Religion And The Philosopher MacFinn

The love of God is the greatest force in human history. The love of God bursts forth like new wine from old wineskins, running out in rivers to cover the world: the Christians going forth to the nations, the Muslims spreading out to Spain in the West to India and beyond in the East, the disciples of the Lord Buddha going from India to all points of the compass...

What destroys the love is the human side of religion: the things human beings need, or think they need, for their enterprise of religion to function; the laws, the buildings, the monies, and so on. This human side of religion is backwards-looking, retrograde, slothful, cautious, fearful, pinch-penny, neutered, and the list goes on...all the baggage of human society.
This retrograde human side of religion is, in the spirit of Arnold Toynbee, the continuation of Universal State by Universal Church. If man is to progress, he must separate God from what has gone before in his life, for by definition, God is the new and the future, and man's life is the thing of a childhood due to be cast aside for the new good news.

This is what I mean when I say that I do not believe in God; I expect God.
If God's being is imminent all the time, does it not strike one as silly to stop and say that one believes? Is it not just as silly as saying one does not believe? I mean, under what circumstances would you say that you are an atheist? You just have an attittude about religious types and you like to attack them? This is hardly a basis for a discussion of beliefs. And if you are in a debate sponsored by such and such a forum and the topic is "God, does he/she/it exist?", in all fairness, would you not expect the entire shambles to be quite ridiculous?

Recently, when Tim Russert passed, someone said that you knew he was very religious guy, but he was never in your face about it. Now, this means that he is a type of person who is not pushy about beliefs, but it also implies that when bad things are done, this type of person may not publicly protest.
Now this attitude, expressed about Mr. Russert, best sums up the attitude of our American and human society about God, it is part of our religious structure: keep God in his place, which is essentially that of justifying everything we feel compelled to do. But it does not free us, rather it delivers us to the evil one in chains. To keep God in his place is to treat God as a concept. God is not a concept. There is no conceptual knowledge of God. To speak of God is to speak of quantum mechanics and what is the state of Schrodinger's cat: is it quick or dead? To speak of God, then, is equivalent to stand with an infinite daisy and pluck at the petals, saying "...she loves me, she loves me not, she loves me, she loves me not,..." as we flip flop between possible states of being. To love God is to stop. I say "...loves me..." and speak no more.

Everyday religious people say "...loves me..." and carry on the flip flop process using different words and different symbols, unleashing an erudite flood of words, overwhelming all in its path. But when the waters recede, we are dry and untouched. It is like MacFinn: the water is the divine and he experiences water within the structure and confines of the established bowl, not quite suspecting what that wavy thing is on the near horizon.

MacFinn: ( slapping his fin against the glass side of the bowl) Thus do I refute unseen and non-local causes, wierd notions and innovation, and things outside the established religion! Yes, I see the wavy thing you call "sea", but it has no existence independent of the glass bowl, the crystal church, wherein we live. Were it not for the light wave propagation through the medium of glass, the "sea" would not exist! What you call "sea" is a projection from the water within our bowl, outwards without bounds. It is merely the natural human desire to expand and to imperialism. The quaint notion that "sea" somehow will make us different is preposterous, as if it makes sense to say: "Now we see as in a darkling bowl, but soon we shall all be changed!" Nonsense! Pure rubbish!
"For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of Lord,as the waters cover the sea."