What's God?

I'm sure I don't know. There are a few possibilities available in our culture.

Many people believe in a personification. Even those who acknowledge God as a being greater than ourselves sometimes do so via personification -- He is greater than us: capitalizing that pronoun especially calls attention to God's personhood, his Lordship over us, his maleness with its broad chest and dangling participle. These are the believers who subscribe to a master, and who allow a church to become a ruler. These are the sheep that non-churchies disdain and some churchies aspire to become. There is great humility in being ruled, and many religions place a high value on humility. Therefore, is it not easier to attain humility when there is a human to humilify us? Humbly before the Human God we hum hymns of Him.

Yet others extend God into the complete realm of the tangible. God is everywhere, unseen and pervasive. God is a rock, an antelope, a raindrop, a kiss. This suffusive God brings comfort like a refreshing breeze or a cardigan sweater; his omnipresence is a safeguard against loneliness and meaninglessness. We are not motes of dust in an uncaring mechanical universe because God infuses our very atoms with Godness, interpreted as Purpose, and therefore our lives are not accidental. This God is often paired with the Human God, because discerning the purpose of the universe is complicated compared to discerning the purpose of a benevolent master, while vice versa discerning the location of a master is depressing compared to the comforts of an all-present feeling, a conjured emotion of caretaken love.

Let us not forget the formula God = Love, an equally valid notion that floats about. This negates omnipresence (love is notoriously fleeting and sought, two attributes that can't co-exist with Everywhere), yet still dehumanizes the mystery of sheer mastery. Love feels good. God is good. Therefore, God is Love. The reductive problem is that Love is also fickle and subjective and -- though we prefer not to talk about it this way -- willed into existence, making God, by transitive properties, a random figment of individual imagination. Hardly the sort of essence a community or species can rally around. Love is noble and love is kind, but love is also difficult and sometimes just not fucking there. If God = Love, who = hate? If God is an emotion, why have we been given such seeming power over our emotions, and who gave that power to us?

Of course, there's God the Unknowable, the God who kicked off this post and who is the favorite refuge of agnostics and semignostics alike. There's comfort and power given to a Creator whose Creations are too stupid to recognize their Creator. But what is nature? Our observances of life and creation are rooted in nature -- ours and otherwise -- and no species on the planet pops free of its maker with the inability to recognize its maker or its kind. The mechanics of reproduction are too powerful a metaphor to fully embrace this non-reproductive, intellectualized God who yet gave us corporeal bodies ruled by reproductive organs and urges. If God is the sexless Creator with no interest in being Known, why the Hell is existence so fraught with Knowledge, Creation, and familial Love? This agnostic God cannot coexist with the God = Love, which cannot coexist with the God as master, which cannot coexist with the God as Everything.

We cannot be infused with self-mastery that asks us to bow to a master. We cannot be infused with love for a being that requires no love. Copping out by saying God is bigger than this and therefore unknowable only falls into the trap of the agnostic God that removes itself from our purview and our love.

What is God? God is clearly The Point, but nobody can agree on The Point and that disagreement sort of negates The Point unless you believe that some people are Godly (and get The Point) while others are not (and miss it), which circles back to a human-like God who sorts and judges for no apparent reason, the lack of apparent reason circling back to the unknowable God....

We have reason and logic, neither of which can describe this God. It's not just a matter of proof being needed, or intelligence that hasn't evolved. There's no God but the one we choose, or no Gods but the ones we choose, and thus God is Choice.

We are Risen creatures. For some reason, we have the ability to choose beyond our desires or because of them. For unfathomable purpose, we have options. I submit it's these options that are holy. When we say 'yes' or 'no' we are exercising our God. When we sort truth from lie, we are defining our God. When we create this or destroy that, we are embodying our God.

God is choice. Choosing the ability to choose, and extending that ability to choose to everyone else ... this is what brings us closer to God and Godliness.

I don't know what the political or religious definition of this conclusion should be. I'm pro-choice on a level that has nothing to do with abortion. I'm pro-God on a level that has nothing to do with abortion. I don't have an answer when it comes to abortion. In this -- in this fickle gray area between 'yes' and 'no' that's defined by an ultimately painful choice -- I think I represent the reason America has such a struggle with this topic. How do we worship choice and existence at the same time? There's an American answer somewhere in there. We'll get to it, someday.