The God Idea

"The world is charged with the grandeur of God". This is a line from a 1918 poem by Gerard Hopkins, and it was my senior year heading for a speech I gave to my classmates. (Great speech I must say). Nonetheless, I'm reminded of it because of a Facebook update I saw about the goodness of God:

"God is good all the time??? Some women have cancer!!! Some people just laid their mothers to rest!!!Some people are homeless!!! Africans are starving and there's even drought there!!! So...before you say God is good all the time don't be selfish just think of the innocent child that is in hospital for that tumour in his head don't be selfish.” Quite angry huh?!

In my speech I used the tactic of the speech that Mark Antony used at Julius Caesar’s funeral used to emphasis his point about the Caesar’s greatness after Caesar had been murdered by Brutus. Through repetition unto irony, he raises questions about the supposed ambition of Caesar, especially given his generosity with the poor. If you would allow me to cite it here as to give you an idea of how it went, here goes:

Complete Speech, Julius Caesar 3.2

Antony’s Speech – lines 82-117

ANTONY

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:

If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it.

Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest--For Brutus is an honourable man;So are they all, all honourable men--

Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral. He was my friend, faithful and just to me: But Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:

Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. You all did see that on the Lupercal 

I thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;

And, sure, he is an honourable man. I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke, But here I am to speak what I do know.

You all did love him once, not without cause: What cause withholds you then, to mourn for him? 

O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason. Bear with me;

My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,

And I must pause till it come back to me. [He weeps]

Antony’s Speech – lines 130-149

ANTONY

But yesterday the word of Caesar might  Have stood against the world; now lies he there. And none so poor to do him reverence.  O masters, if I were disposed to stir Your hearts and minds to mutiny and rage, I should do Brutus wrong, and Cassius wrong, Who, you all know, are honourable men:

I will not do them wrong; I rather choose To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you, Than I will wrong such honourable men.”

Round of applause please, this is such beautiful writing. Did you get the irony there? Okay before I turn this into an English class post I'd like to go back to the part about my speech. The beginning of my speech went something like this and please note I was not a Shakespeare person so this was the best I could do then:

"The world is charged with the grandeur of god. There more I read this statement the easier it is to believe. Despite that people are dying of starvation and 20 million people are made refugees (back then in 2007) from Rwanda fleeing the unrest and women being raped and macheteed but hey the world is charged with the grandeur of god. Despite the fact that a mother lost her 2 month old baby who was shot in the head by robbers in Johannesburg during a burglary, despite all that that the world is charged with a grandeur of God"..

This was written in 2007, not something recent. It was a cynical brash to the humour of how could the world be charged with god's grandeur when there is so much suffering. What kind of a God is this? A fair question from anyone who really observes what is going in the world; it feels like a madhouse where people have lost compassion for each other, where greed of a few men leaves so many lives in plight. Why isn’t God doing something about this injustice and frenzy? Through my pleading to understand why and how, I came to an awareness that made sense to me. God doesn’t allow things to happen, man does. 

Those who hate God give him the same power as those who love him. Let me say that again, Those who hate God give him the same power as those who love him. They hate god because they can't understand how a "good" god can allow bad things to happen to people. And those who love him believe that this god knows better that he condones what they see as right, from getting what they prayed for, to promoting hate for those who are different from them.. Both these groups give too much credit to a god that is sometimes good or and sometimes evil bad. Little do they see that all these are their own judgements about life experiences. Value judgments placed by a mind upon situations.

