Understanding the existence of God is muddled by our need to attribute human qualities to God. A construct of ourselves often blurs the existence of God and God's creation of humankind. I view the creation of "humankind" as the creation of our consciousness or our ability to be aware of self and others. We are literal beings and often fail to challenge simplistic interpretations. The act of God creating the world is interpreted, one way, as a six day event with a seventh day of rest. It is a simple description of the creation of the earth and life on earth and it is a literal interpretation of passages.
Did God Create Life?
by Gary Pilarchik LCSW-C
Cogito Ergo Sum
Rene Descartes gave us cogito ergo sum. A French philosopher captured in Latin. The accepted translation is "I think, therefore I am". The simplified translation may have dimmed Descartes greater point that it is not the act of thinking but our ability to recognize we are thinking that allows us to know we exist. This is the foundation of my premise that God did not create life as directly and literally as described in the Bible and other religious texts. God created life by giving us our ability to be self aware. Our consciousness, our awareness of self, our ability to have remorse and our ability to use hindsight and foresight is what God gave us. We were given the ability to recognize we think and that our thoughts are our own. Our conscience and our awareness of self was created.
Our evolved form is not God's form. It is commonly accepted that we physically reflect God as a being. I would argue this belief comes from our own conceit and vanity. God gave us our awareness as a gift and this gift gave us the ability to bring greater purpose to our lives. Our form, our natural evolution is a product of God creating the universe and allowing the universe to evolve. Our planet and our form came from that process. This may sound like a contradiction. My argument is that God didn't create the earth and life in the literally and simplistic manner defined in religious texts. Over a great span of time, greater then we can imagine, we evolved into our current form. God created the universe and set it in motion to evolve. God, then gave us the ability to be self aware. It is this ability of self awareness that is life. That is his gift.
The Imprint of God's Hand: The Gift of Awareness
God gave us the gift of awareness or conscious life. Within the gift and literal touch of his hand, God gave us the ability to recognize what is good and what is evil or bad. Did his hand actually touch us? I don't think so but this is how we often document our understanding of God and it is also how we miss the bigger picture of his gift. What is good? What is evil? What is bad? It is relatively simple to define. However, it is currently beyond our capacity to accept the definitions. We go well out of our way to justify killing in the name of God and our religions.
God left us with our original nature or our naturally evolved state when we were given the gift of self awareness. We are still trying to reconcile this disparity within our being. Our original nature, is a self serving innate capacity that fails to recognize we and other exist. This nature does not provide us with a method of understanding how we impact others.
Our original nature is more like:
We eat when hungry.
We harm and strike out when angry.
We take when wanting.
It is a reactive state versus a reflective state. It is in becoming aware that we exist, we are able to recognize others exist. Our gift of self awareness allows us to understand, like ourselves, others hunger and feel. That harm is something we can inflict and harm can be done to us by others. That wanting doesn't mean we need it or should take it. We were given the ability to thoughtfully delay gratification or delay our actions. Our God given gift is still being reconciled with our original nature. This reconciliation is an ongoing conflict for humanity as a whole. The process of reconciliation is the human race's true battle. It is our destiny to complete it. We are young and to fully understand God's gift we must reconcile the conflict on both an individual level and on a universal level.
God Created the Universe
God's ability is not limited nor is it focused on a single place. God created the universe and gave it the capacity to evolve. This universe is forever evolving and expanding. It is endless. God's power to create is beyond our limited and narrow understanding of life and the universe. It is our God given ability to be aware that has allowed us to develop beyond our innate capacity. That is God's gift. We have become more then our original form. We still view existence or the creation of life from the point when we first became self aware as a race of beings. It is at this point that spoken and written language began to evolve and slowly take form. Every century our ability to communicate and record our history progresses. Our awareness of each other, our evolution as cultures and nations move us closer and closer to similarity. Hopefully, we move closer to reconciling our original nature and God's gift of self awareness. Could our failure to reconcile be our End of Days or Apocalypse?
We continue to struggle with understanding ourselves and the world we live in. It is this struggle that often defines and thus limits the way we understand God's power. We mistakenly take the path of understanding God through simplistic and literal interpretations of religious text. In some cases we even create religions, rituals and other mechanisms to support our beliefs. We need to look beyond our created religions to understand God's full power and abilities and to truly appreciate and embrace the gift of self awareness that was given to us. Yes, God created life and God gave us the ability to be self aware as a way to live our lives.
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