About: God(s)
Does God exist? Is there some supreme entity that guides the fate of the universe? If so, then how can the existence of this entity be proven? If the existence of God can be proven, why does God allow bad things to happen/does bad things?
This is one of the eternal problems in any discussions of God, the supreme being of any religion. Once one question might be answered, it triggers another and yet more.
In spite of these basic questions, the vast majority of human beings living today believe in some sort of “supreme being”, whether they name it God, YHWH, G-D, Allah, Great Power or some other title.
Individual religions devote great volumes of words and teachings to trying to provide credible sounding arguments for the existence of God.
Interestingly, most people consider their belief in God a personal rather than religious doctrine belief.
In fact, the belief in a “supreme being” is one of the underlying common themes of all religions and is second most common to the idea that human beings possess a “soul” which separates from the body somehow when we die.
God’s Will
The whole basis of credibility for most religious administrations is their claim to represent the true successors of divine messengers of God’s Will. Therefore whenever something major happens, they are generally called upon to place it in context.
The most frequent explanation and label is the concept “God’s Will”- that is God allowed it to happen, but for what reason is ultimately a mystery/or some punishment.
Hence, radical Islamists gained tremendous strength from the natural disaster of the Asian Tsunami by falsely claiming the natural event to be “God’s Will” in punishing unfaithful Muslims. As wicked and untrue as these claims are, they have been extremely successful in promoting the radical form of Islam.
Similarly, evangelist preachers in America that suck in millions of dollars through false teachings, money centric philosophies and immoral teachings frequently use both human made and natural disasters to promote the same message. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina was especially profitable for these Episcopalian churches.
At the same time, the concept of “God’s Will” is why many people turn away from religion and from a belief in a supreme being altogether. For what God could on the one hand claim to be so all loving, yet on the other allow for the murder of innocent children and for so much evil to continue in the world.
It is a fair point and one not capable of being properly answered by any person who seriously believes in a God that once upon a time killed babies in the Old Testament, allowed women and children to die in concentration camps and yet is supposed to be all loving, all seeing and all caring. It doesn’t add up.
In spite of the glaring inconsistencies of the models of God presented by mainstream religions, especially Christianity and Islam, many hundreds of millions of people still believe and still believe in a God that is both loving and capable of supremely evil acts, including the complete murder of all living things one day in the End of Days, or Armageddon also known as Judgment Day.
What is the proper name for God?
All religions have proper names for the major deity or deities they worship. In Christian liturgy it is God, or his son Jesus Christ. In Islam it is Allah, in Judaism it is Yahweh (YHWH).
A feature of all religions in the tuition of their heritage to new generations is the belief that the proper names of their deities have always been the proper names.
Even more importantly, we are taught by these religions that their god is the only god of worship. This is significant, as this belief of exclusive righteousness has been the central thorn and motivation for pro-active recruitment to these religions for centuries.
In the Christian theology for instance, we are told that The Bible is a direct revelation from God. This constitutes a central and vital tenet of the Christian faith. Without reading the Bible then, one might assume that the revelations of God would then show some consistency and wisdom of approach (given the nature and definition of Wisdom). On the contrary, the kind and forgiving God of the New Testament is in complete contrast to the Old Testament’s God of Wrath, an inconsistency that has caused many sleepless nights for Christians.
Many hundreds of Christian scholars over the centuries have produced volumes of explanation as to why the Christian God apparently changed his attitude to humanity and therefore the references to “jealousy”, “anger, pleasure” etc of the God of the Old Testament are answered.
However, the Bible itself does not refer to the same name of God throughout. In fact, there are several different proper names assigned to God (or Gods) throughout the Bible.
We are told the name of the Jewish God is and has always been Yahweh (YHWH in Hebrew). However this is historically and literally incorrect with the different names of God listed in the most sacred of texts of the Jewish religion (the equivalent to the Old Testament for Christians).
The word Yahweh is traditionally assigned with the saying ‘ehyeh asher ehyeh’ which literally means “I am who I am”. This follows the general belief in the meaning of Yahweh to be “yahweh alone”, implying that other Gods must have existed as dangerous rivals to Yahweh at the time of the word coming into usage.
In fact the word Elohim precedes Yahweh and is the proper name given to God in the books of Genesis. The word Elohim in hebrew is the plural of the word El, the Lord. This is well known and accepted by scholars but largely unknown to the general public. For the literal translation of Elohim is not one God, but the Lord Gods.
There are over 100 occassions in the Old Testament, in the earliest and most important creation stories where the word Elohim is used rather than Yahweh.
What is going on? Why don’t they tell us?
