Late Night Philosophy

Misconceptions of God and Human Nature

 (This entry was edited by synthetic on 03-24-01 @ 5:08 pm EST)

The main problem with the relationship that humanity has with God is that humans tend to give God human qualities and emotions. It's the same as saying that "the rock is just sitting there". The rock obviously is not sitting, it just exists were it does. By saying that the rock is sitting, we have limited the rock in human terms that do not apply to it. Granted, givng an inanimate object human qualities helps us understand part of it, but it limits how far we can go with the description. It is that same with human's definition of God.

I have noticed in my experience, that Hinduism has the closest representation of God that I have seen. Hindus have countless "gods" that they worship. To the casual observer, it would seem that Hinduism is polytheistic, and, truly, some Hindus are. But at its core, each of the gods is an aspect or quality of the main god, Brahma. Brahma is larger than any quality humans can imagine and fills those qualities infinitly and surpasses them utterly. Hinduism falls short of my beleifs in that each Hindu god embodies a human emotion or quality, which God or the Creator does not have.

Of course, God could have human emotions, but that would imply that we were made to resemble God and that God is limited by emotions. The idea that must be accepted is that everything that we think, do, and experience is because the laws of physics define those things. When we feel joy, hate, and even love, we feel them beacsue we are bound of the laws of the universe. And who created the universe? God did. Therefore, God is not defined by the laws of the universe, and so does not experience emotions in any way that we can understand. God does not even experience anything in the way that we do. To make an analagy, when we write a computer program, we are similar, similar being used loosely, to God in that we create an isolated program that is defined by laws and commands that we write. The program cannot act outside the commands that we write. It cannot perform any function outside of the computer language that defines it. So trying to perceive or understand God in any way at all is entirely futile. I can only hope, if there is an afterlife, that I would have the capacity to understand the universe and God. But frankly, if there is no afterlife, than my original theory that God doesn't care is correct (although the sataisfaction would be less than whole; zero in fact, becasue I'd be dead).

The second problem with human nature is that we always want more. We are, at the core, a greedy society that always seeks more. Granted, greedy is a harsh world that I applies mostly to capitalists, but most people are greedy in other ways. Some want more money and possessions (capitalists),or more power, or more knowledge, or more understanding. The last three, power, knowledge and understanding constitute an important quality of humankind. We tend to develop social hirearchies and structures. That is not a bad thing on its own; we need structure to maintain order. The problem is that we tend to find the highest common denominator of power. The kid looks to his father for support; as he gets older, he looks to government and at each level or government mentally (and unconsciously) asks, "who governs him?" looks through the chain of command for the next highest power. This continues until that perosn reaches the Prime Minister or President. The President of any given country or, more importantly, the world (if there is such a person) could be seen as the most powerful person in the country. Others might look to their religion for the hierarchical order. The Pope is the highest power of Christianity. The politcal-minded might ask "who governs the President" and the religious-minded asks "who governs the Pope?". The answer to both is God. Normally, most poeple would stop there and assume that God is highest possible power. Unconsciously, they wonder who governs God. I would imagine that if anyone ever stopped to seriously think about God, they would inevitably wonder who governs God or who created God (and therefore has power over God). The problem with asking this question is similar to the problem posed previously. The idea of "creation" does not apply outside of the universe, so God could not have been created in the traditional sense, but surely something must have begotten God at some point. You can't get something for nothing. Of course, that statement on its own does not apply to God, but it is a valid question if one can expand one's mind to include metaphyisical "creation"