My Manifesto

For a while I had a hard time having faith in God. For one, things weren't going as I hoped He would have planned them, and for another, after my long absences from church, which were due to a number of influences, the most prevalent of which were my job and social life, coming back to His words and His people's rejoicing often sounded, to be honest, like the blind idolization of a narcissist. I found myself frustrated with the way Jesus told everyone to be humble, but here His people were giving their lives and all their faith for him. And what really did he represent? He didn't represent others, he didn't represent the people who were themselves worshiping. It seemed that the concept, the thing that these people were sacrificing themselves for was really just simply Jesus himself. And God, who I viewed as the main story of which Jesus was a spin-off. And what kind of narcissist creates a whole world of beings for the sole purpose of worshiping himself? And as one of those beings, why would I ever want to fuel such an ego by dedicating my life to Him as well? Even if he did give me the very opportunity to live my life, it seemed that He was only doing it out of a selfish will in the first place.

And then, one particular Thursday night, I had a breakdown. I had a million things to do and I couldn't get anyone to take responsibility and I knew it would be hours before I would fall asleep and life was generally just sucking for me in that early morning hour. I hadn't been to church for months and I thought maybe that could be the cause of some of my symptoms so I tired praying. That just felt like sucking up. that just felt like telling all the people I was at that very moment furious with that their conceited nature was completely justified because I, a free-thinking and intelligent person, thought they were the epitome of awesome. It felt awful. And I felt awful that it felt awful. Because for a lot of people, praying is the cure to awful. But it wasn't. It was making things worse.

So I pulled out my Bible. Because I love words, and sometimes other people's make more sense to me than my own. I thought maybe I could have a "moment". One of those "moments" that people are always having in which they open the Bible and turn directly to something that speaks right to their situation. I don't know my way around a Bile and more than I know my way around Hogwarts (probably less, actually, so that's a bad comparison), so i slipped my fingernail between two random pages and hoped, quite simply, for a miracle.

I didn't get it. I opened to some story about people traveling in a war, right int he middle of the story nonetheless. It was all narrative and it definitely wasn't speaking to me. It was probably the most irrelevant story I could have possibly found in the Bible, as most of them are broadly enough based that they can be construed with minimal ambiguity to apply to any circumstance. However, this one did not. Then I remembered that there was Psalms in the Bible and Psalms were like poems and poems were like religion to me anyway, so maybe I could get some feelings from those. There was a lot of rejoicing. A lot of idolizing. It was slowly calming me down though. It was helping me breathe. After a few stanzas I had actually formulated a better way to approach my situation at school the next day. I felt a little bit like a better person. I also felt a little bit like my problems didn't matter very much, but that only Good really did. So I kept reading. I read about 3 Psalms. Then the annoyance started creeping in again. I was sick of idolization, I saw enough undue at school every day and it disgusted me. Luckily right then I read the line "All the ends of the Earth have seen God's power to save". I'm not sure why this was so lucky,because I don't even know what in this sentence brought on this realization but it was then that I realized- God isn't a man. Now I know that this is Sunday School 101, maybe even prerequisite material, and as far as epiphanies go, it's unrevolutionary and anticlimactic to say the least. But I have this problem.

You see, I saw God as man. Not in that he had arms and legs and a long white beard and walked around in a toga. In fact, when I pictured him, he actually looked more like the Genie, presiding over a palm-sized planet Earth. But I saw his essence as man. I saw his personality as man. When really, the only thing man about God is the form in which he put his son.

So what is God, really? God is abstract. God is goodness, and happiness, and justice. God is life. God is existence. When we praise God, we do not praise a man with an ego, for God can have no ego, because he has no personal motives, he has no desires. His only desire if "His" existence- the existence of good and truth and justice. We say "His" but we would be more accurate to say "It's", for God is an entity- one full of a goodness that we should all strive towards daily, one that permeates the world around us and burns within each of us. God is life.

And life, existence, created the physical goods that we move amongst. There was existence and there was life, and life created mountains, and oceans, and grass and dirt, and bodies, for us to case ourselves in. We are individual, because we are cased, packaged, with a brain. And that is our soul. But we are all the same, we are all parts of God, because we are merely God, existence, trapped in a case, attached to a soul, and living. "people who love the Lord hate evil." People who love existence, in its purest and truest form, hate evil. "praise the Lord our God, and worship at the Temple, his footstool. He is Holy." Praise life, and existence, and the presence of perfection, and purity, and your verse in the play, and worship at the Temple, it's footstool. It is Holy.