Who is God? Marketing Ploy #1
God is a man-made entity designed to assuage fear of certain death. As such, a better question might be: What is God? God brings comfort to billions because they believe he’ll take care of them, watch over them. God’s existence cannot be proven rationally. God exists through faith. Non-believers often turn to God in times of trouble and suffering. Millions have died in the name of God. Organized religion claims to know the will of God. Women and homosexuals are seldom welcome in their ranks. Some believe God exists in flowers, mountains, streams and bees. In us. Some believe God is dead. Some witness coincidences that are interpreted as miracles, and see this as proof that there is a God. Others believe that God is where ideas come from, and that it’s up to us to act on them, or not. Literary types see God as the omniscient narrator. Some, like Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, claim that God must be evil to allow such suffering as exists on earth. Others say that without free will, belief in God is meaningless. Some argue that you can’t get something from nothing, that God must have intervened in the beginning. Some believe that Jesus was God incarnate. That treating your neighbour as you would yourself is the Godly way to live. Would the world be a better place without God? Some claim that without God everything is permitted. Others respond that this is the case with God. Some argue that humans can be just as altruistic and compassionate without God as with her, that theists have no monopoly on ethical behavior. Some argue that the world would be a better place without a clergy that preaches the supremacy of its concepts of God. Some hedge their bets, and profess to believe, just in case there is a God.
What is God? God is hope that peace, love and kindness will abound on earth and, if there is one, in the afterlife. God is the hope that human nature will evolve enough to accommodate this ambition.
But enough of my palaver. Here’s what the world’s greatest novelist has to say:
God is that infinite All, of which man knows himself to be a finite part.
God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. The more God’s manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love.
God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists…
Where Love Is, God Is
We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.
And the second greatest novelist:
The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced at the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.
And the third:
God’s only excuse is that he does not exist
Have we missed anything?
January 6th, 2008 at 2:48 PM
Who is this "world’s greatest novelist"?
January 6th, 2008 at 9:09 PM
Who do you think Lloyd?
January 7th, 2008 at 4:05 PM
I think you are referring to yourself.
January 7th, 2008 at 4:58 PM
Nice one Lloyd, but no cigar. 1. Tolstoy 2. Dostoevsky 3. Stendhal. Agree? Disagree? or just browsing thanks?
January 7th, 2008 at 11:11 PM
For novelists I like Melville, Nabokov, and Kafka. Best of all writers I like Poe, and Thomas DeQuincey. Your three choices leave me cold, cold, and colder.
January 8th, 2008 at 9:39 PM
Speaking of cadaverous, Poe leaves me cold…but the great Northrop Frye agrees with you, thinks him ‘the greatest literary genius this side of Blake.’
January 13th, 2008 at 10:19 PM
Lloyd has a blog history of leaving other people feeling cold, cold, cold and colder. Advice not to draw him on yourself. Genuinely. Who could argue with Tolstoy & Dostosvkey, though I’d alter their postions in the league table. Recently read Tolstoy’s Master and Man from a collection of the same name, & for me his peak, and one of literature’s greatest moments.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:49 PM
Thanks Patrick. I notice that the complete text is available on line at Gutenberg. But who wants to read all that off a computer screen. Came across this site recently: http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/war_and_peace/ Full searchable text of War and Peace.
January 14th, 2008 at 6:10 AM
A travesty to not read it from a book! The whole collection is superb. All of War & Peace online!!
January 14th, 2008 at 4:00 PM
Must say, it did come in handy recently. I wanted the unbearable lightness of being quote…and bingo, within seconds, there it was. Probably saved myself a good ten minutes.
January 14th, 2008 at 5:18 PM
Reminds me of something from a book on existentialist writings, and I think the piece was by Rilke, on how some poor soul became obsessed with the passage of time and its passage towards mortal demise, and in futile response he tried to manage said temporal commodity better, and so have more of it, but alas, at the end of every week there was no time left over even after his considerable efforts.
January 15th, 2008 at 6:03 AM
Just in case, that was merely a flight of mind as opposed to anything in the way of stern rebuke. I tend to cast my hook into the web in search of correct quotes also. The written words can be so panoramically wide in their openness of potential interpretation, perhaps I should insert paranthetically something along the lines of( he observed light-heartedly, and with no hint of censoriousness). I could be the new Tristram Shandy, not that I’ve read the old one.