Existence of God.

[crowfeather]

I accept, as a given, the existence of God.
This is, perhaps surprisingly, entirely logical...

If I am wrong, there will be nobody to ridicule me when I am dead. It simply will not matter.
If I am right, I stand to gain a lot from not displeasing God.

Meanwhile, why alienate myself from whatever it is that may have created not only me, but the entirety of everything that exists?
I have absolutely nothing to lose by accepting the existence of God, and everything to gain, although gaining anything is not why I accept the existence of God. I allow God to exist, for me, without deciding to make him not exist, for me. God is, or is not, independently of whatever I accept, or don't accept.

As a result of this position, I have, indeed, discovered the existence of God.
Of course, God does not know itself as God, or as anything.
It Is.

It's a good thing, isn't it, that I also don't dispute the existence of air, or water, or happiness, or life.

 

[Jumi]

Is this talking about the Jade Emperor?

 

[Samantha Rinne]

I accept, as a given, the existence of God.
This is, perhaps surprisingly, entirely logical...

If I am wrong, there will be nobody to ridicule me when I am dead. It simply will not matter.
If I am right, I stand to gain a lot from not displeasing God.

Isn't that Pascal's Wager?

Also, religious Taoism seems to be apatheistic (they don't care one way or another about the existence of deities, since the nature of the Tao and bringing their life into balance is more important) if not atheistic (a position I cannot agree with having a previous Christian background).

 

[Karolina]

I don't know if what you say here is a personal reflection or purported to be taken from somewhere, but it really resonates with me. I come from a Christian background and the biggest reason I have struggled in the past with taking Taoism seriously, even though pretty much everything the philosophical Taoism teaches seems just plain true, is that there isn't talk of God. I come from a very real, daily need to not only acknowledge, but also worship and serve God. But this year, perhaps because it is 2020 and everything is upside down anyway, one of the things I have allowed myself to do is to accept that the explanations I have received about "God" have been steeped in mythology. That is not to say that God doesn't exist, just that God is not Santa Clause.

On one hand, I was taught that God is the ineffable mystery and that any attempt at trying to define God does God an injustice, and then on the other hand, I was told that God can absolutely be defined "in His own words of revelation in the Bible", that God is a Trinity, that Jesus is God, that God is contained in the Eucharist (communion in the Catholic church). Finally reason would not allow me to hold both ideas simultaneously and after spending much time in nature, and detoxing from my religious indoctrination courtesy mandatory pandemic shut downs of churches, I have arrived at the proper first question: not "who" is God, but rather "what" is God. And once I allowed myself this train of thought, I realized indeed that we have been making God in our image in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview.

Now, my journey involves figuring out what does it mean if God is not this "almighty, omniscient, immortal human-like Spirit"? And what does this understanding of "GOD" mean for the way I live my life? What does it mean for my morality and value system? What does it mean for my understanding of what happens after death? What does it mean for what I teach my children about what I believe and what the available belief systems are?