Responding To Atheism

The atom

I think that we should all be free to follow what we believe.  And so this is not to offend Atheists, just to discuss the arguments that I have heard in favor of it and against the existence of a God.

When I was a child there was no mention of God in my home, except when accompanied by damn.  When my younger sister was born, I felt less loved by my mother than ever.  Somehow I knew that with my sister in the picture I would never be loved.

So, around the age of four I began sitting in front of my house hoping that someone would pass by and adopt me.  One of the many days I sat waiting for my new family I heard a voice in my head.  It was a male sounding voice, the kind of voice that makes you feel safe and secure.  This voice told me that I was not going to ever get a new family.  It told me that I was very loved, that it loved me, and that when I grew up I would understand why I was in this family and know that it was the right place for me to be.

From then on, I had many conversations with the voice.  It comforted me when I was afraid, and made me feel loved when I felt alone.  The voice did not offer a name, I did not ask for one.  Today, I believe that it was God speaking in a voice that would make a child feel safe.

When I was a teenager, I would come home from school, go up to my room, lock my door and either turn on music or the television.  One night I was locked in my room with the television on and I fell asleep, as I did every night (because I was afraid of the dark).  I was awaken by the one voice that could pull me out of a coma.  I heard my mother scream at the top of her lungs, “Denise!!!!!! Get Down Here”.  I ran down the stairs to find her half asleep and half watching the television.  I asked her why she called me, but in my mind I knew that there was no way that this half asleep woman could look like this after letting out the scream of the century.  She looked at me as though I was crazy and said, “I didn’t call you”.  As we were about to enter into this discussion over how I could have imagined her calling me loud enough to make me jump out of bed – while I was sleeping – an enormous cloud of black smoke filled the stairwell and came pouring downstairs.  I screamed for my father who was in bed upstairs and he almost fell running down,  By this time we could see nothing.

Luckily we found our way to the door and got out of the house.  My father burned his hand opening the doorknob as it was already so hot.   I ran next door and called the fire department.  After the fire department came they told us that it had been an electrical fire.  The origination point of that fire was my television.  Certainly I would been dead, unlocking my door in the dark was not easy, and there is a chance I just might not have awoken before it was too late.  My father and I could have both been dead before my mother even knew that anything was wrong – since she was downstairs.  Something supernatural happened to me that night to save my life.  That something, I call God.

Two weeks later, those same neighbors I ran to to call the fire department were all killed while they slept in an electrical fire.

Here are some arguments that I have found on the internet against the existence of any god.

“The progress of science
The progress of science bring each day a more complete explanation of phenomena that men attributed, until now, to the divinities. God is pushed back within the limits of the Universe.”

Nowthese are quotes from Einstein which address that statement:

“Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that is there.”

and another Einstein quote:

“Science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world
of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

What we are really looking at when we interpret the world – quantum

Here is another argument against God:

A different proof that there is no God is:

“Life is Material, not Supernatural:  We are material, Natural Beings
All Evidence points to life being material and natural”

“A popular objection to atheists’ arguments and critiques of theism is to insist that one’s preferred god cannot be disproven – indeed, that science itself is unable to prove that God does not exist.  This position depends upon a mistaken understanding of the nature of science and how science operates. In a very real and important sense, it is possible to say that, scientifically, God does not exist – just as science is able to discount the existence of a myriad of other alleged beings.”  Austin Cline

According to the ancient religions, God is unnameable, incomprehensible,  a power that works within the universe as the universe exists within God.  According to renown Physicist David Bohm:

“Bohm believes that life and consciousness are enfolded deep in the generative order and are therefore present in varying degrees of
unfoldment in all matter, including supposedly “inanimate” matter such as electrons or plasmas. He suggests that there is a “protointelligence” in matter, so that new evolutionary developments do not emerge in a random fashion but creatively as relatively integrated wholes from implicate levels of reality. The mystical connotations of Bohm’s ideas are underlined by his remark that the implicate domain “could equally well be called Idealism, Spirit, Consciousness. The separation of the two — matter and spirit — is an abstraction. The ground is always one.” (Quoted in Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe, HarperCollins, New York, 1991, p. 271.)’

In Bohm’s view, all the separate objects, entities, structures, and events in the visible or explicate world around us are relatively autonomous, stable, and temporary “subtotalities” derived from a deeper, implicate order of unbroken wholeness. Bohm gives the analogy
of a flowing stream:

On this stream, one may see an ever-changing pattern of vortices, ripples, waves, splashes, etc., which evidently have no
independent existence as such. Rather, they are abstracted from the flowing movement, arising and vanishing in the total process of the flow. Such transitory subsistence as may be possessed by these abstracted forms implies only a relative independence or autonomy of behaviour, rather than absolutely independent existence as ultimate substances.

