So is Reality itself God - or is there no God? Why is it necessary or useful to even have a God? As we all know the most common usage of the word God is the Biblical God, and that God clearly doesn't exist. So isn't redefining God to mean something else really just creating confusion? Isn't it easier to just accept that God doesn't exist? Why should the Church of Reality even address the God issue at all? Why is God even worthy of our attention?
Just as the Church of Reality was a thought experiment, we can look at the concept of God as a thought experiment as well. Since we have already determined that Reality is the only legitimate God candidate, the question now is, "Is it useful to mix God and Reality?" Or - "Aren't we degrading Reality but associating it with something that doesn't exist?"
Let us look at the traditional definition of God in more detail. Is God the Biblical God, some other God, or something else entirely? The Biblical God was invented thousands of years ago by primitive people who were, like us, trying to figure out how the world worked. They didn't have the science we have today. Even the concept of Reality wasn't part of their world. They didn't have the benefits of scientific methodology. Evolution however favors those who learn to live in Harmony with Reality and the first step in living in harmony with Reality is to understand Reality. Understanding Reality is vital to the survival of humanity.
Bible stories were state of the art science, philosophy, government, and morality thousands of years ago.
So if we look beyond the actual God story and look at what the people who wrote the Bible stories were trying to do, they were trying to make sense of Reality, and how to live in harmony with reality. It's just in that era they didn't have as much to work with at the time. Today we know that much of what's in the Bible is just plain wrong. But in its day the concepts that murder, stealing, and lying were fundamentally wrong was a revolutionary idea. And these ideas helped bring society forward to what we have today.
Hundreds of years ago Issac Newton discovered newtons laws of motion. It replace the work of Aristotle who also attempted to explain motion, but was dead wrong. Then came Einstein who came up with Relativity and replaced Newton. But do we laugh at Newton and Aristotle because they were wrong? Was Newton actually wrong? It could be argued that Newton was right in that his equations actually worked except for extreme gravity or extreme speed. Perhaps some day when we unite gravity with quantum mechanics that we will have new equations that make Einstein obsolete. In a thousand years will we look back at today and laugh at our primitive understanding of Reality? I sure hope so!
Like Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, Bible stories were early attempts to understand Reality in a world where the concept of Reality didn't exist. Just because they got it wrong doesn't negate what they were attempting to do. So the Bible is not about God as an invisible white haired farther figure who lives in the clouds. God is really a personification of Reality much the way Uncle Sam is a personification of the United States. Then God is to Reality what Aristotle was to the laws of motion. It was an early attempt to understand the world we live in.
Bible stories are better understood as obsolete rather than wrong.
Since the Bible stories were an early attempt to understand and explain Reality it is more accurate to say that it is obsolete rather than wrong. When one evaluates these stories one has to see beyond the fact that this stuff didn't actually happen, and look at the principles that these stories were trying to establish. In that context they got a lot of stuff right and, over time, we have built on some of those ideas.
One has to credit Bible stories with at least making the attempt and to establish the idea that there is a right and wrong way to do things and that people should strive to do what is right and avoid what is wrong. In fact - the Church of Reality is just a modern day extension of what the Bible stories were trying to do. it's just that we have a more advanced paradigm to explore it from.
In the Bible stories God is omnipotent and omnipresent. God is in all things. God is that for which nothing is greater. We are commanded to understand God because if we don't live in right relationship to God we are condemned to death. If we substitute the word Reality for the word God then the above statements actually come close to making sense from a modern scientific perspective. If we don't live in Right Relationship with Reality we will go extinct. In order to preserve our existence we are compelled to understand Reality. Reality is our creator.
Bible stories just used the word God in part to understand our role in Reality.
In the context that Bible stories were an early map of Reality then Reality can be seen as the upgraded version of God. Reality is like God 2.0. So one isn't really converting from God to Reality as much as they are upgrading to the latest version. Bible stories challenge us with questions about "Why are we here?" "What is the purpose of humanity?" "What is the meaning of life?" "Where does right and wrong come from?" "What should I do to make my existence meaningful?" "What is a good life to live?" On these issues the holy books of the religious world are ahead of science and it challenges the church of Reality to answer these legitimate questions in a scientific context.
Thus if you look at the term God in a historical context as to what it was humans were trying to do with Bible stories you can see that God was just a prototype of what we call Reality today. Thus Reality is not just the only God candidate, Reality is the rightful successor to the God title. To be clear, this isn't saying that the God of the Biblical stories is real. That God doesn't actually exist. What this is saying is that if we are going to continue to use the word God, the only context for which God makes any sense in this modern scientific world is if we use the term God to personify Reality.
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