Introduction
God is a thought, or What do you think?
(In 2003 I wrote and completed a book titled God is a Thought, Or What Do You Think? This is such a controversial book, I will probably release it posthumously.)
Here is the Intro
WHETHER WE DEEM OURSELVES A CONSCIOUS PART OF IT OR NOT, religion is a ship on shore, sailing across the turbulent seas of life, and we are on board of it. Theological statistics amassed from various historical data show and prove that the majority of human beings the whole world over have a belief in God. Common logic does not dispute this, but goes on further to also prove that many of us have no responsibility for our beliefs (neither do we desire such responsibility); to the shameful extant that we only linger on the hope that our leaders will not disappoint us, for if they may one day wake up and say to us, "sorry but, I think we have been following a lie," most of us would be at our wit's end. Few believers, and sceptics, don't comprehend the scholastic summon which to be religious or antireligious beings (more like witnesses) places on us; for every religion has basic truths, deep truths and ultimate truths; all of which need the attention of the believer or doubter in studious devotion. We cannot rely on our leaders forever, neither should we ignore their assertions which have so shaped society. What if they die or quit on us? Do we also die or quit on our beliefs? This book is a sheer reflection of our failure to be faithful to faith, and it is a heartfelt invitation for us to go, or come, behind the veil and seek truth for ourselves. It says affiliating to a faith is not enough, we need to be immersed in the faith; for if not, we are only playing a Boomerang game of religious hide-and-seek. That would be us hiding from ourselves, and seeking for belonging. It is not enough. Actually, it is dangerous. There's a high likelihood that it can always come back and harm us.
Midweek and weekend sermons are from a practical perspective not enough – converts come and converts go, people change religions as much as babies change nappies; when they get tired of one religious vehicle, they simply jump into the next, regardless of the speed at which it is travelling. Such an awkward change is not done because truth has been found, but because truth is still being sought. This is something regarding the authenticity of faith that we should introspectively examine; instead of chasing for more supporters of our faiths, while permanently losing some, we should trace the thin air to which those who were once part of us vanished. It is surprising how we have been celebrating religion's tumultuous rise from the sea; there's an evil net of ecstasy fishing away our minds due to the large number of people we call Christians. Despite its 27 000 different sects and denominations all over the world, Christianity is celebrating "the next Christendom." Nobody cares about the logistics of the belief/s, all they want is to see people coming in, and coming in. The book realises and alludes to the fact that having faith is claiming knowledge of the unknown, the above, the supreme; but how could we possibly profess knowledge in this state of ubiquitous ignorance? Every soul that orbits the parameters of existence is longing for truth – ignorance is endurance; without sounding fanatically Buddhist, let me say it causes a lot of suffering; whose cause we ignorantly don't know. Without having to sound too Christian either, to be able to catch a fish, there is a thing called launching into the deep. Have we launched?
Fact: our leaders cannot escort us to where the God is and still enter with us into Its numinous property. Religion should not give us a fish, it should teach and encourage us how to fish. If we remain at the surface, we may not know whether beneath us is a landmine or goldmine. If we titter around the picket fence of faith we may not know whether it is heaven or hell that lies within the courts of our faith. Indeed, it would be perilous to claim knowledge of the God and still be found ignorant. Better are those who claim no knowledge of the God and do not dispute Its the idea either, than the worse majority who claim such but know zilch; topping that by fervently harbouring an incurable dose of hate for those who seek to know exactly what is it the believers believe in.
From personal experience with different stages of faith and different kinds of believers I have realised that human beings only enjoy being tied by a belief system; that's the reason when one gets monotonous, they simply shift preference, and call it a revelation. It is better described as "path-evolution." The more we walk down the path of religion, the more we discover that there's an evolution of the believer that takes place. Today, preachers are no longer preaching what they did ten years ago. The God has revealed certain things to them.
