2:0 - opening 2

The world does not believe in God anymore, not because anything in God has changed, but because the world only believes in objects and God dies if made into an object.  It is not as if God is not known through subject and object but that this knowing is not adequate.

Once God is an object and we are the subject, anything can be done with this portable divine artifact.  We can write God’s biography, we can give God a sex change, we can turn the one god into the many gods, we can heap irony, ridicule, scorn and apathy upon it.  We can give it its due a few hours a week while our lives remain indistinguishable from those who don’t.  God as object is a definition.  God as definition is something to object to—whether we define this God as male or female, dead or alive, a god or the gods, transcendent or immanent, beautiful or absurd, terrifying or irrelevant.

The modern God sits beside cars and investments, houses and entertainment, Caribbean vacations and creative workshops.  A feeble “choose” dribbles from the sagging divine lips. The sound falls like a tear in a torrent rushing towards a street sewer and disappears.  We rightly laugh at its absurdity.  God as object stands no chance.  God as object is a pitiable farce, a three-year fad, a bitter fling founded on protestations of lust and eternal love, a rusting coin in a safety deposit box.

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The experience of God cannot be taught.  It cannot be set in rules, dogma or moral prescriptions.  The path to God cannot be prescribed or in any way directly imparted.  It can only be pointed to.  It is the responsibility of those who have experienced God to point to God.  It is the responsibility of those who have not experienced God to follow the pointing.

One never finally arrives at the experience of God.  God is not a goal, an end, a static state.  But neither is God an incessant dynamism, a perpetual elusiveness, an unreachable chaos.  While God contains both end and flux, God is not primarily experienced as either.  Fundamentally, God is not experienced as anything.  God is simply experienced.