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Published: September 24th 2008
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I thought of this the other day. "We have an embarrassment of material riches yet a paucity of spiritual wealth". I think I made it up myself but I'm quite forgetful so I might have read it.
I discovered last week that Nathalie believes in God. I think I laughed. Rude eh! But she didn't mind as it's her god. She tells me that she's prayed at times and her prayers have been answered.
Jesu Cristo. If there is someone watching all we do, listening in all the time, then why are there are people bothering to moan about CCTV and ID cards. Or to look at it another way, assuming more than one person is praying at the same time how does god prioritise? Obviously some people's prayers don't get answered which presents more of problem than not being able to get through to the council.
I'm confused on this god thing. Most of me says it's fantasy and it's just been made up by people as a comfort, but then there are things we don't and can't know. There's a bit of me there that says why not have some made up comfort if it works?
Life and living is a struggle for many and anything to make it easier can't be bad. I see that. But the image of god that I've grown up with is the standard westernised, christian one, (which is, I guess an amalgam of previous mediterranean, judean, babylonian, greek versions). A guy on a cloud basically and that's got to be bollocks. I appreciate there's a more sophistcated idea, that of a personal god, in tune with your thoughts, desires, intentions etc which takes a believer further than the law giving, punishing god portrayed in those books, but i'm pretty sure us kids were presented with an image of a guy on a cloud when they made us close our eyes in assembly.
Maybe god is the universe. Benign as far as our understanding goes but an organism that reacts to our inputs in both physical and ethereal ways. Maybe a prayer isn't as much a phone call but a little injection of something intangible into the world or universe around us, tipping a balance which might just provide the result we'd like.
I laughed at Nathalie's god thing, as I've some roundabout conclusions that I'd come to or
read of before. One thing that sticks relates to intelligent design and the claim that "there must be a God because the world is so beautifully complex" only leads to a situation where you need something more complex and beautiful to create the thing that created the beautiful and complex world. And again and again. A pain eh! Still given I've never read the Origin of the Species or seen for myself all the evidence for Darwins natural selection any belief I have is based on hearsay. My swallowing what my science teacher and Richard Dawkin said and my faith that their not just making stuff up for some reason. (They might be shape shifting lizards for all I know, but that's another thing).
Following that, humans as a race, at least in the scientific field I think are arrogant and self-important, in as much as they, we, think we can answer everything by reason, research and calculation. B.S. Maybe we're not clever enough. Maybe there is some things we'll never understand at the heart of our, the world's, the universe's existence.
One thing I do find funny, though I might have mis-understsood when I heard it is
that when scientists calculate the forces, energy, light, mass etc holding the universe together it doesn't work out. They have to add this thing called dark matter to the equations for it all to balance. Dark matter as far as i'm aware is this thing you can't see, measure, detect or do anything with, yet it's the thing that's holding our flimsy existence together. Not just a little portion of what the universe is made up of but 80%. What Mr Scientist? Your answer to the universal question is that you can add up 20% of it and the other 80% is some "dark" thing you infer "must" be there. It's a joke isn't it? A leap of faith if I every heard one. Gimme a moody bastard on a cloud anyday.
But then maybe this dark matter is god? I think the definitive answer is no. Rather dark matter is god's giant elastic band. Holding everything together. It's a red one I think.
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Flo
Faye Thompson
oldy but goody
I like this Jay