Wednesday, November 30, 2005

What's Next?

What does life mean without God? This is the most important question for modern man. In fact, this maybe the only question. We have been so conditioned to seek meaning and purpose from religion and God that we don't know what to do with ourselves without it. In a sense we are lost without it. The result is often a life of suffering from anxiety and boredom. And this is a shame.

So what do we do about it? That is the burning question. I don't have the answer, and maybe there is no one size fits all answer, but one thing I do know is that we should live life with Joy and passion and not with despair or by rote.

Do not settle for a life of shallow materialism and superficiality. Make your life mean something to you. Don't just let it go by like a cloud in the sky. Take your religious passion and seize it for yourself. Why let your religion feelings go to waste? We should use it for our own ends instead of using it to serve God.

God as Metaphor

In the past I have flirted with the idea of interpreting the concept of God as a metaphor for existence in totality. The obvious advantage of this is that unlike other concepts of God, this God obviously exists without question.

The problem with it, however, is that it really doesn't explain anything. Everyone knows existence exists, it's impossible to deny. So there is no reason to affirm or to deny it. It just doesn't add any new information

Another disadvantage of it is that this definition of God is not what most people refer to when they refer to God, so it actually confuses things rather than clear things up as a good definition should.

The reason, I think, why some non-believers in traditional religious God will choose to define God as Existence is because it allows them to not define themselves as atheists, which is still a little taboo in the USA. I prefer the term non-theist if I need to identify my metaphysical beliefs, because it asserts that I don't believe in the traditional religious God, but it doesn't have the materialistic connotation as the term atheist has