What is God or Goddess? Is God "real"? Is religion even a good thing?

These are all questions that dominate the theological landscape. If we can answer them in ways that anyone open to reason can accept the religious worries of the world will almost vanish. But can they be answered in any meaningful way that people can agree upon?

At one level the word "god" is a meaningless noise that truly signifies nothing concrete. Any word that cannot be defined by pointing at some real thing or a process that everyone can agree on is called a high-level abstraction. Talking about God is to operate on one of the highest levels of abstraction. Without a common framework of experience shared by the people communicating, talking about God an exercise in futility at best.

In the broadest sense, God can be defined as the eternal aspect/source/motive of anything we cannot understand. The polytheistic pantheons of history may hold intuitive truths but the humanistic antics of the "Gods and Goddesses" showed little more than the profound ignorance of humanity for how the universe operated. Their deities acted in very human way and for very human reasons. Interestingly enough to the modern mind though, the ancients did not believe in their gods in that way. Those images were for the masses. Most religions were organized into levels of teaching.

As a person was trained and initialed, the allegorical nature of the myths was unfolded to the seeker. Later theologies, such as the Judeo-Christian branching, refined the concept of God to a much higher level but in doing so have also lost sight of the ultimately allegorical nature of all myths. And still they paid little attention to understanding how the universe was the key to understanding the nature of the Gods, if any.

But something amazing has happened in the last 100 years. Science has actually PROVEN a major tenet of a particular branch of religion to be VALID. Not that it must be but that it could be. Only one concept of deity passes the test. None of the others can fit the universe we actually SEE ourselves existing in.

This concept is Monism.

Many, many Pagans who call themselves pantheists are really Monists! ‘All is one and one is all.' ‘All Gods and Goddesses are one'. How many times have you heard this?

Well in this case, science has shown in the laboratory as well as the mathematics that if there is anything we can call God then it MUST be of a Monist nature. It is really quite simple.

Everything is just a manifestation of a piece of a seamless whole. This has been tested and re-tested and every experiment confirms that the universe is, at its deepest level, One Thing. Not just space and energy and matter but time itself are blended into ONE cosmic oneness.

Now this doesn't have much effect on most Wiccans and Neo-Pagans. But it does upset a lot of mythological apple carts all the way from Judeo-Christianity to the truly Pantheistic Heathen faiths.

Think about it. How can any god or goddess be a distinct entity when you YOURSELF are not a distinct entity? And nothing else is either. This extends into time and well as space.

Reality is an IS-ness, not a process.

I have always had a great interest in how everything worked and possess a strong intuitive grasp of physics. Once a principal was explained clearly, it made perfect sense. Newton and Einstein's ideas became a playground in my mind! But quantum physics eluded me. I read about the double-slit experiment and just went fizzled on getting any grasp of meaning or pattern. So I left it alone and let my understandings of other areas develop.

In a like way I drifted from Christian to Agnostic to Wiccan by seeking a path that ‘fit' everything I understood, not just part of it. I finally found it, or it found me. Years passed and I settled in my new faith but still sought to learn more about existence itself.

Then I finally found a clear depiction of the core aspects of quantum physics. It was like two halves of my psyche, the "reality" and the theology, suddenly merged.

EVERYTHING in the Wiccanesque theology fit so well with reality itself! Rather than changing a thing about my religion, my learning in science extended and solidified my "faith" until I can't really call it that anymore. The most beautiful thing about it is how it all just works!

I do not have to juggle and piece things together to span from science to theology. Theology is just the aspects of science that we cannot wrap out heads around in one piece. We need metaphor and analogy to convey things more intuitively. The problem is that for thousands of years allegorical and mythological language has been used REGARDLESS of whether there was any valid information being conveyed!

For religion to leave the dark ages, this has to change!

Imagine a secular theology. A framework that has aspects shared by ALL religions that are not lunatic cults. Aspects that can be talked about and pointed to in reality. Just like the Golden Rule, which can be shown in purely secular terms to be a desirable trait in society, entire religions can share a larger structure that actually reflect the reality that our Gods exit within!

Virtually all major religions already share that Golden Rule component even though a few, like Islam, choose to limit the concept to only those who share that religion.

With our new understanding of reality and time, much more can be shared. The downside is that reality does not seem to be on the side of the most powerful religions existing today!

