The following is excerpted from The State is Out of Date: We Can Do Better by Gregory Sams, published by Disinformation Books. This is Part 1 of a four-part series. Read Part 2 here.
When it is said that someone is “playing God” the opposite is often the case.
“However you define divinity, we now inhabit a universe in which everything is free to create its own future. God does not work to a predetermined plan, but the Universe itself creates an order through allowing the energetic forces at play to work with the materials to hand.”
When we accuse people of “playing God,” it is usually because they have over-ridden the natural flow of events in order to make things run to a plan they had predetermined. Well, however you wish to define your supreme God character, this doesn’t seem to be the way that He, She, or It goes about things.
You could be forgiven for suspecting that some of the breath-taking wonders of the natural world were planned by a divine being. But the Universe and everything in it was evidently not planned by somebody kind of like us but one heck of a lot smarter—God sitting at the Universal Computer, plotting out all those microbes, molecules, and chromosomes; making peaches soft and iron hard; deciding where the mountains and deserts go, and who the lightning strikes. If you were God, wouldn’t you have better things to do? Wouldn’t you build some handy labor-saving device into the system that made things work out on their own, giving you the time to chill out and enjoy the more important aspects of being universal energy?
However you define divinity, we now inhabit a universe in which everything is free to create its own future. God does not work to a predetermined plan, but the Universe itself creates an order through allowing the energetic forces at play to work with the materials to hand. The science of chaos theory has recognized that when you have a large number of seemingly unconnected events flowing freely, they are more likely to form relationships, a flowing stability, and order than they are to descend into a mess of tangled relationships that don’t work. This looks like a bona fide universal rule, yet for a long time humankind has worked on the principle that order must be deterministically shaped from the chaos; order and stability were created according to either our master plan or our linear interpretation of God’s divine plan. Today’s mainstream God of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism is often perceived to have planned our world in detail, and dictated how we should behave, right down to specifics of hair styles, choice of diet, and types of sex.
Of course, it is the failure of these top-down commandments, God-given or man-made, that is the most frequent cause of grief to our species. For reasons that we all innately understand, our emotional reaction to the death of tens of thousands in a devastating earthquake or tsunami is dwarfed by the horror of deaths inflicted by evil-doing humans when bombs are ripping apart innocent shoppers and commuters—people like us. The fifty million human lives claimed by the great flu of 1918 and 1919 are eclipsed by the eight and a half million slaughtered over the prior four years in World War I. The hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the tsunami of 2006 will have faded into the past long before the memory of the 2,800 lost when the Twin Towers were reduced to dust five years earlier. Hurricanes blow, volcanoes erupt, tectonic plates quake, waters flood, people are lost, and this we have been living with and living through for a few million years. We live on the Earth and must accept that it has a destiny of its own that may or may not fit in with where we choose to locate cities and our personal lifetime goals. But the impersonal and intentional killing by human beings of other human beings makes us shudder at a more visceral level.
Putting our trust in God and loving God form the core of many religious teachings, combined with the overall rule of showing consideration to others. Yet by the time this trust and love are filtered through central control they too often become obedience to the church’s instructions and fear of the Lord should you disobey them. The greatest prophets sought to share their wisdom with us so that we might better pursue the path of being fulfilled and happy human beings. These prophets sought to give us principles and tools, not preachers and rules.
God’s power is based on allowing every element of creation to be free to create and enjoy its own destiny in a universe that seems magically programmed to create order from the bottom up. We enjoy this order in everything from the delicate skin of our Earth’s atmosphere to the complex colony of bacteria that operate within our gut to help us turn what we eat into what we are. This free system works, and when we use our considerable intellectual powers to construct an artificial structure that attempts to forcibly control the system, we are not playing at being God—we are ignoring and obstructing the greatest tool that God built into the Universe.
