god (with plenty of parentheticals)

Regarding God, people are allowed to believe basically anything they want to. As long as it doesn't manifest as, well, you've heard this spiel before. I'll spare you.

There's two options when believing in God: one, that He (or She, or Them, or whatever... for the sake of brevity let's assume I'm talking about the Western God, more specifically the Christian God) is something that is separate from the reality that you and I, assuming that you and I aren't fucked in the head, see every single day, or two, that He is in fact everything we see every single day.

There's the archetype: God has a big beard, and he has agendas. He exists...I don't know, he sits on a cloud and is constantly thinking, sort of Atlas-ish, but at the same time he's doing shit, so he's like an Atlas/Shiva hybrid that occasionally comes to Earth and impregnates (un?)willing young women. He loves Republicans, because they love him the most, despite the fact that Democrats CLAIM that they love Him just as much, but God knows your heart, donkey fuckers. He will always favor the team that wins (and those teams, let me tell you, they'd better fucking thank him when they win [or at least give a point at the sky], because without his help, I mean, for God's sake, he could put their asses down, I'm telling you). He loves Christians and hates Muslims and Hindus, but he makes them by the billions, just to give the good guys someone to hate. He hates gays. He hates abortions. He's at the very least amused by Sarah Palin.

What's wrong with this isn't any of God's positions (I mean, he's God, FGS, and since he's right, then I'm wrong), it's the idea that God would even ever HAVE positions in the first place. That He (It) would have opinions, that it would really care either way about anything at all.

Rain doesn't intentionally fall on people it hates. Wind doesn't blow your hat off because it thinks that it's ugly. Your family member didn't die horribly because God was testing you. Reality doesn't do things to TEST you. It just. does. them. Rain, wind, disease, shoes, dogs, couches, computers, beer bottles (several of them, I need to move the trashcan over here) don't do anything to intentionally influence your opinion in any way whatsoever, except maybe dogs. Reality = God, and reality is something that happens to you, not something that cares what happens to you.

But I'm fine with people going with the first option. That God is some person-like being that somehow exists outside reality and everywhere inside of it. That's fine. God exists. Woo-hoo. Thing is, you have to accept that anything you can't prove, must be real, on some level. Can't prove Bigfoot exists? By your logic, it's more important that you can't DISPROVE his existence. So you have to err on the side of him existing. I'm sure there's clever rebuttal to this somewhere, that would lead to an perhaps less-clever retort from me, which would end in some very tired (much like this whole post, now that I think about it) argument that we should all save ourselves from by just accepting that, at least on a hypothetical level, what I'm saying as true. Being positive is more fun than being negative, anyway.

I was going to follow this up with an argument that my disbelief in this type of God gave me a better bullshit detector, but in a way, this would be a false statement, as someone would be completely capable of recognizing shit for shit and truth for truth, the only difference being this "other" would believe that some force was behind the shit and the truth, which said force I don't believe in, neither of which position can be proved, etc.

However, I can POINT to God. I can prove that the God I believe in exists, because He exists right in front of me. Hey, there's a chair. God. There's a bird. God. This is reality. This is God. There is nothing outside of It, though It's boundaries are ever expanding. It's what I believe in, I guess. Seems rather like a matter of semantics, but not once you get into the whole heaven/hell/Bible/Jesus thing. Cause that, dude, that stuff is bullshit.