(David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Boston, 1980, p. 48.)

We must learn to view everything as part of “Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement.” (Ibid., p. 11.)”

This comes from the new physics that is responsible for 30% of our current economy.  When today’s science describes what the material, natural  world is made of, it can be described as nothing less than supernatural or metaphysical.  What we see as the world around us appears to be real, but what it is made out of is consciousness.  A statue made out of clay, can be called a statue, but it is still really clay.  Regardless of what we are made into in this material world, what we are made out of is not of this material world.  So far, according to Science, what we and the entire Universe is made out of is an unending mystery.  And as much as they learn to describe what we are made out of, they cannot ever come to the original cause, why we exist.  If that force that underlies and guides the universe is what our ancestors and many of us today call God.  Then Science proves God.

Next argument:

If God exists than God must interact with our universe and there must be some physical manifestations of his interaction.

For me, the voice when I was very young, and the voice that saved me from dying in the fire were manifestation enough, but the Universe itself is the greatest physical manifestation of God’s existence, not as a “he” not “his” but the mysterious awesome force, the implicate order the unknowable, unnameable Source of the universe.

Often atheists use the Bible to argue against the existence of God.  But the Bible, or the Koran can only be used to argue against the description of God, not God itself.    In this respect, it is possible to argue because these books are ancient and must be taken on faith, not proof.  But God as the Atom, God as the Implicate Order, as Consciousness Itself or Original Cause cannot be argued.  Science is, in every day, coming to understand God in the way that our ancient ancestors once did.

To me, God is impersonal, unconditional Love, far beyond our capacity to understand but it is our drive to seek.  I don’t feel that anyone must believe in God.  However, if atheism is logical and realistic as it is supposed to be, then its arguments against God, must be sound, grounded, and able to address even the most ancient spiritual concept of God, which I have not found that it has done.  It may be capable of an eternal debate over the validity of religion, specifically or in general, but again, that is not an argument against God.

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Love Him As Thyself

Fear originates in the belief that I am separate from you and from everything else in the world.    Being separate – I am obviously alone, therefore I have reason to fear.  We are programmed to survive.  It is the first instinct that we have.  If I believe that you are separate from me, I then have every reason to fear you, regardless of what you say.  It does not matter whether or not you, today, are intent on my harm, what matter is that you are in a position to cause me harm unless I can control you or protect myself against the possibility, however small, that someday, for some reason, you may feel the need or desire to harm me.  All of this is predicated upon the belief that this reality that I can see, touch, and hear is the ultimate reality.  When I say “I”, I believe that it is as true for me, as it is for each cell in my body.  I am the totality of the consciousness that pervades every atom in my body and so I cannot claim that each cell does not see itself as, as much of an “I”, as I see myself.  So it is easy for me to see a liver cell finding it hard to conceptualize a lung cell as sharing a common “I”.

If we understood that we are all cells in the same body, whether I am a brain cell, a heart cell or a cell in the rectum.  The body requires the use of each cell in order to survive, therefore each cell shares the same I in every way that matters – each cell shares the same “I” in every way that matters to the ultimate survival of the body.  Every cell in my body is not in a me, you, them relationship with each other cell but in an “I” relationship in the only way that really matters.  If the liver goes down, soon the pancreas will follow, then the kidneys, the lungs, the heart and the brain.  One day, we will realize that the health of our bodies and all of the diseases that seem to plague it are closely tied to our sense of separateness that would logically pervade every cell sharing the same body consciousness.

If I was taught from an early age that I am because you are, which is because they are, which is because we are One.  If we were taught to believe that the illusion is our separateness and not our connectedness – we would have not fear of the “other”.  We do not see the air, but we are taught to believe that it is there even if we cannot see it.  Ants, bees and many other insects function as one body – we may say colony but that is only our vision of their reality.  To the ant and the bee, they are only separate in function and contribution but not in being.  Therefore the one is never alone, and the whole is never unguarded.  There is no fear of each other, and together they act upon that which should be feared.  There are places in the world where it is only a matter of minutes before one bee becomes one thousand bees.  One bee may seem threatened, but with those odds, it soon becomes the threat.

The Golden Rule tells us to do unto others as we would have others do unto ourselves.  In Genesis, we are told that, yes, we are our brothers keepers.  In Leviticus 19:33-34 it is said, ³³ “And if a stranger sojourn with thee in your land, ye shall not vex him.  ³⁴ But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” Jesus and other spiritual teachers tell us that we are to go further – that we are meant to go further.  Jesus, in Luke 10:25-28 ²⁵ “And, behold, a certain lawyer stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? ²⁶He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? ²⁷And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbor as thyself. ²⁸And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do and thou shalt live.” 28 And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.  29 But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour? “

30″ And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.   31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.   32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.   33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,  34 And went to him , and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.

