Imagine No Faith

There is a famous cliche that goes, “I’m not religious, but . . .” Then they proceed to defend a liberal moderate view of the supernatural and a relationship with their own personal god – practiced of course without any formal religion. It’s their own private cult. They’re hoping you will forgive them their weakness in believing in a thing that cannot be proved. They’ve distanced themselves long ago from the dancing spring-tails in the big tent. That magic is politically discredited by its nationalistic, capitalistic and conservative biases. Everybody understands that the union of the dollar and the bible had its death-knell in the trickle-down event called Christians for Runaway Capitalism. In the end, the moral equivalency of George Bush Jr. wasn’t a Jesus anyone could imagine nor a god anyone thought picked out very good political leaders. They’ve also stayed aloof of the fusty old pedophiles in the unwieldy orthodox conglomerate that’s been around for 2000 years – one of the filthy-richest institutions in the world besides the American government. I mean, they’re nuts for Jesus but not that nuts! But still, what about half-crazy for Jesus, or a quarter-crazy? What about almost rational for Jesus? Can you imagine living a life of reason for Jesus. This is what Jesus would expect of you if you were completely rational: "don’t believe me and especially don’t believe in the old man! He’s absolutely 100% crazy. Forgo faith my flock; it's intellectual bankruptcy. Learn to live life like everybody else: read. Especially something besides crackbrained supernatural theories and carve out a life of significance and real moral values for yourself."

But wait, there’s more! The last resort of the irrational position is to lie, i.e., that is to hide their wishful thinking for eternal life behind an unspoken childish refrain: “I can believe in whatever I want.”

I’m sorry, no you can’t! Not anymore. Maybe if you are entirely illiterate, then you can believe in whatever you want. Maybe if it was100 years ago. Maybe if you’re mentally handicapped in some important sense. Otherwise, you have a moral obligation to go check the facts. If you don’t have a computer go to the library. You can’t deny gravity with a theory of levitation. Yes, there is a religion (see, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi), that does this. You can’t say the earth is under 10,000 years old because of a religious metaphor. You can’t argue for a teleological design by the fact that evolution is heading to some ultimate end when the end is unknowable, (see endnote for the likely manner in which the universe actually ends). You can’t say authority guarantees you absolute knowledge and believe in Relativity at the same time. It means you don’t understand The Theory of Relativity. You can’t use that old refrain that unbelievers can’t prove a negative (i.e., there is no god); indeed, due to the Popperian Criterion and Probability Risk Assessment (PRA), we can offer a solution to this philosophic conundrum. These matters are all different now: if we make an assessment of let us say the likelihood of intelligent-design versus evolution on a bell curve, we now see (plotting from multiple disciplines in the evolutionary and Neo-Darwin study); if zero means intelligent-design is false and one means evolution is true (there can never be actual zero or one certitude), then evolution falls on the curve exceedingly close to one, proof as positive as we can get currently that intelligent-design is false. You can’t say that your loneliness alone guarantees you a close personal friendship with a supernatural helms-person. Need does not create supernaturalism. Believe me, you’re just not that special. To get a life and become special, you have to read, learn, exercise the brain, do something with your life! Take a chance: live for what you were born.

“But there’s just gotta be a god! I’m not religious
but please, Don’t take away my comfort.”
This kind of sentiment is intellectually juvenile

The liberal moderate position hates the harsh light of reason, which cannot admit to a thing without proof; that is why religions the world over attack it as false and unworthy of moral consideration. Behind every self is a mind who seeks the external world and a soul who attempts to avoid it. We develop a strong personality exceedingly young for survival reasons. Upon waking we must be able to act as an organism not retarded or driven mad by our sleeping dream. But it has nothing to do with a supernatural order. We evolved this safety mechanism to throw ourselves back into reality after sleep, (Read: back into objectivity.) In our evolutionary past, we especially had to be able to act at once if we were attacked while we rested or dozed. We come into our personalities from sleep time in such a fashion as to rule out the belief that ultimate reality is based only on us and no accommodation to the external world is necessary. The claim that there’s a riddle about whether we know we’re dreaming or not is easily answered. Complete subjectivity presents real danger to our mammalian self. We endeavor to be objective, especially after dreaming. Being so subjective we can’t achieve objectivity, but to survive we must try. The personality is self, the self is strong (unless radically interfered with) and it comes to us like a soul. But it has nothing to do with an immortal spirit!

