I think this is my conception of God. Not metaphysical. Physical, unknown. So many unknowns. But why God? Why that word? Filled with so many connotations, an old white man with a white beard. Not that I believe that story. But why use the word? The modernists attempted to escape the meaning injected into words of the language/culture they were born into. The post-modernists attempted to use the word but put a strike through it.
The question for me is why God. I don't have the power to re-create a concept. As I write these words, I feel trapped, as the modernists and so many writers before me have. But one must trudge on, yes? Through the scrambled field, call it the wasteland, of language injected with prior meaning.
For me God is in music, God is music. God is death. Real death. Like the kind you don't come back from and the kind you don't go somewhere else from. Finality, the end, but again the unknown. Am I still an atheist? I don't believe in God. In this moment, I'm simply accepting the unknowable. Any scientist will tell you that the unknown dwarfs the known. What we know is a grain of sand in a universe of unknown. What's inside the sun? Why haven't the Oakland A's won a World Series when they have all the data? What is emotion? Where do the unicorns live, and are there huge monsters that collect unicorns in jars, smiling vividly when a new unicorn is captured and placed into the jar with other sad unicorns.
How can you listen to Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" and not believe in God? How can you not believe in the serenity and beauty of the music? Of course, musical serenity and beauty do not have to formulate God. But what is the alternative? That Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" is just a song. I notice all these words: "How" "believe" "just". Trapped again in language.
I would never push my God that is not really God onto you. I can't even clarify the conception, by definition, for my definition includes the unknown. I can't say my God is better than your God or your/my worldview that does not include God. I can't even come to know. However, I can feel. I can feel, and believe/know that the feelings are neurons firing in my brain, physical, biological, certainly not metaphysical. Transcendent, maybe, but a physical transcendence. Maybe that should be the name of my band. But it's already the name of someone else's band. I googled it (no I didn't).
Let me be clear on one point: science is superior to religion because it demands proof.
It's most likely a yearning. Yeah, it's probably just that: a yearning for something more, something transcendent. But more importantly a yearning. To yearn. To want on faith, to want so badly and so profoundly that it strikes your soul like an American Indian arrowhead made of flint; the strike creating friction creating fire creating warmth and wrath, the power to propel or destroy life.
A yearning for God, for meaning, for that which is beautiful and calm, for myself, for all folks, flora and fauna. Maybe it is because this desire, for that which is beautiful and calm, is so far from our shared social reality, so far from the known, so far from what seems possible, we must call it God. It must be something, something shared, text on a screen, something that stands upright for something, because the idea of its absence is so sad, so unbearable. (and the tears flow individually like clowns, so many clowns bursting out of that tiny car). Helplessness, happiness, profundity, excellence, tragedy, humanity, genocide, tactile domes, emptiness, completion, creation, singularity, opposition, human freedom, switch blades, bondage, children, hope.
oh the places you will go.
with the love of a God I accept but do not believe in (or maybe i do?),
Anthony
