Does God Exist?

Does god exist? some people ask. God is dead! others declaim. Heresy to doubt! believers reply. Few concepts evoke a broader range of emotion. Given the state of the world and the role religion plays, humanity might be better off if we stop thinking about god the way our ancestors did. This is a personal attempt to give god a fresh set of attributes, a new definition for the Twenty first Century.

The search for god and meaning

The Bible tells us that Moses sought and found his god on a high place. That revelation was late in our search. Since the dawn of consciousness, humanity has looked for god everywhere; in the stones, the sky, the trees, the rivers and oceans, the warming fire, the depths of the earth, and even in the creatures that gave comfort, or sustenance, or instilled fear. Humans have contemplated with awe the mystery of the cycle of life, birth, death, and renewal. We have witnessed unexpected rewards and blandishments at every turning of life’s trail. We have asked again and again, why, why, why, and sought answers that comported with our time-bound experience. We gave the source our joys and sorrows a name; god. Man is and always has been the exclusive advocate of god’s presence and the only source of understanding of god’s ways. Priests, shamans, hermits, kings, theologians, mystics, prophets, visionaries, have experienced god, perceived god, interpreted god and provided everyone else with universal and more often than not contradictory truths. Without humanity, would god exist? Is god intrinsic in the nature of all things? The answer to those questions might be found in ourselves. Many theologians have concluded that god cannot be described or seen. They suggest that god can be best understood through attributes. Given that the priests were human it is no coincidence that these attributes correspond to many of the common characteristics of humanity. God has been described as vengeful, loving, caring, paternal, maternal, jealous, generous, playful, just, wrathful, benevolent, creative, destructive, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful. In short, man in an effort to understand god, has assembled god from a collection of human attributes and more particularly the characteristics of a tribal leader, a wise person, or king; someone more powerful than you or me. We understand life to be a precarious journey from helplessness to the end of being with an accompanying random oft undeserved pallet of pleasure and mishaps. Humanity early on developed a sense of humility in the face of the power of nature. Our ancestors were dwarfed by mountains, trees, larger animals with sharper teeth that can run or swim faster than we can. They learned to rely on their cunning to even the odds but in the end they saw that death always wins and takes everything. Faced with the burden of getting through life, humans would sink into despair were it not for the emotion of hope. If the fishing was bad this week, the fisherman can hope that it will be better next week. He has learned how to bring the fish in and knows where to find them. But luck plays a role and he needs a little help from a more powerful resource. He knows when the weather is inclement, if an unexpected storm threatens to capsize his boat, perhaps the one responsible for the weather will intervene and give him the strength to steer into the storm. There is no harm in asking. And if he doesn’t ask, the power that controls the weather might get angry and give the wind and waves an extra push to punish him for his lack of respect. To stay on the good side of that power he makes a plea for help and sometimes sweetens it up with a gift. We call that process prayer. From the character of prayer a Terrestrial would conclude that god controls and can alter the future. Prayer in its simplest day to day format, is, “You are the best father anybody could ask for, great and powerful, and now that I’ve gotten your attention with my flattery, could you, would you please, bring us a little rain, or cure my chronic back pain, or make her love me, or even help me to be a better person to be worthy of her, …” and so on. This process is as old as fear. Its formalization is called religion. In the celebration of the cycle of life every marker is commemorated. There are the cycle events of the individual, family, community, and the external events on which our well being depends. There are things we do every day, waking, eating, sleeping. There are milestones; birth, coming of age as an adult, starting a family, curing sickness, and death, and the transition from the physical to the realm of memory or spirit. The communal events are both present and past. Those in the present correspond to the process of life support; planting, the first appearance of new growth, harvest or gathering. Those from the past are the community’s collective memory, the remembrance of how we came to be as a society. Collective memory became folk tales, myth and eventually history. Humans commemorate these universal functions and needs with a rich diversity of costume and ornament, as varied as the colors and shapes of tropical fish, yet all serving the same purpose of making the celebration memorable. In these formalized diversions from day to day routine, humans invented collective transcendence, totem, dance, poetry, literature, art, higher forms of architecture, parks, places of assembly, ornamentation, jewelry, symbols of authority, sports, theatre, opera, and more recently, movies and sit-coms. It may be hard to imagine the connection between a puberty rite tooth filing ceremony in Indonesia and a senior prom but they are only different ways of observing the transition from childhood to maturity. Put another way, religion was the nursery of civilization. The practice of religion may be the oldest profession. The practitioners were agents of the power to change the future for the better by getting god’s attention, eliciting god’s favor on behalf of a client, be it a farmer, a mother, a village, a tribe or a nation. Anthropologists can offer clues to the origins of the priest in society. Predicting the future and changing it would have been a valuable utilitarian function of a priest in early societies. We can assume that early humans had dreams even before they invented language and that the dreams were believed to be a window on another dimension. Dreams were confusing and dreamers needed priests to explain their meaning. The first priests may have been the people endowed with the poetic gift of allegory. The stories that they invented and the rituals, as diverse as language, were the foundation of religious dogma, observance, and practice. Each society’s needs were different. The religious practices of people living on the edge of a body of water differed from a group living beneath the canopy of a tropical forest or one dwelling on a treeless prairie. Each environment had its own unique set of survival problems. Innovators were remembered for their contributions, such as weaving, firing clay, or hardening a spear tip, to the collective well being. Over millennia, life serving skills were formalized and blanketed every step of life.

Winners and Losers

As tribal units coalesced into the first city-states religion became a unifying element in the definition of society. The leader of one tribe subordinated neighboring tribes to become a ruler over all of them. Among the priests of the local villages, a high priest might have arisen in the same way. The priests endowed the ruler with additional powers by making him an emissary of the Godhead. If the High Priest gave power, his own power was dependent on the fortunes of the King. Chances are, if the King was vanquished by an enemy, the Priest and the God head suffered a similar fate. Conquerors bring their gods with them and often slay the gods of the losers, driving the faithful adherents underground to continue their rituals in caves, in basements, and in lonely groves in the forest. Eventually most of the conquered adapt the customs and worship the gods of the winners. If the resistance persists the victors respond by demonizing and persecuting the non conformists. They are labeled fallen angels, followers of Satan, witches, heretics, infidels, Jews, Shiites, Baptists, Catholics, Protestants. They are blamed for plague, drought, the death of infants, natural disasters. Their role as scapegoat is a convenient way of exonerating the prevailing deity from blame when things don’t go well. The concept of the scapegoat, crowned as king for a day then murdered was commonplace, as was animal and even human sacrifice. The latter was a bribe to the deity, the former a vicarious assassination of the deity itself. In Colonial America, a couple of Quakers were hung for evangelizing; needless to say they were not in Pennsylvania. Sometimes the beliefs of the defeated population endured and adapted, even becoming in time a substitute for the lost state. In this way Judaism rose out of the smoke of burnt villages in the lost lands of Judea and Samaria and the Catholic Church evolved from the disintegrating Roman Empire. Both religions abstracted the elements of atrophied governments substituting the moral authority of the King of Kings for the vanished civil authority. Others merged their customs into the religions of the conquerors creating an amalgam of practices in the way that, as with English, the language of the conqueror absorbed the tongue of the vanquished. Institutions seek to perpetuate themselves and religion is no exception. It did so by maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship with the ruler erecting places where its functionaries could pursue an understanding of the world from the perspective of their basic tenets, and establish and refine rules of behavior for the population Priests refined the ceremonies intended to get the attention and curry the favor of the deity. Sacrifices and offerings were common as was flattery. Such practices assumed that Gods were like kings. To find his favor, bring him a gift and complement him. Initially these places were under the sky, high places, unless the God lived underground or in caves. Eventually structures were built, elegant places that matched the home of the local prince in ornament or grandiosity. Places of ritual celebration were embellished, normally places which had been deemed sacred, places where spirits or old gods lived, where they could always be contacted and entreated in time of trouble. As the representative of the god on earth, the priest was also the recipient of gifts from rich and poor, in return for, dispensations, and forgiveness for violation of the prohibitions of the religion. The two institutions, temporal and secular, lived in symbiosis, one physical, controlling a restive population with the sword, the other controlling the psyche with the threat of eternal punishment. Dissidents who questioned either were put away, unless they escaped to a place beyond the prevailing authority where, like the Puritans, they were free, as the sole authority on what was right or wrong, to establish their own autocracy and punish dissenters. Eventually, places of learning broadened their scope and became places of inquiry. But often as not, the questioners and observers lacked the tools to refine their observations. The institutions, certainly the ones in the west, seeing man as a reflection of god, as god’s highest creation, saw the Earth as the center of the Universe, and believed as three year old children often do, that everything revolved around us and everything existed for our purpose. This idea prevailed for a couple of thousand years until the telescope was invented. An inquisitive genius, Galileo, dealt faith based theories about nature a mortal blow, by concluding, through verifiable observations and calculations, that the Earth was a sphere that revolved about the Sun and that the Universe was vast and full of stars, other suns seen from an immense distance. Galileo shrunk man and expanded the mystery of life. But the Catholic Church disagreed and repressed the idea. It resisted but eventually succumbed to the recognition that observation quantified by mathematical formulae sometimes trumped dogmatic assumption.

