God and Moloch: A Solipsistic Deism
The following is an understanding of the divine from a Cartesian foundation rooted in my understanding of works of Camus and Hermann Hesse. It may be well to note that the basic conception of God from which this belief began was, and is, a Jewish one. Enjoy.
In ruminating about the divine the following came to mind. It seems that all worship to any "God(s)" is in fact worship to a very specific one. His name is Moloch and he is the god of Death.
Plainly, all man's actions, may he build a skyscraper or raise a family the ultimate purpose behind it is the desire to leave behind a permanent relic of his impermanent existence. And so, religion is too a security blanket we wrap around ourselves to shelter us from the inevitable impermanence that is life.
I claim that there is however another god. He is God.
Creator.
But creation did not begin like it does in the bible. It was more like this:
"In the Beginning God (or something) created the heavens and the earth...
and then he/she/it stepped back."
The world may have been created by something, maybe even for a reason, but he's not here. The world does not belong to God and he abandoned it a long time ago.
We are the world.
And we exist to service "the good".
And "the good" is life. We know this because we like being alive, or at least like it more that being dead, or at least like it enough to not kill ourselves. Whether we live for fear or dying or for greater or lesser purposes, I contend that the purpose in life is simply maintaining it.
So life has a pretty simple purpose: don't die...
...and if you can, try and help others not die too.
But I want to take this one step further.
I believe in Descartes when he said, "I think therefore I am" because it is the only philosophical statement that I know that is universally true.
But when this becomes the only truth, the rest of the world falls quickly out of focus and crumbles into obscurity. So how does one service the good in others when others may not even exist?
There are two answers. One is that Cartesian doubt is simply a poor lifestyle choice.
And the second:
Since the only thing one can know is one's self, all comprehension must begin and end there. The world is not a desk or a tree, but a mind and it is different for every person. With that said, God is not an invisible force but a thriving element of one's self. God is inside you, but moreover, God is you.
In Hermann Hesses's Steppenwolf we learn that a person is composed of a multitude of souls that work together in harmony or disharmony. In Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund, Narcissus tells Goldmund that man is on earth to imitate God and since God is one, man's ultimate goal is to harmonize the plethora of souls of which he is composed and become one.
The earth was formed some time ago and since then mankind has been alone. We were always alone. But we had each other, and more importantly, we have ourselves and our intellects.
"We are not landlocked"
We have the greatest capacity within ourselves.
"When I think I know myself I withdraw farther and find a world".
God is not a fairy tale or a distant father figure or a person who makes promises. God is a state of being.
We are our own creators and our own saviors.
We are alone in a very big world and we are Gods.