





         Foreword:
          
                    The Prayer of an Atheist who Loves God
          
              God, oh God, why have You forsaken us all?  Why did You
         create us with so little knowledge of Yourself?  Why are we
         so far from understanding You that none of us can say with
         complete certainty whether You even exist?  There is not the
         devoutest among beleivers that could show You to me and none
         either that could comfort me with full faith that You are
         not.  Show yourself to me, so that I can know You.  I doubt,
         and I am told by those with faith in You that what You want
         from me is not the love that comes from knowing You, for the
         love from those that know You comes so easily, as we were
         created by You in Your image and just as we love ourselves,
         if we see You we would love You.  No, I am told, instead You
         expect from us to see Your beauty without eyes, to hear Your
         gentle loving voice with deaf ears.  We must eat Your food
         without tasting, chewing or swallowing.  We must have faith
         that You are with us and love You with all our hearts all the
         time shadowed with the abysmal fear and doubt that there is
         no You.  God, You expect too much from us!  Miracles come
         easily to You, but You created us lowly beings without the
         means for miracles.  How easy it is to despise You with the
         fervor of a lover betrayed!
              And it is even easier to disbeleive those who have faith
         in You, for they are human like me and cannot see You, cannot
         know You.  There is no other on earth that I can beleive,
         many for lack of trust I can afford them, most of the rest
         for the haunting knowledge that they are as easily deceived
         as I.  Truly, none of us are close to You, and the only
         pathfinders are blind, misguided worms such as myself.  Do
         You delight Yourself in the pathetic attempts we make to find
         You?  Are You chortling to Yourself over my plight at this
         very minute?  Did You create us to observe our endless
         confusion?  Or do You even care?
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          
          












              In the time since I wrote the above I have received no
         answer.  My heart has not filled with an unexplained faith
         that any God exists, nor have I formulated a satisfactory
         denial of God's presence.  I have no choice but to wonder
         where we came from.  The first question that must be answered
         on the path towards determination of God's existence is
         whether or not we can assume human existance.
              I do not intend to spend a lot of time discussing
         existance, as it is a subject that cannot be fully proven.
         The question `how can we assume that reality and perception
         have any link whatsoever?' is only answered `we cannot.' So
         the fact that we percieve ourselves as existing does not
         prove our existance; the fact `I think' does not prove `I am'
         within our normal definitions.  If, however, we expand our
         definition of existance to include our perceptions, the
         question becomes a redundancy.  It must be remembered that
         this does not mean that our perceptions equal reality, but
         that our perceptions are a part of reality.  If one deludes
         him or her self that he or she is a prophet, that does not
         neccesarily indicate that he or she actually is a prophet,
         but the unreality of what this person is deluding about does
         not affect the reality of the delusion.  The delusion exists.
         It is not a fake delusion; it is a very real delusion.  Given
         the possibility that we are simply following a set of
         illusions that we percieve as life, we cannot fully assume
         that reality is as we percieve it, but the illusion (if
         indeed that's all it is) is exactly as we percieve it.  Our
         perception of human existance does not prove human existance,
         but it does prove existance, at the very least, of the
         illusion.
              So if we exist, how did we come to existance? If God is
         our creator, then is it not fair to assume that if we find
         our creator, we can call it God?
              God, according to the faithful, is infinite.  Our
         universe is also.  There are a great many scientists who
         would contradict me here, and they have studied the universe
         more than I have but sceince, like theology, is merely a
         fallable human quest based in human perception.  As such,
         with no intended disrespect to those who know more than I, I
         will disagree.  The universe is infinite, undivided, and
         unchangable, although we percieve it as being finite,
         divided, and malleable.  The universe appears finite because
         it is expanding (is space expanding?  is time contracting? is
         there any difference?) and the more distant an object is, the
         faster it appears to be moving away from us.  The light and
         other radiation (the only means we currently have to percieve
         almost anything beyond our atmosphere) from those objects
         that appear to be approaching the speed of light in a
         direction away from us will be completely red-shifted until
         the wavelength is so long that we cannot percieve it as a
         wave.  This gives us a percievable boundary of the universe
         of about 15 billion light-years in all directions but does
         not indicate that there is nothing beyond this perceivable
         boundary.  For a more complete (and more accurate) account of












