Let's Talk About God
There's no escaping this conversation.
"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return" - Carl Jung
I’m not sure if there’s a more loaded idea than that of God, and what that means. Entire civilizations have been destroyed or created in the name of God. The human animal is a complex one, and it seems that in order to function we not only need food, water, and shelter, but a psychological structure of meaning.
I used to pray to God like I was a dog asking for scraps.
I was told prayer could move mountains, after all. I didn’t even need that. I just wanted to make the pain go away. And I thought If I squeezed my palms together hard enough, if I contorted my body long enough, if I allowed my knees to sink into the carpet until they ached, maybe God would turn his eye onto me and grant me what I asked for.
But like most Christians-turned-atheists, my prayers were never answered and a howling bitterness crept inside me. I concluded there was nothing. No God. No demons. No Jesus. I began to believe that religion had just evolved as a way to make sure grains would be distributed properly. To create an elite class of priests. A way for kings to control peasants. An easily digestible set of morals that had become archaic and useless in modern society. We were sitting on a floating rock above a floor of nothingness, surrounded by the corpses of animals we crawled on in order to evolve into these lurching, angry apes with cell phones. It was a complicated series of illusions that ultimately meant nothing.
Because God will not listen to you when you hunch over your grandfather’s hospital bed, and God will not listen to you when you ask for a new mother. And God will not tell the man lurching in the darkness to stop raping his daughters, or tell angry kings mad at their mothers to stop starting wars. God will not stop the murders of his most faithful.
God won’t make anything different. That’s a child’s view of God.
God is not a sky Daddy. He will not send you extra money in your Paypal, get you a free parking space, or help you find a girlfriend. It’s just that most Christians never evolved past this infantile idea.
We all sat around swaying and asking for miracles, even when we told ourselves to be grateful. We thought God was a thing that could fill us and make us feel complete, cure the emptiness that sat like sad silt in the center of our chests.
We thought God was womb water. A return to the comfort of being rocked and fed by a mother who could put stars in the sky above us.
That we’d stop being a victim of physics.
Or even worse, we presumed to think that we knew the will of God. That we deserved sainthood, priesthood, martyrdom, medium status, because we alone could decipher God’s desires.
Christians didn’t know the will of God. The average Christian seemed no more fulfilled than the average atheist. Get to talking to either of them, and they have the same problems. The same empty ache. They commit the same crimes. They have the same guilt that sits heavy in their hearts.
When someone talks about “God,” everyone sees a different image in their head. God can be a benevolent father, or a pastiche of past failures, a set of broken moral codes that have caused nothing but pain. It can be Yahweh, or murderous and bloodthirsty Kali, or Jehovah, or Allah. It can be an abstract idea, or a concrete one.
But God is none of those things. God is the earth. God is the air. God is the star factory that spit out the chemicals that created life itself. God is the dryness in your mouth. God is the pain in your lower back. God is the knife sliding in, the blood that comes out.
God is everything.
God is what he said to Moses out in the desert: “I am the thing that is called I am.”
I am. A verb without a subject. That’s what God is. A verb.
Every culture that has ever existed has looked up into the sky, watching the moon swing low, the air bloated with insects. They’ve felt the warm, rustling hiss of the loneliness of having no access to the past. They’ve crouched between the legs of a woman giving birth, in between the stalks of grain, in the place in the river where the water meets the beach, and tried to explain who we were and why we were.
We climbed out of the ocean wet and clueless, and then we murdered the apes that came before us, including the Neanderthals and the homo erectus, but our children walked above the graves of other species with no memory of what we’d done.
At some point we believed in gods of the stars, gods of war, gods of grain. Little spirits lived inside everything, the knobs of trees and in cupboards and in little grass hollows. They needed to be appeased with food and milk. Sacrificed to. They were little more than fickle mothers and fathers, acid tongues and casual rapists. Greater than human but only barely.
But at some point we realized that the god of grain and the god of the stars and the gods that lived in trees were all the same god. That in essence, it was all God.
In order for humanity to exist, our brains need to differentiate between objects. Everything that we perceive in existence, including ourselves, is through the lens of survival. We scan our environments to look for tools, food, water, friends, prey.
What we perceive with our senses isn’t reality. Not exactly. It’s a version of reality. In actual reality there are no objects. No opposites. Without the human brain to interpret the world it’s like a huge, coagulating mass of data. Nothing is disconnected from anything else. It’s all one.
That’s what God is. Not just the Christian god, or the Islamic one. Not just “The God of the Gaps.” As long as we’re human there will always be gaps. Our ignorance stretches into infinity. That’s why nearly every culture in existence has tried to understand the thing beyond our perception and placed upon that thing the label of “God.”
God is the thing we can only understand through obtuse angles and oblique references. The thing that we try to understand with imperfect religion. Like a platonic form or a Jungian archetype. It can only be alluded to. Never fully described.
So the real question. Why does any of this fucking matter?
If God is everything, then why do we feel the need to create a figure that is God? Why do we need to pray to God, to try to make this split entity separate from ourselves? If God is everything, then doesn’t the concept of God itself become meaningless?
Because if we are everything, and everything is us, then the answers we’re looking for are not outside of ourselves. They will not be handed to us on a silver plate by a smiling, bearded figure. We have to find them. Because we’re a part of God too.
And if we listen quietly to the current of all existence that runs through us, and stop blinding ourselves to obvious truths, the answers that we’re searching for will present themselves to us.
Some people call this intuition. Sense-feel. But it’s more than that. It’s understanding that the forces that govern everything, govern you as well. Nothing can be created or destroyed. That means you are a composite of the matter around you. You have your own gravitational pull. You have a lineage dating back to the beginning of time. Even the love and anger you feel are forces of nature that did not begin with you, and will not end with you. They are part of physics. They are as real as matter.
I don’t pray anymore to ask for favors.
I pray to see what is inside of me, and what will always be.
And when we pray to God, the voice that responds is ours. And it’s blowing to us from across the cradle of billion year mountains, salt-water ocean, bringing with it a knowledge that’s traveled across solar systems.
And once you understand that you’re God too, you’ll stop needing to ask for a miracle.
You’re already living inside one.
