lovey-dovey, sometimes utterly capricious. I mean, at one point, He makes it rain frogs. Frogs! This is not the behavior of somebody who deserves our praise; this is the behavior of somebody who needs an intervention.

The other thing I’ve never understood about that guy is, what is his obsession with us? Seriously, why does he need our attention so badly? He’s God, for god’s sake. He’s the creator of all that is and all that ever shall be. So why is he wasting his time on people? Why does he insist these puny creatures worship Him? It would be like us standing over an ant screaming, “WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME?”

And why just us? Why doesn’t He make the same demands of goldfish and pigeons and kangaroos? It’s weird, right? And it’s creepy. Like, dude, don’t you have a universe to run?

No wonder so many people reject that dude. At a certain point, you just have to say, “I love you but I can’t be with you.”

Yet here I am, writing the fifth part of a series about how I became a believer. Ricky Gervais, loudly atheistic, routinely challenges believers who claim a belief in God with the following question, “Which god?” Which seems like the right question to ask. Because we’ve had a lot of gods: Marduk, Sango, Kukulcan, Acintya, Baiame, Odin, Wakan Tanka, Zeus. The list goes on and on. So who is your god? Do you have just one? Do you have many? How do we figure out which god is the “right” god?

To me, just asking the question answers the question. It’s absurd to maintain that your god, most likely the god of your parents, has any more claim on being the “correct” god than any other. How did you get so lucky that you happened to be born into a household that happens to worship the one true deity? How can any religion claim, with a straight face, that their god is the One? It’s silly. Yet we’ve killed millions upon millions of people over such ridiculous claims.

It’s horrendous.

For all of this insanity, we humans still persist in our obviously flawed conceptions of some higher being or beings. Why do we still believe in God when God has been such a letdown? Why doesn’t this belief just die out? And I don’t just mean belief in the “religious;” I also mean belief in the “spiritual.” Why do we continue to have this nagging suspicion that there is more than (gesturing wildly) this?

Well, either we do what I did for so long – reject any notion of gods out of hand – or we take seriously the beliefs of billions and try to figure out some solution that allows for “god.”

And here’s what I get into the murkiest of waters because this is the part I am trying to figure out for myself. I already know what God can’t be: It can’t be the American God, some dude pointing His finger like Mengele at the camps directing people towards damnation or salvation. That’s not possible. But can God be spirit, like Jesus says in John 4:24? Why not? I know God doesn’t have human form, but does God have no form like Muslims believe? Yeah, that makes sense to me, too. Is “God” even the appropriate name? Does naming It constrain it too much? I buy that, too. But I guess we’ve got to call It something so we might as well stick with God. The only thing that makes sense to me is that It – if there is an It - is timeless, which means It also doesn’t exist within space. It is formless. It is vast, maybe infinite. It just Is.

So if It’s out there, what does it want with us? The only explanation that makes sense to me is the notion that God is Universal Consciousness. I used to think that maybe the universe was a machine for creating consciousness, but now I think maybe consciousness is a machine for creating universes. Human consciousness is just a manifestation of the God consciousness trying to understand itself. All those dopes who go, “We’re all God…” as New Agey and woo-woo as that has always sounded to me, I think they might be right. Which is so annoying.

The whole God thing only makes sense if God needs us as much as we need God. And the only way that makes sense to me is if we’re one and the same. Our consciousness might just be different aspects of God trying to figure Itself out. In that way, we’re all the same, the experiences we have only different aspects of consciousness. And when I say “us,” it doesn’t makes sense to limit it to humans because, again, why the hell would a universal anything care about us? I think there must be a collective Us, the Universal Us, the Us of every aspect of existence, which may not (and probably isn’t) be confined to what we think of as the universe. Our infinitesimal human lives are like cells in a leaf on a tree in a forest of trees on a planet of trees in a galaxy of trees. In other words, the thing that we think of as our individual self, is practically nothing. Which might give you some perspective when you get pissed off because the supermarket is out of gluten-free bread.

We’re both utterly unimportant and supremely important. We’re everything and nothing, which is probably a good definition of God, too. So why do I call myself a “deist” instead of a “monist,” which is the belief that we’re God? As I said before, I’m not comfortable with the term deist but I don’t have a better word. I’m equally uncomfortable with the word monist because although I think it comes closer to describing my belief system, I also think it carries a fatal whiff of hubris with it because that leaf cell may have as much right to call itself a tree as anything else but the tree exists with or without it.

I also don’t think it does us much good to grant ourselves God status. We’ve seen how that shit usually turns out. Better, I think, to put my faith in the larger whole of which I am a part than to claim the larger whole for myself. Better, I think, to believe that It loves me because It is me (and fortunately doesn’t suffer from my very human neuroses). Better to live this life in a state of curiosity and wonder and playfulness with some assurance that this is only a temporary way station on an infinite journey. It's better for my mental health, and better for those I love, to lean into compassion and joy with the faith that there is more to come. That there is always more to come. More to explore. More to learn. That there is more to us than us. That we have a purpose, that the purpose is to live, and that this life is one of many we will live. It’s a better way to get through the day. Even when we suffer, as we all must, our suffering is a way to know ourselves, which is the only reason we’re here. So that’s what I believe. At least that’s I believe today. I just know that having a semi-coherent belief system has helped me more than having no belief system. Having the world make some sense is more enjoyable to me than having it be senseless. In the end, we ain’t looking for nothing but a good time. And it don’t get better than this.