GOD: Father or Animating Force

Turning from what goes on in the lord’s house, what of the keeper of the house, god? Dressing god like a man is not universal but it is more common than not. Our art and anthropological museums are full of these depictions. Then there is another set of theologians, visionary, abstract, transcendent in their thoughts, who have asserted that god is too big to be described in human terms. Some have claimed that human traits are mere emanations, radiating off the essence, like heat from a fire. Karen Armstrong, in her seminal A History of God, provides an overview of the polarity of perception of god. As with ceremony, universal elements of a First Mover can be distilled from the diversity of perceived reality. But the allegory employed by the proponents to illustrate their points, is confusing and misleading. It drives the ordinary observer back to the conclusion that however you try to define god, it’s really the old man hiding behind the rood screen, a canny, powerful magician, someone like the Wizard of Oz. Even the non anthropomorphic god is perpetually concealed behind a cloud, a glaring light, or a curtain. God is simply too big for ordinary humans to encompass, the mystics suggest. Even so, there is no harm in trying and we have been trying since the dawn of language and symbols. Start with the conflicts inherent in the newest established world religion, the Muslim faith. The god that evolved to define the religion, al Lah, was an impersonal creator, rather than an intervener. Anderson reports that the pre- Moslem nomadic tribes of the Arabian Peninsula had an unremarkable collection of place and function gods. Then consistent with the precepts of mysticism and the influence of contemporary religious and philosophical traditions, initial Muslim theology began to view the world as a lens through which an observer might focus and perceive the “ultimate” divine reality. The Muslims were looking about with young eyes. It is no accident that the interiors of mosques are adorned with words rather than human images. Muslem mystics, notably a philosopher named Suhrwardi, adduced that God was akin to light, or illumination. The geographic source of light is the east, where the sun rises in the morning sky and that’s where they looked. For their part, Jewish mystics tended to illustrate the god concept with pictorial images such as thrones, flying chariots, symbols, words and flaming letters with intrinsic secret meaning. Deciphering the meaning is still a matter of descriptors which personify characteristics. For the mystics the process of perceiving god is like taking off from the earth on the space shuttle. It’s tough getting out of the earth’s gravitational force but once you escape, everything seems clear and in perspective. Meditation and the liberation of the imagination produce insights and subjective clarity. The process of distilling life’s essence from signs and symbols, numbers, and observations was certainly one early source of scientific speculation. Philosophers continually tried to reduce what they saw to basic components or elements such as earth, air, fire, and water, according to the Greeks, or with a burst of creative insight, unseen and unknown atoms according to Democratus who never had the benefit of a magnifying glass let alone an electron microscope. Perhaps Democratus was playing off the concept of abstraction and purity, the Platonic notion that there is a perfect mathematical and relational form of everything observable, a real or imagined concept of chair, for example. This puts in perspective the Biblical revelation that in the beginning was the Word, a floating concept to be discovered, refined, ruminated on, yet unchanging in its perfection, eternal, pre-existing, immutable and indestructible. The notion that mathematics was the root of reality persisted into the 19th century and informed physical science and cosmological speculation at every level. Most of the speculation on the nature of god came at a time when science was in the womb. Cosmology, astrology, alchemy, biology, physics were matters for astute observation of the senses, verified with simple experiments using basic chronometers and scales. The rest was the work of imagination or, from an anthropocentric point of view, divine inspiration, or seeds planted by space travelers, or even the residue of successive collapsed civilizations..

Sex

Western religions accept the concept of one Supreme Being, more often than not a male. Why endow god with sexual attributes? If god is the creator it seems more logical to say that god is either hermaphroditic or neither. Perhaps sexuality enters because form follows function, to borrow an architectural concept. This is illustrated in the proliferation of female fertility deities in early Mediterranean cultures. Procreation and renewal were basic needs and aspirations. They are the corollary of survival. Humans need food and children. They recognized the miracle of birth and the renewal of plants but didn’t understand it. Men didn’t get credit for their role in producing children although no doubt some wise people put two and two together and assumed that there must be some connection between intercourse and conception. They saw seeds go into the ground and generate plants. At some point during the transition from hunter-gatherer to cultivator, woman’s exclusive role was formalized in a matriarchal society. Obviously, before monogamy, the child was singularly identified with the woman who gave birth. Woman personified procreation and her infant child was nurtured with milk from her breasts. The analogy that the earth itself was a mother to all living things was poetic and irresistible. The earth had many of the contours of a woman; mountains and springs. And it bore food and drink. According to Robert Graves, (The Great Myths, p. 27) the Pre-Hellenic mythology credits a female goddess with copulating with a serpent and creating the world out of chaos. Personified as a dove, an allegorical moon, she laid an egg which the giant serpent coiled around and hatched. The cycle of menses congruent with the lunar cycle informed this myth. When the snake claimed to have created the Universe the “Goddess of all Things” banished him to a hole in the ground. The symbolism of Earth as mother and phallic serpent slipping in and out of her orifice is obvious. The priestess who first conceived the explanation must have been chuckling to herself. Another allegorical connection was the fact that snakes shed their skins and were symbols of renewal of life. And finally, snakes resemble rivers, at least the Egyptians thought so. The explanation answered basic questions and for the time was as good as any. Most important, the story sanctified and empowered the Earth Mother and her human minion and interpreter, the priestess-queen. She alone had the power to make the tribe strong and bring forth the fruits from the earth. Sound familiar? The story has many variations but the worship of a Moon goddess was common to the Mediterranean cultures as was the deployment of snakes in the ritual. The female side of God in Judaism is the Shechina. The root of the word is to dwell. It is variously interpreted as a divine presence. The Kabalists, Jewish mystics, characterize it as the feminine attributes of God. It might be interesting to do a comprehensive survey of the different characteristics of all of the gods worshiped by all the cultures of the world. Without doing so, generally, it’s the characteristics that personify the deity rather than its form that make it divine. The lion for example is esteemed for its courage and territorial nature. It has progressed from totem, symbol of a state, such as the Lion of Judah, to symbols of football teams. As for the snake, its peculiar role has persisted and ranges from the great tempter in the Garden of Eden to the Serpent God Quetzalcoatl of the Aztec culture. Even the Norse legends had one. Enough of snakes. I can’t get too excited about reverence of monkey’s or for that matter elephants. But as with everybody, I am more comfortable with the familiar.

