God and Revolution, Choosing Hope, Reconsidering Antisemitism, An Anatomy of Our Thinking (4), by Ray Zwarich

I often lie in the dark and think about the Nature of God. I hope all of us do. It can be very therapeutic, by helping us maintain a perspective from which we can see ourselves, and our lives, from the broadest, most distant, yet most relevant and valuable possible point of view. It can help us stay sane, (or at least somewhat saner), during these trying times when we, here in our broken bleeding nation, are all engulfed by the oozing cold molasses goop of mass insanity, which assaults us constantly, and mercilessly, on every side, from every direction.

I like the term “the Nature of God”, because I’ve always thought that God and Nature are one and the same. As a child, reading Jack London was like reading a bible. That’s why I liked Jefferson’s use of the term “Nature’s God”, in naming the source that grants us our presumed “inalienable rights”, from the first time I first read it when I was 9 or 10 years old.

I think best on the infinitely mysterious nature of God in the quiet of the early morning darkness, when consciousness first returns from a deep sleep, when the crazy complexities of vivid dreams yet linger, when I am no longer asleep, but not yet quite awake either. My thinking at such times, and in such circumstances, has led me to know ‘for certain’ that God exists.

I live my life in ‘awe’ of the mystery of infinite time and space. I only need look up on any clear night to know that my finite human mind can never grasp an understanding of what I am seeing. I always know, when I look out from this tiny vantage point, out into impossible distances, and back into times long gone by, that I am looking directly into the Face of God… And I am always filled with utter AWE.

I thus know, for CERTAIN, that there is a God.

But does God loves us? THAT is the question…

Does Good love us? Does God even hear our prayers? Did God create life to fulfill some ‘holy’ purpose? Does God care about Humanity’s fate? Or did we evolve into ‘being’, simply by the accidents that only infinite time and space make possible? After all, and as we all likely know, an infinite number of theoretical chickens, pecking at an infinite number of theoretical keyboards, would eventually type out, exactly, word for word, with every tiny detail of punctuation exactly the same,  every work of great human literature, every single piece of human writing of any kind, every entry in every teen-age girl’s diary, that any human has ever written since the dawn of human language.

THAT is ‘infinity’. It’s a concept that our finite human minds simply cannot encompass the meaning of. Surely there lies God. Surely we mere humans must be in utter AWE of this God that exists in the infinite depths of the eternal mystery of ‘infinity’ itself.

Does “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, (D Thomas), weep for Gaza? Or is all creation, all reality, is all the universe of cold sharp rocks and fiery suns hurtling through the unimaginable infinite expanses of emptiness, completely indifferent to us? (“O my god… Are we here all alone?”, said Mr. Jones).

Is the force that created this infinite mystery, is this force we may call “God”, this force that, by itself, regardless of its consideration of us, or lack of same, commands our complete and utter AWE, is this force indifferent to all our hopes and dreams, uncaring of the fate of we stinking striving beasts? As we grovel for life on our one tiny planet, driven by the leaking juices coursing through us, eating, defecating, rutting, fighting, hoping, wanting, laughing, loving, dying, rotting… are we all alone amidst the cruel vastness of eternal empty space?

“The lips of time leech to the fountain head;” wrote the poet, Mr. Thomas, (as linked above). “Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind how time has ticked a heaven round the stars. And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb how at my sheet goes the same crooked worm”.

Every human tribe and/or civilization has created a concept of God, or, in many cases, of ‘the gods’. There is clearly a ‘need’ in us, programmed into our very human nature, coded into our instincts, into our DNA itself, to have a ‘higher authority’ to look up to, to worship, and/or to fear, and/or to obey. Every single one, every single human society, from the most elemental primitive tribes to great complex civilizations, since the misty dawn of human time, has created a concept of ‘god’. That alone should lend us a clue.

Why do we need God? Does our omnipresent need of God, present among every primitive tribe as it is among every great ‘civilization’, not suggest the question: does God need us? Why else is this written into our deepest, most basic instincts? Does God need us to fulfill some purpose?