What we can assume of reality, we can verify or refute with logic, deduction, induction, mathematics, science . . . i.e., our ability to reason. Our soul tells us we are immortal and our reason tells us this is true until our bodies die. Our knowledge of the external world in which we evolved to comprehend and which our science has refined, is valid in the same fashion for everyone. The study of people isn’t an inference when billions of people are here to analyze, to say nothing of the tens of billions now dead. We can draw conclusions and it has nothing to do with the gods.

Furthermore

We can rule out certain human testimony; we’re exaggerators, constructivists – outright liars. We’ve good reason to be skeptical of claims without verification. If we sincerely believe that baby elephants can fly, we might well witness flying baby elephants. These are phenomena of non-skeptical minds. People who believe in the supernatural are more likely to believe in UFOs, ghosts, the paranormal and other forms of fantasy; their threshold to believe is lowered by the belief in the supernatural world. These events appear to the mind as a huge subjective self-created mystical/conceptual sensation and not as a direct sober apprehension of the really-real which with some effort we could realize many phenomena as a scientific impossibility. Skeptics don’t see ghosts for the same reason that atheists aren’t generally drawn into cults.

If you’ve taken the time to watch, Life of Mammals, Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Life in the Undergrowth, Life of Birds, Life in Cold Blood, Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, Walking With Dinosaurs, Life, Nature’s Most Amazing Events and other such scientific series, you’ve realized all the holes in evolution have long ago been plugged. As a metaphysical theory, it has no competitors, especially not Intelligent Design. What as spectators we were obliged to check centuries ago, and what we are duty-bound to check now in the 2020s is different in kind. Information is almost free. Knowledge requires only the payment of work. Unlike yesteryears, you aren’t entitled to private belief unchecked by anything but prayer. If you can’t prove you were visited by aliens, you must refrain from your belief. If they land tomorrow on the doorstep of NASA, your story becomes more plausible though not necessarily true. Are you so important among eight billion people in 2024 that Jesus, Mohammed, the angel Gabriel or ET came to you personally and not to everyone else? If you see ghosts, you’ve a conduit to the other world. If you can read the future, but live in poverty; you’re our savior. If you’re a brilliant avatar, but modest enough to read only the holy books, you’re courageous beyond mere mortals.

The Gig Is Up

Flying saucers can’t make you important, nor banshees or talking snakes, only hard earnest honest mental labor, learning the facts and relaying the stone-cold sober information so that we may all thrive together. You’re overweight, smoking, under-motivated, over-spent and looking for a disease to equal your pain that you might find some solace. Get out of your funk; give those bibles to the wastebasket. Earn a life in the modern world – there are thousands of brilliant books – none of them guaranteed by divine inspiration or inexorable inevitable economic laws. The thinking individual is set aside from the collective. He creates things, mostly ideas. Our progress has been on his back–paid for in his blood. Behind every collective is a god who roars against him. We look at our mortality and quake. The lonely voice of humankind stretches out into the night and his reason creates religion. The collective and the individual are at odds. Our personalities find this conflict hard to reconcile. Unsupportable faith is better than permanent death; better to suppress the voice of reason. They say that a good soul will avoid it at all costs. Wishful thinking gives us comfort, but with a price-tag of having to embrace the irrational. This is our plight: our minds need an arbitrator and will take any instrument except reason as the judge. However, reason, like love, is the only real treasure. Trouble is that we’ll create a hell rather than give up the idea of a heaven; perhaps the time has come to cast off illusion, accept reason, and learn to live with earthbound mortality. If we did, I think we’d be less likely to spare ourselves our myths and thus live a better life.

