Theist v Atheist

If you take the apparent question of whether “god” exists or not as an existential question or as an ontological question then then I suspect that you will be caught in the never-ending, polarised and irresolvable debate between theist and atheist. Here I am at one with the Buddhist teaching that there are unanswerable questions.

It is not a question. It is not provable or disprovable. It cannot be resolved by any experiment or by any formal method of proof. It is beyond knowing. It is not a thing of the mind nor can it be captured by any web of words. It is deeper and is visceral in its intelligence. It is in how we feel and respond at the very deepest levels of being. It is when we are stripped totally bare and have no shield, no defence, no words, no wisdom, nothing more than the very breath we hang onto - there, that is the point where we touch the divine.

I have no wish to characterise the divine or to label it.

Such things we can experience, but the more we try to tangle them in webs of explanations, the more we enfold them in doctrine and belief, the more we wrap them in words like “god”, the more we try to condition and canalise them to fit in with our systems of belief and faith then the more we betray them.

Christianity, Buddhism, atheism, scientific rationalism, realism - whatever and whichever - these are just the vehicles in which we may travel for a while on our journey. We should not mistake the vehicle we are travelling in with the journey that we are making.

That is the most astonishing journey of all: the journey from our birth to our death.

And that journey is but a thread in a cloth woven since the beginnings of time.

The challenge of polarity

Polarity has always been a theological challenge to monotheism. In attempting to make the deity universal, that is to be all encompassing, the deity becomes just as strongly identified with all that is harmful, destructive, negative, "evil", or repulsive as with all that is constructive, positive, healing, "good" or attractive. An omnipotent and omnipresent god is equally good and bad, equally loving and hating, equally constructive and destructive. If not, then they are not omnipotent and omnipresent.

Watching the apologists for monotheism attempting to salvage a “loving” god from that paradox is interesting. 

The Zoroastrians did so by having two opposed deities and life as a battle ground between the two. It is likely that the Jews incorporated this into their theology during their exile in Babylon, only in a lop sided way, with their “God” on the side of goodness and, as a result of the fall, “Satan” leading the opposing team. In time the resultant lapsarian theology has become much more pronounced in many forms of Christianity than in Judaism or Islam, but is implicit in them all.

That is the problem with calling things “God” - they inflate into monsters who run eternal concentration camps called “hell”.

But why go down the route of using a noun? Why not a verb? Why not “godness” rather than “god”? Why not a quality that things can possess, a bit like a static electric charge, but which can not exist independent? That is the approach taken by Shinto. Kami are a quality possessed by things, not something that exists independently. They are not universal, nor are claims made about their being omnipotent nor omnipresent, but we all know the tangibleness of special places that fill us with senses of wonder, or of peace, or of calm, places that move us. They do indeed seem charged with something indefinable.