People struggle with the question of whether there is a God. People have believed forever that there are supernatural powers and they have named these supernatural powers all kinds of names. Gods are a part of human history and human cultures since human beings have existed and become conscious of their own consciousness.
So when people ask if you believe in God the first question should be “What kind of a God are you asking about?” John Buehrens said one time that when people tell him they don’t believe in God he asks them “What God don’t you believe in?”
Personally, if you ask me, and nobody has asked me in a long time, I answer that my sense is that God is not a noun but a verb. God, like Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars, is The Force. God is the power behind the universe.
Is this force a personal deity that cares personally about me? No. I am simply the manifestation of this force and perhaps there are other manifestations of this force that care about me, which in a way may be representative of this higher power, but the higher power itself is not personal and doesn’t care one way or the other particularly.
But my ego cares. My ego wants to be loved and taken care of by what it conceives as its creator and yet my ego isn’t real. My ego is simply a temporary illusion that allows me to function with a degree of autonomy temporarily until I see through it and realize that my ego is a social construction, something which I can also call my identity.
We have several identities throughout our lives. I am not the same person now I was 20 years ago. I am not the person now whose behavior is recorded in my academic records, my driving record, my credit history, my employment history, my family history, my legal history, my medical history. These histories all describe different roles I have played and different behaviors I have engaged it, but these descriptions do not come close to describing the essence of who and what I am.
So, if I could figure out, in essence, who and what I am, then maybe I would have a better understanding of what God is, because I sense that I and you and all of us are part of God and I have no idea in heaven what that is.
So when people ask if you believe in God the first question should be “What kind of a God are you asking about?” John Buehrens said one time that when people tell him they don’t believe in God he asks them “What God don’t you believe in?”
Personally, if you ask me, and nobody has asked me in a long time, I answer that my sense is that God is not a noun but a verb. God, like Luke Skywalker says in Star Wars, is The Force. God is the power behind the universe.
Is this force a personal deity that cares personally about me? No. I am simply the manifestation of this force and perhaps there are other manifestations of this force that care about me, which in a way may be representative of this higher power, but the higher power itself is not personal and doesn’t care one way or the other particularly.
But my ego cares. My ego wants to be loved and taken care of by what it conceives as its creator and yet my ego isn’t real. My ego is simply a temporary illusion that allows me to function with a degree of autonomy temporarily until I see through it and realize that my ego is a social construction, something which I can also call my identity.
We have several identities throughout our lives. I am not the same person now I was 20 years ago. I am not the person now whose behavior is recorded in my academic records, my driving record, my credit history, my employment history, my family history, my legal history, my medical history. These histories all describe different roles I have played and different behaviors I have engaged it, but these descriptions do not come close to describing the essence of who and what I am.
So, if I could figure out, in essence, who and what I am, then maybe I would have a better understanding of what God is, because I sense that I and you and all of us are part of God and I have no idea in heaven what that is.
Jesus says that the kingdom of god is within us. I think Jesus meant that God is our heart and soul. And in the end, when all else is subtracted, that is all that is left, and that’s God as far as I know.
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