I am going to show you how religious people and atheists are both accurate and correct. I will show you how they do not even conflict. I will also explain why the God question has become so complex and difficult to address let alone answer. I will even identify the culprits and tell you why they choose to argue at all. Then I will really push the boat out and clear them of any guilt.
1: People don't feel God. Science and history supports the case that there is no God.
2: Other people definitely do feel God. They are not faking this.
My premise is that both sides are right. There is no conflict or case to answer.
Let's take a closer look. The old debate runs something thus: Theists or Atheists. Who is right?
But there's something fundamentally wrong with this. For a start, the question is structured all wrong. It presumes one side and one side only must be right. It presumes there are no other options apart from the agnostic opt-out ("saying "I don't know" is not really a credible way to answer an important question in my eyes). But it's biggest flaw, like most bad questions, lay in it's easy presumption that the definition of the subject matter is sound. It seems to be a given that this very subject matter is suited to a debate that hinges on an either/or axis between two variables.
But what if the nature of God as that word is understood by everyone, believers and non-believers, is such that it doesn't fit into the framework of a "true or false?" debate? What if we've been coming at this from the wrong angle ? And why is everyone so keen to have a pop at answering the question without first examining the question ?
Why is nobody asking why the disagreement exists in the first place ? Why does no-one see the very fact of the disagreement as being proof that we've been asking the wrong question ?
Why don't we try and explain what is really going on ? Atheists and believers exist. Why must one of these be wrong ? Why are we writing off a huge swathe of intelligent society ?
In professional sales of any kind, a time-honoured and successful negotiation technique is known as the "options close". In short, this means that if you are trying to make someone buy something and they are dithering, it often helps to put a choice in front of them. To "close" the deal, the seller might ask if the potential buyer wishes to purchase a gas or electric fireplace, a smart-phone or a standard text-and-call handset, a four-wheel drive or a greener saloon car, Breitling or Omega, Louis Vuitton or Samsonite, a red or black dress, you get the idea. Options abound.
Suddenly, the shopper isn't asking herself "Should I spend or save my money?". Rather, she's now focused on which of the alternatives she's going to purchase. It's a technique as old as time and it works.
Knowing the above, you soon start to realise that when people put choices in front of you it does not always mean that a choice is necessary or even advisable. It can in fact mean that they are trying to sell you something.
So is there a chance that a religious person might be trying to sell you the idea of God, or for that matter, that an Atheist is trying to win you round to the idea that there is no God at all ? If so, then maybe I'm being given a choice when in fact no choice is required.
For now I'm going to ask you to trust me when I say that this is the case exactly. To clarify, both believers and non-believers are forcing the old debate into it's current shape because there's something in it for them. It doesn't mean they are inherently good or bad. Just like all humans, their behaviour is based on incentives. But don't worry because I will explain all within this blog. The only point I wish to make right now is that there does not have to be a choice. There does not have to be a right and wrong. It is often smarter to ignore the "choice" and accept both options or neither. (the section below headed "Duality" picks this up further).
If someone offers you a choice then before you go ahead and choose think why the choice is being offered.
When you are caught in a trap, what's the first thing you have to do before you can escape ? You have to know that you are caught in a trap.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe nails it with this seminal bombshell: "No one is more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
You are trapped. You are imprisoned. And best of all you don't even know it. You are locked into the framework of the old debate on theism. As soon as you begin to consider it you are doomed. But you can be free from your upside-down thinking. Keep reading.
let the question reflect reality
The evolutionists focus on disproving God's existence. But moving on from this weary yarn I am required to find out what makes religion possible ? Less "Is there a God ?" and more "What makes faith so solid?". Likewise I need to validate the atheists with equal vigour. One thing I will not do is start from a presumption that these two stances are mutually exclusive. Let's not get bound up in such insecurities.
Here's an obvious question: Why do theists and atheists both exist ? It is also a question that is structured properly.
By analogy, since cars and trains both exist one of the following is a sound and complete question on the subject and one is coming at it all wrong;
Cars or trains on earth: which is the correct mode of transport ?
Why do cars and trains both exist on earth ?
What follows is an argument that theists and atheists are both in the right. I've even included an explanation as to why these two groups tend to fight.
Happily, in theory this enables a reconciliation of all sides. Getting the warring factions to see this however, would be another achievement entirely. Because when you've been living out the answer to the wrong question it's pretty difficult to shift from your base.
But I'm not here to solve world problems. Just to open your eyes. And it's a start.
keep it simple, stupid!
Most if not all of the psychological concepts that I refer to in this blog contain exceptions and other properties that on closer inspection serve to qualify them. In order to keep things simple I have not addressed this. I believe that the benefits of retaining a relatively superficial approach far outweigh the downsides. I am keen for the reader to follow my thread as I work through the argument or else the objective of this argument is defeated.
After all, before we can learn exceptions, we need to master the rule.
dream theory
It occurred to me that there is a marriage to be had between the religious "presence" of God, which I am convinced is genuine among believers, and the effects of the human faculties of perception. By this I mean the tools we have to make sense of the things around us.
Freud is a big name in psychology. He kicked off a whole branch of it and invented the concept of the shrink. Freud investigated dream content and dream production processes but for me he inadvertently highlighted an inherent contradiction in dreams. In that, although we invent them in our heads each night they seem to "come to us" from outside of ourselves. This is what I think happens with God. But how ?
To aid illustration I have used the theory of the "states of consciousness" commonly deployed as a Buddhist frame of reference and which I initially encountered in John Ruskan's book "emotional clearing".
The trinity of these elements (God, Dreams, States of Consciousness) produces a satisfactory explanation of why some people are religious and others not. From this it is possible to deduce the truth not only about the existence of God, as that word is understood by active believers, but to rank religion alongside other everyday "outer-body" experiences. Like doing the washing up. This allows us to map out the well documented landscape of Theists, Atheists and Agnostics and to understand how they came about. An added bonus to this approach is that it gives us a yardstick to measure religion by and thus we can bring religion down to earth. Because that's where we live.
in short
Freud: The faculties of perception regard the products of the imagination as if they were apprehended by the senses
My version: The experience of higher states of consciousness perceive God as if He were apprehended by the senses
Put simply, we know that when we dream, it feels, afterwards, like the dream was received by us from the outside. So we say things like "A dream came to me last night". It doesn't often feel like we were the author of the thing. Even though we were.
This isn't always the case, but here I am referring to the times that it is.
