God, the Universe and everything else

I was just watching one of those chapters of Richard Dawkins' series on evolution and religion. Naturally I share nearly every point of Dawkins' discourse, after all I was quite a typical atheist for some 15 or 20 years of my life, since I reached puberty till I neared my thirties.

In my opinion, Dawkins' discourse is one step behind and probably need some psychedelic experiences to get refined. Or at least some good re-reading of Spinoza's Ethics' first chapters.

Thanks largely to Spinoza, I have for a decade now overcome in my discourse and thought the monotheistic or theistic (I call that "alientheism" in fact) monopoly of God. God is not some peculiar Judaistic (or whatever) cultural and ideological interpretation of God but, philosophically speaking the ultimate cause of existence.

This ultimate cause has not yet been satisfactorily explained via science but much less via religion. Naturally, I do not pretend to understand It to the ultimate detail either but it's obvious from scientific knowledge (not just evolutionary biology but nearly everything else (tectonics, astronomy, archaeology...) that the traditional religious myths are totally wrong.

So the alientheist religions basically lie about God and therefore they are a form of idolatry: idolatry of words. Their golden calf is a book or series of books that just utter nonsense. Ok some of those myths may still keep some truth in regard to Hebrew history or, arguably, some good ethical advise. But otherwise they are just nonsense and those who defend them are blatant liars. And those who have faith are mere idolaters who worship words, not God.

The only valid "scripture" of God is in the facts of life and existence. Of course lies like those uttered in the Bible, the Talmud or the Quran are also facts of life (no more than, say, The Satanic Verses or Les Fleurs du Mal), what tells me that God also enjoys some deceit. Nothing that Spinoza would argue against, obviously, because for him God has infintite attributes, including deceit and manipulation. A perfect and absolute God cannot lack anything, as the Manicheistic preachers want us to believe.

So what's the truth about God? Just look around you in the facts of life, like the biological dance and the cosmological one as well. That is what we know about God.

For some God would be not really present but alien to all this reality, yet its conscious creator. But to these I can't but argue that the artist is always in the artwork, that the two cannot be detached. Who is Van Gogh? Some "crazy" redhair with a troubled life or his marvelous paitings that shatter every soul? Or both? At least we know something about Van Goghs real life. But what about Homer? Like with God, we can only judge him for his works.

So, lacking any evidence of the existence of an alien creator God, I argue that it is pointless and fundamentally not different from an ominpresent holistic God: the Pan Theos. Pantheism is, of course, not essentially different from atheism, just that we pantheists don't let the idolaters of words and doctrines to monopolize such a fundamental concept. Also we are less concerned about death than both atheists and alientheists because we are quite consicous that our individuality is mostly a short temporal illusion and what really matters, if anything, is the whole: the cosmic dance, God, of which we are just manifestations.

Actually I need this understanding in order to relax from the incredible dramatic self-destruction we are engaged in. After all, if we cannot stop it, if humankind and life-as-we-know-it is going to vanish in the next decades or so, I can be confident that the Universe as such will keep going. We can only cause so much destruction after all. It would be a terrible pity that we'd misuse such fantastic cognitive and creative capabilities as we have as species and the lusty thriving beauty of Earth and I hope we can still reverse the process. But if these hopes happen to be wrong, I know that the essence behind all that will still be there. It could be worse, I guess.

Enough for today. Enjoy.
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