One or Many

God has taken many forms. The consolidation of all the attributes of the divinity into one god came late. But paradoxically even the cultures which had many special purpose gods acknowledged an ancestral father or mother of them all. People also recognized a hierarchy of divine authority from greater to lesser, and a succession of generations. As cultures became more complex, special purpose deities sprung up. Gods of the dance and gods of commerce had their own places of worship and manner of celebration. Most of us think of the religious world as being comprised of three or four sectors; Judeo-Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, and Hindu. Recently the media have expanded common perception by exposing the conflict between Muslim sub-groups, the Sunni and the Shia. A great paradox of religion is that, while espousing the high minded values of compassion and charity, the ordained and anointed representatives on earth engage in bitter often violent conflicts over doctrine and dogma. What does this say about the notion of one true god? The best that can be said is that humanity gets it wrong more often than not and either misunderstands, misinterprets the inspiration, or misses the point altogether. This problem of communication puts in further doubt the concept of one all powerful and all knowing deity. The communication skills of such a god would have been far superior to the mixed and contradictory messages extracted by the prophets and founders of today’s competing religions. More to the point, the contradictions and diversity are less a matter of god’s oblique communication as humanity’s mental limitations Our perceptions of our world are personal, a product of our experience and our learned response. One person with a background in physics may see a sun beam as refracted energy. Another person having been taught that the sun is the face of god may observe the same phenomenon and see radiating manifestations of god’s grace. Society is continually deluded by reality; painfully discovering that yesterday’s truth is today’s misconception. Sailor’s never sailed off the end of the earth even though it looked pretty flat to the naked eye. The Jews weren’t the cause of the Bubonic Plague. And so on. This is not to diminish the enormous creative capacity and achievement of the human brain. We take for granted the most dazzling examples of technical and scientific achievement such as instantaneous audio and visual communication over a distance of 9,000 miles, the eradication of endemic diseases, supersonic flight, the speed and capacity of robotic memories, the applications of nanotechnology to surgery, to mention a few. But the efficacy of the scientific method has its limits when it bumps against faith.

After Life

Another area in which theologians disagree is what happens after we die. There is no concrete evidence that our soul migrates anywhere after the death of our bodies. Even the reports of out of body experience are exclusively related by the living. The lore of the supernatural is replete with stories of haunted houses, encounters on dark and stormy nights, but validation is as elusive as the quest for the abominable snowman or the Loch Ness monster. It is a matter of belief or faith. People accept it when it is part of their religious dogma and certainly when they have experienced something paranormal. Having accepted it a priori, they look for ways to affirm it. Few people would disagree with the idea that belief in the after life is a pragmatic means of mitigating the dread of death and the end of consciousness. From this view point alone, it can be a useful life enhancement tool. But the social benefit disintegrates in the hands of suicide bombers who blow themselves up with a smile convinced that they will be rewarded in Paradise. Surely there is no shortage of suicides among those who don’t believe in an afterlife but it is doubtful that their last conscious emotion is happiness. There is no agreement on the nature of after life even among those religions that embrace it. Some Christians believe that Heaven is a place where they will actually see god’s face, implying that god has a face. Some Moslems believe that the afterlife will be something like a perpetual celebration; good, food, and even lots of good sex, a paradoxical view given the Wahabi fundamentalist puritanical condemnation of the loose morality of the West. Elysia and Valhalla were depicted as places where dead heroes could hang out and reminisce; a kind of Veteran’s of Foreign Wars club house where the booze is free. Others believe that the spirit after death is self aware and even capable of communication. Reincarnation according to the Hindu belief is a form of after life in which the life force of a dead person animates another creature, returning again and again until it ultimately attains a state of non-being. The after life, as with all dogma, is a matter of faith.

Many Faces

There are about as many religions as there are languages in the world. And like nature itself they are continually evolving in that new ones keep sprouting off of the main stems. It might be informative to tour an exhibition hall of religions, stopping briefly at each booth with the object of finding out what they have in common and ways in which they differ. As mentioned earlier, they all celebrate the human life cycle and have initiation rites to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood, the passing of seasons, and historic events that bind the community and help them define who they are. All of them strive to transcend the ordinary through prayer, music, dance, or uncommon ritual. They all do these things in different ways but each with a unique structure, a correct way, usually handed down from generation to generation and taught to the young as what is right. All religions seek communion with and the favor of a greater power. Aside from these commonalities, they each do it in a different way, which they believe is the right way and often as not the only way. If we could take each religion into a laboratory and examine it we would recognize that they differ in appearance, as much as a potato differs from a turnip. Dissolve them in solution and break them down into components and we might find that under the surface they are pretty much the same. Some of these traits that might be identified, and further analyzed, are; egocentrism, narcissism, vision, apostasy, accretion, ossification, compulsivity, reutilization, moral rectitude, exclusivity, community, and as mentioned identification with, and subservience to, a unifying force. The first four traits might be initially associated with the founder. Perhaps the earliest identified founder is the legendary Abraham, the father of the three principal western religions. What distinguished him from the rest of the people living out their lives as merchants and farmers in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia was his iconoclasm and his apostasy, his willingness or need to challenge and repudiate authority. A related trait was the audacity to identify himself with a single god that he alone believed was superior to all of the others. Yet another trait was his willingness to sacrifice everything that he cherished in life to demonstrate his faith in his personal god. Abraham’s connection to god was not abstract. His god spoke to him, commanded him and he obeyed. Assume that Abraham was a historic leader of his tribe who heard a voice in his head, believed that it was the voice of god and followed. If there were there other events in his life that influenced him, such as family conflict, economic setbacks, they have been omitted from his biography. We know today that physiologically, not every voice is divine. More often than not they are the result of abnormalities of the brain that can be controlled with psychotropic drugs. In Abraham’s time drugs were sometimes used to induce voices thought to be divine rather than repress them. People who heard voices were often thought to be instruments through which god communicated. Dreams were often thought to be another plane of reality as well. These days anyone who is caught preparing to kill his child because god told him to would be locked up. To say that the historic Abraham was delusional begs the question. What is important about Abraham’s story are the common traits that he shared with other founders of religions such as Mohammed. Like Abraham, Mohammed had a vision, one so powerful that he was motivated to openly repudiate the prevailing theology and preach the concept of one God. In the early 7th century, Jewish and Christian communities coexisted with Arabs on the Arabian Peninsula. Most Arabs still worshiped the local deities of place. The historic Mohammed was a wealthy merchant in Mecca the site at that time (and now) of the holiest shrine on the Arabian Peninsula, the Kaba. His heretical teaching alienated the town’s establishment and he fled for his life to a city that was ultimately renamed Medina. Mohammed considered his revelations which make up the Koran to be the culmination of monotheistic theology. The text departed from but was also built on the platform of Judaism and Christianity in the same way that Christianity had both synthesized and diverged from Judaism. Mohammed accepted both the Jewish prophets and Jesus. The Kaba, a pagan shrine, was ultimately absorbed into the Muslim religion and continued its function as the principle pilgrimage site, an accretive process that has been described as ‘new wine in old wine skins’. We shouldn’t overlook the passage of the historic Jesus. Like Abraham and Mohammed after him Jesus repudiated and chastised prevailing religious practices and took a simpler path. He too had a personal dialogue with god. Like the others he built on the known, but deviated from the norm. He too was cast out for his convictions and ultimately paid the price of his life. As with the others the historic Jesus was embellished after his death and Jesus the legend was transformed by his disciples from a teacher and holy man into something more. How much more was the subject of disputation for hundreds of years at least until the Catholic Church settled on a common doctrine in 325 AD at the First Council of Nicaea.

