Love Is God

There is no God in America.

by Lloyd H. Whitling

http://hedonix.wordpress.com/2008/10/23/love-is-god/

Sure, I’m an atheist, bonafide, but this is not about that, this is about what is it that people are calling God and, “Why are they calling it that?”

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Now, Xians have been taunting me all my life about this thing called God that they say really exists. I might believe them if they could tell me what it is so I could go check it out. They tell me my puny brain cound not stand up to meeting with God, according to their Bibles, and that even Moses would be blinded by a vision of it.

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To prove it, they showed me a verse in the Bible that said pretty much that, and told me that whatever I wanted to know, to just look through my Bible and I would surely come across an answer. Well, I think they doubted I would do that. I think that they have never done much of that themselves, and had just heard that someplace and repeated it. Maybe their mamas told them, or a preacher somewhere, I have no idea. I do know they can’t have taken their own advice, or they would be just the same as me.

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Now, come to think of it, I have heard a couple of them brag about having read their Bibles through more than once, and daring me to do the same. I tried it, but it scared me too much and then tried its dambdest to put me asleep, it seemed there was no middle ground. What I learned from it, mostly, was why Xians act so bad as they do, what with their instructions to go about killing off people who won’t believe their tall tales, or else go to cutting of body parts for punishment. That’s scary, to think that people would believe in something like that, claim to one and all about how its the godawful truth, and proclaim themselves to be the servants of that belief.

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And one or two of them seem to be such nice people! Good gracious, go to living! How can that be?

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Well, I have found, during my studies, that there seems to be two kinds of Bibles that have been mashed together into one hodgepodge of stories that go in opposite directions. I don’t see how those braggarts could have missed that, unless they were so busy at doing their reading that not much if it sank in. It does make it clear, though, why the Catholic Church of old condemned to dire consequences anybody caught actually reading that book who was not an actual priest or somehow else in charge of churchly teachings.

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What if it became commonly known what all it says people are expected, by God, to do and actually tried doing that? When they would try what the God on this hand says is right, they are going to discover themselves going against what the God of this other hand demands. They are going to say, “God works in mysterious ways, but even this is too much for my puny brain to figure out,” and end up doing what they had been doing in the first place, which was to go to the preacher in their churches, and do whatever he tells them. “Ask God’s forgiveness, because no matter what you do, you will have sinned and will come up short.”

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The problem with that, as I have always seen it, is that one person’s preacher will say one thing is right, and another one will condemn it and tell us something else. It makes me believe they all are just guessing, and guessing also about the forgiving part. One thing is for sure, you can test a preacher by putting some money in front of him. By their own words, and by that verse I told you about somebody showing me, if they had ever been in God’s presence they ought to be blind. If a preacher reaches out to touch the money, or gives any sign he knows it’s there, he is just plain being dishonest.

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So, okay, somebody told me that’s the law side of whatever it is they call ‘God’. While I still await their showing of that to me (een though I might go blind from it, I would have such a story to tell I have no doubts at all I could still earn a living. They do, after all, even with it being obvious they don’t know the first thing about it. That’s why they get so mad so easily, and go flying off the handle issuing condemnations and such. I would not ever have to get that mad at people, if I knew a story I told was true. No, if I knew that story was true and nobody would listen, I would not get mad, I would cry.

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I would cry because the law side of this God thing is still being pressed, even though it seems like all the dirty deeds that God demanded have been done. All the people were killed that it ordered to be slain. All the people were maimed, the babies were burned, the women enslaved, and the cities burned. That’s all in the past, and all that’s left, for the most part, are some how-to’s about things like trading jackasses and slaves that we don’t have all that much of going on nowadays. There’s all that stuff about murdering and keeping the Sabbath and such, some of what we have laws about, and some of which we can’t keep because our calendars don’t have the right days on them.

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I could send you to my web site for a better explanation of that but, it being kind of beside the point, let me give you something to mull over instead: There are 365¼ days in every year, leap or not. There are seven days in every week, leap or not. The calendar we follow was contrived about 5000 years after the week Creation was supposed to have taken place, and so it was by necessity that the Jews (who came along some couple-thousand years after that week) and the Catholics both not only had to guess at exactly what days were the first and last of each week, but also guess about the effects of that extra quarter day of every year. We know, and it has always been plain how the Jews and Catholics have always been at odds with each other, and it seeems strange they would agree about this one thing and very little else.

They don’t even agree on whether the first or last day of the week should be kept holy!

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And that even increases my perplexity about why so many people take their words about something that ought to be important, without checking out all they can of it for themselves.

