Welcome!

Of GOD...

OK, first we have to clear up a basic issue. The issue of GOD... As soon as we answer that one, we'll go ahead and knock out the Grand Unified Field Theorum...

Now, if you detect a note of sarcasm within my voice, then you're squaring up to the proper frame of mind to recieve this.

Fact is, I'm not going to touch the question of God. Too many others, both athiests and the faithful will do a far more competent job with an attempt to define what I believe can not be perfectly defined in this or any other day and age.

For me, the question, "Is there a God?", is very much like the question, "Is this art?" There are sociological standards with which to compare any answer, but such standards are subject to evolution - to their relative fitness for their times, to the occasional brilliant and seemingly spontaneous mutation which can propogate and lend its forms to a redefinition.

I've been willing to offer various personal definitions of art. I've had a knack for it. But I lack the spiritual or scientific skills needed to add anything significant to questions of religion or a "first cause". And this for myself, much less anybody else. I believe each of us, according to his or her circumstance, experience, and/or psychology has an inherent right to be at peace.

Shalom, Asalam Alaikum, Peace be with you, Jion, Jen, Namas te, and Peace-out, dawg!

A Background

About ten years ago, I wrote a short novelette, a parody of Judeo-Christian Mythology called "Paradise Re-quantified" in which the God, Jehovah, having grown old and tired, decided to hold a creation-skills contest to see who among his senior staff of semi-deities might be chosen to assume the position of Supreme Being. The competitors were the top three leutinent-lords, Vaillen, Sharmecria, and Bold-Perry (The Sublime Avatar of Perplexity) and the former "vice"-lord, Lucifer. In the story I described the mechanism of creation as an understanding of the "sub-qualia macro-temporal phasic mathematics" by which the entire universe - life, evolution, and death - was governed.

To anyone with half a mind, this is of course, complete nonsense. But then, as now, there are prodigious, wholely capable minds who seem to glimpse ever more complex portions of our mathematical universe. From Hau to Hawking to Mandelbrot to Einstein to Bohrs, and as far back as Newton and Galileo, pure mathematics has given rise to applied science and technologies which enrich our lives and our mind-model of the physical universe.

But what of the Spiritual universe?

Well, let's be honest, bravely, together, for a moment. For most of us, our comprehension of universal math doesn't get far beyond e=mc squared. Anything beyond the speed of light or an object's gravitational mass and the mathematical description of behavior might just as well be a description of angelic force. Elemental quantum mathematics such as String or Chaos theory could just as well be called Gabriel or Bruce or Bold-Perry. But a basic understanding of Relativity gives us an appreciation if not a total comprehension of the applied visible patterns which loosely sketch-out the workings of our physical universe. Conditioned by the exponential advent of new physical technologies we utilize yet really don't understand, a gap has evolved - a free-for-all zone between the physical and the spiritual, into which we pour an amalgamation of traditional dogmas and common scientific sense. It is the religion of secret perception, each according to the sum of his or her diverse personal experience and A Priori (Kantian mind-model). For the most part, we are too ashamed to stand openly against the sluggish evolution of traditional religion. Human's do shame very poorly. Should I look down my nose at my Catholic friends, because a paranoid pope in the fifth century branded "The Mary Magdalene", perhaps one of the most sanctified figures in Christian History as a whore? Or should I recognize the limitations of the time and remember instead the role of the Church in the re-birth of culture and art during the Renaissence?

I applaud the efforts of evolved thinkers, men like Stephen Hawking whose A Priori is so immense it imagined a universe full of black-holes, where gravity and time sit eternally suspended. Men like John Shelby Spong, retired Episcopalian Archbishop of New York who openly calls for a new Christianity - a new, evolved myth upon which we can close the gap between Hawking's universe and the two-thousand year old doctrines of the Council of Nicea.

And as the gap closes, let all men learn from that great twentieth century prophet, Bill W., who taught men how truly small and insignificant they were in the powerlessness of their addiction, yet so shamed, they find the strength to survive.

Bottom line, I think, is that religion and philosophy, just like science and mathematics is forever destined to reveal but a small portion of the Infinity of God and the Cosmos. We recognize mere patterns in the chaos, and we are thus delivered from the lonely, certain knowledge of our own mortality.

The "sub-qualia, macro-temporal phasic" mathematics of Infinite Creation simply dwarfs even the minds of those paramounts I named above. Ask any one of them, and they will readily admit to their ignorance of the overall macro-design.

Only, it is probably best you skip over the actual S.Q.M.T.P phrase lest you draw a blank stare and the conviction that you're a complete moron.

I have witnessed a universal truth to the human condition, mine at least - the more we learn, the more sure is the knowledge of our ultimate ignorance.

In Part II, I'll put forth some ideas on complexity, Natural Selection, and mankind's aesthetic senses. I'm sure you'll hold your breath.