We might say "I had a dream" and this too has the same inference. Much like "I had a Pepsi" or "I had a good journey", the phraseology implies that we consumed the dream as a third party product or experienced emotions due to exposure to the qualities of it. This all points to our conscious awareness / acceptance that the dream comes from without and we receive it. It is easy to accept in the cold light of day that this conscious feeling is a fallacy, and that, of course we created the dream. The truth lies in the sub-conscious. Crucially, since we don't address this fact in the cold light of day, it begins to become accepted within ourselves that dreams are external in some way.
I see proof that people often believe a dream has an external source every time I hear somebody recount a dream with the belief that it was some kind of foretelling, premonition or "magical" prediction.
By comparison, it would be ludicrous to carefully and skilfully prepare a meal and then sit down to eat it whilst excitedly declaring "Wow! This meal just came to me. It's incredible!" Yet this is just what we do with dreams.
Why ?
Because when we "get in touch" with our sub-conscious this is how it feels. It's just the way our perceptions work. Like feeling weightless when you fall, happy when you laugh or hungry when you fast. It's just a feeling. But like most feelings, it's not a true reflection of the state of things. (hunger and other real "needs" excepted). Because feelings are in your head and don't change the shape of the street outside.
So what's happening when we feel God ?
It's useful at this point to refer to the "table" of the states of consciousness as decreed in Buddhist teachings. They are often referred to as the "Chakras" and illustrated in a chart or table format.
From bottom up, we have Survival (Base of Spine), Sensation (Groin), Power (Solar Plexus), Love (Heart), Creativity (Throat), Intuition (Forehead) and at the top, Spirituality (just above the crown of the head, where you might imagine a halo). I interpret Spirituality as an empowered state of "oneness", of perfect unity and harmony, and some people interpret Spirituality as God.
The rule is that we work our way slowly up this ladder. We cannot move up a stage until we master the current level. Sometimes we hop up and back down again in the style of a temporary "visit". All too often we slump down and live in the lower reaches, because it costs work to get higher up, even if you've been there before.
"most people ignore opportunity because it comes dressed in overalls and looks like work."
(Thomas Edison)
All in all, it is my argument that each time we move up a level, it feels like it is coming to us from the outside. Examples would be that Love ( often perceived as a feeling in the heart region) feels very beyond our control at first and that Creativity (akin to a sensation in the throat like a desire to speak up) also does this - so Paul McCartney declares that a song "just came to me", ditto Noel Gallagher and countless others.
Lower down and on the negative side of things, Robert Mugabe or Adolf Hitler would decree that the firm tightening of the muscles in the abdomen around the solar plexus, like an overwhelming anger, are a manifestation of destiny and divine Power, and sex craven people (usually men) would openly interpret the sensation of sexual urgency in the groin (Sensation) as an act of nature, with excuses / explanations that run thus "I am a man, it's just how I am". Women phrase it differently and less crude and declare "A woman has her needs" but it's the same thing.
If you fear for basics, like your personal safety, there is a chill right at the foot of your spine, right on the Survival consciousness nexus. And Americanisms like "I saved your ass" suddenly take on a more accurate literal significance. (language we take for granted and use frequently is a great source of clues / intelligence, I find).
My contention is that from Love upwards, any fleeting feelings of goodness (the word God is a derivative of the word "good" ) that pertain to an experience with a higher state of consciousness, feel equally as external, and now God feels like a third party and He feels personal and real. Just like the dream.
This is how and why people genuinely declare a knowledge or firm belief that God exists. This is it entirely. It is a good thing, for it means they are evolving into higher beings. But it is also technically incorrect. For there is no God in fact.
I have felt this overwhelming religious presence of God as I have prayed, and it is marvellous. I am speaking from experience.
God sits alongside the dream that came to me last night, alongside the poem I just pulled out of thin air and a great tune I scribbled down on the back of my gas bill. He, and they, all "came to me". He is a powerful force, as powerful as my urge to experience sensations and ensure self-preservation. He is as consistent as my hunger when I haven't eaten. He rises up with the unannounced confidence of my ego if I don't keep look out. He is as magical as my mystifying instincts to "feel" what is good for me and he instructs me in the same all-commanding way.
And like all of these things, he is my creation. He is my invention and comes from within. But he feels without.
God is an immanence. God is not an eminence. This is the crux of the issue and the axis of this debate. All things spring from this truth.
If I command enough self-awareness to truly open my mind and my eyes thus, I will always see how things really are. And they are like this.
Datsun, Paki, Homosexual
(Dictionary definitions:
Semantic: of meaning in language;
Semantics: branch of linguistics concerned with meanings)
There is, therefore, a strong case based on the above interpretation of things, for God and religious people being forces for good. They are what happens when humans get in touch with higher states of consciousness.
Religious people are technically incorrect in that they have misconstrued an internal experience felt by all humans as third-party sourced and exclusive to themselves. But they are still good people. In any case such hair-splitting is an irrelevance.
Like dreams then, the God phenomena is not only good, it is essential, as long as we know how to interpret it. This rule reverses if we mis-interpret God. If we make it a He, then He becomes divisive.
an aside about dreams
Using Freud's methods of dream interpretation, I am able through dreams to get in touch with my sub-conscious self. Dreams can act as early-warning systems and help identify feelings that I have been pushing back and denying. Likewise, if I address the God feeling as a unifying "knowledge" of my higher self, rather than it being someone or something else separate from me, I can channel similar value from it. Resolution conflict and true forgiveness are possible in this state.
My advice when reflecting on dreams is not to focus on the details of content - the people, places and props - but to focus on how you felt as you dreamt. For this is the emotion that your subconscious wishes you to address in waking life. Dreams are not predictions. Don't fall for this. The dream content is just stuff in your memory. The feeling is all. If you had an inappropriate romantic dream about someone don't worry. The personnel is not the message. The romance is. Freud tells us that dreams are essentially wish fulfilment. If you are denying yourself an essential human requirement then you will dream of it. But all the details will be wrong, as dream production uses anything it can lay it's hands on in terms of dream material - rather like an incompetent prop team backstage at a theatre. Weirdly, I have learnt to monitor my dreams as I am having them, so I am speaking from experience.
back to the point
Atheists who concentrate on the fact that believers are mistaken and are therefore "invalid" miss the point and in doing so propagate their own demise. Theists are not invalid nor incredible in the literal sense of that word.
I should know. I have been an "Atheist" who has done this often enough.