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Well, that aside now, if I could only see it demonstrated as though people actually believed in it, I would take the description of God I found in the New Testament part of it. Now, no one can believe what they see is wrong. No one can force that. We can, at best, pretend for so long as we cannot be shown otherwise, but only because we are frightened of what the messengers might do to us, or because we cannot perceive of any alternatives. Either way, to pretend about this is unforgiveably wrong. People have tried, as I said, to convince me but my questions were those they had no resources for dealing with. Some would try, as I have said, but only get angry when I would talk about things for which they had no awareness, and then their attacks became more personal. (I am very familiar with ad hominems and other logical fallacies, as people over the years have plied all kinds of them against me until I became familiar with their tactics).

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Still, I remain basically tolerant. People can pray all they want, say “God bless you” or “I am praying for you” and I will accept that as an expression of love or concern (as the case may be). It is their effort that is being made and, if that is all their resources allow, I can accept that as the best gift they have to offer. When we first came to tennessee (I have not noticed of late, as we seldom go that way anymore), a sign near Nashville along Hwy 70 informed everybody who read it, “God is love.” That seems like something seldom practiced when it comes to God’s messengers, especially of late, but that sign bothered me when I first saw it because it seemed untrue.

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I had some thoughts that led to this: “If God created all. then god made lust, which begets love. If love in any form is a sin, then, there is not God, or else God is evil.” Would it not be better for God’s reputation that love in all its forms should be understood as a force for the good in every way. How can we be so foolish as to misunderstand that so badly that love gets our condemnation, and so, too, then, does God.

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Quite some time ago, I had occasion to write about it, and about the nature of love and logical fallacies. It is a logical fallacy (equivocation) to turn it around while thinking, “If God is love, then love must be God.” [1 John 4:8] “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” I know that, but I am not the guy who wrote it into that New Testament Bible verse. If the fellow who wrote that was so all-knowing as wise as is claimed, then he must have intended the equivocation and it must be true if the Bible is deemed inerrant.

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Now I, as an ordained clergy for the Church of Spiritual Humanism (UK), would not ordinarily use the Xian scriptures as a source of information, but it sometimes can serve as a source of inspiration, usually in the reverse of what God’s self-appointed (they are not blind that I can tell) messengers would want. What I find inspiring is how that verse seems to justify the logical fallacy in this instance (I can somehow feel you glowering at me) so that its meaning holds when it gets turned around. If Love is God, then I can accept that and practice that for I find that to be sensible and even some kind of lovely. It heightens my urge to be tolerant of others, who have not had the opportunities life has offered to me, and gained the vantage point I occupy. It stills my concerns over their intentions towards me and towards those over whom I watch.

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I am more aware, of late, about when I am being attacked and when I am not. People do concern themselves about others in many ways, and concerned people who believe in spirits and souls will be concerned about that aspect of our existence they believe in. They are expressing love when they ask after others, mostly. Quite a few ask after that kind of concern because they feel like someone with a worldview unlike their own will somehow contaminate them. It threatens them to the point where they feel driven to eradicate the presence of it, either by seeking conversion or the removal of themselves or the other person from that current situation. Their concern is not one of love, but of self-preservation or preservation of the vested interests their beliefs have caused them to develop.

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It appears like the various sects of Xianity produce people whose natures differ greatly from one sect to another. Seventh Day Adventists appeared on my porch, learned I am someone willing to discuss with them, but to whom they had little they could say. They now leave me alone, and I appreciate that. Some people from the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons took a while longer to reach that conclusion, and now they no longer come around. Some people from an Evangelical Baptist sort of church kept at it the longest. I used to see them around town at various intersections haranguing people in their cars. Mama Lou read in the paper where someone had them arrested for harassment, and I have not seen them lately. I would join their church only to have somebody with whom I could ride bicycles, but I would not like having to wear a penguin suit while doing so. Besides, I would then be a hypocrite, and Love would not approve. I doubt, though, that they knew much about 1 John 4:8, about God being love, and so had very little experience at practicing love as being God.

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Let love be God, and act like it, and I will no longer complain about the nature of what I have come to know as the ‘Arabic Religions’. Let love be God, as the New Testament proposes, and I will take that as the proper interpretation for such phrases as “May Love go with you,” “You need to find love in your life,” or “Love forgives all sinners.” Only a crazy person would get angry over that, unless you made it clear you really meant otherwise, like the way it now seems: “Love, if You are out there, speak to your people and let them know you are real. Please?”

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Now, I could be very wrong about all of this. After all, there is little of science in the Bible, it having been assembled into written form a thousand and a half years ago, but I will still be the same person I have always been: If I am wrong, don’t tell me about it, show it to me. Is there Love in America? If there be love here, please show me it.

 

Spirituality

I regard myself to be a student of the human spirit. Were I to tell that to a group of atheists, a large portion of them would take it to mean that I believe in ghosts. I have had that argument. It is stupid.

