Is it really any argument to say one doesn’t believe in God when the very use of his name concedes his existence, in that the (nay)sayer’s concept of God is presumed by he himself to be that very shared concept? Does the shared concept itself mean nothing?
Okay, there’s no God. Do we have ancestors? Did any of them act as hero’s? Did we lionize them over millennia, extracting each of their key heroic deeds (and leaving aside their lesser’s) to personify one ideal characteristic at a time through the sieve of history, negating those who’s value no longer survived extant times as a still-relevant, still-valorous deed, as representative of one of the ideal characteristics of the ultimate super character; that of a Superman to which we all revere as savior of mankind, which we all aspire in our deepest hope of ourselves? Is not Superman a representative of all our hero’s past? Is not Superman our idea of God-man, Gotmensche? Did we not contrive Superman? Does that word not exists? Is that word nothing but a string of characters to your mind? Could I have written another and conveyed the same altruistic and heroic meaning? Do you not revere? Do you not aspire? Do you say Superman is ‘just fiction’? Is your belief then, and your existence simply fiction? Does your mind (not your brain) not exist? Do you not see and think and live in narrative? Do you not perceive and grant as real, time? Do you not live by the calendar and clock? Are those not also contrivances? Are they any less real once we admit them as such?
Did we not take the random blessings from Mother Earth and combine them into the blessings of Mother Earth, amalgamate them into our dasein –our experience of being human on earth– and take those blessings as fortune from a single source, even if through a sense of thrownness into historical time and place?
Did we not take the spirit of all of the good and all of the bad of all of the archetypal characters who’s contemporary manifestations we found ourselves among -those who are modern personifications of the spirits that possess each of us from time to time– and hold them up as moral and immoral, placing expectations on each others behaviors in order to live a reasonably safe existence amongst what would otherwise become absolute privation? Are those expectations not emergent in us rather than contrived by scientific experiment?
Do we not aspire to greatness as defined by ideal characters? Does the concept of character not exist to describe those great and terrible traits?
Are these not the components of what we experience as immovable, unchanging, and true as proven by time?
Are we not discovering magical facts each day with our instruments, that have been fact as such for all of history?
Do we not experience awe at the sight of nature? Do we not weep? Do our hearts not become light and reverent at the sight of new life? Do we not wail and tear ourselves apart at the loss of an elder? Do we not mourn?
Do we not negate the word ‘god’ in place of wrestling with him and these a-scientific components of life? Do we not avoid holy books -those oldest treasure troves of esoteric writing- in order not to contend with the truths of old?
Is not our desire to write our own morals on our skin and by yard sign a sign itself that we are possessed by the spirit of all of mankind of deep history; one who needs his morals written? Are not our yard signs filthy, weak attempts to fill a nihilistic hole in our psyches where once the worship of our ancestors, their hero’s, and the collectively conceptualized amalgam of them all as monotheistic God once resided in us? Have we not simply kicked God out of the house, only to find him humbly sleeping beside our stoop each morning awaiting our sorrowful, regretful reunion? Have we not kicked the dog who loves us most in anger and resentment for the cost of feeding him?
Do we not have a common word for this strange experience? Does not the fact that we have a word which we all understand -despite our opinions of its connotations- the fact that the word exists even to this day, mean that such a thing –if not being, then concept– exists? Are there any words that do not represent concepts we hold as true, even if fictitious, contrived, whether extant or passé? Is a parlor no longer a parlor simply because we call them saloons? A saloon no longer a saloon simply because we call them a lounge? A lounge no longer a lounge simply because we call it a club? A club no longer a club simply because clubs are closed?
A word simultaneously makes a thing real and acknowledges it as such. If there is a word for God, God exists, because that word has a meaning, and those meanings are, at bottom, narrative, and we swim in the ether of narrative. Narrative EXISTS. Does it not? Are you not a story, but a mere composition of atoms? If so, what use is your collection of atoms? Why do I treat you as a moral being rather than collection of atoms? Yes, your drive is evolutionary. But why is there a you? Why are you a bag of stories walking around IN a story, telling stories, and playing a character?
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
William Shakespeare
If Shakespeare exists; if Superman exists; if you live in a story; if existence is; then God is, for God is our most grand narrative –narrative of all narrative– and perhaps narrator who like M Night Shyamalan or Stan Lee, enjoys writing himself in as one of us, an NPC of sorts, from time to time just to experience the only thing a boundless, omniscient writer cannot experience: the constraint of direct submission to the laws of physics of his world, the boundaries of his story.
And if you accept your narrative nature, then accept the writer. And if the writer, then call him an author. And if an author, his authority to write. And if authority, his care for characters. And if characters, that you are one. And if you are, that you have been written and possessed by the author. And if possessed, then regard yourself as author. And if by god, then a manifestation of god; a player on stage. And if a player, then do please play–entertain your best; make a tune, tell us a story; manifest the glory of god that is in you; that is you.
If at some point in your world-building, inside your Minecraft (think about that beautiful Germanic name; Mein Kraft; ‘my making’) you decide to leave for a while, in order that you might revisit some time in the future to discover anew what weird and wonderful things have happened; to remember something new through your creation.
Where there is time, there is a plot, where there is a plot, narrative speaks its epochal truths, where there is truth, there is an ideal, where there is an ideal, there is striving, falling short, sin, morality, resentment, humanity judging itself and its other in comparison to its aggregate heroic ideal; “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” In clearer terms derived from the Greek, Hamartia: all have missed the mark at which we owe a debt of eternal aiming and of orienting our lives toward; the honoring of the sacrifices of our great ancestors’ that ensured our very existence today–our every opportunity paid for in real sacrifice to their future, us; in sacrifice to us. And so we must do the same. That is our debt, our burden to the future, the future of this unending story of humanity.
If you, then Shakespeare and music and fractals. If all or even one of these, then God.
If you; then God.