But on the upside, Wicca and most Neo-Pagan religions, as well as Hinduism, have nothing to fear from science. Quite the opposite.

Do you have any idea how much fun it is to convince an atheist physics major that their own beloved science not only allows the concept of Monist Deity but almost demands SOMETHING to exist that fits the bill?

As the ramifications of the new physics spreads, you can expect the "traditional" religions to continue to fade while the monist faiths only grow stronger.

Any religion that has to depend on dogma and mythology that does not fit into reality will be facing an uphill battle to win new converts and to retain the young as they learn about reality with a new understanding.

It is often said that people can't hear the Voice of God because they won't shut up long enough. I have reinterpreted Genesis to show that the ancients may well have had some pretty profound intuitive understandings. Most other mythologies also have interesting intuitive truths. But the more you try to take them literally, the further you stray from reality.

To take those intuitive allegories and try to make them historical myths is to lose the path of what you were seeking to find: Truth!

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Quantum Theory.
We live in an amazing time. Two of the deepest mystery's of large scale physics ended up solving each other. Most of the problems with the models of the evolution of the universe have vanished like the dew in the light of the new insights from these issues.

All of this has only served to deepen the universe though, to make it MORE comfortable a place for Gods to live in. But these gods would be no more separate entities than we are at the core of Reality. We are far from proving any deity actually is, but much closer to seeing that the quest for truth is not one of futility. Quantum theory even allows possible pathways by which magic can operate.

Imagine a day when religions are like cars. They serve different functions for different people but ALL, as a valid religion, can recognize ALL!

Imagine KNOWING that the God or Goddess you worship is a reflection of reality instead of some priest's ego?

It may not solve all the planets problems but I figure anything that makes televangelists get a real job is a good thing!

 

Quantum Wicca
By Guy Robert Whitney copyright 2006

God is Dead, Long Live God (in this article I use the word God in place of Deity, it includes all personal forms of Deity, god and goddess and spirit. It simply scans better and is not meant to endorse or preclude the "God/ess" of any religion. In this article God is NOT Jehovah, Jesus, Odin, Osiris or Athena, Brigid, Sophia or Isis. For the purpose of theology all of those are merely symbols that humans use to relate to the unknowable. Theology is not about religion. Religion is a particular set of symbols that humans use, theology is trying to understand what is behind those symbols. I call this something God here though in personal use I use both God and Goddess)

In the 14th and 15th centuries Western theology had to abandon much of its view of basic reality in order to remain relevant to the truth of the quest to know God. Some churches fought tooth and nail, some retreated deeper into literalism, but many began to incorporate the new view of reality into their theology. New Religions and new sect appeared to try to fill in the missing connections with the real world. Today we have entered a new century after spending over 100 years formulating a profoundly new view of the nature of the universe and reality itself. It is time to move beyond 19th century theology and explore the realm of 21st century quantum theology. Both philosophers and scientists can now agree to the inescapable conclusion that everything, the entire universe and cosmos, are one. Let me say it again. What high philosophy has said for thousands of years is proven by science and quantum physics. We are not talking about silly-science, but mainstream, broad based acceptance, and experimental proof. There is only ONE thing in the entire universe, the universe itself. All time, space, mass and energy are inseparable and seamless. We are not "connected' or "linked" to the people and things around us. We are ONE with them. Mass and space and energy CAN appear and disappear. Even the laws of entropy have been shown to be as limited as Newton's mechanics when talking about the foundation level functioning of the universe. Something that has long been intuitively known by those who meditate is now laboratory proven fact; All is truly One.

At the quantum level there is no Is. Nothing IS. All is flux and probability, not what WE call reality. At the primary level an electron ISN'T, a proton ISN'T, nor photons or neutrons. It is only probabilities of being and location. But these probabilities intersect with other probabilities and gradually, then suddenly, appears certainty. For a moment. Then the electron and the photon it interacted with are NOT again. Step back a bit and then the probabilities intersect more often and more things suddenly ARE. Now we see atoms and light rays, but don't look too close or they become whatever we are looking for and nothing that we are not, within certain limits. At a certain level there are so many probabilities colliding that all seems real and stable. This is the world we see with our eyes and our other senses. Most of us think of atoms as electrons whirling around hard cores of protons and neutrons, but this is a false picture. Nothing IS until it has a significant probability of interacting with some other bit of nothing. But All of that nothing is part of a seamless whole. A foundation of reality, time and space. Everything just an expression of it's interaction with another part of the universal everything.

