I've expounded before on my thoughts on God, which I'll try to recap in a nutshell here, and connect to question above regarding God and love.
First, with apologies to the better half, I must say we differ on the nature of God. I can't believe in a personal God separate from us, and in this I differ with the mainstream of my own religion. I do think that consciousness, in fact, a conscious cosmos, is a very good match for God in my own thinking at this point. That includes a consciousness not which created and planned everything, but which is everything, down to the subatomic level... I think of the various scriptures we trade with one another here as lending insights into this great underlying unified universe... and often giving insights into the great thinking which we don't parse properly at our individual, illusory levels.
The stronger one's yearning for an exclusion from this reality, to me, the more one adds to one's own anxiety. At least that's so for me. The more that one accepts that the omnipresent and omnipotent being must be all, not a part, the more one realizes that omnibenevolence simply can't be a condition. That is the hardest thing to realize and accept -- that if God is in the innocent gunned down in fervent prayer, God is also in the shooter. Or rather both are in God.
To say that God loves us is to say that we love ourselves and one another and other select aspects of creation; to protest God's lack of love for us is to say there are those who do wrong, and there are wrong actions.
I don't posit an afterlife, necessarily -- only that in this life, I am a tiny part of an immeasurably larger mind. You are not a brain, you are a neuron.
Does God love? At that level, I am boggled at what the thoughts must be. We are tiny tiny parts of God; I don't think there's a personal God standing back from creation and saying "I think I'll do this. I think I'll do that." I think rather that the universe, or many universes, are interconnected from the beginning, that if you like, that interconnection, that coherence, is love, and that we hear its echo in the words of our loved ones, and feel its echo in our lovers' arms. But every being, "be he ne'er so vile," and more than that, every animal, plant, and rock, are linked to this great mind of a much higher order.
The vocabulary here is full of symbols and characters that make for wonderful stories and arguments. We assign God that name in English, or a number of other names in Hebrew or another in Arabic. Then we have these other characters - Satan, Jesus, etc. They're all very solid and very easy to discuss and make up if/then statements about.
By contrast, God -- the God that includes all things -- is very hard to talk about; in fact, talking about God is impossible, and we proceed immediately from error. Our description cannot describe that greater self in which we partake. Yes, death must too be part of God, even an evil death, as I'll say it using the vocabulary of the scale of each of our lives.
So I arrive finally at a conclusion a lot like the atheist's: Do good for goodness' sake. I think I have a heretical idea as well, that the enormous all-encompassing being called God, of which we're part, can have a little better day or a little worse day -- and more heretical yet, can be more and less complete, as we accept more or less that we're of him. Wherever consciousness arises, he is there, or rather, there is a bright neuron firing in his mind, rather than the dull just-thereness of the more inert parts which are nevertheless of him.
Falling back on my human understanding, I think that hate hurts him; it is like peeling off your own skin, to use a gross anthropomorphism.
Prefer whichever deity you prefer; it simply cannot be true that God loves us in the sense that he will cure all disease, stop earthquakes from happening, etc. etc. etc. -- because the bad things still happen. Is he conscious of us? Yes. Perhaps that's why one needs a mind spanning the whole cosmos -- simply to have a grand enough mind to know all its constituent parts.
As to punishment, it's irrational to explain the more serious tragedies of life as punishments -- they happen to good and bad people without real discrimination. The bad guy beats the good guy. The children die, the shooter lives. The village dies, the SS guards live. However you want to express it.
It doesn't matter which character you saddle with these things. They persist, and they cannot be solved.
The name for this greater God of all things, for me, and English-speaker, is God. I also think of his proper name, from my upbringing, as the name we don't write or speak aloud out of awe. Forgive me my primitive heritage; I find it appropriate, however, not to try to name a being I can at best tell vague approximations about. Awe doesn't begin to describe all that there is -- all that I am, in that I partake in the all.
Now then -- in that I have insufficient thought, and insufficient vocabulary, to describe something of this scale, please understand that everything I have written here is, by necessity, a lie -- but it's one of omission rather than commission.
Exult in your self, in that your self partakes in something limitless and more complex than you can begin to comprehend. Exult in your fellow men and women, as they do as well. We represent spirit that's achieved consciousness... much more so than the rest of what's on this pathetic little wrong in an unfashionable backwater of a mid-size spiral galaxy. Exult in all of us, and in all of it, and in the beauty you see and the greatness you can become - the more of the all you embrace, the closer to the all you become, the closer to God you are.
And if that's loving the sunrise and sunset, the newborns and the veterans, the stories we all tell each other of our lives, understand that every moment of connectedness is a moment of greater closeness to what you/we all really are -- supremely connected. Every moment you push those away, close your ears to the stories, miss the sunrises and sunsets, deride the other, or commit unnecessary cruelty, you are separating yourself further from what you are, part of a connected conscious all. That's not what we're for.
That's what I think.
