I’m going to open this can of worms. Politics and religion are the two topics you’re never supposed to bring up because it’s too easy to offend somebody or get into big arguments, but I’m going to do it anyway. I generally refer to myself as “pagan” for simplicity’s sake, but my actual beliefs are more philosophical and vague than that, in reality.
One thing I do not believe in is a god (I will be using the lower-case “god” for this article because I’m not referring to a specific god. Please don’t be offended, as that isn’t the intent) who is an anthropomorphic personification (as Terry Pratchett would call it). That is, I don’t believe in a god in the sense of a single consciousness who looks down at the Earth and rules over us all, and makes rules about what is sin and what is good, and judges people after they die, etc. I was raised Christian and so I believed that kind of thing until somewhere in high school, when my belief started to unravel.
I read a book by Scott Cunningham about solitary Wicca and suddenly a bunch of things clicked for me in my mind. I began to see that all religions were simply different ways of looking at the same thing—different ways to try to understand and acknowledge the divine. It became absurd to me to think there was any validity to the concept that there was a god up there who accepted one method and then sent everybody else to hell because they didn’t guess correctly. If there was a god, I believed that he/she (I also can’t conceive of a god needing genitalia, so the idea of a god with gender is also a bit absurd) would appreciate all attempts, regardless of what name was used or what ceremonial rituals were followed.
Several years later I had a few experiences that were very powerful to me. I won’t go into them in detail but they proved rather convincingly to me two things: First, that there was some higher force, and second, that we are all connected to this force. The thing it did not clarify for me is what the nature of that force is, but I view that as largely irrelevant. I don’t think it is possible to know the nature of “god” or whatever it is, nor do I think it’s necessary.
I believe that there is a higher force of some sort, a sort of macro-level of life, which is accessible to people (and probably to animals as well, I have no idea). Some would argue that any self-proof of a miraculous event is really just a person tapping into a strength they didn’t know they had. For example, recovering from an illness as a placebo effect of believing that there is a god curing you. The human mind is certainly a vastly complex thing that we have barely begun to understand.
What I personally think is that the higher power, or whatever you want to call it, is something like the internet. No, let me explain. You can think of the internet in a few ways. You can think of the internet as a bunch of individual computers, touching each other through a network, or you can think of the internet as a unified thing, made up of a lot of networked computers. This is how I view “god.” Whether our experiences that seem like divine intervention/connection are our own minds reaching some higher state or whether we are connecting with a larger source, it’s essentially the same thing.
I can’t exactly explain the interconnectivity that I believe in with any sort of coherency, so I’m not even going to try. I will say that I have seen it, though, and that it is a beautiful thing. All life is tied together at a higher level and it is at that level that we achieve things like “answers to prayer” and such.
To summarize, I believe the nature of god to be this interconnected force of life, which is the combined force of every living thing, and which is greater in itself than the sum of its parts. I believe that it has a self-awareness and presence to a degree, and a benevolence, and that either through an act on “it’s” part or through our own ability to access its power, that it can intervene and affect us in the real world. In other words, I don’t know if we’re handed the cookie, or if we take the cookie, but I believe the cookie is there. (So, what… does that make god a cookie jar?)
So I’m not a Christian, but I don’t believe that Christians are “wrong” in their beliefs (except that belief that everyone but them is wrong—which is an idea shared by most religions) they are just anthropomorphizing the same force that I believe in because it’s far easier for the human mind to conceive of something familiar than something so nebulous. I feel the same way about pretty much every religion. They’re all just groups putting their own face on something that is inherently impossible to truly comprehend the actual nature of. Religions are sort of the ultimate analogies. We use analogies all the time to take abstract concepts and give an easier-to-understand example. Understanding the analogy gives us the ability to (to whatever degree) understand the bigger concept. In the same way, religions which give god an identity that can be tangibly understood, give people a way to understand or connect with that higher level of life, whatever that actually is.
— 12:21:29 PM
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