One of the biggest problems atheists and other seculars have that interferes with ease of communication and gaining understanding of each other, has to do with defining words, and the obstinate tendency to allow only one definition to apply however many, of good practice, can be found listed in an authoritative dictionary. Beyond that, a goodly number of potentially useful words are refused admission. “They are not,” writers such as myself get told, “a part of our vocabulary.”

Well, then, get educated. I am of the opinion words we do not “like” need to be redefined in whatever manner it takes to support what we do “like”. I arrived at that opinion after years of holding the opposite, and after taking notice of how much time I have wasted on what ends up distractive from what I *do* want to discuss with people.

In other words, it tends to appropriate control of a discussion toward arguing about the meaning and viability of words, a ridiculous aspect of atheism that shows up in many other topics. I have found that by offering a definite definition and insisting on it, those who insist on nonsecular definitions only realize they have no way to talk to me, since my refusal to understand their meaning –one that applies to something that does not exist– renders them voiceless. When something nonexistent has no label, and the appropriated label means something different that is real, their stories turn into gobbledy-poop. Unless I give in to their insistence upon bending my ears, and my thinking, to only their way– the discussion veers down a different road to derailment. In other words, the demand is to allow them to appropriate my mind. Atheists are the worst at refusing to see how such a reluctant attitude works against their own best interests. Talk with them about it, and you’ll soon get the feeling they actually desire the losing end of the shtick.

The word “spiritual” is a good example. Spirit, in a secular sense that offers no recognition to such things as ghosts or an afterlife, retains what is thought to be its original reference to the breath that signifies a person (or any mammal) is alive. When the breath has ceased, the spirit has “gone” (there is no sign of its presence).
In a modern secular setting, spirit refers to how one displays an attitude, or disposition (their habits or characteristic tendencies and moods). The poor habit of understanding words only by their nonsecular definitions inspires modern humans to see mental images of ghosts where gamboling sheep was the actual intention. Spirit, as a sign of life, can be read into many descriptive sentences without forcing it. “Spring into joy, and let that great spirit fill you with its pleasure.”

By ‘human spirit’, I refer to the attitude by which the process of being human gets approached, and the interactivity within that. ‘Spirituality’, concern with the things of the spirit, refers to “otherworldliness” in the nonsecular sense, and the pleasure of living in the secular vein. Does “otherworldliness” refer to Mars or Venus? No, those are real, secular entities we can observe. “Otherworldliness” refers to that which is intangible to the senses, a portion of artificial reality (see my book, Reality 101).

‘Soul’, a related word in the nonsecular world, refers only to autonomous animation of any physical body within the secular world (and so all animals possess “soul” if they have capability of motion and seem to display conscious awareness and ability to make decisions). The secular equivalent to an afterlife is represented by “oblivion” –there is no awareness, ability (or need) to make decisions, no life signs (spirit), no sense of a “self” (soul). It is the “place” or “state” from which we arrived here, the condition being one of nonexistence, to which we return. My story, The Mystic Wytch, referred to death as “the long road to oblivion.”

The most promising way to arrive at, and stay on track with, a secular worldview, is to realize at the outset that all of existence arises out of events that, seen in a chaotic continuum, combine into processes, from the tiniest and simplest, that become more complex events that, seen in a larger view that envelopes each increasingly complex level of chaotic continua, builds through successive layers of events forming processes until all of nature is so encompassed, the final result of all those layers of chaotic complexity being commonly named ‘Nature’.

An aside: I have no idea how many people in the world would agree with any of this, it is my own philosophy I have worked out to enable my own ability to cope with all the cultists that surround me, and to be able to understand them according to my terms (in other words, I got tired of all the furrowed expressions I had to make, and all the resultant headaches from that). I felt like I had to do something, and the common secular way to handle it seemed ineffective. To me, ineffective has been something I have tried most of my life, and it has resulted in the should-have-been-expected nothing.

So, the secular sense of spirituality, if understood from all of that, is a heightened awareness of self and the place of one’s self in this natural world. We were born with a genetic set of predispositions into a variety of environmental circumstances that determine pretty much how we should go about attaining that heightened awareness.

We don’t do it with mind-numbing procedures such as religion or drugs. We surely can’t achieve it by off-handed rejection of the terminology best suited to talking about it. We can only accomplish it by following our inclinations, gaining the required knowledge to support those inclinations, learning to be self reliant and self responsible, by learning to apply the scientific method to the information and opinions we acquire, and all that goes along with that. As a result, a highly spiritual person would be someone very aware of his/her place in the scheme of things; of his/her place in the social pool; of what goals he or she could most successfully and satisfactorily pursue; and especially someone who could inspire such a level of self-actualization in others. Atheists may not like that, but I have too-well noted a central lack of any kind of inspiration or an inspiring message emanating from among us. The nonsecular may offend themselves by deeming secularization of “their” terminology to be abusive. Maybe my gran’ma’s advice should be taken: “Eat your peas. You’ll learn to love them, and they’re good for your health.”