Design Your Own God, Then, And Quit Your Complaining

I grew up in a church with a God so I wasn't offended by the idea of God when I came into Alcoholics Anonymous.  I didn't need to use the term Higher Power or to reject the God idea outright.  My God, unfortunately, was sort of a sanctimonious prick, really judgemental and negative, looking to punish me for my transgressions while being quick to overlook and minimize my goodness, my inherent goodness.  So I've been able, slowly, painfully slowly, to transition to a much hipper, cooler God, relaxed and positive, and this vision has worked for me for many years.  While I respect people's choice in believing in a specific God or a Higher Power, or rejecting the concept outright, I admit to rolling my internal eyes at those of us who adamamently refuse to accept the whole God thing.  I'm a logical, tactile, practical guy but still can't get my mind around the idea that life is a cypher, originating out of nothing, spinning along in random nothingness, disappearing into a meaningless future.  Life seems far too complex to reject the premise that something Bigger has been involved.  None of this at all can be proved, of course, which can be maddening and freeing at the same time, allowing us to come up with our visualization of what "something bigger than me" means.

I asked SuperK what her definition of spirituality was recently and she said, pretty quickly, that she didn't know, that it was hard to define.  I scoffed a little too audibly, I guess, so she fired back: "What do you think spirituality is, then?"  I stood there for a moment, like a pious idiot, and realized that I didn't know, either.  When I tried to haltingly describe spirituality she kept pointing out that what I was describing was religion.  Thus my blog post from yesterday.

I then asked myself what would a God look like built to Seaweed specifications?  That was a lot more fun, and a lot more intuitive.

Really, really relaxed.

Good sense of humor.  Doesn't take himself too seriously.  Laughs at himself all the time.

Never judgemental.  Always finds the positive in everything.

In the moment.  At peace with his past and not worried about the future.

Constantly thinking of other people even if this comes at his own expense.

Possessing a good energy, a good vibe, a good aura.  You feel comfortable hanging out with this dude even if you're not sure why.  "That's a good dude," you think as you walk away.  You don't even have to like him to know he's got a good heart.

Inscrutable, of course, and this is the most frustrating part.  If you grill him on death and pain and unfairness he'll shrug his shoulders and say something about the nature of existence, about the agony and ecstasy of possessing a huge brain, about the complexity of being the only living creature with a foreknowledge of his own death, gently reminding us that he could very easily made instinctual creatures whose behavior was only determined by internal programming, that if want to have Free Will, to have the ability to choose how we're going to behave, that we have to deal with the fact that we're going to fuck up from time to time.