Origen

On the subject of fathers of the Christian religion we might spend a moment looking at an early theologian, Origen, who bridged the second and third centuries and sought to reconcile Greek philosophy with the evolving Christian doctrine. Origen was born at the beginning of the third century in Alexandria, Egypt which was the New York of its day. To understand Origen we need to take a quick tour of the religions which co-existed in his world. The predominant religion was the familiar Greco-Roman pantheon of Gods; Zeus, Apollo etc. The Gods were immortal but looked and behaved as we do and participated in the affairs of the World. Another common religion practiced in the Roman Empire was Mithraism. It was secretive; its rituals were practiced only by male initiates. Astrology might be the closest counterpart in that its adherents celebrated the 2000 year cycle of the seasons as manifested by the movement of the heavens around the earth, which was at that time, unlike today, believed to be fixed and stationary at the center of the Universe. Imagine an X, or the Cross of St. Andrew, inside a sphere with one bar representing the celestial equator and the other the continual movement of the zodiac in the heavens. Initiates moved up seven layers of knowledge until they attained a comprehension of pure reason, an abstract concept that Plato suggested was what filled the space beyond the sphere of the cosmos. Pure reason represented the basic and paramount law that ordered all things. A third contemporary religion, Zoroastrianism, had originated in Persia hundreds of years before the Christian era and was still common in that region. Their principal deity was Ahura Mazda which represented the highest knowledge. They posited a conflict between the forces of light representing good and darkness representing evil. Their struggle to liberate the spirit from the flesh would ultimately conclude with a golden age when the dead whose spirits were pure would arise. Manicheism, a dualist sect centered in Babylon, believed like the Zoroastrians that the world was divided between the forces of light and darkness. Celibates and ascetics, the male adherents associated women and sexuality with Satan and the flesh with evil. They also rejected the Bible as evil and believed that after death the soul began again with another life. Yet another sect, the Gnostics, practiced a religion that fused many of the existing mythologies that had gone before. Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge. Like many of the others, Gnostics embarked on an ascendant path of salvation to free themselves from worldly evil and the corruption of the flesh. An ascetic, non materialistic life led them to value the soul and nurture the spirit; the divine spark or life force. Over the Centuries Jews had left Palestine, taken their religion with them, and established communities throughout the Roman Empire. The Jewish religion had one patriarchal god who occasionally meted out justice, rewarded the good and punished the unrighteous. The Bible was both a cultural history and a moralistic tract. The destruction King Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century, the culmination of a Jewish revolt, marked the end of the Jewish Priesthood and resulted in a further dispersion of the population. Diaspora Judaism became more communal and participatory. The early Christians were practicing Jews who observed all of the holidays and proscriptions, but, in contrast to mainstream Jews, believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Origen lived at the intellectual cross-roads of all these contrasting and competing belief structures. A dichotomy can be seen between the worship of a paternalistic deity and the pursuit of an idealized state of perfection. A Christian scholar, Origen took on the task of reconciling the conflicts within Christianity and competing belief structures. He undertook an analysis of the Bible, comparing texts in several languages in order to leach an authentic meaning from the words. He saw the Bible as inspired, a source of ideas and positive values. With a nod to Plato, Origen saw god as reason, the “all in all” and the source of love. Evil was not so much a polar force as an absence of good and ignorance was a failure to apply reason. He explained the Trinity in somewhat allegorical terms. The father was the perfect spiritual mind, Christ the personification of wisdom, and the Spirit, the source of salvation. He also suggested a cosmological cycle which drew from Gnosticism and other orders. The material world gives rise to evil, followed by Logos, perhaps an allegorical Christ with a pure human soul, who promises salvation, dies, and is followed by the spirit and renewal, the triumph of the enduring nature of god. Salvation was the liberation of the spirit from the flesh and an eternal union with god. Having briefly viewed Origen’s theology, what of his life? Did he achieve a rational existence? He castrated himself to be free of carnal lust and to focus on the realm of the spirit. He was repeatedly persecuted by the Church hierarchy. Finally, a couple of hundred years after his death the church, having debated and decided for good and always what constituted truth, declared him a heretic and systematically destroyed his books.

Shabetai Tzvi

Leap forward a millennium and peak into the lives and thinking of the seventeenth century Jewish theologian, Shabetai Zvi and and his eighteenth century successor, Jacob Frank. It was a time of despair for Jews, precipitated by pogroms in Ukraine. Shabetai came from a well-off Smyrna family. Early on, his life assumed the extreme behavioral pattern of what today would be diagnosed as bi-polar personality disorder complicated by rather extreme narcissism. Kabbalah mysticism, with its subordination of the physical to attain the spiritual and unite with the divine, suited his disorder and informed his views. His wife divorced him because he abstained from sex. He heard voices that told him he was the Messiah. He wandered the Mediterranean picking up devotees. In Saloniki he had himself married to the Torah in a ceremony. Arriving in Palestine, another visionary, Nathan of Gaza, confirmed that Shabetai was in fact the Messiah. A book was circulated confirming his Messianic identity. News traveled fast to Jewish communities in Europe and he was soon added to prayers. He married a charming Jewish woman, a victim of the Ukrainian pogroms who had been abducted and forced into prostitution. His marriage to her was a philosophical extension of his Kabbalistic beliefs–essentially he sought perfection through degradation. Shabetai surrounded himself with disciples, appointing twelve of them as representatives of the Tribes of Israel. He designated his birthday, the Ninth of Av, a fasting day which commemorated the destruction of the Temple, as a feast day. Ultimately the Sultan in Constantinople convinced him to convert to Islam. To the despair of his adherents, he did, and proceeded to attempt to bring Moslems and Jews together, practicing both traditions. Sabbetaians continued to practice their mystical religion long after his death. In Turkey, a sect called the Donmeh continue to mix Muslim practice with Jewish ritual even now. And consistent with Shabetai’s tradition shattering approach, this group was active in Ataturk’s revolutionary secularization of Turkey. One hundred years later, in another period of Jewish persecution, Jacob Frank, built a following, claiming to be the reincarnation of Shabetai Zvi and if that wasn’t enough, King David. Predictably, the source of his claim was a personal revelation from heaven. If nothing else Frank shared Shabetai’s mental state. Like Zvi, he advocated breaking with tradition in order to achieve perfection. This led him to accept the New Testament, the Trinity, and ultimately to embrace Catholicism with the long term goal of bringing Jews and Catholics together. His devotees ultimately assimilated and disappeared. About the same time that Shabetai Zvi was accumulating adherents, another Jewish innovator was breaking with formalized scholastic religion in Eastern Europe. Like Shabetai, the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings were rooted in Kabbalah mysticism. He taught that god was everywhere in all things and humans could achieve well being and grace by staying in constant contact with the divine presence through emotional, joyous prayer, song, and dance. Hassidism, the movement he founded, remained within the Jewish fold, and over the generations has remained a vital alternative tradition. It goes without saying that all of these movements were resisted by the mainstream clergy who utilized condemnation, derision, and excommunication against the newcomers.

Joseph Smith

Jump forward another Century in our founders tour and visit the life of perhaps the most successful visionary since Abraham; Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, otherwise known as Mormonism. Smith had a fantastic life and an imagination to match it. According to Church history he had a revelation and a vision of god and Christ and he was led by an angel to buried golden plates inscribed with an ancient language. He translated the plates into the Book of Mormon. Among other things the plates informed him that American Indians were descended from a Jewish tribe that had sailed to the New World in 600 BC. Seven witnesses swore that they saw the plates. Later Smith acquired an Egyptian papyrus, apparently a section of the Book of the Dead, and translated the hieroglyphics into what became the Book of Abraham, another important foundation writing of the Mormon Church. According to the Book of Mormon the site of the Garden of Eden was in Jackson County Missouri. It also was destined to be the future site of the New Jerusalem after the second coming of Christ. Smith took issue with the Catholic view of the Holy Trinity. The father, god, was corporeal, he claimed. He initiated the practice of baptism of the dead. In his theology, the human spirit existed before birth and after life, attaining degrees of relationship to the celestial kingdom, all the while awaiting resurrection. The most controversial of his teaching was plural marriage, a practice that was ultimately repudiated by the church. Like other founders he and his followers repeatedly faced the opposition of non Mormons. Smith was accused of bank fraud in one town, and finally met his death at the hands of a mob in Missouri. The hierarchic nature of the Mormon Church leadership is unique. The President is a prophet and apostle. Lower down are elders who have the gift of revelation and the power to heal the spirit by the laying on of hands. Marriage is celestial and continues after life on earth. Mormons have the responsibility to bring others into their religion and are active missionaries. There are about thirteen million members world wide.

