Thursday, September 24, 2009

God as Hamlet


The stark differences in God's persona between Old and New Testaments had changed his mind as to what to do with the world he created, and it's reasonable to think of him as a Deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with an continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed , as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides.

Process Theology, put forth by Alfred North Whitehead and others, deals with a bit of this, as does Norman Mailer in most of his writings, most recently in his dialogue with Michael Lennon, On God. God is a creator , small "c", in the sense of the artist, continuously involved with their process as they investigate the further reaches of their muse.

New forms are created from old parts, and not everything is a success, and yet everything is a needed aspect of a life that is fully engaged in a struggle against an all -defeating death. Things wouldn't just be moot, in the popular sense, they would stop being things at all. It may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent ; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates. There's a reason that it's written that God blessed/cursed man with Free Will, but I'm hesitant to say what that is. It has to be more than a curse he engineered in us all to cause us to stray from a path of righteousness.

Being Omnipotent and A Supreme Being, I would think, implies that there's more for a Deity to do than create Heaven and Earth and treat his subjects on the one inhabitable planet in the solar system as if the whole guise of existence is a reality show, everyone one of us literally, in some sense, waiting to see who gets "voted off the island". Or worse. I would assume that we are possessed with this cumbersome element because it is also in God's nature to choose to one thing, or several things, as opposed to doing one or several things to the contrary. And, of course, he could also do nothing and instead wallow and abstract about all the things he might do when his calendar clears , that is, procrastinate. This might be the reason for the lack of witnessed divine interventions in large public places since the Bible was gathered and codified as Church doctrine. In is image, we are ambivalent and decide on the basis of what crisis is most immediate I actually believe that FW is central to his Divinity, in the sense that he could choose to battle his creative power and simply do nothing.

The existential nature of God, though, would become bored and ill-tempered simply existing in a vacuum, and so he decided to create meaning for himself, much as we do in this realm. Free will is that thing that allows us to associate together and determine and define right and wrong, good and evil, and it is also that inspire given instinct, I believe, to empower us to fight the baser desires and instincts.

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