Any world view or religion that does not take into account quantum physics and its description of reality that has been tested and proven without a single failure time and again is doomed to wander in a spiritual dead end. God works and exists in this quantum reality. I do not feel God created the universe so much as was co-created. God is what we call the idea of an ego, a personality, monitoring and controlling the universe. But God must be part of that same universe. Otherwise a truly personal relationship with God would be impossible. IF God was outside of our world there would be no interaction. Both space AND time would be fixed to an outside observer of our reality. Every pattern and cycle would be fixed and unchangeable from beginning to end to God. No growing of a relationship between man and God, no intervention or modification of plan. To look at the universe from outside is to see all of time, not just all of space, unchangeable. The universe would be a pretty knickknack, a crystal bauble to put on a shelf and admire. God can not be part inside and part outside. The part outside would be just as connected to the inside and so BE inside what can be considered the connected reality we call cosmos. If God has a conscious ego then we are intimately connected to it. We are PART of the mind of God. God does indeed look through our eyes.

This is the basis for any modern theology as I see it. So, where does that leave us with all the universal questions of theology? Let us begin at the beginning.

Genesis:

In the Beginning the Universe was without form and void. But God was there. That is who/what God IS, that which was before there was anything. God is still there. God is the very framework and background and initiating force of everything that we can see, feel or know.

Then God said let there be Light! And Time began. All was chaos and confusion. But the nature of God was Law and could never allow this lawlessness to continue and swiftly ordered all into order and cycles and simplicity. The universe grew more and more beautiful and complex. The very laws of God demanded Growth, Change, and Diversity. A point was reached when it seemed all was, if not stable, then predictable, proceeding with nothing essentially New. But God's Law was not finished. The universe was dividing into two parts. One whole still, whole in the heart of God, but a duality, a polarization had occurred. God had breathed the Breath of Life into the World. This polarity deepened and grew. Living things appeared. Things that moved and grew and changed beyond the simple laws of physics and motion. Again God's Law had made Beauty more Beautiful. Then Life began to assume its own duality, a rich harmony based in and an echo of the primal split of living and non-living.
Male and Female were they created, Life reaching to Life to create Beauty and change and growth. Life followed its cycles and rippled through time to God's Law but even then God was not finished. God had let life produce a Mind, a Soul to act for God always in accordance with God's Law.

Intelligent Life is God's Will manifest.

How did we get Here?

Mankind is, and always has lived in the heart of God. There can be no measure of distance from us to God. No measure of time where God is not with us, of us. Indeed nothing in all God's World can be separate from God. Or each other. The Light that God created merely reflected and refracted through the lenses of Gods Mind, God's Law to produce the rainbow worlds and stars and all that is and will be. We are God's Children, not God's toys. There are inescapable laws that must be followed. Nothing impossible to God's Law can happen, but it would be wrong to say that all that happens or that we do is God's Will. If there is an Ego, an "I" to the universal mind of God it promotes harmony and balance, not chaos. But as the soul of God becomes the breath of life in one of our souls free will is given. We always can and Always DO only that which God allows yet the Law of God is not a jail, it includes choice and desire. We are not programmed machines, we are co-creators of the next new pattern in the mind of God. We choose our actions but God's Law holds us responsible for it. We must live in the world we create. Every choice and action changes all patterns we are a part of; indeed every thing IS one pattern so everything we do IS a change to that pattern. One with echoes and resonances and, harmonies.

The universe is not done growing, it is not done changing. We are perfect since we are perfectly ourselves. But that perfection is for here and now. Complaisance is not part of our destny, instead, like the universe we are restless and ever changing and growing.
We are but a slice of the Mind of God in Time. We have free will but can never break the law. We cannot even be sure that any particular thing we do is choice or a conflux of patterns we cannot affect. How can we know what God WANTS us to do? How do we know there IS a God?

Are we alone?

Much about God is unknowable, it must be accepted that this is so to progress in finding God. The Facet of the Soul of God we call Me is just a facet, one confluence of universal thread in the tapestry that is All. That Facet cannot Be the whole jewel and also we cannot be other than the facet. Those that try to Know too much of God must rely on lies and distortions and illusion to construct their vision of God. The Facet has turned away from the jewel and called itself, it's prejudices and desires God. To try too hard to define God is to attempt to BE God. But since we already ARE of God in all our being this only blinds us to Truth.