There lies a convincing clue, but certainly not proof… not to a scientifically discerning mind. Other answers to those questions might exist, the objective scientist would feel obligated to point out, answers we simply haven’t yet discovered.

But I am certain, beyond any possible doubt, that there is a God. God’s face is there before us, clear as the miracle of sunshine that grows our corn, that gives us life. In any direction we choose to look we see the mystery of infinite ‘being’, of infinite ‘reality’. Is that not God’s Own Face? How much space, after all, can our finite minds discern between mystery and miracle… between matter and energy, (E=MC2, eh?)… between eternal time and infinite space… between our human hopes, the power of human love, and so much human pain and suffering… between being born and dying… ?

There lies the very mystery of Infinity… In every unit of time, no matter how small, infinite divisions remain. Does every nano-second, (one billionth of a second), not itself contain an infinite number of further divisions?  Is there a smallest unit of distance, or time, to define ‘infinity’, to define ‘reality’ on one end, as the endless expanse of ’empty’ space, the infinite vacuum of nothingness, defines it on the other?

Are there only two ‘ends’ of infinite reality? Are there only the infinitely large and the infinitely small? In the relation between eternal time and endless space, how many ‘ends’ might there be? Does time itself fracture into some other dimension? At some mysterious point does zero collide, or perhaps merge gently, with infinity? If we divide by 0, or multiply by infinity, doesn’t the product of the latter equal the quotient of the former?  Is reality some sort of ‘mobius strip‘, (which any of us can make with a strip of paper and a dollup of paste), only with all dimensions, even time, twisted upon themselves, rather than just the two dimensions of a plane, which can so easily be twisted to have only one side?

There lies the mystery of infinity. There lies the Face of God.

In every parcel of matter,  whether infinitely large or infinitely small… or in empty space, in the endless expanse nothingness itself… or in infinite units of ‘eternal’ time, whether in infinite divisions of nano-seconds, or in unimaginably unmeasurable eons, however small these infinite portions may be, or stretching before us forever in all the vastness of the infinite “one-truth”, the endless “universe”… can we not all see the very Face of God? Are not all the grains of sand on every beach on Earth an ‘infinitesimally’ tiny number when measured against the infinite expanse of all the grains of silicate matter in all the universe? Is that alone not a mystery that we, as mere finite mortal creatures, cannot begin to fathom?

Is that not the unfathomable nature of this ‘thing’, this ‘concept’, this eternal mystery, that we call “reality”? Is it not all but a glimpse of God?

How far will a single photon of light travel, at 186,262 miles every second? (A ‘photon’ is a discrete ‘package’ of pure energy, into which light organizes itself). Like a nano-bullet shot from even the most powerful gun, will it  ‘ever’ just ‘peter out’, and then stop? If it does, how long will that take, and, at 186k miles traveled every dang second, how impossibly far will it have gone? Or will it shoot through the vacuum of nothingness, through empty space, forever? What the sam-heck is ‘forever’? How ‘far’ is ‘forever’, as we finite humans have no choice but to measure endless distance as a function of eternal time? In their eternal mystery, are time and space themselves not God’s creation(s), or perhaps are they God Itself?

Such silly questions are the thoughts of a finite human fool. Such are the thoughts that pass through my mind, lying in the dark, crazy vivid dreams rapidly fading, no longer asleep, but not yet fully awake either. “Be not afeard”, spake Caliban, the creature sprung from the genius of Shakespeare’s imagination, neither beast, nor fully human either… (and an alter-ego I’ve long inhabited). “Be not afeard.. The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not, ready to drop upon me; that, when I waked, I cried to dream again”. 

And all our most brilliant brains have spent multiple lifetimes asking themselves these questions, searching in vain for any answers, as they study ‘reality’ with all the intensity of human yearning itself.