Indeed, many of us are only committed to commitment; we are unashamedly devoted to devotion; we cannot answer for our God although we serve as ambassadors. Many unbelievers ask, "why would a righteous God let the devil spread unrighteousness on earth like this God was on holiday?" Instead of finding an opportunity to present faith, doubt comes out only to be suppressed while a billow of toxic suspicion fills the mental rooms of the one asked. People begin to rage, isolate themselves and ostracise the world; bedevilling it, and tagging it demonic, depraved and devoid of truth, because they are afraid they can't answer for their own faith. But what is that truth? So we ask. Why have faith at all if we are not willing to learn about its contents and origins, its prospective objectives and the practical results? Why won't we leave the elementary teachings behind and grow in knowledge, surfing on the blowing tides of the ocean of truth? Without risking a Christian tone, I believe we should count the cost of swearing our allegiance with a religion; its leaders should caution us and give us a chance to weigh the sustainability and plausibility of the pros and cons. It is so unfunny what people are taught when they embrace a new faith; is not the tenets and credos of that faith, but the propaganda about other faiths. This is a Compulsive Faith Competition Syndrome, from which many faiths suffer; it is caused by an apathy to go deeper into the entrails of faith and a fear to be overtaken by other advancing faiths. Everyone thinks their faith is the true one and others the epitome of fake. Thus, it encourages inevitable tendencies to hurl about the malicious tentacles of slander against other faiths and/or denominations.
This syndrome is taxing to faith's credibility. It is no wonder to see a 14-year-old Palestinian Muslim adherent flanking himself with C4-explosives and launching into a restaurant or bus, going all-out to detonate himself and his precious little physical life to rubble, for the sake of a faith upon whose basic truths he has merely travelled. All he wants is to be deemed a Shahid. It is indeed hardly surprising to hear of a Christian who starved his children to death for the sake of fasting and praying. It's all over the news: Christians in Nigeria in an Amargeddon with Muslims; the orthodox church versus the power-claim of the charismatic; a Christian cleric on pulpit braying that people should give and tithe generously to an emotional God who feels defrauded, yet neither hungers nor thirsts; wealthy pastors opportunistically using a verse from Jewish antiquity within a New Testamentist Gentile-accommodating context have created a polemic atmosphere from which we view the church. Leaders who make people quit their jobs, sell their property, give all the material wealth in exchange for eternal life; virile men and women who partially offer their sexuality on the altar of a monastery or convert, to a later revelation of decayed foetuses under a bridge, aborted to cover the sins of the saints; this is all old news to us. It won't be the first or the last time that news catches wind about the fornication of political wars with religious instigations. Russia and many communist states have been rumoured to have their foundation built upon Satanism, while America and all its cronies are built upon an evangelical ideology of imperialism. All war is a matter of religion. Christian/Islamic/Jewish martyrdom, kamikaze pilots and hijackers; human rights violations yoked with cult movements and linkages of states with worship circles have well driven before our eyes into an unpalatable scrap garage. The astigmatic calls for the reinstatement of an eclectic biblically passable death penalty in the South African justice system. Christian/Islamic Fundamentalism and Asian Nationalism for and against American Patriotism all come espoused by one polygamous consort: a belief in the God. This belief is not only strong, but various, contradictory, and very psychological in nature. Pathological. It is a psycho-epistemology that borders strictly on the metaphoric preference of knowledge and its examination, with overwhelming counter evidence merely treated as blasphemy or insanity.
Child-rearing is simultaneously involved, with the idea of the God introduced to the thoughts of the infant. It is a pity that our children are welcomed with open religious arms into the world, to be "Christened" and named after biblical greats, or ancestral monads; thus intoxicated with an opium of the welcoming party's indoctrination. And I thought politicians were the only ones hungry for votes!
Being of an alcoholically strong Christian antecedence, I had a serious problem dealing with other people's view of the God. Somebody I knew once made me angry when he spoke what I considered to be blasphemous words against our God. He had a similar background and he had just come from a year of study at the Durban Westville University, which I thought had bedevilled him. He asked me if I'd be believing in Jesus had I grown up in Iran. He told me that the God must have been evil to let those Eastern/Middle East children grow under intense Islamic teaching and still expect them to convert to a very suspect and outlandish Christianity; worse burn them in the everlasting infernos of hell if they died unrepentant Muslims. I called him demonic; not because I felt he had demons, but because I felt he had a point; a point with which it was extremely difficult for me to agree. A point that placed my theology under extreme fire and scrutiny. Today, I look back at my mind-rigging historical Christian indoctrination and my lack of deeper knowledge then, and I am overwhelmed with indignation. I do not hate Christianity, I simply dislike the contradiction found in the centre of all religious mechanisms and their ever-escalating fallacious paradigms. Talk of a spiritually fanatic obsession with the opium of paradox. Funny almost every Christian hates some form of Christianity. So who's right and who's wrong? Whose theology gets the heavenly thumbs-up? Muslims as well, as far as I know, have embraced or endured the push of multiplicity. This is what Geoffrey K. Nelson calls "religious creativity."
At the depth of the book you find what appears to be an antireligious belligerence; as I reveal that the psychology of religion results in a weird individual anthropology. Fact: You cannot be religious and still call yourself an individual; you are a community, for within you is a carriage of all the traditional-cultural-socio-political dictates of your religion. You are not yourself, you are what you were told you should be. You strive for perfection when you know damn well that no one can be perfect. You are practically trying so hard to be nothing. No wonder many mental illnesses have been linked with affiliation to religion. Many serial killers have always had the idea that they were serving the God's purpose. religion breeds no individuals at all. Yet, the search for individualism does not justify an uncanny anti-religiosity, neither should it inspire such a littered mental attitude. The God forbid!
The only thing that one can do is to divorce oneself from the marriage of self and their religion, step back, pick up a holy book, and begin to search for this God. You will not finish four religious books without having found It, the true God. All we need is to excuse ourselves from the traditions of our sexual-genealogically transmitted quasi-knowledge that we rely upon, and begin a quest to seek for real knowledge; surely a true God will not let us be deceived when we earnestly, not necessarily desperate however, seek for It. the God is right under our nose (between our ears).
I think it is a serious burden upon parents; they should let their children learn more about the God from a wide view spectrum than to breed a nation of hateful believers of error. It is surely error when I grow up believing that Zoroastrians, Muslims, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Hindus, Buddhists, Anglicans, Inyangas, Magicians, Jews and all die helle are pagans and heathens whose teachings are epidemically heretic; deserving of ultimate eschatology. (In fact every religion is a heresy in the eyes of the next religion.) These are but crumbs of my disturbing upbringing: distrusting and very paranoid; and both my distrust and paranoia were not unnecessary, because all these people as well were taught to be on the watch-out for people like me. I had what they called a discerning spirit; it was a demon. But now, without sounding too Christian, I am delivered. This was all a devilish thought of the God implanted like a timebomb inside of me. It was a holy dangerous thought. That's a thought I can do without. For now my thoughts are renewed, I am filled with knowledge that would bring men of the book to their knees – for to me today, is no distinction found between or amongst all the various Gods the world is daily presenting to its newly born: they are all the one God, just one human thought.
Today, through this book, I claim that I am the answer to the apostle Paul's wishful request to know Jesus – Jesus, not as the Christians preach him, let alone know him, or as the anti-Christian veto him. For Christianity, in all its claims, is not Jesus, neither could it ever be, but it is merely one of the prominent admirers of Jesus. This man, this divine Mind, was and is, bigger than Christianity. Much bigger. Eternally bigger. An everlasting thought, from an ever-elaborate thinker. The Christian religion that my parents and their parents and all other believers helped give to me cannot in the least contain this Jesus. I have come, in this book, to find the independence of Jesus from the intricate Christian point of view. Jesus, to me, is the iconoclastic symbol of the Herodean era, whose historically anachronistic birth declared, indeed subdued, ancient and future time under the Anno Domino permanence. History, together with its twin sister the optimist's future, have always conceived, and will always conceive, human and superhuman figures like Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth, Martin Luther King, Hitler, Shaka Zulu, Mother Theresa, Chief Luthuli, Mandela, Botha, Zeus, Prometheus, the Fates, etc.; all who did transform and reconstruct the world's manifold and chronologically marked eras; however, the womb of history – from its hallowed virginity to its deified maternity, has never carried an offspring as delicate, as colossal, and as mysteriously rapturous as Jesus of Nazareth. (This is unfortunately found in part two of the book, where I explain Jesus not as the world knows him.) Jesus brought knowledge to the world; not about the divine creation of the world, but about the creativity of human thought – this is found in Chapter two, under the subtitle: Jesus I know, Paul I know, but who are you?
