In which there’s a repost, because I liked what I wrote.

My dad, no idiot, who has told me about his own experiences of the ineffable (while yet confusing “religion” with idiot American Christianity and considering himself an atheist), posted this on Facebook:

This was my reply:

Seriously, though, who believes in a God as a separate, remote, all-powerful entity in the ceiling, and not the whole of distributed consciousness? (We’re not the ancient Greeks, for fuck’s sake. We call it “weather” now, not “Zeus.”)

Children do, maybe, ideate such a “God” briefly, and also the pitifully indoctrinated, and the ignorant. Have pity on these, as you would on the idiots and the damaged, as you would on those who believe in ghosts or magic. They will either come to know better in their time, or are incapable of knowing better. Either way, let them be. (Unless they vote. Hah.)

Most atheist memes are raging against a “God” nobody worships, because truly that “God” is well known to be a caricature of a symbol of an icon of an idea of a koan, weakly and vaguely representing that inexpressible, ineffable state every conscious being knows intimately and yet seeks endlessly: love.

The truth is that the entity whose duty it is to feed those hungry and protect those kids and women from idiot ego’s bottomless and selfish hunger is that one who can perceive such suffering: You.

Me.

Us.

Every one of us.

We’re conscious, we’re consciousness; we’re consciousness embodied, distributed, and rarified, and WE’RE what’s capable of perceiving suffering and acting upon it.

We’re “God.” Us. We, alone (as far as we yet know) among all the elements of the manifest, immense, infinite physical universe, are the only ones who experience refined intelligence and consciousness. (Barring ET and cracking superluminal travel, of course, but I digress. So far, it’s just humans.)

In brief, bitching about suffering — and raging at some one-dimensional cartoon “god” nobody credible actually believes in — is really no more noble than ignoring suffering altogether. The problem is not with “God,” it is with that ridiculous definition of God as a thing apart from the world, an individual entity like our minds, separate and finite, capable of selfishness and laziness.

God is consciousness, or love. And infinite. This is plainly stated in most scriptures, but one has to, you know, actually put in the study time, in earnest, to learn it. Figuring out what “consciousness” means apart from our finite minds, knowing what the mystics know, takes time, introspection, and intense self-discipline.

I guarantee no earnest seeker thinks God is a white dude floating in the sky like a Marvel superhero.

TAT TVAM ASI: thou art That. (Or, as I learned it, lifted from a Beach Boys song: I am That, thou art That, all this is That.) Figuring out what that means is the only meaningful journey.