After thousands of years of intense human study, as a thigh bone became a sling, a spear, and then a bow-and-arrow, and then the exploding energy of gunpowder, and then the elemental energy of the atom was unlocked to become the weapons that now threaten us with self-annihilation… As a canoe on a river became ships sailing across the oceans… as our marvel at the flight of birds became airplanes to fly us through the air… Then rockets to propel us off the Earth itself…. After all this yearning study of the mystery of reality, the best that our most brilliant brains have yet been able to give us is what they call the ‘Big Bang’? There was ‘nothing’. And then a big explosion suddenly became ‘reality’?

LOL… Yea… Well… Okey doke, then… LOL… but… but… what was ‘there’ BEFORE the explosion? Did time not even exist? Something happened ‘after’… What was ‘there’ before?… Does the latter not imply the former?… What is the nature of ‘nothingness’? Did the vacuum of ‘space’ not surely existed before matter and energy exploded into it? Reality itself just suddenly exploded into existence?… LOL… After all your thousands upon thousands of years of intensely learned study, the best you can give us is “and then there was light”?…

Gee… Thanks, fellas… But… uhh…. That’s the SAME thing that ‘they’ said several thousands of years ago. They even wrote it down… God said “Let there be light”, and then there was light.

My derision, of course, is given in good humor, with tongue in cheek. The humor in it makes my point. The mystery of ‘infinity’ is simply NOT a concept that we mere mortal humans, with our finite minds, forever trapped in our finite ‘reality’, no matter how brilliant our minds may be, can EVER ‘understand’, other than as ‘mystery’, other than as a “God Unknown”. (Hello Betty).

“O Humanity, heirs of Glory, heroes of unwritten story, nurslings of one mighty Mother, hopes of her, and one another; rise like Lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number, shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you –Ye are many – they are few.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley – from ‘The Mask of Anarchy‘.

Throw off the yoke of the evil ‘engineers’… Nurture the seeds of joy within you… Rejoice in being alive… Claim your living power to set wrongs to right… Be not lost to self-destroying anger gone to mindless rage, over the violence engendered in our hearts by the deadly bloody tragedies imposed upon us.. Be not hateful over the evil wrought upon us…Be not afeard to give your heart fully, be foolish enough to give it without reservation, to love in spite of all… Be forgiving as ye ask humbly for forgiveness… Be kind in your hearts… Spill out your kindness on others… We have been deliberately ‘incapacitated’… Re-capacitate yourselves… Be alive with the awareness of God all around us, however you choose to define that Infinite Mystery.

“And I have felt a ‘presence’ that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought, a sense sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is in the light of setting suns, and in the round ocean, and in the living air, and in the blue sky, and in the minds of [Humankind]” — Wordsworth — from ‘Tintern Abbey‘… (with minor liberties taken)…

*****

I beg thee understand… This is not a ‘religious’ sermon… It is rather an exhortation to revolution…

Like poor Caliban, only partly human, I dwell in the realm of Spirits, not of robed priests… I have not affected the comforts of ‘faith’ provided by any formal religion. Please know, please have no doubt, that I do pray fervently, but as an expression of my Hope, not as an assumption of ‘faith’ and/or of any other presumptuous ‘belief’. As a mortal finite man, I dare not claim to know the nature of infinity, nor the mind of God, nor the essential Nature of God. But I fervently hope that this mystery we call “God”, this infinite force and power whose eternal Nature our finite human minds can NEVER know or grasp, this infinite force that we mere humans can NEVER know or describe or define, this mysterious miraculous “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, that drives an infinite host of planets around an infinite number of suns, I fervently hope that this force, this “God” does love us. I fervently hope that this force is not indifferent to us, but hears our prayers, and cares about our yearning hopes, and has created us to fulfill some purpose we cannot yet know, or even yet fathom.

I don’t pretend to know, nor believe, that God loves us… My fervent prayers are an expression of my fervent Hope, not of an assumed ‘faith’, or a presumed ‘belief’.

