As you can see if you look at my profile, I very seldom post on here. I read posts a lot and think about them, and occasionally comment, but I question sometimes whether I have anything useful to say, and the few times I’ve tried I’ve posted I’ve honestly been surprised by the incivility of many responses. I think I need to change that for myself as well as the community, and I’d like to stick my head out a bit and ask in this first post in a while for some help to understand something that I’ve struggled with for my entire life: the existence of “God” and human suffering at the same time. I was raised Roman Catholic, with all the guilt that goes along with that. I left the church after confirmation, and except for a handful of times over the years (I’m 64) I haven’t been back. I will say that the times I did go back helped me a great deal, because the rituals, the sense of community, and the memories from my childhood made me feel part of something.
I’m not widely read on religion, but I think if forced to choose a home, I’d probably be a deist, like many of our Founders. I’m an engineer, and have always had a great love of science. I’m certainly no atheist, because I don’t think we recently-former apes can comprehend what God even might be, and being agnostic doesn’t work, because I believe in some sort of “higher power.” But that power to me is more along the lines of the spiritualism that First Peoples believe in. I’ve been in therapy for 16 years, and my first therapist was very interested in theories of consciousness (www.bernardokastrup.com/...) He convinced my fertile scientific mind that it makes perfect sense, given what we now know (or not) about how the universe works, especially at the quantum level, that everything in the universe has some level of consciousness. We just haven’t figured out how it works yet.
If we humans are part of a global consciousness, and, as people like Martin Luther King Jr. have said, the universe bends toward justice, why don’t tiny, tiny things happen (or not happen) that would prevent much universal suffering? I certainly don’t believe we can’t know “God‘s plan,“ because I believe we ARE God (we and the rest of the universe and perhaps many other universes that we inhabit) and together we must have great power.
Maybe just like in our inability to comprehend the God given vastness of the universe, we’re very far from understanding how consciousness works. But it’s curious to me that some (www.rollingstone.com/...) ascribe spiritual intervention in what happened on Saturday, when I see a clear presence of abject evil in Trump, and I believe that’s the prevailing sentiment of humankind. Doesn’t consciousness bend toward good?
Just to be crystal clear, I’m not at all disappointed Trump wasn’t killed Saturday, so don’t drive me away again by misunderstanding and attacking me. What happened was truly horrific and I’m relieved that yet another life wasn’t taken by gun violence. I’m just questioning their side’s reasoning against the meanings of “Good” and “Evil.”
