The Gods and the Bees

Since coming to the harsh awareness that the myths of Mormonism no longer align with my constructs of ultimate reality, I have been struggling to redevelop meanings for some of the symbols I left behind. The most powerful of these was obviously "God".

I think God is a great support for some of the myths I continue to tell, such as the notion that, "the worth of souls is great in the eyes of God." But problems with theodicy and the (as far as I can tell) inseparability of the "soul" and our gray matter leave me unable to consider a micro-manager God. I've been leaning more towards pantheism, in fact. After all, if we were microscopic creatures studying a living brain, the behavior of neurons would appear completely deterministic, just like the world around us does. (I'm siding with Einstein here, not Bohrs.) Without the quale of being human, we would have no sense of the consciousness of our subject on a larger scale. As I see it, God could be like that, for the whole universe. Likewise, just as a human cannot select a particular neuron to manipulate in a "random" way, pantheistic God can't be manipulating our day-to-day lives. My only problem with this approach is that God then seems to be pointless to some extent.

I was drawn to thinking more about this recently after reading an article on swarm behavior. If you don't want to read it, here's the gist: swarms can solve problems that individual members never could. In essence, intelligence is additive in a universal sense. This clearly holds true for humans as well. Consider, for example, the manufacturing of a jet aircraft. Not the assembly, but the machining and forging of parts, mining of ores, fabrication of silicon wafers in the circuitry, generation of power required to run welding equipment, etc. The knowledge to build an an aircraft from "nothing" does not--could not--exist in a single person. There aren't even organizations with the complete knowledge, but rather groups of organizations that must act together in the simultaneous application of inter-individual knowledge. Yet airplanes are common sights in the sky. The same could even be said of much simpler things, such as ball-point pens. Perhaps we as humans are progressing towards divinity not as individuals, but as a species. I like this new idea, as it captures Zion and God in one idea--a collection of humans united in the pursuit of familial love create Zion and become, in a sense, God.

I am God. No, wait, you are God.

I posted about this on NOM a little while back, but I wanted to comment on it here, too, so that I can always find it.

The University of Chicago Magazine published a fascinating article on how people tend to see themselves in agreement with God on moral issues. While this seems a truism at first--people naturally align their morals with what God "teaches" them--the interesting thing was that when those moral beliefs were manipulated in a laboratory setting, God's beliefs changed right along with them.

This has played out in my own life, where I cannot believe that God is an exclusivist when it comes to religions. At the same time, I saw God in a totally different way as a believing Mormon, and I can actually remember that.

My take-away from this is that "God's teachings" are synonymous with "your personal beliefs" in the majority of situations. Which means if someone says that "God wants us to do such-and-such," it's identical to saying "I want us to do such-and-such, and ALL CREATION agrees with me."

Seems like a hard pill to swallow if you're a believer in God. But then, you're different, right? You actually do understand what God teaches; the idea that you project your beliefs onto God is ludicrous...right?