The good and bad things that human experiences is because of humanity. We collectively create our hells and heavens to the degree of our compassion and prejudices. Yet want to continue to insist that a power either than ourselves is responsible for what’s happening in the world. And all of this because of the lack of awareness of who and what we truly are; lack of awareness of our true power. Suffering is permitted by men, yes men, because they are simply driven by two ideas, the love for power and the "scarcity" syndrome. The syndrome that says there is little to go around to some lives have to be sacrificed in order for others to have enough of the scarce resources, and this then these men call, the law of averages, and some even believe is the law of nature. "The Survival of the fittest, fairest, palest" they say. Some even insinuate that it is God ordained by making up ridiculous reasons in the form of religions. The Rwandan Genocide, The Holocaust, Hiroshima, Somalian Famine, kidnap, rape, murder of your next door neighbour, all these are things done to man by man; things allowed to be by humanity upon humanity, not some god who decides the whims and woes of our lives. Man is the Creator of heaven and hell through his choice, and thus has permitted unnecessary suffering upon his kind.

People will say God is good when things go as they wished them to, and then turn around and say “he’s” unfair when they turn out not as expected. I admit I also did this when I was still ignorant of the great powers of thought and choices I have at my disposal all times. They give too much credit to a made up force that they give that force real powers with their own powers of making up beliefs.

Are there supernatural forces that act upon us or is it all our wills? It’s my opinion that those "supernatural" powers are still us, greater and broader degrees of who we are but can't truly grasp as yet. All of these powers and outcomes are the combined results of the choosing of humanity as a collective of what it thinks of itself. We really need to start being science experiments of ourselves. Study ourselves to better know the what and why of things related to life. 

People  worship or hate a "living" god which is simply a "living" idea that is kept alive with their own thoughts. Kill the thought or idea you kill the reality. And humanity has been conceiving and killing many realities and many gods as with every change in its choosing as humanity. Religion is about removing the power and responsibility of humanity from humanity. It is supposing that anything either than the humans themselves is responsible for what happens to humans. A god, and for the Greeks, it was gods, they even had a god for sleep Morpheus/Hypnos ... Some learn to give reverence to this man-made idea or ideas that soon some grow to despise it because of the powerlessness it induces in ones true identity. Many have used, and even today  many still do use, this idea to perpetuate their own personal agendas prejudices under the umbrella of "God said so" thus avoiding responsibility. The racial hates, hates on gays and lesbians. Laws are passed under the comfort of this God idea such as the recent Antigay law in Nigeria. Even in South Africa the were laws passed by the previous apartheid government that were said to be right because God forbade interracial marriages (Mixed Marriage act of 1949), this they said, got the sanctity of the bible.

To regain our true powers and thus creating Heaven here on earth I suggest we first stop hating or revering a god and start revering ourselves, for hating on a god, or an idea rather, actually empowers that god or idea in the same way as loving it. It is all your own powers, your own doing.  The evil that man does is because of the irreverence that he holds about himself, and this is the reason for all of the chaos and suffering in this world. Worshipping and idea instead of the man. (Okay that sounded atheistic lol).

When someone asks "how can God permit such suffering to happen?", I  now simply say God doesn't permit it since god is an idea, but man does, through man's ignorance of who he is in relationship to everything. That he is both the conceiver and terminator of realities. We are the gods we have been conjuring, and it is by high time that we use our god powers of choice to create the realities we say we want to live. And the first key to that is lose the idea of separateness and scarcity, and take up a new and more truthful idea that we are all one and there is enough for all of us that no one must be without.

With all that I have just said some may be thinking  "it still doesn’t answer my inquisition about why would God do that" or those who simply are appalled by my heretic claims, I would then like to leave you with a quote from a book that brought much sense to me:

“If you believe that God is some omnipotent being who hears all prayers, says “yes” to some, “no” to others, and “maybe, but not now” to the rest, you are mistaken. By what rule of thumb would God decide?

If you believe that God is the creator and decider of all things in your life, you are mistaken.

God is the observer, not the creator. And God stands ready to assist you in living your life, but not in the way you might expect.

It is not God’s function to create, or uncreate, the circumstances or conditions of your life. God created you, in the image and likeness of God. You have created the rest, through the power God has given you. God created the process of life and life itself as you know it. Yet God gave you free choice, to do with life as you will.In this sense, your will for you is God’s will for you.

You are living your life the way you are living your life, and I have no preference in the matter.”

~ Conversations With God