Myths for instance are symptomatic, like the cults of the golden ox, calves, elephants, etcetera who gives gold to the people. They idolized them and loose their way to heaven. They take the golden beasts to be their true god but a prophet comes from the mountain, the desert or back from his travels and demolishes the idols, destroying the leaders and restoring god’s rule. Take for example Beowulf’s intervention between Grendel and Grendel’s dam, as depicted as a Queller of Beasts (560-670 A.D.), and the taming of lions, called the Queller of Beasts from Crete 1600 before Christ. Take the flood heroes of myth, Yu from oriental mythologies and the biblical Noah, the similarities in the two stories abound. We find some gods born in December of a virgin mother who had an annunciation from an angel. The virgin birth was accompanied by a bright star in the east which led the mighty and the humble to his adoration. He was a teacher at the age of reason, baptized by a holy man, executed and resurrected in the spring. Many virgin-conceived crucified-saviors can be found from antiquity. Many of them are born near the Winter Solstice. These are Sun Gods, The Light of the Ages and The Son of God.

These similarities were first pioneered by the great Joseph Campbell who outlined universal themes in the myths of our evolution. Parallels in the global myths are revealing. No proof of any supernatural reality exists but the need in humankind to create myth seems paramount; however, after 9/11, the world awoke from its modern religious stupor. The terrorists weren’t godless Marxists out to enslave us in a happy worker’s industrial gulag, but fourth century religious zealots who were ready to collapse each brick from every high-rise and bring down Western Civilization itself, returning us to living in tents, a habitat that only old school environmentalists could drool about.

You Might be Surprised,
Some of This Occurred by Design

Academic philosophy in an attempt to save supernatural reality turned its back on rationality. This occurred post David Hume after a wedge had been driven by him between nature and reason. Reason was soon considered an epistemological device no better than instinct, intuition or even faith. By disallowing inductive knowledge as valid, human reason was greatly restricted from many areas; ethical, metaphysical, political, etcetera. The path this restriction took was through Kant, Hegel, the three American Pragmatists, Positivists, Continental Philosophers, notably the Phenomenologists, but especially, the English Analysts. From that event over time, religion philosophically gained equal footing with reason, particularly in regards to issues of morality, faith and tradition. This incrementally allowed the resurgence of worldwide theology and fundamentalism. The religionists quite aware of the declaration by many philosophers that reason and faith were two different, yet compatible ways of seeing reality and seeking truth, wasted no time. Nietzsche’s haunting foreboding, “God is dead!” turned out to be premature. Always the academic philosophers embraced the criticism of reason, a distrust of open societies and disdain for sensual inductive knowledge. Plato has long been their romantic favorite, the idealist who first envisioned the philosophers in charge and the masses obliged to become beholding to these self-preoccupied elitists. They saw no conflict of interest.

This drama, like, the sun god one, appears to be one thing, and yet is actually another: the Christ Myth endorses a platonic scorn of rational selfishness, individualism, science and pluralistic societies. Many of today’s thinkers accept the Christ Myth as characteristic of a sun god phenomena, then embrace Christianity’s platitudes about morals, many of these bromides aren’t based in reason at all, but rather in tradition. Most are quite indefensible from any rational point of view.

The great global Military Industrial Complex stands poised to strip away our legal rights to habeas corpus. Governments throughout the world are preparing to drastically expand their roles in their economies. Western Civilization is at a crossroads. The Left and Right’s fusillade is in zenith especially after covid. It’s the age, not of Aquarius, but of the Irrational. Wishful thinking, deceptive paper money, malevolent state-run capitalism and universal egalitarianism stand before us at the precipice of our end, yet still we argue over the gods.

Imagine a World Without Faith

Teaching morals is underwritten by action; we learn by example more than by theoretic paradigm; a phenomena like faith requiring little scientific proof produces a low threshold of belief. Magic and superstition are anathema to the modern mind – we must be poised against reason for them to reign supreme in us. However, if people are to embrace science over the unreasonable, then the role of religion has to be marginalized to a form of myth. Skipping those mind-numbing hours of prayers and sermons and the contemplation of brain teasers like three men in one god or the body and blood transfiguration, frees a person to be creative about real problems in their lives.

