MARTIN LUTHER KING TO GOD: "We've seen an Italian pope, a Polish Pope, now a German pope. Do you ever think we'll have a Black pope?"
GOD: "Perhaps someday, my son, but not while I'm God."
But seriously folks...
The point of the joke is the belief that God is eternal, unlike man who lives a few years and then dies. God never dies, but we think, in our minds, of God as drawn in our image, a great white bearded father who benevolently looks down upon us from the lofts of Heaven, and in some way sometimes affects what happens here on Earth. Well, maybe so...
How about this: God as a great Spirit which has lived forever, and Heaven as an omnipresent Spiritual "place" that is somewhere and everywhere all at once, as Spiritual places are wont to be. This might make God more acceptable to those who can't seem to fathom the creationism of the bible, which, with all due respect, is all that the people of the earth, led by people who wrote it down, could come up with at the time thousands of years ago. Seemed logical then, even now, to some.
But God as a Spirit - only a Spirit- might not be swallow-able to them, until now, now when we can first-hand see the enormity of "creation," can go to the places in the Universe that heretofore were believed to be actually created by the God of the bible. "How could this be?" we say. "How could one entity have created all this, all that too? (indicating the sky)" "God always was, always will be." we were taught. But what if it's the Universe that always was, always will be, and the God we faithfully worship is the eternal Spirit that pervades it all, from then - way back when - right up to now? Actually that might be easier to imagine or comprehend, since we can actually see the physical Universe now, through the scientifically proven age of it all, in millions of years and thus be skeptical of the "creation" process, yet even more accepting of the Spirit of the Divinity that is the basis for faith.
The Spirit of God - The Holy Spirit if you will - Now that's a matter of real faith, because not only can we not see it, thus not imagine its form, we can't locate it in a "Heaven," and can only contact it, and it us, at the deepest levels of our consciousness.
But back to the original point: "Not while I'm God." - Could the God we imagine, the being we see in our own image, actually be a temporary entity, a sort of franchise passed down through generations? How could that be? Think of it this way...
We are at a point now where all the so-called "miracles" of the bible, old and new testaments, could be created by any competent magician. OK, the parting of the Red Sea, a myth that might be a problem, but the "Voice of God" the "Burning Bush" Moses on Mt. Sinai, Noah and The Great Flood, Curing the Sick, Making the Blind See, even Raising the Dead, Water into Wine - Phenomena all explainable in modern terms.We have mastered the science of all of it, and now we could go to another planet where the civilization is at the same stage Earth was thousands of years ago, and amaze the people of that planet by re-creating the same phenomena all over again, proclaiming God's hand in all we do. They would believe it as we did, knowing only the level of their knowledge at the time, which was the level of our knowledge until a few hundred years ago. That established, we let them go on as we did, build their churches, synagogues, mosques, leave them alone. God is eternal, ever watching, you might think going on, creating new worlds such as theirs, such as our own.
But I digress. The nature of God is what is under consideration here. God and this omnipotent being that "Shazam" let there be light, made the sun and stars, sea and land, the creatures thereon and therein, and as a final stroke, made man, then from him woman. But if we take the other tack, if the Universe always was, and if various species, including homo sapiens, simply developed over the millennia as Darwin said, suddenly a whole different light is cast upon our idea of a Diety, yet the notion of the Divine Spirit, the Holy Ghost if you will, remains quite fathomable even as God the creator recedes in the pantheon of belief. The Spirit lives, though The Father dies. How can this be?
Suppose that thousands of years ago, somewhere on another planet among the millions in the Universe, our species - homo sapiens - had developed to the stage at which we find ourselves now, able to travel among the planets, to cure illnesses, make the blind see, raise the dead etc., even duplicate ourselves, i.e., cloning from DNA, and they decided to invest all the Spiritual knowledge into one person that they would name "God," and then, throughout millions of years, thousands of generations, proceeded to re-clone that individual again and again, until now, investing him/her with the divine qualities we associate with God or Jehovah or Allah or whatever Diety you might name. The humans die, the divine clone lives on, and on and ON. Think of the knowledge we have today; Imagine we are that first planet, and we go to another underdeveloped planet, uninhabited but just like ours, and we plant our own Adam and Eve, cloned from our cloned "God," there with the ability to live and procreate an entire new civilization for thousands of years to come...
Think it couldn't be done? Think again. We are skirting the edges of just that capability.
But the Spirit, the Divine Spirit that lways was and always will be - We've only nibbled at the edges of that, though it lives all around us, in us, between us, among us, and it's the same Spirit that has permeated the Universe and all of "creation" from time immemorial. From time existential. From, well, way back when.
Henry Francisco, Special to
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