How can I have been atheist and have found God in prayer ? It is possible because they do not conflict. They are not mutually exclusive. Atheists say that God does not exist in fact. This is true. Some religious people experience God as a personal emotion and humbly declare it. This is also true.
(Although atheism is objective fact and theism is subjective "feeling", there's a twist, as covered in the section headed "the action precedes the emotion", further down. In short, theism may be a subjective feeling but it is caused by actions.)
Rather than getting lost in the argument of who is closer to the truth (atheists based on recent evidence, religious people based on being in touch with themselves and the planet) is it not better to accurately observe both groups playing out their games ? You will, no doubt, fall on one side of the fence, or you may find yourself sitting upon it, but if you can rise above the subjectivity of your personal position, you can reach the vantage point of truth, and watch the whole dance playing out.
If you find yourself saying "But this isn't the truth" then you haven't managed to attain objectivity yet. But since the world consists of people who are religious, people who are not and people who don't know, there can be no doubt that a theory which recognises and finds reasoning for this is somewhat closer to the truth than any which does not.
Why the crazy sub-heading above? Well, because some names just don't work out. The word Atheist is a good word for believers and a bad word for non-believers. John Gray tells us that, to call oneself an atheist, one is making a move in a game whose rules have been devised by the Christians, and to this end, one is playing straight into their hands.
Why ? Look close at the word. Atheist contains the word Theist within it.
I see proof of John's point by looking at the modern day connotations of the word. Atheism seems to imply a void. An emptiness. It infers a sense of lack in direct contrast to religion's sense of fulfilment and purpose. If it were an integer, it would be a negative to God's legion of positive digits.
are you being anti-social ?
It got me thinking. It's a question of semantics, cleverly used, to devastating effect, and it shows the power of words when in the right hands, or the wrong hands, depending on your perspective.
"What's in a name ?" wrote William Shakespeare at the turn of the 17th century. It was a rhetorical question to emphasize the superficiality of names. And in the context of labelling theory, which Mr Shakespeare appears to have been addressing, he was quite right. But in my case, as you see below, there's a lot in a name.
Theologians are studiers and practitioners of religion. Theism is, therefore, faith. A theist, is therefore a believer. And people who don't believe any of this have the word "theist" contained in their own name, "atheist". So what ? So what does it matter if Labour are to be called the "Non-Conservatives", BBC is "Un-ITV" and Walkman is "the iPod killer" ? How important is it to not have the name of another built into your own name ? How important is self-identity ?
To answer that last very important question and by analogy, suppose I like all-night parties. I like to commence partying at midnight and finish say around 10 am. I like the music loud and I like my parties to consist of at least twenty people, dancing and fooling around being reckless and carefree. But beyond this, the parties are pretty responsible. Let's say there is no alcohol or other artificial stimulation and my parties always take place far away from residential areas so disturbance is negligible. This means they are, in themselves, pretty hard to criticise in a negative fashion. Rather, if you don't like them, it's more a question of personal taste than political or ethical determination. You might prefer reading and exercising the mind, or you may prefer a different taste in music. You may, of course, enjoy a regular body clock.
But if I call anyone who comes to my church of dance "Social" (like Theistic) and by contrast anyone who doesn't attend Asocial (the common version of this word is "anti-social" , like A-theistic as the derivative foundation of the word Atheism), then, if this semantic application gets a widespread acceptance in society at large, what are the implications ?
Am I not guilty of provocative tribal welfare ? Am I not saying that you're either with us or against us. And since with us is a good thing, against us is a bad thing ? Yes I am. Who wants to be seen as anti-social, with all its underlying far-reaching inferences of negativity such as xenophobia, joylessness, lack of humour, ill temperament and so on ?
Before we know it, a large majority of people in society who don't like all night parties are realising that it's far better to just say nothing on the subject for fear of being labelled a loner, a racist or a social pariah. So they concede to silence, and in their silence the party-goers read guilt, confusion, loneliness and unhappiness. They see a void wherein they themselves have fulfilment, and they use the silence to confirm their suspicions that all night parties are best, not just for themselves, but for everyone. What a wonderful feedback loop ! Use semantics to intimidate non-conformers into silence. Into this silence read guilt and defeat. Thus you have created the evidence to back up your pre-formed prejudice and in doing so have strengthened it.
This analogy with religion is good.
As an aside, there is a powerful analogy with gender chauvinism. To dominate women, men wholly consume women's individual previous identity by insisting (in most of the world) on the marriage surname being, not a new name or a merged name, but exactly the man's existing name.
Actually, organised religion and chauvinism are proving here that they are operating within the power energy field. Ironically for married men, Power is way below Love and ironically for religion, light years below Spirituality. Doh! The comedy of this irony is wholly contained within the tragedy of failed lives known to us as acrimonious divorces and wayward self-hating parishioners.
beyond atheism
If the word now technically still conveys a truthful sense of my take on religion, yet is simultaneously drenched in implications of a negative nature, it strikes me that the word is infected and needs replacing. If I cannot use it without my audience hearing, not only that I see God as the product of a human process of higher consciousness which is terrific and also technically incorrect, but that I am also in some way lacking or empty or even bitter and cynical, then it's function has been usurped by the church, and it is over.
So what to replace it by ? To go down the route of "evolutionist" would be to defer to Darwin and miss the point, for once more we are concentrating on the technical fact that religion is mistaken. This leads us back to the trouble with Atheism and finds us, once again, more in danger of slagging religion off than saying what we actually stand for.
Realism is also inappropriate. Besides risking confusion with Realism in the world of physics (the opposite of Empiricism), which is only a slight risk, and despite being technically accurate (so was Atheism, remember!), realism contains a built-in broadside to those who have faith and therefore sounds too much part of the "them and us" argument from which we are trying to stand clear. It sounds a little arrogant.
Too many people before me have gotten so bogged down with this pitfall of semantics that it may be best to learn the lesson therein and step clear. Having considered Humanist, Spiritualist, Buddhist and so forth, I have nearly settled on Philosopher. I have a philosophical view of man and his religious predication. I am aware of the theory of religion. But of course the solution is to avoid aggrevated labelling at all. What Shakespeare meant by "what's in a name?" was not that name's are powerless, but that they are inaccurate. So what am I ? Well, I am Gary. I was Christian and then Atheist. I am now post-religion. I am post-theist. (note this three point journey that I have taken, for it is a journey upwards).
In October 2009 I was listening to an edition of a superb podcast called Philosophy Bites. You can find it on all open-platform podcatchers and iTunes. The guy who was the guest speaker addressed religion and I can only paraphrase him here. (later I'll try and dig out his name and the name of that edition of the show and I'll write over this with the details so that you might take a listen yourself.)