In the book of fairy tales and myths, a big magical sky daddy delivers the populace his own flesh and blood to get horribly slain so that his resurrected son can become your imaginary bearded hippie-friend. The chip off the father’s block is sort of a young Santa Claus for idealists who bestows his gifts on his birthday and is otherwise an enforcer to his father’s backwater creed: a doctrine  which  threatens eternal hell and other hateful things if you don’t do what you’re told. Even Darwin, an incredibly moderate 'agnostic' and the epitome of English gentle manners, saw clearly  this fact: "I hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine."

Religion often promotes unsavory outcomes. The frequency of unwanted children being brought into the world by religionists’ opposition to birth control is one of them. Modern self-management and sexual self-protection are rejected as religion hangs on tenaciously to the creepy idea of sexual abstention. Over 5000 Catholic priests worldwide have now been implicated in pedophilia and the statistics for overall clergy sex-abuse is “significant” and “shocking” according to most figures. While alcoholism may be the most common factor in sexually abusive parents, conservative religious belief is the second most common. Even self-relief can be looked at as a form of abortion if you’re an idealistic enough religionist.

Overall, religion is an event in conformity and discourages independent thinking. It comes with a golden parachute: if you fail at life through mismanagement, and kneel and pray before sentencing begins, you receive a ‘get out of hell’ card and go to celestial eternity by cashing it in at the less-than-luster pearly gates. In religion, wishful thinking has never been more naked; in cults, at no time, so inexplicably undisguised. One of the things always pressed home in the media about Islam is that it’s the fastest growing religion in the world. It’s more likely the quickest shrinking one. Compare the perplexity of the claims of Marxists in the 60s. The swiftest growing movement/religion in the world back then was communism. With the Soviet Union, China and all the rest, they engulfed one third of the world’s population with brute force and an outright refusal by almost all Marxists in power to recognize basic human rights: see, 1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8, 9. How can you count individual choices in a closed society? If you’re living in Iran, you’re never going to meet an admitted atheist. Even in an open society, a religionist’s kids are  a statistic even though only an adult can make choices of belief. If five out of nine children in a religionist’s clan like mine choose as an adult not to believe, the column still counts nine for religion. A third of the population of the world is Christian, but believe that to your own disgrace. They have far more power than their numbers represent, and all their institutions’ incomes are tax free. What a huge unfair advantage to other more preferable viewpoints in life.

There is another problem for religionists who speculate on numbers. Compared to religion, atheism has grown exponentially during the 20th century. According to the World Christian Encyclopedia, a respected source for religious demographics, the number of non-religionists  has skyrocketed from over three million in 1900 to over 900 million in 2000.  (The figure could be much larger than this -- it's complicated to calculate, but by 2024 it was well over a billion).To quote from God and the Folly of Faith: "In France, [where there are a 100 better things to do than pray], fewer than seven percent of adults attend worship; continent wide, only 15 percent of adults attend worship. In Denmark and Sweden, fewer than five percent of adults are in church on a typical Sunday. Denmark's Christian-Democratic political party attracts only two percent of voters. Although Ireland remains dominated by the Catholic Church, the Archdiocese of Dublin graduated only one priest in 2004. In Britain, only four percent of children attend Sunday school compared to 50 percent in 1900. The Anglican Church of Canada lost more than half its members between 1961 and 2001. The United Church of Canada's membership dropped 30 percent in the same period. The Presbyterian Church of Canada’s membership has fallen 35 percent during those fifty years. In Japan, 77 percent of adults say they do not believe in a specific religion."

