Good Golly Gosh

GOD

Greetings, world.  My name is Jesse Lawrence Teshara, and I happen to be God.  Relax, relax - it’s not that big a deal.   That just means I’m good.   What’s good?  Not being bad!  You can be God, too.  The bar is low.  Just don’t be evil.  People have different moralities, different gods, different ideas of what’s right and wrong.  You might think I’m being heretical, or egregiously narcissistic, or full of myself.   But if you agree with me, then we’re in a kind of religion together.  So hear me out.  

Is it ALL good?  Am I the devil’s God, too?  When we say “all right” are we assenting to a morality that permits anything?  It certainly sounds like it.  I mean, if Jesus’ crucifixion, for example, was good and holy, then what isn’t, right? Or if God is in control, is all-powerful, then all of reality must be good, no?  Or if the nirvana of a buddhist is being one with the universe, then the most enlightened state of consciousness possible treats with equanimity any and all hellishness or depravity or cruelty or injustice, as part of the natural order, something deserving of compassion and understanding.  Maybe it’s not good OR bad.  It just is what it is.

SOMEbody’s gotta be God, right?  If only God is good, like it says in the good book, then someone needs to step up, seems to me.  If nothing else, being God is a self-help process.  A way to beat your demons, as it were.  The only way for God to be made real is for you to play the role, is how I see it.  It’s a way to take control over your life, to not be a slave, to be free.  You can even be God over yourself, your own God I mean to say, while being an atheist toward anyone else’s God.  If you are the ruler of your own universe, and make your own world heavenly, you don’t have to submit to anybody else’s pie-in-the-sky imaginary deity.  Heaven is something to be experienced here and now, not up in space, after you’re dead.

Religion is an ancient method of social control.  It’s also a source of community, friendship, and help for those in need.  I grew up Catholic.  A priest is called a Father.   The Catholic God is Father-Son-Holy Spirit.  So a priest gets to think of himself as a part of God.   A part of the corporation, the body of Christ.   “Godco”, you could say.  A global community of christians, x billion strong.  But I disagree with the church.  I don’t believe in souls, or heaven, or even sin.  I don’t believe in God or Jesus.  The only deities that exist are the people alive, today.  Sin is breaking God’s law, which is hard to believe in, if you don’t believe in God.  I’m not about to impose my morality on the world (although maybe I should).  Apart from the fact that I don’t believe in God (That is to say, a God who hears our prayers and can answer them), I also don’t believe Jesus is alive in heaven, or coming back to earth, or was anything other than a deluded jew who thought the apocalypse was near, and did a few magic tricks.  Alright?

Which is part of the reason I became Him/Her/It.  God is not a concept entirely without merit.  God is love, after all.  If you want to believe Jesus died for your sins, because he loved you, you go right ahead.  Maybe he did, not that it makes any difference.  Everyone is going to die.  Anybody can believe anything they want.  Like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  Or Adi Da.  Or Allah.   Or Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu.  Or Zeus.  Or Ra.  Or Quetzalcoatl.  Or Ahura Mazda.   Or Buddha (who did not think of himself as a god, but more as a philosopher who had insight into the truth of suffering, and the way to cessation of suffering).  Or me.  I think it is likely that everybody, Absolutely Everybody, (including me!), is wrong.  But we’ve got to make an effort, in any case.  Or you can live and die, without thinking, like the worm that you are.

It’s okay to be a worm.  We’re all just animals, in God’s zoo.  We’re tubes, from mouth to anus, that happen to have arms and legs, and big brains and opposable thumbs, that walk upright.   We’re carbon based lifeforms with computers and calculators and cars and culture.   We have dna in all our cells, as well as a city inside, the microbiota in our guts, that have their own dna, in symbiosis with our own.  We’re a team effort, and it takes a village, and evolution continues, weeding and selecting, rewarding and punishing, molding and shaping.  Even if you don’t have any children, you can still be God!  God the Father doesn’t have to be your God, too.  I mean, look where it got Jesus, hanging up there, nailed to a tree.  

Nowadays, everybody is a god.  With the internet as a second brain, and huge libraries full of the condensed-time of millions of geniuses, we all are potentially godlike.   And it doesn’t take much to be godly, just Be Good.   That’s what religion is in two words, right?  Omniscience is basically a library, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t care if you think I’m crazy.  I mean, I am.  But I’m saner than you.  That’s what I think.  Probably.  

Prove me wrong.   I don’t want to be assigned to oblivion as much as anyone else.  Make immortality real, if you can.  God bless.