One God Many Religions

‘“In your nothingness I hope to find everything,” said Faust to Mephistopheles, and so it was; after the Mothers, Faust became free to follow his own instincts.”

I owe so much to the teachings of Goethe’s Faust!

In The Beginning was the paradox: How can God/perfection and creation/imperfection coexist? Paraphrasing Robert P. Scharlemann, “what cannot be thought is that the world is the being of God when God is not being deity; the world is, in the time of not being, a moment in the being of God. (p. 89-90, 1982).

Short answer to the paradox above: One God, many religions, why— because God backs into existence; that is, by virtue of being not-God in the form of “being-what-is-not-while-not-being-what-is” God becomes, in the verb sense, “free to be,” and, by implication, in the noun sense, free to be the “God of all creation,” i.e., the logically implied God of creation. This state of affairs suggests to me the original significance of John Paul Sartre’s definition of pre-reflective Cogito (the double movement of conscious reflection). But, of course, in Sartre’s Cogito there was no God. As Sartre says: the transcending For-itself …”is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself.” (Being And Nothingness p.801) Yet, in so far as Sartre’s pre-reflective Cogito is a product of freedom, i.e., a product of universe, life, and the symbol-generating movement of free thought, it reflects both the backside of God (the time of not being) and the “face of God” (implied self-Logos). Absent the “face of God” knowledge—language with its lexical, syntactical, and contextual designations, science, ethical behavior, existential meaning, and religion(s) —could not exist.

The above realization—that I am both D.H. and divine—was a very emotional event. Eventually, I came off of that high, but there was no going back after that. Put another way: God resides in my temporal present as an “all knowing awareness,” but I do not (usually) experience awareness that way. Instead, I experience my own beliefs, concerns, intentions, and deeds. God (implied God), however, resides in my temporal present in the same way that images reside in figure/ground Gestalt representations, e.g., whether you see two faces or a vase depends on which part of the drawing you see as figure and which part as background. This figure/ground relationship is what lies behind my personal relationship with God! bwinwnbwi

For more see: http://bwinwnbwi2.wordpress.com/page/19/