“Since it is obviously inconceivable that all religions can be right, the most reasonable conclusion is that they are all wrong.” [Christopher Hitchens, “The Lord and the Intellectuals,” Harper’s, July 1982]. And try to remember, in an important sense, you are already an atheist, if you hold onto a belief only in your god, for you likely don't believe in Thor the Thunder God, or Zeus, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or whatever you are not. There's so many gods you already don't believe in, join in the new enlightenment and what could possibly become a golden age of reason; reject the irrational in all its forms: banshees, astrology, faries, gods, God and all supernaturalism. There's a thought out there, it goes: "God saved my life. Who are you to tell me otherwise? I was smacked out, a junky alcoholic hedonistic sex pervert -- fill in the blank -- mess, and I found -- fill in the blank diety." But I can assure you, that's not what happened. Self-control saved you, the conduit was the fear and love of an imaginary being that is all too real to you. I am sympathetic; however, you are now on your own two feet and you must take a new look, a rational look, at life, find purpose beyond magic and help other human beings to rise above their beginning, no matter how low those may be. Giving people korans and bibles is not the same as giving them, Breaking the Spell, Darwinism Evolving, Origins of Life,  The Theory of Evolution, The Third Chimpanzee, Sapiens, A Universe from Nothing, Why Evolution is True, Wonderful Life, The Blind Watchmaker,  The Evolution of Everything, The Origin of the Species, A History of Warfare, Knowledge and Decisions, Why the West Rules, Why the West is Best,  Black Mass, The Big Picture, or Plagues and People; understanding Natural Selection, for instance, has the practical application that since we were evolved on the plains of Africa for between two and three million years, we may want to emulate our eating and fitness patterns as we evolved.

Not Fallen Angel,
But Ape Risen,
D Morris; The Naked Ape

Today, non-belief in religion is flourishing at the exceptional rate of over eight million converts each year. The figure of a billion adherents is here, and most of them, like me, have been raised as religionists and by religionists. Christianity and Islam (and Hindus and Buddhism) have grown not through freedom, education or witnessing miracles, but through unprotected sex. Non-belief has gone from 0% to 15% in less than a century. Magic is not winning the day. The sin of the moderate position in regards to faith is the claim that a lot of magic is irrational, yet a little bit of it is without harm. If the bin Laden family numbers 600 moderate millionaire Muslims and only one of them dreams of patriotic emirates and pure Sunni caliphates (and a repetition of the ancient Islamic empire of the east from Uzbekistan to Nairobi) and has fanaticism and WMDs, and kills, lord knows how many people, then the moderate position is still unconditional failure. Would bin Laden create a closed empire like the one the Soviets had for 75 years? You bet he would. The point is that the liberal position creates the most irrational adherents. Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri and others of Al-Qaeda  studied the tactics of Mao Dezong and Vladimir Lenin in Western universities. Iraq’s Ba’ath Party got its pointers from the Nazis. Al-Qaida, Nazi, Ba’ath and Communists’ lust after power made them antepenultimate fascists. Their imperialistic goal is to rule the world; yet, like 9/11, they produce unintended results. It’s like a puzzle: “I was responsible for entrusting the 19 brothers with the raids,” Osama bin Laden admitted after much denial. “. . . We – with god’s help – call on every Muslim who believes and wishes to be rewarded to comply with god’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”

“I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator by defending myself against the Jew,” Adolph Hitler said in the 1930's. “I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”

The result of unexamined belief in the mystic is religion. Religionists may produce the most babies, but they also fill the most jails. Ultimately by their violence and buffoonery, they discredit magical belief over the world, which it so richly deserves. Inadvertently, and ironically, by some religionists’ cruelty and stupidity, they produce the most ardent atheists. No amount of charity can get them out of this mess. 

Magic is Ascended to Without Proof.

People hold to their gods on emotional grounds. The vulgar believe that faith is a gift. Those crippled inside, the lame, weak at heart and injured have grievances against life and join together in the cold comfort that are their gods. The Jews, materialists, third party minority traders, and the wealthy are the easy scapegoats. It’s no wonder that the Christians, Marxists and Islamists have consistently used them over the decades as targets for their wrath. Faith and religion have been a curse on humankind’s history, not just by weight of its overestimation of the impact on humankind’s moral valuing but more so by the harm they do to belief itself. The religionists maintain that religion and faith are beyond reason, and thinking on the problem is a waste of time. They claim that rationalism cannot decide the issue, but in the long run, it is either reason or passion which decides.