Reverend Moon

If the Mormon Church is the most recent to achieve a world wide franchise, it is by no means the last to try. New religions or variations on old ones are continually sprouting. One recent addition is the Unification Church, commonly known as the Moonies after their founder, Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Moon was visited by Christ who asked him to finish his work on earth. He was imprisoned and tortured in North Korea for fomenting unrest. Liberated during the Korean War he founded the Unification Church in 1954. His identification with god took another step in 1960 when he claimed that he and his wife are the True Parents, “the first couple to have the complete blessing of God, and to be able to bring forth children with no original sin.” (Unification Church Web page). Reverend Moon moved to the United States and expanded the church until he was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to Federal Prison. After serving time he went back to South Korea. In 1992 he declared himself and his wife the Messiah whose mission is to unify mind and body and heaven and earth.

Jews for Jesus

Moishe Rosen, a Jewish-Christian evangelical minister, founded what became Jews for Jesus. His initial objective was to fill the religious gap in the Jewish counter culture by convincing errant Jewish youth that Christ was the Messiah and the Son of God. JFJ is not a church and is not formally affiliated with any protestant denomination. Adherents celebrate all the Jewish holidays as well as the Christian ones. Otherwise their beliefs are no different than their fundamentalist evangelical brethren. For example, “We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are divinely inspired, verbally and completely inerrant in the original writings and of supreme and final authority in all matters of faith and life. …We believe in one sovereign God, existing in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, …that God is the source of all creation …We believe that God the Father is the author of eternal salvation, having loved the world and given His Son for its redemption.” (Excerpt from Jews for Jesus, Statement of Faith) They even believe that Satan is a being who actively “creates illusions, lies and counterfeits” and disseminates “hatred and rebellion.” Their mission is to gain Jewish converts by “a clear presentation of the facts of the gospel to the unsaved and an urgent appeal to receive salvation through faith in Christ.” And they seem to be good at what they do. There are missions throughout the World, wherever Jews can be found, even Russia and Israel. They do it the hard way, one on one in the streets, with pamphlets, musical performances, and public meetings. Needless to say they are anathema to the Jewish community. After two millennia of persecution at the hands of Christianity, Jews are satisfied with a separate but equal status. Jews don’t actively seek converts and are uncomfortable with evangelism, even more so when the messenger is Jewish. Jews for Jesus is not a new religion. Rather it is a variant, almost a throwback to Christianity in its infancy when Christians still practiced Judaism. Founders who split off from the mainstream and manage to collect adherents is a never ending story. They all claim to pass on the truth. Whatever the claim of divine inspiration, the witnesses are all human. And the very diversity of their teachings deprives every single one of them of the right to claim that their version is the truth to the exclusion of all the others. And yet they manage by strength of personality to communicate their passion and intensity to others and some people follow them. The believers teach it to their children and the community reaffirms it with repetition and lore. And after a time it is self perpetuating and institutional.

Bible: Truth or Allegory

Most Christians are taught that the Bible is divinely inspired. Some go further and believe literally that every word is the word of god. How literal? Was god a poet? Did he use allegory? So what if the world wasn’t created in seven days as the Bible tells us. Maybe a day in the life of god is much longer than a day in the life of mortals. Maybe it was 10,000 years, or maybe it was even as physics has shown us, 12 billion years. What’s important, we are told, is that we still witness the hand, or mind or god in the process. Which brings us to the theory of intelligent design. This construct posits that evolution can only be explained by accepting the power and influence of a mind assembling all the parts to make it work. One of the best examples, so goes the argument, is the spinning whip behind a single celled animal that moves in both directions. It has a little turbine engine that makes it spin fast enough to make the one celled creature move through water in the direction of food which it identities on contact with sensors on its membrane. All this happens at the electro chemical level; proteins attaching to or resisting each other. This couldn’t be the result of random accident, the proponents of intelligent design argue. Some entity had to figure out how it worked and put it all together. But Darwin came up with the rebuttal to this concept. He traveled to the remote Galapagos Islands and observed the diversity of life. He found no less than 13 variations of the Finch, the only place in the world where they could be found. Since birds haven’t been around the world that long, only millions of years– they came after the dinosaurs– the diversification in the Finch population happened over a short time span. Darwin concluded that variations in the Finch beaks were recent adaptations to different kinds of food available in this harsh environment. The changes occurred at random; errors in the DNA. The traits that survived from generation to generation were the ones that succeeded in getting enough food to create another healthy generation. Some of them ate seeds, while others ate bugs. The ones with bad beaks couldn’t break into the seeds, and so on–. in other words the genetic adaptations of the Finch illustrates the principle of, “survival of the fittest.” The proponents of creative design don’t go far enough. If they chose to, their argument would run up against a stone wall. For example, assuming the existence of a mind, so great as to make a single celled animal swim in the direction of food, and something as complicated as a human, why would the mind have taken 13 billion years?. Or even why take a billion or so years after the earth had enough oxygen to support life? Why create a whole species like the Dinosaurs or all the other less photogenic creatures that have disappeared along the way? Why didn’t the mind do a better job with the latest model, and make us less prone to destructive impulse and violence? And then we must ask what intelligent mind created the mind that created life? And if it has existed forever why did it wait six to13 billion years? To return from these questions, science is not without gaps in understanding, but the empirical evidence substantiates the process of accretion that led from sub-atomic particles to complex forms of life. And the mystery is far greater than attributing the process to a watchmaker in the sky. The creative design hypothesis trivializes life. It is an unrecognized blasphemy and idolatry.

Prayer

Prayer is praise and pleas. Without doing research and developing data it is safe to suggest that the percentage of prayers that succeed is not high. Not every religion’s prayers are exclusively praise and adulation; the kind of compliments that a sycophant would confer on an egoist. I for one would hope that God would be above all that. After all, would that kind of sniveling prostration get you a promotion or a seat on the fifty yard line? I don’t think so. In some cultures, the worshipers would abuse the deity when he didn’t give them what they wanted. But that probably wouldn’t work either. Even, so there is something to be said for prayer. Generally it summons the god within and can tap a hidden resource of personal physical or mental strength, at least for those who truly believe that it will help. It can be cathartic. It can help focus on a daunting task. Even is if it is no more than the placebo effect, it doesn’t matter so long as the supplicant feels that it helps.

Finding God in the Twenty First Century

It might be informative, even illuminating to travel the path of life through time and see if god can be located somewhere, anywhere, perhaps everywhere along the way. The observations can be based on what is subjectively observable at this time, what is theoretically consistent with empirical observation, and what remains in the realm of speculation.

