I am one of the other admins and I DO NOT agree with what Tim posted earlier and I would like to share something productive for the community. Sorry, John, but I just cant abide that asshole and his crude behavior. Anyway, here is my submission: SOLVING FOR 42 What is God? Before you answer that, lets go a little deeper and ask where the idea of God comes from. Whatever your beliefs, you are likely reaching into a repository of knowledge given to you by someone else for a description. Holy book after holy book contain the words of other human beings attempting to portray this concept to us carried on by generation after generation, giving us conflicting religious beliefs based on a common desire to understand the divine. What happens when you go even deeper, though? Where do these various ideas of God come from? Instinctually, you might be led to call upon mystic revelation given by a supernatural force, but look more closely. There are many claims to divine revelation, can they all be true? If you separate yourself from your individual bias, you will see beyond these collective attempts to ascribe objectivity onto a subjective answer to the question posed at the beginning of this thought experiment. Asking what God is then causes us to infer another question: Why is God? Down we go, into the rabbit hole... Picture in your mind a species that has evolved from instinct and now possesses the capacity for rational thought. Evolved primates which have now become homo sapiens roam the landscape of the earth and with their ever evolving minds begin to ask questions about the world around them. Emotions of fear provided as a tool of survival against predators now haunt us with the uncertain prospect of mortality. We start to ask ourselves what happens when we die, what makes bad things happen, what makes good things happen, and where did all this come from. Our growing imaginations rooted in an inescapable ignorance led us to begin crafting answers to these questions. Anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered relics of the deities some of these ancient humans concocted to answer the questions that arose from the birth of our conscious minds; questions that have been answered and re-answered over and over again as they evolved from one form to another, changing with the cultures that adopted them. Eventually, even as the conflicting answers to these age old questions battled for supremacy, a new way of thinking began to arise. Reason and science showed us that the sun and stars were not gods or ancestors, but giant furnaces fueling the existence of life on earth through nuclear fusion. Sickness was no longer a curse, but something we could understand and begin to cure. We were no longer separate from nature, but related to all life around us biologically and chemically. However, because science could only answer what it could prove through evidence, many of those questions that lingered still remain unanswered. The mistake many of us make is to forget that these are still questions. Sure, answers have been provided, but if you trace back the origins of these ideas they all go back to that moment when we first looked up in ignorance at the world around us. Deep down at the very bottom of this journey into Wonderland, we see through our looking glass a projection of our fears of the unknown and hopes for the future that evolved from our imaginations into a personification of all those nagging questions, and we came to call it God. God, or the concept that became God, is nothing more than an intellectual cover for the unknown. No matter what way you look at the question of God, who it is, what it is, you always come back to the assertions of others that lead you all the way back to a burgeoning species of primate trying to comprehend the mystery of life around them. What we never did, and still refuse to do, is admit the reality of all these unanswered questions with the appropriate answer: I dont know. If the real answer to Gods identity is absence of knowledge in the face of the unknown, then we must conclude that God is merely an abstraction of our ignorance and our failure to understand the yet undiscovered truths of our universe. When we bow our heads and kneel down to pray, what we should be offering reverence to isnt the linguistic expression of a regurgitated myth, but the recognition of our own primal fears and the questions we have yet to answer with certainty. So, with humility, bow to your ignorance, and speak softly to the air, “I dont know, but lets find out.”
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:40:24 +0000
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