Religionists criticize reason as hopeless and embrace faith. By doing so, they espouse herd mentality and preach against the lone rational materialist. Religion is a trick of the mind used to deny the most obvious realities: the mortal chaotic life . . . the evolving ever-changing organic universe. The beauty of religion’s explanation is the Absolute. Truth is supplied by the vendor. Logic and science can happily be disregarded by the buyer. To the seller goes wealth and authority. To the purchaser, simplicity and conformity, and often, impoverishment.

To the Rational Materialist?

When people choose the irrational, we are all losers, even the winners. Western Civilization depends on reason. Christian philosophers like Eric Voegelin believe contrarily that it depends on Christianity. They see the Dark Ages, which they called the Middle Ages, as a moral achievement, and in general, god, especially the Christian one, as an indisputable teleological fact. To think that we have to share the planet with them after all this time or as physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss says, "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded, and the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand . . . forget Jesus: the stars died so you could be here today." Last century’s Fascism and Communism were bad enough. Now there’s a Christian whitewash: 21st Century Hermeticism. Will these Western political philosophers ever get over Plato? He’s the one to discover the hidden other-world of the gods and envision the first utopian closed society.

Martin Heidegger is the moral compass for the new ecumenical age. He’s the philosopher who sold-out Edmund Husserl to the Nazis but called it something other than betrayal and iniquity. Voegelin professed that the rise of violent cult ideologies like Nazism was the world’s spiritual pathology. He couldn’t see the connection between Christianity and Marxism and this makes him as foolish as Friedrich Nietzsche, last century’s moral guide for egocentricity and nihilism. Nietzsche’s school of thought helped produce all sorts of obnoxious beliefs, including Fascism and Nazism. Here too is David Berlinski’s and Peter Hitchens’s approximate views that our savage human nature is mitigated, perhaps even rescued by the redemptive force of faith and that the 20th Century’s democide figures are substantially the result of our collective rejection of the Judaeo-Christian moral regime and it was reduced on a cultural geopolitical scale by atheistic ideologies. But that’s the thing about religion and philosophy, they don’t take any responsibility for the ideas they spread. And if anything goes wrong, it’s never their fault.

Philosophical Proof Against Any Supernatural Reality.

Long ago, even before Kant, the ontological proofs that there is a god were weak and out of sorts with a mature thinking person. Many knew the universe was very old – it is just under 14 billion years old, and they asked, “This is the best that an omnipotent creature can do?” In our hearts we know that anyone – anything -- could do better than this. The only real (non-pretentious) argument for a supernatural explanation is what I called the Spinoza-Hegel-Einsteinian, unaware or barely-aware god. Hegel thought that man is resolutely, inevitably, evolving with a thesis/antithesis seesaw toward a finite terminal synthesis of full self-knowledge of the ultimate idea, (or the Absolute.) “God is god only in so far as he knows himself.” Spinoza’s explanation is that the universe is identical with god. God and nature are one and the same. God is the uncaused substance of material reality. Life then springs from a metaphysical entity which is the basis for all reality, but god can only be seen through the world of material things or by conscious thought. Einstein’s view was that god reveals himself in the harmony of all being, a sort of cosmic religion for physicists: “science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Spinoza’s god-intoxicated design for the universe holds no warrant for humankind. Its detached god is as cold as much of the real chaos of organic ever-changing life. “Life is god and god is life” can at once be reduced by occam razor’s: life is life. Why offer two explanations for the same event. The more logical one will suffice, never mind our wishful thinking, even for the Dutch. Hegel’s process of spiritual progress is contradicted by the actual ideologically-driven thousand-year-devolution of humankind through the Dark Ages, and also, by the fact that much because of Hegel’s articulation of this dialectic progress of history, we almost fell into a second “Dark Ages,” with the ascendancy of a form of political Christianity, Marxism. This is an example, if we need another, of how dangerous platonic philosophy is: of how believing in innate knowledge or internal processes leads to calamity for human beings. We are creatures of ideas and we get them, (especially the good ones), through intense hard work! Einstein held the rather unreasonable view that, in nature is the evolved-perfection of mathematical simplicity. However, life is rather an ever-changing organic event, and in that sense, is driven as much by chaos as by harmony. There are the white swans, for sure! However; there are clearly enough black ones to go around.