Ascending the Ladder of Life

The current scientific concept is that about 13.6 billion years ago the Universe began when literally all the energy now present, compressed and concentrated, broke its bonds and literally exploded. And it’s been moving ever since at a pretty constant speed. Units of light, photons travel at a constant 185,000 miles every second. Where is it going? Away. Infinity is a concept that is hard to grasp because we look around us and see boundaries and limiting definitions of objects. It’s easier for us to visualize light moving in the universe and inevitably bumping up against a wall somewhere, but if so, what lies beyond the wall? Even the concept of the Big Bang defies credibility. But empirical observations supported by mathematical constructs support the theory. Telescopes look back in time and evaluate the properties of these infinitely tiny refugees from the womb of the Universe. How small are they? Virtually no weight at all; a mere speck of energy or light hurling on through space. These tiny space travelers have different properties that are also observable. Some are pure energy, electrons that give off heat and can create light or fry an egg. Others, photons, are the basic properties of light itself. Gravitons are like magnets that pull their cousins toward them. This stuff is so ephemeral that it can move through a brick wall or a mountain. Recent tests in a linear accelerator clocked a sub-atomic particle called a quark at having raced 430 miles through the solid earth in .00023 of a second. To visualize this, think of a telephone conversation with someone on the other side of the earth. You hear them almost as they speak; sound travels that fast focused and beamed up to a satellite circling the earth and back down to a receiver near you and finally to your cell phone or shot through fiber optic cable or copper wire to your house. These shards of the big bang are almost the smallest units of energy, and the basic building blocks of life. What is significant about all of them is that they each make a difference. They interact with what they come in contact with and change them. According to the cosmologists, it took 300,000 years after the big bang before protons and neutrons, the two components of the nucleus of the atom, appeared. The atom represents a critical step in the formation of more complex and stable masses. The center of the atom or nuclei is made up of these protons and neutrons. The nucleus of an atom is about 2000 times the mass of a single electron. It is held together by a “strong force”. We see them as pulsating specs, flickering shadows on a screen. Atoms with different properties make up the elements, like hydrogen. The number of protons in the nucleus of an atom defines the element. The nucleus of an atom is surrounded by an orbital field of electrons moving at about the speed of light. Some of these electrons bond with electrons from neighboring atoms and remain linked. This combination is a molecule, the next stage of organization of the ladder of life. Now think about another characteristic of the Universe, symmetry or balance. All electrons are not equal. Some have positive while others have negative characteristics. Children who play with magnets learn that sometimes two magnets are pushing away from each other while at other times they rush towards each other and bond. The magnets are just inert lumps of metal. But the electro- magnetic energy field and the gravitational field that makes them attract and repel are present even though we can’t see them. Given that some of the matter and energy attract each other, clouds of these fugitives from the birth of the Universe coalesced and formed larger concentrated bodies. They picked up things in their path and sucked them to the center, increasing the density of the core and left slackers behind in a kind of spinning wake. Let’s return to the attracting and repelling magnets. The protons at the core of atoms all have positive charges. Like charges repel each other. So atoms stay separate from one another except when their orbiting electrons connect to electrons flying around an adjacent atom. But when atoms are squeezed together the resistance of the positive charges of the protons in the nuclei is overcome and their nuclei merge and give off energy; a process called fusion. The by product is more light and more energy. And that’s in very simple terms the recipe for the furnace at the core of the sun and the stars. Eventually billions of these concentrations coalesced, each with its own gravitational forces and energy fields, ranging in sizes from enormous to tiny. Yet each one has its own bonded center with different characteristics depending upon which combination of particles were linked to each other at the core. The rotation of the mass combined with the intense heat of the furnace at the core threw off small units which solidified as they drifted away and cooled. The attachments of molecules clinging one to another led to new more complex forms and basic elements and minerals such as carbon and acid came into being. When we look at the sky we see points of like but what’s in the dark spaces in between? Apparently, it too was occupied with a loose web of these hurling particles, just dense enough to warp but not impede the travel of the loose photons. What’s been going on? The small units have been combining to make more complex units and they’ve also been smashing into one another to make more heat, light, and matter. Our time travel now focuses on one of these self contained furnaces, our very own Sun. In its whirling it has thrown off globs of mass which, though locked in its gravitational force field, are nevertheless far enough away from its intense heat to have cooled at the surface. They are spheres rotating forever on an elliptical course locked to their mother by gravitational apron strings, and nurtured by their mother’s energy, heat and light. Some of these spheres are too hot, others are too cold, but one is its own dynamic cooker. When we first look back in time at our home, the Earth, in its childhood we find a different atmosphere altogether; a hot smelly gaseous place; a rough surface often bombarded by lumps of congealed matter hurling through space and striking the Earth, provided they didn’t burn up when they entered the Earth’s own spinning gravitational field. The Earth’s surface, though cooling was perforated with open sores erupting with concentrated fiery matter which congealed and turned to cindery stone. On the surface were vaporous gases; ammonia and sulphur and acid, the product of the heat and a combination of trapped particles, atoms, increasingly linked together in more complex ways as the continual bombardment of energy and light from the sun and from the earth’s residually heated center kept them dancing, agititated, and bonding. Up to this time, a few billion years ago, half way to now, these structures, found themselves replicating when the conditions were the same. That is, a certain combination, exposed to the right amount of light and heat became something else. And given the tendency of the particles to attach to one another, the bonding process continued making longer and longer chains, molecules, each with more complex characteristics. Anyone who has watched an Alka Seltzer dissolve in a glass of water gets the picture. Start with two different items, put them together, they interact and create something related but new. This didn’t happen over night. It took billions of years. It was slow and random, and no doubt a lot of mistakes along the way, got lost. What eventually resulted was a combination of basic elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which coalesced under cooling surface temperatures and became water. And water, when it evaporated or vaporized, gave off oxygen changing the character of the gassy atmosphere by degrees. Someplace deep in the water were hot jets of minerals coming up from the hot center of the earth and interacting with the minerals on the bottom of the oceans and the minerals in suspension in the water. This flux was infused with new energy and chemical molecules began to replicate themselves. What advanced this process was a long molecular string called an amino acid, a self starter which somehow etched its own recipe into its structure, and eventually helped form even more complex molecular chains; proteins. Time for a break. Three questions, before going on to the next stop on the tour. Enter the hand of god? Or was the whole process the work of god? Or is the process itself, god?

