Theology

 Amtrak, Coast Starlight, 11, Ride Home

Portland to Emeryville

Then roommate pickup, to Berkeley

9:30p

Not much to say, the view is black, just me and my brain and my computer, to pass the time, and maybe come up with some blog ideas, if not an excellent essay or chapter or something.  Just bought a cheeseburger, and a powerade, and took my meds, and I’ll probably feel like sleeping at some point, but writing should be fun for now, or a few hours, or until the spirit doesn’t move me!

So, my card is always interesting.   I chose NOT to give it the Eric the drunk, but the woman next to me, on boarding, seemed like an interesting possibility, but she got anxious after I gave it to her, so I took my card with me (she left it in front of her on the tray table) when I moved to a window seat.  I didn’t get her name.  But she was friendly when we got off.

The internet and phone service are not operative - boonies! - but I can write of course.  Mental masturbation?  Or inspired literary afflatus?  Through the mountains we go.  No mount/in, here.  But we should come to Emeryville, in about 11 hours.  Merry evil?  Huh.

The kindle lights up, so it’s perfect for reading in the dark.   The Willamette weekly (WW), not so much.  I have my speed-reading book on it, which might do me some good to re-read.  But introspection and creativity are calling:  can I be my own muse?  Almost everyone around me is silent.  Train staffer is chatting, up ahead.  Me, myself, and I will have to commune with the spirits, I guess.  The potential reader, you (and me), mainly.  If this goes on my blog, my thoughts can reverberate through god-only-knows how large a span of distance and time.

I guess that brings me to the main idea bouncing around my head lately.   

     

     Could God be real?   I mean, like the one most people seem to believe in:  Creator of the universe, hears and answers prayers, lives in heaven, loves everyone, knows everything, omnipotent and almighty and supreme and all-powerful and can do anything?  I mean, should I stop playing around, and give serious consideration to a possibility, however slim, that God, the god of this paragraph, in a real and meaningful sense, actually exists? 

First of all, maybe I should stick with my blog’s premise, and see where that gets me.  As an adult of 50 years of age, can I create my own universe (or have I, already?).   Or, to get weirder, am I responsible for Reality, as a global telepath or something…. Or….. am I actually tiny, my mind a reflection of everyone else, and thus maybe in some sense the opposite of almighty (as in really weak and puny and powerless).  My blog is kind of a box, and I’m trying to step outside of it.   A train is as good a place as any for that, I think.  

Secondly, hearing and answering prayer - is that just a verbal phenomenon, or can god help you by rearranging reality to your liking, moving things around in a magical game of logistics, to  grant wishes, like the (mythological?) genie of Aladdin’s lamp?  That seems possible, to me.

Thirdly, God living in heaven (or Heaven).  A synonym for outer space, the universe, everything, is “The Heavens.”   Earth can certainly be heavenly.  Maybe there are zillions of inhabited exoplanets, that can also be heavenly, for the space aliens that thrive, each to his own.  Another angle, is each species in its own idea of heaven - (an alligator’s heaven is different from the cheetah’s).   So it’s not necessarily black and white.  There are winners and losers. Furthermore, if God is everywhere, then he lives in hell, too.

Fourthly, why should I believe in a God that loves everyone, even the Devil and all his demons, all the criminals, the war-mongers, all the sadists and torturers and cruel bastards, who surely deserve hell, if there is one (that’s another question).  Some people are Bad.  Either born that way, or made that way, or both.  Infinite love would surely be a source of infinite life, an afterlife, and would preclude a place or state of infinite torment.  That’s where the words of Jesus have real power.   We would love to survive death, with our loved ones, in bliss, not aging, without disease, etc.   Like all kinds of restaurants and no borders and teleportation throughout history and the universe, and freedom and great sex….  Heaven is a kind of library!  All the books, movies, records, magazines, websites, papers.   Personally, I like the idea of freezing time, and being born again, like a new life in a video game, starting over or starting fresh, or being able to turn off pain.  I’m getting off track.  Anyway, an infinite, universal love seems to entail making a lot of fantasy reality.   Maybe libraries are as close as we can ever get.  Virtual reality can be even more real than the quotidian facts of everyday life.   Escapism is Heaven, I think.

Fifthly, Omniscience.  Theoretically, I don’t think that’s possible.  But maybe all that CAN be known, eternally refreshed, is sucked into the black hole of curiosity of an Uber-genius deity.  Even a super fast speed-reading, computer-mind, that vacuums up data at ungodly speed, wouldn’t know everything.   I mean, right?  Maybe I’m wrong.  Knowledge and wisdom a     nd science and visualization and cyber-enhancement and madness: there’s some possibility, here.

Sixthly, and finally, power.  If everybody has freedom, then we all have a frightful responsibility to use our power wisely.  Power is money, knowledge, violence, authority, and people submitting to your will, by freely chosen deference, or by force and threat.  There is also electricity and potential energy and watts amps volts ohms coulombs etc, for the sense of power, in physics.  There are people with powerful voices, powerful rhetoric, and various superpowers, skills and talents and abilities, like say, bodybuilders or martial artists or writers or comedians.  Genius and wisdom and compassion and goodness and kindness and the ability to alleviate suffering and create joy.

I've had crazy dreams that have given me insight into brilliant, genius, mental worlds unlike my own, that give credence to the possibility and existence of godly superpowers, perhaps distributed corporately among different people with different talents, but that -in combination with computers and internet- make me a believer in a kind of God, if a bit different from the standard understanding.