The problem with the PhDs’ monolithic god is that the idea of it itself is philosophically unsupportable. Let me explain this. If the idea of god is of a creature without limits, being omnipotent, omnipresent, infinite, etc., then god is nonexistence, i.e., nonexistent. If he has limits, then he is a god not unlike Zeus, Thor or Buddha and the PhDs are going to have nothing to do with it, so we want to say in the first instance, god is without limits, and therefore, god is nonexistence! Nonexistence is an idea from which sentient-creatures are removed and which can never be presented as an indisputable absolute fact to the rational faculty. It isn’t tangible to the senses, and yet it seems as though a description can be always forthcoming, namely, that nonexistence is causeless, and being uncaused, it is eternal above, and beyond, existence. Nonexistence is outside, and alongside existence, and it’s therefore, immutable, and can have no temporal secession. Nonexistence can’t change nor can it be comprehended, it’s incomprehensible, nor can it be described except in the negative concepts which humankind never actually, or regularly, think in, such as, it can’t be finite, (it’s infinite), it can’t be divided, (it’s indivisible), and because it has no matter, or form, can’t be seen, (it is invisible). Nonexistence has no dimensions of any physically extended sort, but is the totality of all immateriality. It is pure essence. Since nonexistence is uncaused and unconditional upon anything that exists, it’s before, and above idea and matter. It’s pure non-substantive form can’t help except be immutable and eternal. Nonexistence is pure essence; it’s pure form and pure substance. Since, both of these can’t be logically separated from non-form and non-substance, and further, since, form without substance, and substance without form, can’t actually exist except in this indivisible, infinite, immutable, invisible and eternal concept, therefore, god and nonexistence have the exact same definition. The concept of nonexistence, as of god, is specifically vague enough to fit any religion, from polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, to reincarnation. The concept of nonexistence, nevertheless, is made always in the affirmative as a definition of a definitive and living god; however, nonexistence is actually the same entity that we define as god. God is nonexistence, but the distinction, god is god and is therefore by definition, alive; however, nonexistence is nonexistence, and obviously doesn’t exist, therefore, god also doesn’t exist.

If this is all too much for you, I sympathize. The thing is, if there is a creature defined by the expression, “Has no definition and has no limits” then it’s safe to say, that you are talking about nonexistence. A god with any definition at all is blind-sided by that very definition. He has some limitation because of a definition! For instance, take the expression, “He sees all!” What exactly does he see with?

Do You See the Conundrum for Those Who Believe?

If He has no actual equipment to see and sees all, then what’s the point? If he has some super sensory capacity then he can’t be all knowing; the capacity is the means by which he sees, and everything beyond its reach, he cannot see, or what he sees is channeled or bracketed by the means of perception; yet if that sense sees all, then it is, in a sense, no sense at all. It’s nonsense and unnecessary to talk about: it’s nonexistence! The problem with any restriction at all on god (such as a definition itself) is that god’s restricted to an essence or form of the definition. The trouble with no restrictions (that is no definition), is that he is then the exact image of nonexistence.  The whole idea that god is life and life is god, is no more than to say that life is life; well, in that case, you’ve said nothing at all in regards to the supernatural, perhaps you’ve said, god is inside of us. In this regard, I couldn’t agree more. He is humanly created and part of our wishful thinking.

ENDNOTE:

From V J Stenger's -- ‘Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings' -- God and the Multiverse: Since there are about 150 billion other galaxies in the visible cosmos, this multiplies out to 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets (five sextillion) within our horizon capable of supporting life of some form. However, this number could be off by orders of magnitude, so just remember . . . it is very, very big. These are just the planets within forty-six billion light-years of Earth, which is the horizon beyond which light cannot reach us in the 13.8 billion-year age of the universe. If inflation is correct, beyond that limit exists a far vaster region of space that Alan Guth estimates contains a minimum of twenty-three orders of magnitude as many galaxies as those inside our horizon. It is probably much greater.

 Timeframe of the whole event of the known universe: