[austintorn@aol.com]

r.p.,

Yes, our potential is unlimited, but you know ahead of time I can’t just say that “God-as-a-person” granted things or God wanted this or that because he didn’t make me privy to the workings of his intelligence, not would I know how such a system of parts that does wanting and granting could just appear fully formed or always have been around and not be dependent on these very parts. So, it still seems like God is a very large claim for primitive humans (all of us) to make for a being so powerful and so far beyond.

I just found myself here on Earth, although I don’t remember the first day, for I was very young at the time. I heard the majority’s view of God that came from my religion’s and other’s sworn testimony of divine inpirations—a type of vengeful God that you seem to not be for either, so, it is not a soiling to be against these types of superstitions.

“God”, stripped of most of his usual connotations leaves something more like the Ground-of-Determination (G-O-D), although, again the acronym is full of confusion. Your “God” word is at least underloaded of all bad things and is pure, but the battle is lost on most when they hear the word “God” and that one knows God wants this or that but please ignore the other theist’s claims, such as in the bible or in what churches preach, for most think of him in terms of Heaven, Hell, adore me or get tortured, great rewards, etc., whether theist or atheist, for that is what was “revealed” by him (or her or it).

If the ground of all existence, being, and the universe’s order is called “God”, like Nobody suggests, it’s just a confusing name for the underlying ground, which could just as well be a very simple and uninteresting thing, as complexity seems to be built from the bottom up, not top down.

If the universe is made of consciousness (God) and our conscious awareness comes of it and is one and the same with it, made in its image as they say, then so be it, but I can’t just declare it so even if I neurologically seem to meet with it during meditation. At any rate, pure experientialness or consciousness could just very well be what it is and nothing like the God we claim or not God at all, or a God-who-is-not-a-person—just the workings of everything—and surely no one has penetrated this as yet.

Still not sure of the need to explain design with with a higher design and then suddenly dispense with any and all worries about design that were so needed in the first place, but everyone wants to neglect this kind of question, saying something like “it just is”, the very thing they couldn’t say about the universe in the first place.

No hard fellings—please stay calm—me, too, as well—I know some people can be abrupt and dismissive, when their “little self” shames them, as Deepak says—but we are both full of love and compassion—this quality seemingly having nothing to do with beliefs of origin of everything that is.