As human beings, we are endowed with freedom of choice, and we cannot shuffle off our responsibility upon the shoulders of God or nature. We must shoulder it ourselves. It is our responsibility. – Arnold J. Toynbee, British historian, 1889–1975
This is the first of four excerpts from The State is Out of Date that will be published on Reality Sandwich.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq6s11pmaaI
Main image by Richie Diesterheft, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
I am the dot at the center of your nothingness
the poka in your design of creation
the period at the end of your sentence
the burn hole at the end of your red hot poker
the point on the tip of your pen
that exists at the furthest end of your expression
the impressionistic impersonal arrangement of space and time
I am what flows from the place where you put pen to paper
the milky way is somewhere inside each scrawl
if they say, may you live in interesting times
are they saying something that came from centuries of experience
or are they merely pointing to the chaos inherent in each moment
If there is a control central is it a culmination of centuries experience
or is it a reaction to the momentary chaos we all seek to control
is there such a thing as controlled chaos
and if so would we call it God
or would we call it dragon or tiger
or thief of fire…
do we put our wild instincts in a cage of words
or do we set free the random order of things
and let the fallen angels sing of the morning glory
or when strange objects fall to earth
do we still call it unidentified until it is identified
is it beautiful objects that we seek to own
is it terrible subjects that we seek to disown
have we seen the story written on the words of the prophet
at what expense do we pile gold on a thing we call God
do we find that there is enough diamonds in the Sutra
is there enough heart in the jewel at the center of the lotus
can we shed enough tears to match the rain of the heavens
and when there is a drought of tears is there a drought of rain
and when soldiers bleed do we call it main street America
is God a concept by which we measure our pain, said John Lennon
but do we still believe in War and God and in that order, or God and
War, what really is at the core of your belief
is it disbelief, is it grief or relief, or is it something you cannot name
or do you just go along to get along and play the god game
whom or what do you imagine really is in control
do you look inside for an answer, but what do you hope to find there
and when you run out of questions, do you look elsewhere for more
when I write this am I placing everything inside a poem
and the god of the poem laughs like lightning and thunder
and we all look at the thing called light coming through the darkness
and cry “look” it’s coming from asunder and that is how we mistook
the word of God as being somehow separated from the word of the Poet
do you still read the newspapers to find poetry but then why do you still
look at a book for the Word of God and find more meaning that way all shook
Fucking Epic…!
Well, I’ve gotten a few peeks at Mr. Sams’ book. We exchanged a few comments on his Amazon book page – I’m still open to seeing something worthwhile in his book, but if this is any example, things don’t look promising.
This is one of the most egregious misrepresentations of what the word “God” means that I’ve ever seen. true, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris have done far worse, but then, they so clearly have an axe to grind, and Mr. Sams seems to really want people to accept what he says about government.
Recipe;
1. Create a ridiculous caricature of what people think about God.
2. Attack that caricature.
3. Don’t leave any clue in your writing that the caricature you created has nothing to do with “God.”
If you actually read any of the traditional spiritual texts instead of relying on what seems to be some kind of cross between a gallup poll of People-magazine churchgoers and bad summaries of Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris/Dennett wholly uninformed religious commentary – the traditional spiritual texts will sound (surprised?) quite astonishingly (shouldn’t be astonishing) similar to chaos theory.
Only infinitely more profound.
What? More profound than science? Those lispings of ancient ignorant humanity?
yes.
I recently had an interesting online conversation over at Bernardo Kastrup’s blog (he has written the wonderfully titled “Why Materialism is Baloney”
In the course of the conversation, Bernardo suggested that science should be ontologically neutral.
The problem here is the phrase “Should be”. Yes, Bernardo is right, it should be, but it hasn’t been for several centuries.
Most contemporary scientists (who haven’t a clue about this) subscribe to a bizarre 19th century wholly non-empirical, non falsifiable faith that was once known as positivism, later came to be known as materialism and as more of them started to realize there’s no such thing as matter, it became physicalism, but nobody knows what that means so some just refer to phenomenalism, which is really positivism with another name.
Mr. Sams will be able to have an intelligent conversation about God (without not so subtly trying to show that he’s right about why we don’t need governemtn because the “big bad old God” that never existed that Mr. Sams thinks no longer exists is the “same” as big bad old government.
Silliness in the extreme.
I suggest if you want to do some scary work, try examining any genuine research article on Google scholar and see if you can detect the hidden positivist bias (what Owen Barfield called “the residue of unresolved positivism”). If you go far enough, be careful because your whole world will start to fall apart (and it will remain transformed if you go far enough, unlike with ayahuasca and other substances which wear off after awhile – this won’t wear off if you do it right; but beware, you can never go home again)
Read religion.