35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.   36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?   37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.” To understand what God means by “neighbor” or “brother”, Jesus uses this example which, at the time, would be the equivalent of telling the story to an Israeli and instead of Samaritan – using a member of Hamas.

I consider myself to be a very spiritual person, yet, it has taken me until now to understand the full import of loving my neighbor as myself.  I have heard so many people, Christians, say to me that they live a certain lifestyle while there is such poverty in the world because, “They worked hard for what they have, they earned it.”  Or, they may say that they, “give to the poor” or to charity.  But that is not what Jesus is saying here, it does not say give what is left after you give to yourself. Or, give what is comfortable, after you give to yourself.  It is saying, think of others in the same way as you think of yourself.  Care for others as you would care for yourself, not after but in the same moment, in the same breath with the same love.  It says give to others what you would give to yourself, because you earned it for yourself and for your brother. If we all did this, then no one would be without enough.  This could be called many names, it could be said that I am talking about socialism or even worse, communism – but I am quoting the Bible, I am speaking about religion.  Yet, I am really speaking about the topic I began this with, fear.  Fear is as responsible as greed and selfishness for the mess that we are in.

We fear that we will not have enough to share, yet in truth, if we do not share we will not have enough.  No one rises up with a full belly.  No one steals when his needs are met.  The storehouse is dwindling and if the owners don’t begin to share, the peasants will take it over.  It is a story that is repeated time and time again throughout history.  We must begin to allow ourselves to open to the belief that we are not separate unless we separate ourselves.  We are all connected by the Spirit that runs through the One Body. We are One in reality, we are One in necessity, and we are One in God.  The only way that we will guarantee our own health and survival is to care for the health and survival of the entire Body of which we are all a part.  Here is another of my favorite stories that exemplifies this point.

There is a story told in Kabbalah:

“With an angel for his guide, the visitor is first ushered through the gates of Hell, which, he is surprised to find, are made of finely wrought gold. The gates, in fact, are incomparably lovely, as is the verdant land­scape that lies beyond them. All this is quite astonish­ing to the visitor, who turns to his angelic guide in disbelief. “It’s all so beautiful,” the man says. “The sight of the meadows and mountains . . . the sounds of the birds singing in the trees … the scent of thousands of flowers. . . .” And then another scent catches his atten­tion: the aroma of food being prepared.

The angel leads the visitor toward an immense ban­quet table laden with every sort of delicacy. However, something is terribly wrong. Hundreds of people are seated around the table, but they all appear to be starv­ing. Their emaciated condition is painful to see in the midst of such bounty, but even worse is the frustration and anger they are obviously experiencing. Each person at the table has a long-handled spoon chained to his wrist. The handles are so long that no one can place food in his mouth. But that does not prevent the con­demned souls from trying. For all eternity, they are struggling to feed themselves a meal that is right before them, but that might as well be a hundred miles away. Taken aback by the tragic spectacle, the visitor is now more than ready to visit Paradise, and the angel immediately complies. At once they pass through an­other set of golden gates, alike in every detail to the gates of hell. In fact, a great deal about the two locales seems to be identical, including the banquet table and the diners chained to their utensils. But the people around this table are well fed and happy, despite the fact that their circumstances are identical to those of the damned. The difference is not in the physical situa­tion, but in how they respond to it. As you might have guessed by now, instead of trying to feed themselves, each of the souls at this table feeds the one across the table.”

There is One Enemy and That Is The Hypocrite

Matthew 13:24-43 (King James Version)

24Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field:  25But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way.  26But when the blade was sprung up, and brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also.  27So the servants of the householder came and said unto him, Sir, didst not thou sow good seed in thy field? from whence then hath it tares?  28He said unto them, An enemy hath done this. The servants said unto him, Wilt thou then that we go and gather them up?  29But he said, Nay; lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.  30Let both grow together until the harvest: and in the time of harvest I will say to the reapers, Gather ye together first the tares, and bind them in bundles to burn them: but gather the wheat into my barn.

An open mind is an amazing thing.  One day I realized that if I needed an answer to a question, and I could not find it, I just had to leave my mind open – eventually the answer would come.  I extended this to my religious reading and an understanding of the parables of the New Testament and the Books of the Old Testament.  So, in reading the above parable of the Sower and the weeds I could not understand how it was that the Sower thought that the good crop would be picked up with the weeds.  All of the stories are told in terms of the reality that we know so that we could draw a parallel.  However, I easily remove weeds from my garden upon the first appearance because they do not appear alike.  Suddenly, during the Presidential election I saw the true meaning of weeds.  I saw people who said that they believed in God, were “good” Christians and Jews turn into hateful bigoted people.