Therefore, the purpose of this book is to say that we need such knowledge. Believers and non-believers alike; we need this knowledge. Leaders as well are found to be without knowledge, or with it but unwilling to share it, thus leaving believers in utter confusion. Where is the truth? One of my friends says, "a lie told a million people becomes the truth." He says the truth amounts to what people agree to believe in without anyone objectively disputing the agreement. Is that the truth of our faith, and/or doubt? If it seems to be the case, it is only a case of hopeless escapism.
W
hat this book says is that it is time to grow, time to launch into the deep, time to ask, to knock, indeed time to find. But first be prepared to be shocked. This is a non-ritualistic initiation into religious maturity. An invitation to celebrate a God conceived or perceived by human thought. In the very first chapter the book opens you to a world of questions. I do not question the idea of the God but I question us who believe in, or doubt, It. Why do we believe there's a God? Why don't we believe there's a God? Who is this God, who is she not? What is this God, what is it not?
For me personally, there is no religious question that can be hard to answer. I can take any question coming from any direction. I can take it all. I can face any religious leader, but I doubt if they can face me. I am the third degree of the religious world. I eat knowledge for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. I am only ignorant during sleep, but very knowledgeable in my unconscious – wake me up, you have a man who knows what he's talking about. You may call this arrogance, but there's a wild rumour that arrogance comes with success. See I love the God with all my facts. This is what I want all of us to be like; if it is too hard, to at least come close. We cannot go ahead and believe in things we know not about. One great teacher once said, "ye worship, but ye know not what." It can be asked, who was the "ye" in that hard statement, (or was it criticism?) Could that be me? Could that be you? Who are these "ye worship?" I don't want it to be me, and I know you wouldn't want that to be you either.
Chapter two of the book deals with the location of our God. We always preach a God who is in heaven, but it's very difficult to imagine where heaven is found. Is it the same world as the one we live in? Or is it another world in another different reality beyond the Milky Way? The Holy Books are placed in an awkward situation, as we weigh the material golden streets, streams and fountains against the immaterial Elysium of saints, and see if spirituality has not become scientific, and/or if science has not become spiritual. In this chapter we explore how sensitive, indeed delicate and private, man's relationship with their God is; how intimate, how very personal. In secret we all doubt the God, regardless of whether we think it has done great things, including miracles, for us. Yet again in secret, we all believe the God, whether we think it has done woeful things in our lives and in the world. A man would give up his own family, his own job, his own lifestyle – he would give up all he has, even his manhood, just for this God; he has a private affair with God, a sensitive madness. A woman would give up pleasure and vow to remain chaste for this God. I have come across people who quit higher professions and renounced caste for their God, people who donated all their physical wealth, people who even risked their health, for the sake of this God. But for the God's sake, if man is so deeply and mentally involved with the God, it is then his reality or at least part of it and he and his God deserve a thorough exploration. The chapter explores the complications of man's faith against being faithless. Hope versus faith and faith versus hopelessness. It's a war in here – in our minds.
One once mentioned that religion is the opium of the masses, and this was surely not a criticism but an honest observation. I am very religious, but I see that there is something amiss with religion – it has become distorted; it no longer searches for the truth nor does it give humanity the truth but it creates its own truth. And that, is a lie. After the book, it will be difficult to criticise other people's faiths, and yet, it will be more difficult to accept anyone's faith.
