“God” and “the Devil.” [Part II: Gods vs Higher beings]

I believe that what most people think of as “Gods” are simply beings of a higher order. They can  be corporeal or pure energy. They can show themselves to us or remain unseen. They are forces of incredible power. Forces of kindness and forces of malevolence.

I do not believe that they are Gods in the divine sense, but they are godlike, in that they have abilities and knowledge that most mortals will never realize. These beings became “Gods” in the eyes of some simply because of the stunning magnitude of their power. I think they are much like a forces of Nature itself. These “gods” are the Spirits that inhabit our world within and without. They can manipulate the very energy that holds the universe together. They slip in, out, over, under, and between the simple boundaries of our limited perception. Their realms are among the Otherworlds, heavens, and hells. These are not mythical places of divine origin. They are as real as Cleveland is to Bangkok (different and far away).

They are beings like Zeus, Athena, Odin, Thor, The Dagda, Danu, Cernunnos, Dambahlla, Legba, angels & demons, faeries, ghosts and on… and on… Some might be identified in different cultures by different names -even though they may be the same being. Zeus & Odin, the Dagda & Amon Ra, Athena & Freya, Jesus & Osiris. These may have been the same person, the same kind of energy, the same sentience. It is telling that the oldest religions all have remarkably similar stories concerning their “high gods.”

The truth about these gods lie somewhere in murky space between myth and reality. Their tales are not literal, but they all have elements of truth. Perhaps a name is wrong here, or a feat is exaggerated there, but these beings are very much real and they are out there, even now.

While these beings are not “gods” in the divine sense, for our purposes, they may as well be gods for all of the awesome power that they possess.

~~~ As far as Divine beings ~~~

As I mentioned before (see previous post) I am not an atheist. My beliefs about the nature of divine Gods are my own.

Much like the Deists of the mid 1700’s (Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, to name a few) I believe that a god of some considerable power created the universe eons ago…. Beyond this – I do not speculate.

Like a “watchmaker” this god created the piece and set it in perpetual motion. Indeed, in creating “the Universe” it is likely that this god simply constructed the first atoms and bent the unknown laws of chaos into the order which we know on Earth as: physics, chemistry, life, genetics, evolution. For all I know: this “God'” was barely sentient, had obsessive compulsive disorder, and a few trillion hydrogen atoms lying around…

Like Deists I do not believe that a divine god has ever spoken to human beings. When ones considers the infinitesimal size of a human on an astronomical scale, or when one thinks of how quickly a human life passes compared to the lives of stars… it is only arrogant to think that God would devote any more than an instant to our concerns. If anything a creator god would look upon us as humans look at a nest of ants. Holy books of revelation like the Bible, the  Quaran, the Bhagvad Gita, are all wonderul books, filled with powerful moral truths, but are wholly man-made.

Until the god of all creation personally comes down to Earth and tells me his/her story: I refuse to be so arrogant as to say I know his or her will.

 

“God” and “the Devil.” [Part I: My take on the Judeo-Christian tradition]

I do not believe in the “God” or “the Devil” of the Judeo-Christian / Islamic traditions. But I am not an atheist. To my knowledge my personal view of God and the Devil are uniquely my own. They do not mirror any other system of belief that I have yet come across. I believe that organized religion has distorted a simple idea (or simple ideals)  into something more complex than it really is.

I believe that God and the Devil represent the supreme human tendencies: Love and Hate; Peace and Anger; Good and Evil. They are not sentient beings that exist on an unseen plane of existence. They are two archetypes that we are born with imprinted upon our souls .

And this is why the Devil is so frightening. “He” lives deep within every soul. Not in the literal sense. The Devil is NOT  a sentient being, but a possible manifestation within each of us. The Devil is frightening because any one of us can become the Devil. The Devil represents the in-born capacity of each one of us to commit the most evil of acts. Adolf Hitler is a perfect example. The Devil is what every person fears they can become given correct circumstances. The Devil frightens us because we are aware that it takes so little for us to become evil. Unlike the God within us, to become like the Devil is relatively easy. To give into fear, anger, or hate, only passion is required. Only a moment of inattention. A flash of — something. Anything. This is why the archetype of a Devil personified (created by some religions) has such resonance in our psyche.

Whereas becoming and maintaining the God within us is very, very difficult. It requires literally constant meditation upon what is Right. To become what we think of as Good, to become Godlike, requires us to continually monitor our selves. It requires us to constantly watch what we say, think, feel, how we react to others. What we tell ourselves, how we act “when no one is watching.” People like Buddha and Jesus Christ are excellent examples of human beings that became Godlike. Buddha called this process “Enlightenment.”

Few people can ever become Godlike. I dare say it requires decades of effort, mediation, prayer, and other strategies to master your mind. It certainly requires some kind of special insight. I think this is why the few people who reach this lofty goal are in turn worshiped by other people as “Gods.” Conversely, most people never become the Devil either. But the road to evil is far shorter than the other road. I think most people spend their lives caught somewhere between these extremes.

This is what being human is all about.

Somewhere deep in our consciousness every person knows this. Every human being is aware of this fact on some fundamental level. This is where the archetypes that represent Good and Evil stem from. The struggle within ourselves to be be Good or to be Evil is what has given rise to metaphorical figures of “God” and “the Devil.”