Over 170 people posted comments on our blog here last Friday. Nearly 100 posted about our blog yesterday. People are hungry to talk about God, and God’s role in our lives, that’s clear.
I am going to do my best this week to respond to some of those posted entries in the Comments Section of this, the most interactive blog on Beliefnet.com. Then, this coming Sunday, we will continue our deep exploration of How God Functions. (For the first part of my answer on this question, please refer back to yesterday’s blog.)
A class member posting as “SheerLuckHolmes” said just this morning…

Wouldn’t it be ironic if experiencing this physicality is the point of it all! WOW!

My information, my friend, is that physicality is not the “point of it all,” but that pure “Being” is the “point of it all” — AND that Pure Being cannot be achieved without physicality — that is, without Knowledge of Self embodying in the physical, so as to be Experienced. Physicality is not the point, but it is one of three points in the Triune Truth: that Divinity Knows Itself, Experiences Itself, and IS Itself thus Fully Expressed. Being fully Expressed, it Knows Itself fully, then Experiences Itself fully (through endless physical lifetimes), to once again Fully Express through Pure Being.
Think of this as a triangle, with Being at the top, Knowing at the lower right, and Experiencing at the lower left. The process of then, this: the Essence of Divinity existing and expressing as Pure Being (the top of the pyramid) Individuates Itself and moves into Knowing Itself (the bottom right corner of the pyramid) as a Singularization of The Singularity. It then Physicalizes Itself and moves into Experiencing what it Knows of Itself (the bottom left corner of the pyramid). It then returns to Pure Being (the top corner of the pyramid) as the Knowing and the Experiencing become simultaneously expressed (as in the life of Buddha, of Jesus, and other Masters, known and unknown, throughout human history).
Can you follow this? I wonder if I am making this clear enough…
We are engaged here in a triangular process…you might call this the Triangulation of Diviinity…or, perhaps more descriptively, the Holy Trinity.
The Roman Catholic doctrine that teaches us of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is one expression of organized religion’s attempt to explain this triune nature of the Divine.
Our class member “Don L.” posted this in response to yesterday’s “lecture” on God’s Function…

God is God. He does not have a ‘function’. To even say so is to reduce and demean God. God does serve many functions in our life while executing His purpose to save our butts from the fire in spite of ourselves. But God is not a function.

Well, Don, I am not sure how explaining something reduces and demeans it. I believe that God desires that we know and understand how God works in our lives (that is, how God “functions”). I surely do not think it is insulting to God to help people to better understand God.
But then I get even more confused, Don, when you say on one hand that God “does not have a ‘function’. To even say so is to reduce and demean God…”, and then, in the very next breath, “God does serve many functions in our life while executing His purpose…”
Am I the only one to whom those two sentences seem to be direct contradictions????
Then, Don, you tell us that God’s purpose is “to save our butts from the fire in spite of ourselves…” Oh, gosh, Don…what an interesting point of view. God created the “fire,” God created the possibility of us falling into the fire, and then God has as His purpose saving us from the fire that He created? That feels like such a convoluted theology.
Then Don added in his post…

This ‘New Spirituallty’ is really not new. It is merely a modification of eastern religion, with the inclusion of bible terms in order to appeal to westerners

You are right on this, my friend. I have always said…and the CwG books say, that the ‘New Spirituality’ is not really new, but a restatement of, and enlargement upon, ancient spiritual teachings from many traditions, combined. What is ‘new’ is the combining of these various teachings from various traditions, and what would be even ‘newer’ would be the embracing of the theology of a God unified with humans (and all of Life everywhere) by the world.
Such an embracing is going to happen, I believe, in the years ahead as humanity begins to see more clearly that the theology of separation, that teaches that God’s function is to “save our butts from the fire,” is not only remarkably primitive for a supposedly advanced species of sentient beings, but simply dysfunctional. That is, it has not produced the outcomes which it intended to produce, even after thousands of years. I observe that humanity is losing patience with all this. Sooner or later we will conclude that the theology of Reward and Punishment has not brought us peace, harmony, or lasting joy. We will then collectively move in a new direction with regard to our theology and our entire cultural story about God and Man and Life and All Of It.
That is my prediction.
Regarding our discussion on Friday about whether Hurricane Ike was ‘God’s Will,’ our friend posting as “Therese” said..

Perhaps now, in addition to intellectualizing the hurricane, those on this forum could actually consciously send their thoughts, energies, prayers, and even money and time to the area, and lend the physical energy to their mental creating?

Yes, Therese, I agree with you and join in this hope, and I believe even the very blog to which you refer included, and opened with, a prayer for those in Ike’s path. And I encourage everyone here to send, as well, money, and to lend whatever physical energies they can, to the recovery effort.
What I am really wondering, however, is how long it will take us to “get” that the Weather Pattern of the World has changed dramatically, and that it is no longer safe or practical to keep rebuilding cities like New Orleans or Galveston, putting hundreds of thousands of people back in there, waiting for the next calamity. The day will come, I believe, when the United States will simply become clear that the entire Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps much of our southern and eastern coastline, may have to be evacuated permanently if we want to save lives — to say nothing of the billions of dollars it is going to keep costing us to reconstruct massive communities in areas so vulnerably to increasingly dangerous and calamitous tropical storms.
I know it is sheer blasphemy to even suggest that….but once the weather pattern shows itself to be permanent, we may have no choice…
More later on the many comments here…and thanks for engaging in the discussion!