Chapter three is the centre of the book, (like I indicated earlier, the book actually has two parts and six chapters, but this is only part one of it), which will get you ready for a very revolutionary part two. This book takes the God and puts It in the sky such that one vividly sees Its image such that It cannot be denied. (In fact, this God receives the justice of being set free from the male gender limit that our patriarchal world has forced It to live in.) Just when one was becoming comfortable with having faith in the God in the skies, the book abruptly snatches the God from the skies to inside one's mind, so that greater becomes the one in one's mind than the one in the world. This is a question of an individual's intrinsic construction of outer reality.
A great rabbi once went about preaching the coming of the kingdom of the God and calling people to repentance; when they sought repentance he told them that no man can enter the kingdom without being born again. When they became born again and hoped to see the kingdom, he told them it was not by observation and could not be seen with the naked eyes but was within them. This makes it difficult to locate the kingdom of the God, for we honestly do not want the God living in us, but we prefer It lolling far away, holy and untouched by the blemish of human activity. This then gives us a self-righteous chance to later invoke it from afar, shrieking out in poetic prayers and supplication. Thus, the outcry of Jesus' twelve, "then who shall be saved?"
A philosopher once said that the God changes, because It has a maternally personal relationship with the world, and this relationship affects It, and if It can be affected it is open to development and growth. So the more involved with human life It is, the more the God grows. This might be true as explored in this book; just when you begin to enjoy the God within you, I pull It out and make you see with your eyes exactly what It can do through you. For the God being in you does not render It useless but gives full meaning to It being called the God (creator). This here will be good stuff for transfo-motivational speakers. It will be a very bitter book for atheists and believers the same.
The emphasis is that the God is definitely not dead, but very alive in our thoughts. The existence of the God is only valid in the fact that reality can be separated into two: essential and substantial. The God is an essential reality, which can only exist in our minds. It will never die as long as human beings continue to think. The God will never have a grave as long as its worshippers persist in worshipping It; for regardless of what it does or does not do, Its death can only be declared by the death of worship, and worship not being singing and crying during praying sessions, but mentally placing this God above the situations of life and all human capability. Our dialogues, monologues and soliloquies will always be stamped with the Oh-My-God remarks. I swear with all my intelligence, the God will never die, as much as worship will never cease to be part of us who live. Ira Shikansky says, in his 1996 book Rituals of Conflict: religion, politics and public policy in Israel, that "proclamations of God's death have been premature." Indeed no man dead or alive may kill the God, no dead or living man may. The God has lodged in what evolution deems the Homo Sapiens' Broca's area.
The only question posed is whether the God created the human mind (not brain), or whether the human mind created the God. For we can only know the God through our thoughts, and when we say we are convinced that the God exists, it is only through our thoughts. How do we know that we know? We simply think so. We may search all we can, trace history, travel future, pray or cuss, the final location of the God is the human mind. No wonder the Christian Adonai took sin from being a physical taboo to being a mental glitch. "Whoever looks at a woman lustfully has committed adultery." He made sin to have nothing to do with a physical ritual and discipline, but to have everything to do with the mind. The God is our thoughts, as multiple and various as they come, as good or evil as they come. These thoughts we may call spirit, for spirit is an immaterial being, and our thoughts are definitely immaterial although the loudspeaker (the brain) that they use is material. Biological studies have proven that one may only see the brain, but the mind is a hypothetical work. From page to page, literary (scriptural) proof is brought in and common sense is begged to intervene. One epistle writer once wrote to a certain group of believers, saying, "compare scriptures to see if I am not in error, see it for yourself." And that's the attitude of this book, compare with any book and see it for yourself. When the biblical Jesus argued with spiritual leaders, he did not say they did not pray enough or that they never went to church, the mosque or synagogues enough; he only played the literature card, saying, "you err for you know not the scriptures." Everything we know is based on information we have received. It only takes knowledge of scripture or historical documents to be at the other side of error. The fault with us is that we have read too many commending/rebuking/consoling/reassuring letters and books that tell us to believe scriptures and follow certain laws but we have never sought to know what scriptures were. What does scripture have to do with the human mind? Why did Jesus come to earth and why did the Holy Bible and the Holy Qur'an call him the Mind (Logos) of the God? What did this mysterious Jesus think we were?
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