Who is God? Why are we here?

God is absolutely, unconquerably, supernally, good, true, beautiful and loving.

Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon;
and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated
and there was no longer any place for them in heaven.
-Book of Revelation

What is God, to us? While a lot of people will deny this, God is everything that makes existence in this place remotely meaningful. God is not limited to being that, he is not only that which gives us meaning, but without God you might as well exchange the Sun for a black hole. God is all meaning, all good, all truth, all real beauty (beauty in itself not beauty of appearance), all love. God is that which endows meaning to existence, without which we are merely absurd monsters, or machines without a valid function. A reality without God would be a reality that morally ought not to exist. It would be suffering without purpose, a cosmic mistake. God is radiantly, absolutely, superlatively without shadow, without evil, without lies, without wrath. God is perfectly absolutely good. God does not get mad, God does not hate, God does not judge, God does not strike anyone down or cause any bad to happen to any being. We do that.

And yet the three major Abrahamic religions portray a God that is implicated in some pretty seriously heavy shit. First off, he is directly responsible for creating this world, a place full of horror, fear, death and suffering. He wiped out the vast majority of the human race in a flood, making God directly responsible for one of the most appalling genocides in human history. He commanded Moses and his successor Joshua to perpetrate what can only be described as crimes against humanity, including the murder of defenseless women and the rape of girl children. Moses bears more resemblance to Pol Pot than to a prophet. The Abrahamic God supposedly smites people pretty regularly. Last but not least, there is hell. A place where the Abrahamic God demonstrates His extreme vindictiveness. Even the Inquisition only tortured people over a limited time period. The Abrahamic God does much better: you can be tortured f o r e v e r. This in itself is proof enough that the spoiled monster that is the Abrahamic God is not worthy of being called God. Abraham's god may very well be the chief of all devils, but he is not God.

What all religions have to address in one form or another, is why the perfectly good God allows this extremely messed up world. The Abrahamic religions only give lip service to this concern: "why is it this way? You did it." Which is to say, Adam and Eve did it, but God holds you responsible. It is like a parent with an untidy child saying, "it's your mess junior, clean it up!" Except of course this mess is on a planetary scale, committed by 2 illiterate naked people who would not have been able to write their own names, had paper and pencil even existed. Yet we are all somehow responsible. How members of Abrahamic religions can even believe that there was an Adam and Eve in this day and age is beyond me, and yet their explanation for why God allows suffering absolutely hinges on it.

Buddhism doesn't even touch this issue at all. Nowhere does the Buddha speculate on why existence is suffering. He doesn't even look at the problem. How did things get so screwed up to begin with? He just took it as a given that things suck, and went on from there. As with everything, Buddhism is very practical and analgesic in focus: it only cares about making the pain go away, not why it is there. Why the world is full of suffering was never in the scope of its interest.

And make no mistake, this world doesn't just have some random suffering here and there. It runs off of suffering. Suffering is part of the operating system of existence, the screaming gasoline in the engine of Life. Not just suffering of human beings, but of all creatures capable of feeling pain.

I think this world exists in the way that it does, because the creation of something extremely important and good created the possibility for it existing, and that thing was so very important that it was worth allowing a world full of suffering to exist, in order that this wonderful thing would exist. What was that thing that was so important that its existence took precedence over the existence of all the suffering in this world?
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Souls.
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An automaton has no soul. It cannot make its own decisions. You cannot love it, nor can it ever really love you. A soul on the other hand is sort of like a micro-god, a tiny piece of God. With souls comes a terrible possibility though, the possibility that you would go your own way. The possibility that you would be god to yourself, instead of loving the real God.

The first ensouled being that went its own way, might not have been a human being. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, there is a war in heaven and some of the angels went their own way (became god to themselves) and others didn't. Curiously, there is mentioned very little connection between the fall of the angels and the fall of Man, as if they were unrelated facts. The Serpent in the Garden of Eden was never referred to as other than just that; a snake, not a fallen angel. To the Gnostics, these fallen angels (Archons) are directly responsible for the existence of the Creation. The chief Archon, called the Demiurge, created the World which we subsequently became trapped in (or our wayward souls voluntarily entered). Not only that, but they believe that the god of the Old Testament and of Islam is the Demiurge. Which would explain some of his aberrant behavior.

Whether the universe exists because the Archons made it, or for some other reason, the very existence of souls entails the possibility of their (hopefully temporary) fall into ignorance and evil. What was the greater good for which God was willing to risk the existence of this suffering world? We are. God wanted us to exist, and implicit in our existence is the possibility that this place would exist.

This world is the only hell that exists, and we only stay here until we can break our addiction to it and realize who God is. In the meantime, we are subject to the demonic rulers of this realm, whether those rulers are the gnostic Archons or our own evil will, desires and cravings.

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