To suggest that Judaism and Christianity were anything other than Monotheistic in their beginning would be considered as heresy by most avid followers of these religions. Yet, as we have already discussed the very texts that these religions state is their central message and belief reveal this is not the case. Why then the continued hypocrisy?
Sadly much time and trouble has passed since the days of a divided Hebrew nation (Israel in the North and Judah in the South). The rabbinic traditions of post AD 70 (destruction of Jerusalem) only provide Hebrew scholars with a sanitized version of the past, avoiding the obvious existence of multi-god worship in the traditions of the Hebrews.
Christianity is the same, with the multi-god worship of the Gnostic churches, eventually cut and destroyed by the prevailing Roman Christian faith. Yet the shadows of the past remain, with enough archeological and textual evidence to enable us to piece together the historical path of names of these three major religions- Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We will now briefly describe the various names that have described the supreme deities of these religions.
El (Il)
The name El, originates from Western Semitic regions and Israel ( northern Hebrew tribes) Suria, Lebanon and Israel. The word El literally means creator god.
The origins of the names are old, possibly older than 2500BC and were used commonly until around 700BCE. Il is considered the supreme authority, morally and creatively, overseeing the assembly of gods, while El is similar to Baal (the creator god of the Canaanites), represented by the bull and revered by the hebrew tribes who settled northern Palestine. In historic tradition, El(Baal) is considered ultimately answerable to Il.
El and Il are also contextually similar to the ancient Sumerian religious beliefs (at least 4000 BCE) of An, Anu (Amun) being the supreme creator and his son Enlil (very similar to Il) and Enki ruling the earth, often represented in terms of bull worship.
In Biblican texts the word El comes to be used in a descriptive sense as a qualifying epithet meaning ‘lord’. Possibly El came to represent the sum of all the creator spirits of the northern tribes.
Israel was unwilling to part with the name El against the pressure from the southern state of Judah, but the name fell into disuse after suppression of Israel by Tiglathpileser II (Assyria) (around 750 BCE).
As mentioned earlier, Elohim literally means the supreme council of the gods, or lord gods, a term similar to the Greek word Pleroma
YHWH (Yahweh) I am what I am
The name YHWH originates from around 1300 BCE from the southern tribes of hebrews, headed by Levi and Benjamin, formerly known as the state of Judah. The centre of the religion were Hebron and Jerusalem until around 587 BCE, then subsequently throughout the world.
Possibly a copy of the Egyptian deity Atum (Aten), introduced by the Pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE. Arguably the first surviving concept of a truly universal deity first recorded in the city of Ugarit in Northern Syria. Yhwh is the god, according to tradition, was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai and who provided the Covenant, the ten tablets of law.
The name Jehovah was adopted around 1200 CE replacing the name YHWH in English speaking countries.
ALLAH
The name ALLAH originates from around 300 BCE from the Nabatean and Arabic peoples of Africa. Allah is believed to have been modelled from the western Semitic god Il (El) and is considered the creator god of Islam.
Allah in pre-islamic times was considered the creator of the earth and water. Allah was then named by the prophet Muhammad as the one true god and given a hundred names or epithets in the Qur’an, ninety-nine of which are known to mankind and accounted on the rosary beads; the final name remains a mystery.
“Gods’ Will” is no longer an adequate answer
In reflection, the image of a deity capable of intervening to stop evil but choosing not to act is probably a worse concept than an impotent God that can do nothing.
UCA cannot physically interpose on itself
The UCADIAN model of unique collective awareness (the dreamer) and the universe (the dream) answers this mystery once and for all by stating that one point of Unique Collective Awareness (UCA) cannot merge with another point of UCA. If this were to happen, dimension (dream) would collapse and existence (the dream) would cease.
In other words, as much as unique collective awareness would love to intervene it can’t. The only means by which the dream of existence can be consciously and deliberately altered from the perspective of the universal dreamer is through dreams and thoughts in the minds of higher order life capable of physically affecting the dream.
We are the architects of our doom and our destiny, not God. We are the ones that have created Hell on Earth, not God. And if we ever do destroy ourselves again, it will because of individuals, not “God’s Will” that such madness happens.
Religions have no right to perpetuate such lies and false claims of representing that which they know thing about, nor can ever hope to properly represent.
Instead, the world is given the Ucadian model, the great constitutions of unity and the wisdom of understanding as an attempt to end the cycle of madness that entraps people in beliefs of supreme beings, but abdicate all responsibility and capacity to make the world a better place themselves.
The time has come to end such foolish behaviour and to hold ourselves accountable and responsible for our own destiny and the future well being of our family, our community, our nations, our regions, our planet and our solar system.