The Cell

First let’s take a careful look at the building blocks of life as our climb up the ladder of life moves from organic chemicals to micro biology and the building block of life as we know it, the cell. Franklin Lloyd, an eminent microbiologist, author of The Way of the Cell, gives a non- scientist a fascinating and awe-inspiring overview of the cell’s development. He summarizes, “a cell is far more than an aggregate of individual molecules; it is an organized, structured, purposeful and evolved whole.” (p.7) He explains, “. . .an organism is not an object so much as a process, sustained by the continuous passage through it of matter and energy. . . A bacterial cell consists of more than three hundred million molecules (not counting water) several thousand different kinds of molecules and requires some 2,000 genes for its specification…” (p10) All that in a single microscopic cell! But they didn’t start that way. As complex as it is, the cell is a community of interdependent variants each comprised of the same basic chemical building blocks. Picture hundreds of millions of different tinker toy or Lego constructs of different shapes, compressed in a membranous sack. Each cell is a factory made up of many specialized but interdependent parts which absorb and metabolize food, create and dispose of waste products, defend themselves against enemies, and carry the memory and the means to reproduce. We take for granted that a plant needs sun light to grow or create fruit. The reason is that each cell needs to absorb the photons traveling from the sun to the earth which are the source of energy utilized to turn the water and nutrients absorbed through the plant’s roots into new cells. We take for granted that the purpose of the process is to both prolong the finite life of the plant as an organism and to produce a specialized unit of the plant which will preserve and replicate its species if and when the host dies. And we take for granted that the waste product of this chemical process is oxygen; the building block that we must have to nourish our own component cells just as the stored nutrients in the fruit or the seed are reduced to components and absorbed by our own cells to prolong our own life. The laborers that make all of this happen in every cell are folded and crinkled strings of proteins called enzymes. Move from the cell to other living things and we can see the interdependence operate between species. One species waste is another one’s food. A dynamic balance flows from the interdependence. Survival of a given species does not occur in a vacuum. Rather it is the support of others which sustains it. The examples are myriad and fascinating. They range from the interdependency of a fungus species and the ant to the relationship between the farmer and the grain he cultivates. What gets all the celebrity attention in the life of a cell is the two complementary opposing twisting chains of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) that are linked together much as the rungs of a ladder join the two vertical bars; the so called double helix. The genes dictate the structure of each protein in the cell by scripting the order of one of the building blocks, amino acid. In simple terms a worker called a ribosome reads the sequence instruction and lines the amino acids up. Proteins actually supervise the production to make sure that there are no errors. But random errors occur and the result is the diversity of each and every species and the development of other more complex forms of life. Fortunately the error factor in causing change is restricted. It can only come from a change in the instructions. Put another way damage to the components of a cell will not prevent it from dividing and producing a perfect twin consistent with its genetic profile. We all can see about us the enormous diversity of life forms that result from this process. It is remarkable how much each species has in common with the others. Biologists identify only about 100 small molecule compound building blocks that are common to every living animal or plant cell. Peel away the diversity of living cells and we find the unifiers of the building material and the replication code; common and continuous from a single cell bacterium to humanity. When confronted with life we not only look for meaning, we search for cause. And the jump from complex chemical compounds to an organism capable of replicating itself, is, we imagine, too complex, too awesome, to be left to chance and the random interaction of intrinsic if universal electro-chemical processes. If life is something new magically arising out of a combination of inert ingredients, there must have been a catalyst, some entity that intended the consequence. Not necessarily. We only have to look about us and see the results of natural forces working over long time spans. Take the Grand Canyon, the result of water rubbing on soft stone, or even more colossal, the movement of entire continents roving an inch at a time about the earth’s surface. It’s hard for us to comprehend a three billion year time span in which life evolved. The geological and anthropological records embedded in the Earth tell us that it did. Layers of sediment preserve the remains of each stage of life’s development including archetypes, a kind of fossilized begat. The biologists help by adding a few missing pieces to the puzzle. We’ve already considered the inherent glue; magnetic and gravitational forces pushing or pulling, positive and negative energy charges, that make molecular components stick to one another and become more complex. Raw vegetables, when heated in water turn into soup. With that in mind, consider the Earth a mish-mash of minerals cooked by the fires of its molten core, bombarded by the heat and light of the sun for billions of years, and its easier to accept the premise. Biologists have something more to add, but explanations are technical. The simplest concept is to picture a car battery. Protons, charged units of atoms, are passed in and out of the electrolyte fluid in the cell creating an energy flow. In the same way, a charge changes the chemical composition of the cell and, among other functions acts like glue, assembling molecules into more complex compounds; proteins. The cell is nourished and replicates another one. The process may contribute to the leap from a chemical to an organic compound. Biologists observing the process consider it both dynamic and conservative. Electrons, protons, photons, and gravitons, those tiny building blocks behave in predictable ways that both replicate existing modules and synthesize new forms through small adaptations. It is easy to assume in the evolving process from particle to atom to molecule to protein to replicating cell, to multi cellular animals, the hand of an omnipotent mind. We imagine a great mind endlessly tinkering to produce ever more complex forms of life in a cosmic laboratory; the intervening god. Even should we eschew the intervention of he Creator along the way, we can still posit the first cause, the willing creator of the “Big Bang”, the master engineer who sets the process in motion, a super-sized Leonardo da Vinci. That reasoning demeans and restricts the process of ceation. For it casts the creation process in the methodology of humanity. What if god were not the creator of the process but the process itself?