He essentially argued that, by labelling people as either religious or atheist - with no opt-outs other than agnosticism - as we tend to do in this world, well, it's as ridiculous as going up to someone and asking: "Hey, are you into astrology ?" and if they answer "no" then saying "Well I guess this means that you are anti-astrology, so you must really hate that stuff and hope for it's demise and perhaps even organise and attend protests against the astrology movement ? Either that or you're an "agnostic astrology" person for sure, so you must be really confused about the whole thing and quite scared of addressing it head on."
Of course the truth is none of these. I personally (and most people) couldn't give two hoots about things that I am indifferent to. I am not for or against them, precisely because I am indifferent to them. Nor am I confused in the traditional agnostic sense of it, waiting for proof before I decide. I will never decide on astrology for the same reason that I will never decide on Japanese mud wrestling or the current on-field football strategy of Mansfield Town FC. I will never be for, against or stand-offish in respect of these things because I don't know or care about them. They are beneath my life radar. Nothing personal, astrologists! Just nothing at all.
And so it is and must be with God. I am not for God nor am I running around attacking the concept of religion or various religious movements and institutions. Nor am I fearful of treading on egg-shells and submitting to silence out of some mis-placed concept of respect. It's ridiculous to insist that anybody must be either religious, atheist or agnostic.
What the guy on the podcast was illustrating was being beyond religion. This is post-theism. I am convinced that an awful lot of people fit into this category.
God is good ?
In a similar vein, the word "God" has also been semantically abused. In a narrow sense, referring only to the subtle underlying forces of nature, such as the momentum witnessed by Darwin in evolutionary processes, or the speed of light being the speed limit of the universe, the unknown quantity, rather like a UFO, may be termed God and this God must be acknowledged. It symbolises forces that are not the making of mankind and are as yet unexplained. Leading non-believers who recognise this "deity" include Einstein, Lord Carey of Clifton - the former Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991-2002 and Sir David Attenborough.
Yet, just as the religious institutions declared all non-believers "atheistic", the three big mono-theistic schools of Judaism, Christianity and Islam stretched the definition of "God" beyond what is stated in the last paragraph. The term now has a narrow definition, and the key addition is that God now also refers to a personal force present and effective in the minutiae of daily life. A personified God, omniscient and omnipotent, who punishes bad behaviour and rewards good behaviour and for this reason alone is worth fearing and obeying.
Although image personificaton of God is blasphemy in two of the three big religions, all three push the concept of a personal God.
A sweet irony here is that by extending God to this over-bearing and child-fairytale supposition, the greedy big three have created a state of ridicule of their cherished "icon", rather like the unintelligent liar who boasts of achievements way beyond realistic possibility such that all audiences are left in no doubt as to witness credibility. Everyone knows that a successful lie will be a half-truth - and is much harder to detect. Alas, God stood a chance until institutionalised churches killed him off. A sweet tasting justice.
the creator presumption
It is worth adding that I find the presumption of creation by God simply the biggest act of intellectual theft and hypocrisy ever to be undertaken.
The creator presumption orders the church flock not to ask questions but to accept "intelligent design".
It steals man's right to ask questions with a truly open mind and the truth and it's beauty as exposed by the likes of Newton, Faraday, Edison etc exist in spite of the creator presumption which seeks always to keep us in the dark.
It has a quality of the keenest hypocrisy because love and spirituality are higher states of consciousness that demand the truth. Love and spirituality are the alleged goals of the church. Yet the creator presumption deprives us of thinking freely, of using our imagination creatively and thereby developing quantum leaps of thought leadership. Without these tools, love and spirituality can never be attained. To this end, the church is no more than the bad parent that deprives it's child of the right to think for itself with the old excuse that "I only had your best interests at heart." The church is a darkness. A liar. For the church is power, disguised as love.
This is not a criticism of God or religion. It is targeted only at the institutions built in the name of the big three religions. God is grace. The cornerstone intention of the Church is a dis-grace.
fate and religion at distance
Even fervent atheists will have difficulty in refuting my forthcoming compromise. That, essentially, if we define God in a very wide sense as a distant, non-personified and opaque "force" that envelops everything we see and do not understand, then can we establish that God, on these terms exists ?
As Obama would say, "yes we can".
For me, the same is true of fate. It is the same because, suddenly, something which didn't seem present actually makes it's presence felt if you stop looking in the obvious places such as daily life and immediate time frames. It is a subtle long term truth that can only be seen if you look a little harder. This isn't shifting the goal posts. This is looking at the same thing from a different angle to try and find the truth.
Does fate mean "whatever will be will be ?". If it does, it is wrong in a very immediate sense. Right now I can choose to eat a burger, take a bath or jump off the balcony. So if I die from the fall, is this fate ? No, it is my doing. For I am in immediate control.
When something happens to me that I did not intend, is this fate ? It may just be my submission of control to outside forces. But this is a grey area, since I may have exercised caution and done everything within my power and still have happened upon me an unexpected event. But if fate is a grey area, how do we identify it ? If it occurs sometimes, then when ?
Look under the surface. I can choose to live a good life and feel great. I may choose to commit sin and thereby feel guilty. I can choose work over and above a family life, and be both rich and lonely. I can choose to eat and feel satisfied. I can choose to forego sleep and feel very tired. It's a free country.
But I can never chose to eat without losing my appetite. I can never attend the gym everyday and work out without feeling great afterwards. I can not hate a loved one or feel sad when I am happy.
Spinoza said "Man can do his will but he can not will his will". This is fate because fate is simply causal determinism.
Fate and religion can only ever be underlying, subtle and long-term in their existence. Their being personal and immediate notions within daily, visible manifestations is totally unsafe as a proposition. Indeed, I have diluted them beyond common contemporary recognition in order to identify them.
If you are confused about fate and religion, it may be that the common view of them is out. It does not align with the truth of what they are, which is how I have laid them out above. If you re-align your understanding, you will find them. They are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Atheism, if it denies fate and religion at distance, as outlined above, is denying a truth. Worse still, atheism never considers it's place in the scheme of things.
I mentioned Causal Determinism as a definition of fate, just now. This term means that every event is necessitated by earlier events. Sounds pretty straight forward. And it is. The trouble is that the order of events is not quite as you thought it was. We misunderstand fate because we misunderstand this vital point. Let me show you.
the action precedes the emotion
Survival, Sex and Power attainment all appear to be actionable doctrines. They seem like action-based "things", that can be gotten by doing things. Yet Love, Creativity, Intuition and One-ness appear more as "feelings" and external feelings coming to us, at that.