*****

Am I religious, then? Do I have religion? Hmm…

Jesus himself did not say he was ‘God’, or even ‘a god’. In the bible I read, in all the Gospels, Jesus ALWAYS calls himself the “son of Man”… ALWAYS…

The only Bible I own or have read, (which I picked up, long ago, from among the chaotic filth of an abandoned ‘crack-house’ in Kansas City, Missouri), has all the words that Jesus is attributed with actually having spoken, in red. I have read them all, and unless I somehow missed it, Jesus never claimed to be God come to walk among humans. He never claimed to be other that a “son of Man”.

It was the authors of the Four Gospels, writing many decades (even over a century) after Christ was executed, that transformed Jesus the Great Prophet into the living ‘God’ sent to Earth to walk among us. Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John were not eye-witnesses to the life of that Great Prophet. They were reporting a mythology that had been handed down to them by word-of-mouth. They wrote down, possibly with their own embellishments, of course, the reverent awe-struck whispered rumors that had passed from ear to ear, from parents to children who were not yet even born when Jesus walked. It was these ‘Gospels’, written after generations had verbally repeated a ‘legend’, until it was grown into a ‘mythology’, that transformed this Great Prophet, Jesus, who called himself the “son of Man”, into the ONE living ‘God’ that all must worship on pain of hellfire…

Jesus did not claim to be ‘God’… Did he? Show me, in case I somehow missed it, where he made that claim. Was it not the self-consecrated ‘high priests’ of formalized Christianity, who donned gilded robes and affected the pretenses of holiness, the priests of the formal religion that the Romans intentionally spread to counter the Judaic rebellions against Roman authority, that elevated a humble carpenter revealing a hopeful prophecy into the ONE living God? Was it not the formal governing political hierarchy of the Christian Church, a political organization, that created the “Holy Trinity” which made Jesus, who had emphatically and always called himself the “son of Man”, into the tripartite corporeal entity which was their version of the one, the ONLY ‘God’, that ALL must worship, or else feel the eternal pain of hell’s fire?

Was Jesus was not born purple and wet in human juices, bloody from a woman’s womb, the product of his father’s helplessly compelled manly passion? Did he not blossom magically into a rosy peach color, (as did my own three daughters at their birth, before my very eyes), when he took took his first breaths, then cried out his anger to have been expelled from the comforts of the ‘holiness’ of the female human womb? Did Mary not cry out in the pain of childbirth, did her fingers not grip the straw, did her nails not claw at the stable’s dirt floor, did the sinews in her neck, at the sides of her throat, not draw as tight as steel cords, as she screamed in her female courage and determination, as Joseph watched in helpless anxiety to see his beloved wife suffer so? Did she not weep with joy, laughing at the same time, when the pain bore its fruit, and the babe was placed into her arms?  Was the baby not wrapped in swaddling, to catch his human defecations? Did he not still his cries and take comfort in his nurture at his mother’s soft swelling breast? Did she not feel the rapture in her milk’s flow?

What does the imposed ‘magic’ of a virgin giving birth, imposed by self-consecrated male priests, in gilded robes, presumptuous of their own ‘holiness’, add to the miracle of a child’s birth? Why must his mother be a magical virgin, rather than he himself being the miraculous product of the human love and passion between a man and a woman, between a husband and his wife, between a wife and her husband?

Eh?

​*****

Is vehement resentment over our large and once powerful nation falling under the complete power of the tiny Jewish state of Israel, an example of ‘antisemitism’? If so…

Is resentment over the complete corruption of our government into a giant system of fully legalized bribery, and over the open frontal assault on the most basic “inalienable” democratic rights of the citizens of a democratic nation of 330 million people, which has thus fallen under the power of 7 million Jews in the tiny foreign nation of Israel, and their powerful and highly organized Jewish foreign-operatives in the US, an example of ‘antisemitism’? If so…

If being among we ‘goyim‘ requires us to be so stupid that we should accept being punished for even talking about Jewish power over us, or else the Jewish People will use the immense power they claim not to have to punish us by ‘canceling’ us, by rendering our lives into ruin, then you can count me among the ‘antisemites’.