Jun 17 2008
My Gawd
Today is a momentous day. I have finally decided upon my own personal deity. I shall call it “Gawd.”I don’t like to use the conventional, uppercase “God,” because it perpetuates two false notions. First, by using it people knowingly or unknowingly imply that there is but one god. Which deity are we talking about? You know, “God” god. That god.
Second, as I understand them, proper nouns refer to specific persons, places and things. How specific is the catch-all uppercase God? When there are specifics, “God” tends to splinter into many gods. Where there are no specifics, God is indefinite. The word tells us next to nothing; it is more of a poetic black box than it is a viable intellectual tool. By voicing and writing it we give a green light to the use of sloppy language, however politically expedient that sloppiness may be.
So I have chosen “Gawd” as the deity I will refer to when I talk about belief in a higher power. Heck, the pronunciation is nearly identical. And unlike most believers I will specifically outline what I mean by “Gawd,” thereby justifying the uppercase letter and the lack of the preceding article, “a.” No, I don’t believe in a god, I believe in the Gawd. Even better still, I believe in Gawd.
My Gawd is the maker of all things green. It created and continues to create the garden of good eatin.’ Every spring Gawd does its thing and trees and flowers and fields become verdant. Sure, a better word than Gawd may be “photosynthesis.” But that term lacks flair, so why would I want to use it?
That my Gawd is equivalent to photosynthesis and thus redundant and fully superfluous violates the philosophical principal of Occam’s razor: If an element adds nothing to your understanding of the universe, you should jettison it.
Screw Occam. With Gawd in my life I can now answer the query, “Do you believe in God?” with the response, “if you spell it g-a-w-d, yes. And I think this god is very groovy. My Gawd makes the world beautiful and it feeds me every day. What does your god do?”
Of course, there is more to my life than vegetation, so I may expand the definition of Gawd to include the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, gravity, the Higgs field (if they find it) etc., etc., all the way up (in terms of complexity) to the forces that inform and drive human psychology.
Presto, suddenly I’ve got a very great Gawd! It’s awesome.
Best of all, thanks to Gawd, I can be both a believer and an atheist, for I still don’t believe in all those other gods. I only believe in my Gawd.
But there is a glitch. To explain how I can simultaneously be both a believer and a non-believer – my religiosity indeterminate, you might say – I may have to turn to quantum physics. I hear that’s a goldmine of spiritual insight. At least if by “insight” you really mean a sloppy use of language that amounts to little more than a fresh, steaming pile of excrement.
My Gawd creates that, too, by the way.
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