This universe came to be and is, was shall always be root and branch a product of what was "before" the Light, that which gave the universe an environment to grow in. The Mind of God is not the mind of a man. The minds of Man are infinitesimal parts OF the Mind of God. The finger knows the brain is there even if it doesn't understand why it moves as it does. If the finger cares about anything it is being the best finger it can for the purpose of the Mind. It is not so important to worry about what God wants you to Do as it is to worry about what you should Be. To know what you should Be first you must know who you Are. God's reality decreed you would be a Human Being. Fallible, unfinished and ever seeking to grow and change and develop.

Is God a nice Lady?

God the Father, Mother Goddess. Man or Woman? Male or Female? Mother or Father? The Judeo/Christian/Islamic Churches hold that God is Male only, yet the Judaic tradition that it derives from always held that God is both Male and Female. They address God as male as we say Man when we mean mankind as a verbal shorthand. Is the gender of God even something that means anything? Are the masculine and feminine actual aspects of reality or just the prejudices of sexual beings? I propose that the male/female duality is indeed intrinsic to the natural universe. When a child is conceived the main source of its genes are the female X chromosome. The male chromosome modifies it and adds the structures of the male. All of us are female first as we develop in our mothers womb. I see the Feminine as that aspect that is passive and cyclical and the source or root. The female is, the male does. This is not to say that women should not strive to Do things. All of us are Both; a unique balance between the physical gender and the psychological/spiritual gender. When the universe began it passively obeyed the laws of physics. Stars formed, gasses condensed and planets congealed according to fixed laws. Given particular conditions. Matter/Energy produced basically consistent results. But then something happened. Something new. Matter began to form complex entities called life.

Living things did not just passively respond to the forces around them. They acted, they moved of their own will. Yet every atom of their being was the same matter that made up the non-living parts of the universe. The Feminine universal patterns birthed Life, which in turn inseminated new conditions in both the living and non-living parts of the world. I see the feminine as the base, the root of all. The masculine is the part that acts, that seeks. Feminine without Masculine is stagnant; the Masculine without the Feminine is cancerous and in the end sterile. Both the universe and life are made up of two intertwined aspects or forces. The Male, the Female. We are both and so is the universe and so is God. The Fairie Wicca creation myth with the Blue God spinning off from the Goddess and changing and returning actually fits the Quantum reality very well. Hence the name of this article. We have di

Can the Quantum God Love?

How can we be loved by this vision of God? In the same way as we can love our bodies and minds and selves. We are Of God. We are Part of God. Unconditionally, whether we recognize it or not. Much has been made by certain religions of the seeking of God's "forgiveness". This is not the way to look at it. Do we ask our heart to repent and seek forgiveness for having a heart attack? No, we love our heart as a vital part of our self and seek to care for it and help it to heal. When we fall short of what we could/should do/be God does not turn away in disgust. God understands and forgives and waits for us to remember who and what we are. No person is perfect. We all fail in what WE believe to be our purpose and role in life. But these purposes and limits are created by humans, it is a struggle that relates to the human world. We live in a human world. We cannot just forgive the murderer or rapist. We must deal with them in human terms to protect the balance of society. But to project human ways and laws onto God is a mistake. God's Laws CANNOT be broken anymore than gravity can make things fall up. Thinking that God has turned from you because you fail in human ways is to add to the struggle not helping it. God does not choose sides, God does not harm or heal based on human affiliations. The power of God is available to us all, to use or misuse (according to human standards) To truly KNOW that whatever you do, whoever you are God LOVES you and forgives you is to free yourself from the very limits that can keep you from becoming what/who YOU feel you SHOULD be. It is a trap that must be overcome to be free to live in a Loving, Godly way. To feel that God hates you or does not love you is to project YOUR feelings onto God. It is YOU or your church that won't forgive or love unless certain conditions are met. Gods love is unconditional and eternal. To KNOW this is to be free to be loving and Godly and is the first step to true righteousness.

