Oh God

If I keep up with this "sending letters" thing, I can see I'm going to be spending a lot more time at the post office. Today I had a Swap-Bot package to mail to Brasil and another package to mail to the Compassion offices in Colorado and so off I went sometime around noon.

(This was the stack of outgoing mail today. I print the picture to show the dumb thing I did. I was sending a letter to a new penpal in Arkansas and decided to put a little butterfly sticker on the back of the envelope...and then proceeded to also put the stamp and the return address label n the back of the envelope too. I had to re-address it to her on the back of the envelope, and what it says up there in the left hand corner is "from her dumb friend who can't tell the front from the back of an envelope")

But anyway, the point of this is that I had the radio on tuned to a talk show from KGO in San Francisco. I was coming into the conversation quite late but I gather that a guy had written a book about God -- pro God, I think -- and he was fielding questions and comments from athiests and agnostics.

Now, I'm really the last person to claim to be an expert on God and there are those who would poopoo my observations, but what the heck.

One woman was angry because he always used a male pronoun when discussing God...and how did he know that God was male? He kind of brushed her off with essentially "because it's always been thought so" comments.

Which of course made me wonder the blasphemous thought--if God is a man ... or a human at all ... where does he pee? I mean, really. If you make God human, and if we are all made in "his" likeness, then that means that God pees. And poops. (I'll bet Ned would like to get some of that God poop). It means he has sexual urges and dandruff and halitosis and, if he has, as is usually pictured, white skin, does he also have heavenly sun block? Does God sleep? If so, which hemisphere's nighttime does he choose to sleep during?

Another guy talked about the big bang theory and kind of got all metaphysical, talking about theories that God was some sort of an amorphous blob that somehow set off the big bang and said that it has been proven that without various body parts to make manipulating the amorphous blob into banging, it could not happen. He then said that there were powerful telescopes which show this tiny little rock-like thing and could prove that this was the start of the big bang.

Which, of course, brings up the question--where did the little tiny rock-like thing come from?

I guess my thoughts about "God" come from the combination of 12 years of Catholic School instruction ... and Star Trek (either of which probably has the same percentage of truth and fantasy!)

But it seems to me that our problem is that we are applying the laws of physics as we know them. We are applying rules that apply to human beings ... and as we all know from Star Trek, once we discover warp drive, we are going to discover that in this entire vast universe we are not the only ones here.

We figure God is an old white man dressed in robes with a long white beard because we can't imagine something looking un-human like being the cause of our existence. Maybe our solar system did come into being as the result of a big bang...but maybe that big bang came from another galaxy's death.

I think human beings have to create meaning based on our own knowledge, but we don't know what is normal on Alfa Centauri...or the planet Malcor.

So these intellectual arguments about the existence, appearance, and actions of God are really pointless. I believe there is "something" greater than ourselves. I believe that there is "something" after this life. But I don't believe that we really know anything about what it is, because all the people who supposedly "know" are...human beings.

But it makes for great radio audience participation, of course, because everybody is so sure he or she "knows" the real answer.

(Of course it's silly to argue about the appearnace of God...Everybody knows he looks like George Burns.)