         the universe's infinicy, indivisability and unalterability,
         read John Dobson's Advaita Vedanta and Modern Science.
              Especially any devout athiests will agree with me that
         we were spawned from the universe.  Life is a product of this
         planet which came out of the sun which collected itself out
         of a cloud of gases floating within this galaxy which is just
         one of many in our universe.  So our creator, in a sense, is
         the entirety of the universe, something that is infite yet
         undividable and unchangable.  Sounds an awful lot like many
         people's description of God, does it not?
              To even the dull witted readers it must be obvious that
         I am getting around to a cross between an overmind theory and
         an expanded scale Earth-Mother sort of religion.  I won't
         completely deny this, but emphatically insist on the wider
         scope, as there is a lot more to the universe that spawned us
         than Earth.  I also reject the sexism inherent in the title.
         A creator would of neccessity be of a different order of
         being than ourselves, perhaps beyond any human biological
         labelling of gender, or perhaps simply simultaneously
         germinator and geminatee.  I am also very wary of the term
         overmind.  It brings to mind a conciousness far too
         anthropomorphised to accept as coming from something as grand
         as the universe around us.
              Like those that are trying to prove that our Earth is
         itself a living being, I will present the theory that
         everything is alive.  It is perhaps true that we humans have
         defined life in a very narrow scope.  New evidence of
         communication between trees and other plants make me and I'm
         sure others, wonder if plants are not only alive (as we
         already knew) but concious.  It would be ridiculous to assume
         that plants' conciousness would be similar to our own, but it
         also seems humanocentric to assume that the state plants have
         is inferior.  The only way that we can claim superiority is
         to prove that plants have a state of mind that is similar to
         a human state of mind, only stupider.  If plants have a
         dissimilar state of being, we have no reference to call one
         better or worse.
              Nobody has yet proven that the earth itself is a living
         being, and I believe that if we are looking for a human
         conciousness or even plant conciousness, we will never find
         one.  Could it possibly be said that existance equals, in
         some way, life?  Biologists and chemists have for decades
         posed the idea that humans are merely extremely complex
         combinations of certain chemicals and nothing more; that our
         perception of conciousness stems from our complexity and not
         from a `soul.' Some of these theories suggest that the
         computers we have already designed have an extremely far less
         complex version of our own sort of conciousness and that by
         constructing a computer with bits roughly equivelent in
         number to the number of our synapses, we will have created a
         rough equivelant to a `conscious' human brain.
              If there is nothing special about the things that we
         call `alive' that make them so, why is it impossible that a
         simple rock could be considered alive? It depends entirely












         upon your definition of life.  If you feel that life is
         comprised of animation, growth and some form of consciousness
         then the rock quite clearly is not alive.  If, however, you
         are willing to accept that the only things that make us seem
         alive are the specificity and complexity of certain groups of
         chemicals, then a rock can be looked at as a non-specific,
         uncomplicated version of ourselves.
              Now, a simple rock is not complex in its composition,
         but the universe, comprised of rocks, gases, energy, and
         space is incredibly complex, as scientists are showing to be
         true each day.  It seems conceivable that the universe of
         which we are several parts, could be considered a living
         organism.  If the universe is indeed expanding, perhaps we
         can look upon this as growth.
              This universe/organism has spawned all of us.  As part
         of its natural process, it has created us.  And we are a part
         of it.  If it is our creator, we can call it God.  Each and
         every one of us is a very small part of God.
          
              Now that we have unveiled God, how can we worship It?
         What could the universe want from us?  What can we, puny
         mortals give to show our gratitude for existance?  I am sure
         that God is not aware of us, as we are not aware of our
         kidney.  I would not want my kindey to worship me.  My best
         second-guessing of God is that It would only want us to
         perform our natural functions.  It would (if, indeed it had
         any awareness of us) not try to alter the course of our
         behaviour.  It is up to us to determine the proper course for
         ourselves.  God, in this theory, is as mysterious as any
         other of mankind's gods.
              It is because of this mystery that we all strive to
         discover God.  Perhaps an acceptable form of worship is
         study.  If we study God, we discover how It works and we are
         at a better advantage to thrive within It.  I see no reason
         why God would be offended at science.  If it were aware in a
         manner similar to ours, I should think It would approve of
         our inquisitiveness of It.

























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