Why ? And is this really the case anyway ?
Well, first off, this is an illusion because they are all actions. The first three (above) operate on a lower plain and we have all, to some extent mastered them. It is because we are familiar with them that we see them as "actions". We know what actions to take to get them anytime we choose.
But the other four, love etc, require the "higher" brain, and very few of us have properly, if ever, visited them. It is because, therefore, that we do not know what actions to take to get these prizes that we believe they are really "feelings" that mysteriously arrive without warning, if and when we are lucky. But they are not. Just like power and sex, love and creativity and one-ness (the God feeling) are actions. And if this sounds unlikely, how about this ? Not only are they actions, but they are actions that immediately precede the emotions that we might associate with them.
We don't act upon our feelings. We feel upon our actions.
Buy a pet and act with love toward it for a while. What feeling will slowly build in you now ? That loving feeling.
We all accept that to feel power we need to get the job or win the game, that to feel the elation of sex we need to have sex, and that to survive we need to eat and drink and shelter and sleep - all actions. Yet we don't seem to accept the same of love and intuition. Nor of God nor of creativity. Nonetheless, all are actions.
Why do religious institutions insist on multi-daily or at least frequent rituals to ensure religious compliance ? Why are there myriad obligatory actions, recitals, blessings, meetings, lectures to ensure God stays around ? Why do people who do not undertake these actions not experience God ?
My springboard for this realisation was M Scott Pecks law that Love is as love does. Love is not a feeling. It is a process.
So extrapolating this, think about other less profound instances. Try smiling without feeling happy. Try shaking your head and thinking anything other than "no". Ever worn a suit to feel like a businessman ? Have you ever undertaken any action to "get in the mood" ?
In Straw Dogs, John Gray mentions recent medical evidence that electrical charges in the brain to summon body movements happen before the accompanying brain secretions that determine the feelings via the usual neuro-transmitters. We act and then and because of this we feel. As opposed to getting a feeling and then acting on it. It's the other way around.
Not hungry ? Go to a restaurant and hang around for 5 minutes. You will be! Not feeling like the gym, just go and you'll feel like it once you've started working out. We act out of habit or convention and the correct feeling follows.
Actually, my food example here is a little careless, because although appetite can be induced thus, it is fundamentally a need not a feeling. Though the above example stands good.
M Scott Peck: The feeling of being in love is not love. Rather, it is an emotion that accompanies the process of cathexis.
My version: The feeling of having God close is not God. Rather, it is an emotion that accompanies the process of worship.
But like my earlier sub-section entitled Religion and Fate at Distance, it's also a case of Consciousness at Distance. The truth is to be found in the slightly longer term, more subtle events. Looking to the immediate daily cases will show the opposite to be true. But it's not. It's just that we're looking in the wrong place.
Feelings are almost always the result of behavioural actions. Feelings are always temporary and will die, unless the action causing it is repeated.
On a conscious level, we appear to act upon our feelings. This pales into insignificance on the much more vast subconscious level, where we always feel upon our actions.
Semantics has let us down with "God" and "Atheist" already and it's the same with "love". Since we use the same word "love" to mean all sorts of things, including the feeling of being in love (but also need, control, desire, possession, admiration and self-sacrifice to name a few) then we are thrown into doubt by our wonderful ambiguous English language, once again.
Unlike a pure language of a fatherland, the mongrel English is Germanic at base with generous helpings of Italian, French and Latin from whenever anyone conquered the place, plus Indian from our own short lived empire and Finnish, Swedish and many other things by virtue of geography.
With a language like that how can you expect anything other than confusion ?
the feeling of being in-love, incest and gay
This may seem like a digression but I want to explore how "feelings" that often run alongside concepts and processes such as love, are not part of the concept. I have decided that I can do this by using three examples. I want to separate feelings from actions in a clear-cut manner. I want to show that feelings are short-lived and can be activated and de-activated by society at large, not on a whim, but gradually and over time. Society might do this wilfully or without conscious intention, but do it nonetheless.
I am doing this so that in the future, were I to say that love is not a feeling it is an action, yet there are feelings and actions that we term "love", then you'll understand what I mean. Ditto God, of course.
Some "feelings" in the form of instincts that correlate to human actions are here for a reason. Some are fake and have been turned "off" for political reasons, by societal leaders long ago, perhaps. We run into trouble when we try to turn these "on" again.
By attaching belief-codes to certain feelings, society controls our actions. Conversely, by attaching belief codes to certain actions (worship comes to mind), society controls our feelings.
What?
Let me explain. Below are three examples of belief codes having been attached to feelings. In the first example, the aim is to promote the feeling even after it has died. In the second, the aim is to kill the feeling off. In the third, we see that problems may be encountered when, having flicked the switch one way, we then change our minds and wish to reverse the signal. But these problems are mere cultural blips anyway.
1 being in love
It would be hard to get people to act lovingly forever toward their partners, but it would be good for society and civilisation at large if they did. The "in love" feeling gets people to act in this way initially. It is the necessary magnet. Later, when the feeling dies, the loving action's might continue if we sell couples the illusion of the "perfect match". Old couples fondly recall how they felt when they first set eyes on their partner all those years ago. They are simply remembering the "in love" feeling and using it to justify current behaviour. Of course, things are a little more complicated than this simple viewpoint, but I wish to convey merely the essence of the point. Which is that being "in love" is not love. It is a promoter. A primer.
2 incest
Here's another example. Incest is natural. If you believe in Adam and Eve, you have to concede this point since if incest wasn't natural none of us would be here. If like me you think Adam and Eve is nonsense you still have to concede that incest is undertaken freely by at least one participating party who is a creation of nature. So incest is natural.
But as incest is also dangerous from a medical standpoint - hereditary diseases and so on - we have successfully obliterated it by creating a position of social outrage against it. We have turned incest "off". Much later, like now, this outrage is so coded into us that we actually feel that incest is "unnatural". And since the reason for banning it still exists - that is, it is still dangerous - we make no effort to "on" the incest instinct that has been turned "off".
