Introduction to God
Wouldn't it be nice if none were needed.... introduction, that is!
But this is not your father's God, and probably not even your mother's. My father was an atheist, but this would probably not have been the God that he did not believe in. But we'll have to ask him sometime.
This God is bound neither by stricture nor scripture. It was not just by an oversight that Jesus did not have a stenographer. Jesus is the word made flesh, and that is not the Bible. All you legalistic, literalistic Pharisees out there, listen up. I may not feel disposed to repeat this. If you don't catch the spirit of what I say, you have caught nothing but hot air. You are not a computer to be programmed. Your only program is to become one with God. You will come to know God in the biblical sense, not in the literal sense. That is our eschaton, our rapture.
So whose God is this, anyway? I'm afraid I'm not enough of a scholar to provide you with a list of historical precedents, but I'm sure they're out there. My job is not to be original, it's just to be in the right place at the right time. [7/6 -- Oh, and also to keep my ear to the ground, I'm just not sure what ground....]
Clearly there is a healthy dose of pantheism and panentheism (q.v.). This goes with the immaterialist territory. You dualists will just have to lump it. But there is a much bigger dose of coherence. The coherence of God in not unlike the coherence of our own selves, there is just a lot more of it, a lot more than the sum of ours.
Neither is God a thing. God is a part of the living dialectic of love, or cosmic agape. God is the eternal cosmic potency of love. There is no other potency that is not totally dependent on this singularity. You and I have no existence outside of the ambience of that light.
One could go on. I have and will, but I trust you catch the drift.
Introduction to God (part 2) -->
7/5/02