So what is the Harvest?  Many like to think of it as the “end of days”, when in fact there is no one end of days.  There are many fields in God’s world and many have seen an end of days.  Surely there was an end of days in Germany for six million Jews.  There seems to be an end of days in Darfur.  There was an end of days in Bosnia, Rwanda, and certainly parts of Iraq.  There certainly was an end of days for the thousands killed and still dying due to the World Trade Center attack, and Hurricane Katrina.  No, the Harvest is not connected with the end of days, it is a time when we are ripe and bear fruit.  That time is not the same for everyone – It is how we each answer when we are called to show ourselves.  When Obama ran for President I saw so many people grasp at straws to find a politically correct reason to fear his being elected, but their desperation exposed their truth.  They had been living as hypocrites, going to their Churches and Temples lying to the God that demands that we love each other as ourselves, perhaps even lying to themselves.  The Harvest came to the Germans.  Those who risked their own lives to save the Jews were the good crop, and those who turned on them were the tares.

The same holds true in Rwanda, there are so many stories of people who risked their lives to protect those whose lives were threatened, and those who did nothing – harvest.  Today, as millions of people lose their jobs and their homes – while others still spend tens of thousands of dollars on accessories rather than coming to their brother’s aid are showing the fruit – or lack of fruit that they truly bear.  It is not about tithing, it is not about giving of what is extra or comfortable – it is about giving what is needed – even when it requires a sacrifice, because to sacrifice is to make sacred.

Whether our hatred surfaces, our greed, or our indifference to all other life on earth, all is coming to the surface during these testing times.  The real enemy is never the one standing in your face holding a gun – no, the real enemy is the one standing at your back holding a gun on you while he tells you that he is your friend.  There is no greater enemy to man, to the world, or to God than the hypocrite.  The Harvest is when there is no choice but to act in accordance with who we are.  It is when the circumstances are so dire as to force a response that is true to the self – and when no response is equal to a response.

I once firmly believed that the enemy was Religion.  Clearly, at a time of readily available weapons of mass destruction Religion, being divisive, and the cause of so much death and destruction over the past two thousand years had to be our greatest enemy.  This was a disheartening belief, because we cannot do anything about religion.  Then one day I was reading about what it means to be a Jew.  I read:

“How could anyone who believes in the God of the Bible treat his fellow human beings, all of whom are created in God’s image, with less than compassion?”  “To Jews, compassion is the keystone of being a mensch, and so basic a requirement of being human that the Talmud’s Rabbis were willing, at least in theory, to read an unkind person out of the Jewish Community….  From Judaism’s perspective, an unkind person is presumably a non-believer”.

All of this would be intensified for Christianity because it is upon the rock of brotherly love and compassion that Jesus built His Church.  With or without religion, even with belief in One God and One Way – there will still be hypocrites because there is a universal belief in One God, and that God demands that we love and that we understand that we are our brother’s keepers.  Yet, there are still those hypocrites who place themselves above and apart from God by choosing to pretend to live in the image of God while living in the image of the deceiver.  We can only worship and honor God, the noun, by living God, the verb.  So, for many different reasons, the Harvest is coming to, perhaps more fields at once than ever before.  In a sense, it is a time of Revelation, as it was originally depicted – a time when all that has been hidden is being revealed – a time when however hard we try to disguise ourselves – we can no longer hide.  We are in a time when there are only two paths on which to walk – the path for those who are God-ing and choose to serve all as needed, as brothers and sisters under God, and the other path, the one for those who cannot bear to serve any except themselves and those they consider their own.

The road is forked and we must walk that path of who we are.  I never really grasped the big deal made of hypocrites in the Bible before now.  Now, I realize that a hypocrite is a promised vote that cannot be counted on, a promised service that cannot be depended on, a promised hand that cannot be trusted to be there, a promised fire that will cause one to freeze, a promised meal that will cause one to starve, and a promised ally that will cause one’s defeat.  The hypocrite is the one you trust to be there and because of whom you look no further.  The enemy that you know can make you strong; the one that you don’t know will destroy you.  We don’t need to eliminate religion – we need religion to eliminate hypocrites.  In the days to come religion too, will be revealed, it will be known by its members.  A whole is the sum of its parts.  It is perhaps the decade of harvest, and what will be separated out will be the hypocrites.  What are the “Meek” who will inherit the earth?  Perhaps meek means simple – clear – transparent.  Perhaps it is the true, the transparent who will inherit the earth.