3 gay
But what about gay ? Again, I reckon for the survival of the species in the early days, the homosexual instinct was out-raged and switched "off". This may have been millions of years back. But post 1960, we wanted to create a free and choice-laden society with personal respect at it's core. By this time, population was not just secure, it was excessive - thereby recasting "gay" from a threat to a blessing. Oh dear ! Suddenly the reason for condemning this instinct has been removed. So we turned the gay instinct back "on" again, by legalising homosexuality. And what fun that's been! People with a belief system deeply embedded in their genetic make-up will "know" gay to be "unnatural". This is simply what I would call "cultural momentum".
Clunk Click Every Trip. Remember seat-belt wearing being made obligatory in cars ? It took years before most people actually played along. Why ? Because what we feel is right is what we know. That's cultural momentum.
If I believed in God The Creator I would see a wonderful symmetry in the gay instinct, and I would declare that my God has put it there with a divine purpose of population control. Sadly, the churches turned the gay instinct "off" and over-population and famine abound. This is an excellent opportunity for the churches of the future which may be forced to incorporate the gay element into their flock, so don't put it past them.
Fortunately, knowledge dispels ignorance, and Thomas Malthus's essays on the principles of population in the early nineteenth century laid the foundation for a science which proves that over-population and famine (both the risk and very fact of them) act as essential components in the process we know as "natural selection", whereby human gene's fight for survival at the cost of lesser genes.
The fact that I can fit even homosexuality into the God story and make it work just amplifies how the church is a story teller. To bend the facts and twist the truth to suit your needs is to play at being the church.
God is doing the washing up
So here on earth we are a planet made up of people praying who have "found" God, people sleeping who are "visited" by wild dreams, and people doing the washing up instead of going to church on Sundays who are labelled Atheist and, equipped with a dodgy language and poor (at any level) education decide the smartest thing to do is shut up and look away.
God is as "everyday" as love and other kicks. It, or He is actionable. He is an it rather than a He. Because God is an action, centred around praying and other ritual actions of worship.
God is not a third party entity. God is a human action and the human feeling of spirituality that accompanies (or more precisely, follows) the action. We do perceive God as a separate entity, just like dreams, love and intuition. For such are human perceptions.
Believers all seem to make one crucial mistake. They use their feelings of God as evidence of God's outer existence. Sadly, this is bad logic and the chain of causation is broken. The God feeling is real in it's own right and may be instinctual genetic coding. The Atheist truth is correct too. There is no God, in fact.
Richard Dawkins rightly proclaimed; "There is no God. All religion is wrong."
panning out
Think of a film or TV show where the camera pans out in stages. Stage one, a man is on a rooftop. Pan out and there is a street of roofs. Pan out again and it's a town of streets. Pan out again and it's a country of towns. And again it's a continent of countries. And again and it's a world of continents. Once more and it's a galaxy of planets. One more then, and it's a universe of galaxies.
But just because our knowledge stops there doesn't mean it ends there. We've known for 80 years that distant galaxies are moving away from us at millions of light years. So what if the universe is a large cylinder-shaped entity of supra-universes ? And panning out further, this entity is just one of a collection of bigger things still. What if this "room" of cylinders that contain supra-universes full of galaxies of planets of continents is actually just one room in a "house" of rooms and so on. The brainy guys have calculated the fourth dimension of time-space but my last sentence accounts for a fifth, sixth and seventh at least.
When I see an ant on the wall, I know it can't know or comprehend that the wall isn't everything. That it's just a wall in a house. And the house has a roof, and the roof is a street of roofs. And the street........and so on.
But lack of knowledge and/or comprehension is irrelevant to the fact of existence.
I am not saying that there are no questions to answer.
Einstein's concept of "Flatlanders" is a great illustration of this. Imagine flat-men in a two-dimensional world moving along a plain. They cannot conceive of the notions of "up" or "down". Just left and right. They think the "world" is infinite. But although it never ends in the sense that there is no edge or borders, it is finite since it is the surface of a sphere. Now, although the sphere and certainly other planets are absolutely beyond the flatlanders comprehension, it doesn't mean that other planets or "dimensions" are not there. Take a quantum leap from two to three dimensions and this is us now.
So if humans on earth are just like tiny ants and unbeknown to us, something really big's happening, and that something is making the rules, then maybe there is a force other than ours, bigger than us and unbeknown to us. But it's not here it's somewhere else!
It might max the speed of light out to 186,000 miles per second and cause gravity and mass to bend each other but that's all it does. It does not watch us and judge us and govern our lifestyles. This distant "God" is an unknown, and is someone or something else's "God" fundamentally. We are incidental and not directly affected. We are not ruled.
Humans have been here on Earth for millions of years. The three big religions of the last five minutes, or two thousand years, whatever, are reassuringly off the mark. Their God is a pawn in a power game. And by calling me an "Atheist" they have proved it. As an aside, there can be none of their God. That's an easy one. But this is only an aside.
Socrates: When you don't know, say you don't know.
Church: When you don't know, say you do.
Shakespeare. God gave them wisdom men that have it. And men that are fools ? Let them use their talents
the paradox of truth
The central point that comes from all this is that Theists and Atheists are both in the right. They each speak the truth yet they have each fallen into the trap of focusing on proving the truth as they perceive it de facto.
(Agnostics, by virtue of their failure to opt-in to the old debate, must therefore also be excluded from this happy reconcile.)
If you accept my premise, as I do, then your position is now one of post-religion and you can transcend the debate.
Am I Theist or Atheist ? Now I am both and I am neither, for I am post-theology and one step closer to the truth. I am Alice Walker, observing wisely (see Alice's quote, below).
Watching society's confusion about religion is like watching a man who has just eaten, arguing with a man who has not eaten all day and the subject of their argument is "whether appetite exists". Of course, the man who has fasted is right to proclaim that it does. Just as the man who prays and worships would argue that God exists.
If we all undertook the same actions, we'd all share the same convictions. Look at Mecca.
Paradoxically, a gathering of parties who are all in the right are also all in the wrong if they cannot see it. This is a paradox of truth.
So why all the fuss and fighting when really there's no fight to be had?
In many respects I cannot surpass the words of Alice Walker whose nutshell on human nature seems, alas to be a time-honoured truth;
"I have seen two men face each other when both were right.
Yet each was determined to kill the other, which was wrong.
What each man saw was an image of the other man made by someone else.
That is what we are prisoners of."
duality, cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and the law of unintended consequences
If your head is still spinning from trying to conceive of a seventh dimension I apologise. So far I have identified "what" is happening. Now I am going to explain "why" it is happening.
So far I have separated God from Atheism by identifying the fact that they are not like-for-like entities that act as ideal substitutes for each other. This renders the old debate obsolete by virtue of trying to evaluate two incomparable and non-conflicting positions.
