What proof can possibly be offered? The miracle of life? The ability of a plant to perform photosynthesis? The existence of the oceans? The way that the moon controls the tides? The way that a bee pollinates a flower?
These are all miracles, and they occur every day. That's the only proof I require to believe.
No, a miracle is when a
scientifically impossible event occurs.
You seem to hold nature in awe, as something beautiful and precious. You're right to do so. Things are far stranger than you can imagine.
But 'God' in this sense is just a word reducible to 'Nature' or 'Causality' or 'The Way Things Are and Will Always Be No Matter What Happens or Will Happen'; Hegel talked of 'God' in the same way.
It's a language game, but it's subtle and it's insidious; there's a whole contradictory idealism that comes with it by extension.
If God is not a continual moral force - an intervenor - then he is redundant, and we should eradicate all reference to him. If he
is a continual moral force, then we should see in him his deep contradictions and the evils that he places around us.
There are these constant demands for proof. There is no proof. That is the point of faith. It's something that you believe DESPITE the clamoring of non-believers. That is the true sign of FAITH. There are constant challenges in life that can tempt you to abandon your faith. But a true believer hangs on in the face of adversity. A true believer doesn't turn their back on their faith because life got too tough. A true believer simply believes.
Then faith is, as I've said, inherently exclusive from reason. Falling back onto the argument that you've arrived at this faith '
through reason', through the 'common sense' of asking 'well how
else can a bee pollinate a flower, how
else can we account for
the miracle of life, how a plant photosynthesizes?' That isn't truthful reasoning; it's a fallacy.
'God' becomes a premature explanation. And in the absence of a society advanced enough to research the world with rigour and cogency, theism
was a survival instinct, a means of man understanding himself and his relation to the world.
But now a belief in God is
in spite of such scientific endeavour,
in spite of the social advancement and intellectual development of mankind. Religion is far outmoded; it
remains as primitive and naive as it was when Poseidon ruled the waves and Athena was goddess of wisdom and the arts and when Zeus ruled over both of them.
It's just a silly cop-out. Again, to go back to an earlier post: if I believed, despite showing in other areas of my life a clear capacity for rational analysis, that there were fairies living at the bottom of my garden, I
would be mocked, and challenged. Don't pull my leg by saying I wouldn't be. And it'd be right to mock and challenge, in the face of how silly such a belief is; you can substitute 'I believe in God' with 'I believe in The Smurfs / Santa / The Tooth Fairy / The Devil' (all of whom, again, are just anthropomorphic self-projections (why does the Tooth Fairy look like a human? Why does the Devil have human features? It's BOLLOCKS!)). The same things apply, but the beliefs no longer appear as reasonable. And I don't see why 'God' should endure reason when nothing else does; I don't see why religion should be off-limits when everything else is thrown out once a child realises that Santa
didn't come down the chimney last night, that the Tooth Fairy
didn't leave a pound coin under the pillow.
'God' (I add quotation marks because I speak of an idea, not a being) is the great tyrant masking the truth from us all. Reducing your beautiful, inexplicable world to, as said, a premature explanation in the name of OHMYGOODNESS clarity.
For those that don't believe, have a nice day. I hope that your emptiness is filled with something else.
My 'emptiness' is filled with my family, with my friends, with love for each of them; it's filled with the joys of cinema, of music, of art, of life; of people and their interrelations, their frustrations, their strangeness; the ineluctable irreconcilability of linearity - time itself; with memories fabricated, selected to protect me from the trauma of the present; with writing, with thinking - 'I think, therefore I am'; with quests for the truth, for the objective reality despite all attempts at the internalisation of the horizontal plane; with the churning of my stomach as I look at a girl and she looks at me; with the moral dilemmas of eating meat; with the daily struggle of the emancipation of the working class from the illusions of a 'selfish human nature'; with debates with people I've never met before but would love to meet, for they are humans, inherently mysterious, of interest, strange and unique and perishable and fragile - significant and expendable, meaningless and void; with the utter horror of mortality, and the liberation of such horrors; with outrage at the many social injustices of the world - the increasing decline of civilised man; with the writings of Trotsky, Lenin, Marx, Engels; the films of Patrick Keiller; James Joyce; Terrence Malick and Frederick Wiseman; James Gandolfini and Edie Falco kissing in a swimming pool; the peaks and troughs as I stand on the threshold of adulthood as a graduate in a world seemingly hostile to graduates; as a graduate in a relative privileged social and economic position, but one whose exploitation seems inevitable due to his relation to the means of production; DH Lawrence - Birkin and Gerald, their honest declaration of love for one another after that naked wrestle; the absolute heartbreak of a break-up; Aroon - her tits, arse, pubic bush; dark nights when the rest of the world seems to be sleeping and I lie awake wondering why I can't stop thinking why I'm wondering about nothing in particular and everything at once; my adolescent yearnings for innocence; weed-induced laughter; the naked comfort of comforting nakedness; transience, of which we are at the mercy, always and forever; the sweeping moment; when Michael shoots McClusky and Solozzo; when Vito shoots Fanucci; Noah23, Ihmotep, New York, Tuscany, poetry, green, red, blue, yellow and everything in between and beyond and within and without and what is said and unsaid and the faint sigh of delight as we realise there's really nothing to it after all.
And I guess I don't need the idea of a God to get me through any of that.
