What is God?

What is God? 

According to monotheists, and others, God is a deity. The supreme being who created everything. If this is so, argue Atheists, then God is a very flawed designer. You would surely expect from so powerful a deity perfection in his creations, if not that then a single lack of cruelty? For is cancer, famine, pestilence, AIDS, children with severe disabilities not a flaw in design?  No. Not if it is nature. Not if it is Tao. Nature makes no mistakes. Those seeming flaws are our perceptions based on judgement's made by long established conditioning. It is no different than when we suggest this person is ugly, that person is fat, the other is to be feared. These thoughts have no basis in God's mind only within human's. They are reactionary judgements. 

Shackling God to such man-made logic is questionable. How would those who follow him know His methods let alone His intentions? However, if God is the supreme spirit that lives within all of us, a Christ-like presence awaiting our personal discovery, then what some call God becomes more than a distinct possibility. 

Reading the Bhagavad Gita you discover how much symbolism there is in the Hindu faith.   They are not alone. Jews and Christian's too have a great deal of symbolic storytelling found within the pages of the Old Testament.  Krishna is the light, a sublime force, that exists in all mankind. The old Egyptian god, Horus, like Jesus and Mithras, was a virgin birth. More pertinently, Horus is a symbol of the goodness within us all. It is a goodness Buddhist's call enlightenment. Zen Buddhist's have a saying, I'll have to paraphrase it I'm afraid, which goes something like this - 'if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.' This is an ironic statement suggesting we all, by our flawed personallities, by the manner in which mother nature has created us, can never acheive full enlightenment. We can, however,endeavour to make that change. To better ourselves.

This may be so but when I meditate I join with that which is far greater than me. Some would call it God. It is not an authorative presence but a collective force, gentle in the extreme. It aids in realsing a Christ-like sense of being one with all, of wanting to improve oneself until God, Tao, Krishna are finally released within the individual.

God is within us and without us. God, like Tao, is just a word. It is our understanding of what God is that causes us so many problems. But there is one word that combines all our beliefs admirably well, that word is love.