Rather like me asking "Are your jeans blue or size 34 waist ?"
But the question of why remains. That is, why has the God question gone down the route of "true or false" all this time ? Why are people wasting their time in trying to answer the wrong question ? It's tempting, like Alice Walker, to simply conclude that humans are flawed and often stupid. It's tempting to recall the old saying:
Mankind is ninety nine percent animal and one percent human. And it's the human bit that causes all the problems.
True no doubt, but we are now wholly in the field of firing off insults at our own race and I'd sooner invest my time in delving a little deeper that I might arrive at something resembling a worthy answer.
And that answer begins to unravel with the concept known as "duality".
on duality
I have encountered duality in the writings of various philosophers and psychologists including Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and M Scott Peck. It is a very well documented doctrine which is accepted as one of the fundamental human conditions.
Duality suggests that when faced with two things, humans tend to see one of these things as "good" and one of these things as "not so good" or even "bad". It is thought that our brains are simply designed to deal with life in this fashion. File allocation in this manner enables us to make sense of the world.
People who bought Tom Tom sat nav handsets tend to firmly believe (without any evidence being laid out, I might add) that NavMan devices are inferior. Car drivers are the worst. A guy who drives a Renault is very likely to express an air of superiority over Citroen and Ford and other makes of car within that band of vehicles. How many times have I heard fellow commuters declare a genuine belief that, across the board, a certain brand of mobile phone network is far and away better than all others. To be exact, they are not saying that one particular brand is better in one location - their home, for example - which may be true - but they express certainty that this brand excels by all the main performance metrics across the board.
Our brains find it easier to rank things in this manner. To deal with a choice between two things by accepting that there is nothing to substantially differentiate the two things is not how we are built. After all this would make the act of choosing very difficult. So we create a good and a bad. And we proceed much easier and happier thus. This in essence is duality.
But have you noticed how, despite the massive array of opinion on what is best, one thing and one thing only remains constant ? Of course! The best in any given situation always happens to be the very same brand or type or volume or colour etc that the person declaring the fact is in possession of.
Hold your thoughts on duality for a moment or two because I want to layer in something else. That something is the concept of Cognitive Dissonance.
on cognitive dissonance
We engage in duality sub-consciously. That is, we do it without thinking and we do it whether or not it is a reflection of the truth. Moreover, we do it to avoid a state of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive means "thinking" and dissonance means "discordant" or out of synch. So take cognitive dissonance to be a posh clever term for "conflicting thoughts".
When we humans experience "cognitive dissonance" or "conflicting thoughts" it causes us pain. This pain is in the form of discomfort and it is severe enough to make us instantly react and get out of the pain field. We do it so quick that sometimes we may not even be aware of it. But at other times we are fully aware of it, though we choose not to dwell on it afterwards.
I'm going to run an example of what I'm talking about in with my train of argument here as I believe it will make it easier to grasp the point I am making.
Here is an example of cognitive dissonance in the form of two conflicting thoughts, which have arisen because in this instance, let's say that I have had a heated argument with my friend and he is now upset and hurt by the things that I said. The two conflicting thoughts are:
1 I am a good decent and sensitive person
2 I am a bad and insensitive person because I have upset my friend.
Clearly these two thoughts can not exist with credibility at the same time, simply because they conflict. If one is true the other is not.
The first thought above represents a long term quality that I both aspire to and believe that I possess as I live out my life. It goes to the heart of my self identity and is very important to me.
The second thought is a short term cognition that has come about wholly because of the heated exchange that took place between my friend and I.
In order to resolve the conflict and end the pain, I am required to negate one of these two thoughts. I can rubbish the first one and reshape my whole self identity. But this will be very difficult and it will also lead to a new type of pain as I will have to accept that I am generally not the nice kinda guy that I thought I once was.
Or, I can negate the second thought. And this is much easier. It does not involve me undergoing a fundamental change in my core being and self-image. And so I will do this.
Please note that all the above, and the below, happens lots of times everyday and we complete the process almost instantaneously such that we may often never be aware that it ever took place. (except after reading this, hopefully, you will be aware)
Now, hold your thoughts on duality and cognitive dissonance while I layer in a third concept. Last one I promise!
Because we are going to escape the pain of cognitive dissonance with a clever little technique that is a familiar friend of our subconscious selves, and it is called confirmation bias.
on confirmation bias
Confirmation bias is a process by which we shape and distort new information to make it fit a convenient "truth". To continue working through the current example, I reflect on the argument with my friend and by selecting some facts and ignoring others, I manage to get rid of thought number two and thereby end the pain of cognitive dissonance. There will be no conflicting thoughts. What will be left is only thought number one - that I am a good decent and sensitive person. No buts.
To do this, I ignore the details of my hurtful choice of words directed at my friend. I begin to focus on the fact that I had suffered a real hard day at work and that I was tired. Therefore it was reasonable to expect that I would be a little short on patience this evening. I gloss over the fact that I had started the argument and that I was the only one to raise my voice. I concentrate on my friends very being in my presence at this time. Doesn't he know I have a lot on ? Why on earth would he choose to wait for me outside of my office ? Is he stupid or something ?
I ignore the details of the exchange - that I blamed my friend for failing to buy cinema tickets even though the auditorium was sold out and it was impossible for him to buy them. I choose to bring in new information that backs me up. I choose to entertain the thought that if he had tried to secure the tickets the day prior, none of this would have happened. I ignore the fact that he only got paid today and so couldn't possibly have bought the tickets earlier. Finally, I settle on the warm belief that anyone in my shoes would have acted just the same and I even introduce a mitigation plan - that I will apologise and buy him a beer next time I see him - as a way of somehow confirming that thought number two above cannot exist.
Confirmation bias is unreasonable and uses distorted logic and falsities to operate. But operate it does. I use it all the time and you do too. In fact everyone does. There are no exceptions.
the flight from cognitive dissonance
The shrinks and the professors and all the big important guys like to speak of "the flight from cognitive dissonance".
Thanks for bearing with me and concentrating. So let's unfold all this. It's really as easy as 1,2,3;
1 We rank things as good and bad or better and worse even when things are much of a muchness. This is duality.
2 We feel pain when our behaviour forces us to hold two conflicting thoughts. This is cognitive dissonance.
3 We flee from the pain of this by twisting facts and blanking things out. This is known as confirmation bias.
Much of our behaviour can be explained when we realise that we are in the "flight from cognitive dissonance" very very often indeed. Sadly, we don't even realise all this is happening. Alas, we rarely understand ourselves.