The Role of the Church

Churches are curious entities. They seek to guide people to God yet all too often are only the arm of human ego and political control. Many people only go to church for the social and economic benefits. Is it possible to have a church that really leads people to God or is it only possible to find God on your own? In the current state of human development it seems most people are not prepared to or even willing to strike out into their soul and find God alone. Pete Townsend once wrote "you've all been shown many times before, Messiahs pointed to the door, but no-one had the guts to leave the Temple" But can a teacher/priest/minister actually TEACH people to find God? Is it inevitable that their own egos and prejudices will cloud more than clarify? Do doctrine and dogma help or hinder the quest for God? Unfortunately I do not believe that it is possible to have a church that truly can lead all to God who are willing. People are all unique individuals and our understanding of human minds and souls is limited at best. To fulfill their function appropriately I think that churches need to focus on those aspects of Deity that are shared by most all religions; The Love of God and our fellow humans and all of God's world. The rest of their function should remain social, it is a mistake for priests to assume they and only they can teach truth. None of us has all the truth in our hands and should not presume to stand between God and another human. We will continue to have churches, and temples and mosques and synagogues but we should not let them rule us or keep us from knowing God in our own hearts.

Doing Your Job in the Eyes of God

God's HR dept is a bit annoyed lately. It seems a lot of people around the world have lost track of the job they are here on Earth to do. It is not an easy job but we all should be doing it.

What is ego? What is that funny thing, that "I" that looks out from behind our eyes? I think there are two "I"s in a person. The one in control most of the time is based in memory. In our life as human beings everything we do and think is based in the memories, our "database of reality". A child sees time run slowly by but the older you get the faster the days weeks and years flow by. Why? Simply because as we get older we compare what is happening with what is already in our memories. Our memories ARE our reality. 5 year old children see a day last forever because they have only seen 1825 of them, whereas a forty year old has seen 2000 WEEKS. Our conscious ego is just software and memory running in the biological hardware of our brains and senses. Put a person to sleep and take away all their memories and it would be like rebooting your computer. All you would get is a blank stare and reflex actions. The person, the "I" would be gone forever. Without even the memories that a new born carries from the womb, without the software building itself bit by bit as the hardware forms could this person ever again come to consciousness? Probably not. Each stage of development, mental and physical is interrelated. The mind programs itself based in the current stage of physical development. Each new stage of brain is accompanied by a new stage of mental programming. Only by the early twenties has the physical "machine" become fully wired. But would they lose their soul? No, the very hardware, the energy of the software and the time and space they move within are ONE THING. But it all is still matter and energy that is part of the universal whole. Nothing can change that. God's eyes would not shut on our poor mind wiped person.

So what does this have to do with God's HR dept? What is this job that is not getting done? There are two complaint's going over the dept. chiefs desk for the last few thousand years (and that was just between clock in and first coffee break to her timescale.). The first is about the quitters. The ones who have stopped working at all to sit and meditate their lives away. Their personal "I" closing its eyes and napping in the mind of God. That intuitive connection to God that we all share is wonderful, but we were not sent here to do nothing but bask in it like a hot tub. Memo; if you must spend most of your time contemplating God then at least teach or DO SOMETHING with what you learn.

But the biggest problem the Chief talks about is the independents, the ones who close their eyes to God. All too often these are the very ones who use religious power the fullest. Their mind has closed from its relationship with all that is around it and struck out to build a world view based in their own ego and desires. They are spiritual Newtonians building a clockwork toy of a reality, denying the reality that ALL the parts they use and misuse are of God. Memo: God put you here for a reason, if you are not serving God at the core then nothing you do is really "on the clock" and you will not be paid.

So what is our job here on this Earth? It is simple. To live, love, learn and act. We are the physical eyes and hands of God. All life simply the part of reality that ACTS. We are not here to find a way to escape, nor are we here to die with the most toys, power etc. We are here to learn and act and build, with one "I" looking on the world and one "I" looking on God. We are here to pray and meditate but only as they serve building an intuitive picture about what we are supposed to DO in life, not as an alternative. We are also not here to close our minds to hearing God (God always is connected to US whether we acknowledge it or not). While we use our Conscious "I"s eye to pursue toys and power. Our Godly "eyes" are closed. We have a left brain and a right brain; let's start paying attention to Both sides instead of just one. We are here to be both. To Live and Love and Sweat and Learn, and to Feel and Care and cultivate the eyes of God. Our lives should be grounded in both worlds. Learning and understanding the reality we see with our eyes and also learning and being guided by the intuitive understanding of the reality beyond everyday life. We have a left brain and a right brain, not just one or the other.. Let's stop stressing out the Big Boss's staff and start doing ALL our job.

This is my first entry. I have to run so I will be back later t do something real : - )