Humanity-The Divine Spark

Given the diversity of opinion on any given subject any thinking person must agree that the process of discerning facts and reality is a subjective dialogue between the environment and the observer. Everything that we think we know comes to us through our senses, our sight, our hearing, or our touch. What we experience is then filtered by our brain. The brain organizes the information using templates of past experience. Imagine an aborigine in the Brazilian jungle who has never seen a can of beer. His experience might tell him that it is a projectile. It might be a receptacle, there is something inside, but there is no opening. He turns it around and sees a ring on the top. His initial observation doesn’t tell him that it is a handle. If he has a long attention span he might play with the ring and perforate the seal only to face an effervescence of bitter smelling fluid. He might take it as poison and drop it or if the smell of the stuff resembles something that he has drunk before he might even be inclined to taste it. The point of this is only to introduce the complex mechanism that we as humans deploy to arrive at the truth. And the point of the exercise is that we never quite do get there because our perceptions are deceptive and our processing instruments are subjective and besides, truth is not constant. The human being is the most complex entity on the chain of life. We don’t perceive ourselves as what we are. We look in the mirror and we see a face and a figure which we identify as self. The image masks the enormity and complexity of the billions of single cells that work together to make us function. Recall that a single cell, whether free standing or one of billions in a unit called Tom or Mary is a complex factory inhabited by thousands of differing yet complementary chains of atoms, combined in unique ways to function as messengers, transporters, nutrient fabricators, waste disposers, replacement fabricators, design readers, fighters, all of which work together to keep the cell alive and contribute its special function to the human organism. Though separate they interrelate, cooperate, and contribute to our continued life. We don’t have to think about any of it. They just happen. These functions we have in common with all other living species. As human’s we are separated from most other living things by our complex consciousness and all that goes with it; memory, association, emotion, communication, a sense of self. How do we know what we think we know? How do we arrive at truth? To begin with we inherited a lot of life serving equipment. Our eyes, ears, sense of touch, taste, our capacity to organize what we see and tap our stored memory of past experiences are survival tools passed down genetically. For example light and shape are broken down by the eye and transmitted on neural paths by electro-chemical impulses to the brain where the information is passed to many different information centers matched against existing memory data and reorganized. Existing information centers in the brain will reassemble it as to perceived attributes such as color, form, speed, identity, familiarity, and risk. If the image is perceived as a black animal running toward you, these information centers will tell you whether it is the family dog coming to greet you or the neighbor’s aggressive mutt. Past observations on the two dogs are triggered and contribute to an appropriate emotional and physical reaction. Of all the functions that contribute to our life, the senses are possibly the most complex and significant. Without them we would have no external awareness. They need to be very refined in order to pass coherent information to the brain. The brain needs nuance into order to sort what it receives from the senses and connect the information to earlier associations so that we recognize what we perceive and give meaning to the data. As an infant if we see a tree we perceive movement, shape, color, but we don’t know what the object is. We don’t yet know that it is capable of producing food, shade or building materials, not to mention oxygen, or fuel. We pick an apple off the tree, smell it, taste it, and discover that the tree is a source of nourishment. This learning experience deploys our sense of feel, sight, smell and taste. Each new element of the experience is registered in the brain. So that the second time we see a tree we know something about it. How does this happen? The function which underlies the process is invisible to us. When we break a single sensory experience down to its components we find that the process is an amplification of the way the Universe works. How do we differentiate a tree from a rock? Its definition is communicated to our eyes and brain through invisible messengers, electro magnetic bundles. These travel from the tree to our eyes in the same way that ocean waves strike the beach. The frequency and depth of these data packets define the properties of color. This is easier to perceive when we compare it to the frequencies of sound coming from a piano and observe that the differences from high to low depend on the thickness and length of the piano wire. These invisible light waves are focused when they strike a thin membrane in the eye made up of 125 million open cells. These are connected to about one million separate nerve channels, organic wires. These nerves transport the light by an electro chemical process to a place in the brain, the thalamus, that sorts it, and passes it on to another part of the brain, the cortex, where it is matched with similar stored data. The new stimuli activate connections that have similar characteristics to the information transported. To use a simple analogy consider a box with 10 pigeon holes as opposed to one with ten million pigeon holes. Similarly before Mary has learned to distinguish between an Oak tree and a Cyprus tree the brain will send the information to the place where nerve endings have grown to store the concept and memory of “tree”. After Mary gets an A in Botany, that same area of the brain will have a much more complex pattern of connections so that Mary can identify and differentiate between an Oak and a Pine. Her brain has laid down neural pathways that track the similarities and differences of everything she has already observed about trees. Is this formidable instrument as reliable as a yardstick? Unfortunately the more we know about it, notwithstanding its awesome capacity to absorb, process, and retain data, the more we understand that what we perceive as reality is vicarious, second hand, and modeled by our brain. Take the taste of wine for example, to be more specific a Lodi old vine Syrah with a few years of bottle age, the produce of a well respected small winery. Give a sample to ten people from the same bottle and no experience will be the same. To some extent the difference will be genetic, the capacity of the individual’s taste sensors to quantify differences. Some will be experiential, the brain’s capacity to identify and register nuance. Some of the tasters might describe it as a bit like concentrated dark cherry juice. Other more sophisticated palates might identify notes of cedar, vanilla, cigar box, and cinnamon. Our noble savage, should he join the group, wouldn’t have a frame of reference and might not even want to swallow it. There we have it. Ten people can’t agree on common attributes of a drink poured from the same bottle. How then can they be trusted to reliably describe the character of the universal god? Religion’s answer is to confess that they can’t. Take it on faith. Just accept it. Believe it. The problem with this idea, well one of the problems, is that accepting a concept of god is only the beginning. Once the door is open, all sorts of subjective clap- trap comes in with it. Don’t eat milk with meat, don’t kill cows, non believers are infidels and can be killed, a raped virgin is guilty of sexual promiscuity and can be stoned to death, young women should be circumcised, women shouldn’t expose any part of themselves to strangers, pray five times a day, pray seven times a day, fast one day a year, fast during the day for a month, take off your shoes, wear a hat, don’t wear a hat. Did god really dictate all of these admonishments or is the source a collection of patriarchal, authoritarian narcissists who wanted to put their personal stamp on religious practice? If there is any doubt a review of the physiology of the brain and its fashioning of consciousness and reality is convincing evidence that no testimonial that comes to us from the mouth of humankind is worthy of absolute trust. This remarkable instrument performs many functions. An executive, it controls all the basic body functions like movement and interrelation. Through your sensory organs it processes what you experience outside your body. It stores this data and uses it referentially, processing new information. It directs your response to the new intake of information. It is highly specialized. Various departments have responsibility for specific functions, but these departments are interactive and help one another. It is the source of your personality. Like any organism it can malfunction. And when it does, your perception of the world and or your capacity to relate to it can be impaired. Damage to a specialized area will prevent or impair a function, whether it be speech or space comprehension. Physiologists point out that the thinking part of the brain is the cortex, the front were 100 billion brain cells work together on a surface about the size of a table napkin. From this source comes, the human genome project, nanotechnology, and the B Minor Mass. It’s also the source of the Holocaust, more wars than we can count, the Inquisition, and numerous discredited scientific theories such as the world is flat and the sun revolves around the earth. What does this tell us about our human thinking machine? It’s a marvelous device for accumulating information, storing and synthesizing it. But it remains a shattered mirror and always will be. What conclusions, if any, can we draw from this? We are both unique and the same as everything around us. The tree itself is made up of the same dense atomic and molecular structure that we are, the same elementary building blocks of the Universe. It lives in a balance with us for its single cells consume our waste and convert it to its waste product, oxygen, which it expels and which is food for us. The differences that we perceive in the world mask the underlying unity. Consciousness, awareness of our selves, our capacity to learn from what we experience, to recall and use our past, to make associations, to add 2 and 2, are all manifestations of the basic behavior of matter and energy in the Universe. They are elements of what it takes to survive and to continue in the face of change. This process is both dynamic and balanced in the same way that a single building block of a single cell, an atom, exists in a dynamic state of balance with other atoms. Does this organic view of our life trivialize us? To the contrary. Our very existence as humans should provoke in each of us a daily sense of awe and wonder. Should it make us self- satisfied? Not when we recognize that we also carry both the creative and destructive forces of life and are capable of both impulses. Given what we now know about the life process, what must we think of our notion of god the father, punishing and rewarding, the source of all creation? Our source for this belief, we are told, is the universal truth found in the holy scripture, which has emanated directly from the divine omniscient source. The problem is that the transmission is not direct from god to each one of us. Rather it is through a medium, an intermediary, Moses or Paul or Mohamed and their advocates, the minions of their religions, all ceremonially garbed and speaking ex cathedra to their flock. How reliable is their testimonial? Should we believe them? Should they believe themselves? The source of their testimonial is their observation of their personal experience viewed through the singular lens of their personal brain. We can agree that the institution of religion performs many valuable functions. But the idea that each religion is the only truth to the exclusion of all the others and the notion that each religion’s god has a monopoly on truth, continues to be a source of pandemic ignorance, hatred, and violence. It does no good to suggest that the world would be a better place without it. It is more constructive and positive to think about ways of fixing it. Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to give god a new set of attributes, clothes that fit what we know of life in the Twenty First Century. It demeans god when we dress god up as a man or a woman and endow god with all the emotions of a human. Given the history of our world and particularly of humanity the weight of history indicates that god doesn’t intervene either for good or ill, reward of punishment. There are too many instances in which bad deeds are rewarded and the righteous suffer. This reality, the randomness of life, does not mean that one is free to pursue a path of infantile nihilistic self-gratification. Even when one thinks that there is nothing more than the pursuit of pleasure in life, there comes a time when that person finds an unsatisfying emptiness, as the novelty of short term pleasure wears thin and physical deterioration saps vitality and shatters self-image. Sooner or later people seek something more, be it support, comfort, or purpose, and that search often leads only to emotional placebos. As already considered religion can and does fulfill many of these needs. It might do so with equal or greater effect if participants had a view of god that was less surrogate father and more animating source. And yet it is chilling to face death without a continuity that is more than a reduction of our body to atoms and our consciousness to evoked memory living for a time in the minds of our survivors. Can we find comfort in a life experienced from moment to moment and an awareness of what we have achieved? If that’s it do we have a need of god? Yes, if it helps us to understand life and our place in it. What then are the attributes of this god? We can distill them from what we know about life. Once we do this we can tune our conduct as individuals, as communities, nations, to be more in harmony with these characteristics. In leaching out these elements of god the first one that comes to my mind is interdependence or symbiosis. The smallest stable unit of life is the cell. What does the cell teach us? That we can not stand alone. Rather we are tied to others by interdependency and that our stability and well-being is contingent on finding an equilibrium. Neither selfishness nor selflessness will serve this balance well. We must recognize our needs as well and equally the needs or others for we are interdependent. We can see this in the function of a single cell, or the symbiosis of cell colonies, or the interdependence of cells in a complicated creature or in eco systems. But we should also recognize that the balance is not perpetual or immutable. Introduce a destabilizing element and we change it or even destroy it. So a second element of god is that the stability is dynamic and we as actors can change it for the better or worse. So far if we follow god’s way, we must be cooperative with others and apply a standard of give and take. If we take too much and don’t give enough back we run the risk of changing the balance in a harmful way. We can’t take anything for granted, because all around us we are faced with impermanence. As the mystics all say we can’t perceive god but we can know god’s attributes. We can distill this new set of attributes from what we know of the journey of life from particles to atoms to molecules, to proteins, to cells, and so on. And when we do this we find that god is symbiotic, interdependent, dynamic, stable, random, accidental, competitive, life perpetuating, increasingly complex, process oriented, sustaining, altering, continuing, cyclic, causative, unifying, and life serving. Well that’s a start. And with that realized we can throw out the demeaning human attributes like, loving, judgmental, vindictive, caring, intervening, and merciful. Save those for your favorite grandparent. How can this be achieved? Like any new idea, like evolution of religion. A few people pick it up, pass it on to others and sometimes its acceptance broadens until most people accept it. But more will be needed. One day in the future the leaders of the world religions will convene a world counsel with the aim of refashioning god. If god is universal a universal definition needs to be formulated from reality. When this happens each religion can go on about its unique celebrations satisfied that there is but one god for all, not a prince or a king but the source of all life. When that occurs prayer will have true meaning directed at the in-dwelling source. And on that day will God be one, truly one.

Sheldon Greene

Copyright c April 15, 2009, Sheldon Greene, all rights reserve, duplication of all or portions of this article only with permission of the author

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