Not just arguments, but mistakes, cheating, acts of disloyalty, lying, losing, failing to keep promises, even just to face off the vane discomfort of embarrassment- all of these things kick off the above processes. Even much more acceptable behaviour activates the mechanism. You don't have to be bad to be in this place. When anything challenges our distorted self-image then...boom....we're at it again.
the God debate is one such long-haul flight, baby!
The culprits in the God debate are all its partakers. The Believers, the Atheists and those who associate to each group by any degree. They all have one major weakness. They are human.
Say I believe in God. I know some other people that do, but I know an equal number that don't. Remember duality - Peugeot or Renault ? Remember my tendency to rank things and also to rank them such that the "good" or "right" product happens to equate with the product that I happen to have bought, or bought into ?
Duality is certainly at play in the God debate. For both the faithful and faithless.
This blog has essentially been about realising that both sides are correct. That duality is a fallacy. That there is a God for those who know him and there is no God in fact, as proved beyond any reasonable doubt, thanks to science and Darwin.
Yet I don't fancy my chances of winning people around any time soon. Because if readers go with me on this one and quit the process of duality, low and behold they will fall head-long into the process of cognitive dissonance, and, running with the scenario that I am religious, here are the conflicting thoughts I will now be required to entertain:
1 I am an intelligent and successful person who has found true meaning in life by investing much time and effort in religion.
2 It is possible to extract full meaning from life without ever being religious at all since God is an immanence and does not exist in actual fact - much like dreams.
Clearly, if 2 is true, then 1 is at best qualified. I am not that intelligent if I have spent a lifetime chasing something which isn't strictly necessary. Nor am I that successful, at least relative to the atheists, since it turns out they are at least as clever and productive as me. This pulls me down the pecking order relative to my brethren somewhat.
I could lay the two conflicting thoughts out in short hand thus:
1 Religion is a worthy path.
2 Atheism is a worthy path.
Desperate to avoid the pain of housing both these cognitions, the behaviour we see so often begins to take shape.
Atheists will emphasize Darwin's tree of evolution and conveniently gloss over any evidence that favours Theism - such as the fact that Christianity brought literacy to the masses at the end of the Dark Ages in Britain, or that our greatest seats of learning including the University of Oxford, were conceived, devised and funded by the Catholic church.
Theists will ignore the massive body of scientific evidence that shows God to be an internal experience. They will quote verbatim from the holy texts to bring their faith to life. Christians will ignore the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was a normal human philosopher who was deified hundreds of years after his death.
At this stage, when The Bible and Q'uran get quoted and the tree of life makes yet another appearance, we are in nothing less than confirmation bias. Both sides cannot tolerate the idea that there is another way and they go running for supporting evidence. They cast aspersions on each other to avoid facing the fact that, rather than being possessors of the single unifying truth which makes them "right", they are in fact merely possessors of one of at least two truths, which are just as good as each other and which makes them, not so much "right" as just "OK".
When our insecurities surface, we tend to lash out, believing attack to be the best form of defence. At these times we default to concentrating on our differences and ignoring our similarities.
If I bought Vodafone over O2, Orange, Three and T-Mobile, but the truth is that all are good, then I am not that clever and even worse, I am not in control and my discerning discretion is an irrelevance.
If I am atheist but the truth is that God is an alternative, solid and successful route to take in life, then I am not that clever and even worse, I am not in control and my discerning discretion is an irrelevance.
everyone's off the hook
I promised earlier to exonerate the culprits and it's not difficult to do so. We've already seen that complex automatic processes like the flight from cognitive dissonance take place often - maybe mostly - on a sub-conscious level - so that by definition we cannot be even aware that such things are taking place.
Even if we gain an awareness of the processes, we still fall for them on a daily basis. Perhaps some exceptional Buddhists and monks and certainly some psychoanalytic psychotherapists have attained a degree of mastery over human folly and human behaviour at large, but I'm certain that most of us have not nor will ever do so.
The biggest crime of those who keep the God/No God debate alive is that they are human and as such are not programmed to deal with two right answers.
the law of unintended consequences
My thoughts on the church are in no doubt. But in the main, it is my firm contention that religious people do not intend to castigate the non believers and vice versa. They are simply reacting to sub-conscious instincts in a bid to avoid pain. Earlier I stated that people act in certain ways because they are responding to incentives.
Can we really come down hard on people who's main incentive is to avoid pain ? After all, pain avoidance is one hell of an incentive in any ones language. We are all geared up thus.
Humans are good and humans are flawed. We are both of these things all at once and at all times. In a bid to avoid pain we embark on the complicated and subtle (if not downright invisible) processes laid out above.
An unintended consequence of this pain avoidance is the God debate. But the God debate is not the truth. The truth is that the only conflict is in our heads. Another truth is that as humans we are far more intelligent and complex than most of us can hope to understand.
When we set out to achieve Goal A but in fact bring about Goal B, this is the law of unintended consequences. In this case each side of the debating chamber has set out with the goal of elevating it's status to a higher level. Yet in doing so both sides have brought themselves down.
The law of unintended consequences sees the techniques we have deployed in order to climb the ladder of consciousness being precisely the reasons that we are sliding down the snakes.
Next time someone is debating religion down the old usual lines and striving to answer the wrong question, try and listen out for the "options close" sales technique* and try and realise that the person speaking may not even realise they are doing it or even what it is.
Truth is all and we stand a much better chance of reaching it if in our treatment of each other we focus on the common qualities that bind us rather than the differences that set us apart.
Theism aims for the highest of the states of consciousness - spirituality - but it falls wide of the mark and comes to land in the power energy field where it persists in attempting to discredit and ultimately destroy atheism. Atheists reciprocate.
In this blog I have introduced a well documented but rarely-marketed position of post-theism, rising above the noise and attaining a sense of objectivity. I have pulled together various concepts and doctrines from various esoteric schools and I have attempted to build my own world view based on this foundation. In this way I have tried to inform the debate and push it a little further along. I have not yet come across such an attempt to address this issue from this angle. No doubt this is only due to my limited range of reading material and knowledge.
However, even if I have succeeded in any of this (which is highly doubtful) let it be written that I have attained only a state of creativity. In the table of the chakra's or states of consciousness I still fall far short of intuition and spirituality despite my best efforts to venture upward. The pursuit continues.
We are one.
Thanks for reading.
GK.
..........
