/lit/ - Literature

Take the God question out of existence. It's not the point, not the question, to be an atheist, theist or any degree of doubt in between. I mean it, this is not just to end the discussion or look to pacify its parts or anything like that. I mean that this is not the point in the slightest, because you'd be putting this God in relation to what you think existing means, what you think differs reality from fantasy and so on.

That's not the point because the point is precisely to understand how God functions as a signifier of our world, that is, precisely what makes things real and not real. This signifier is individual as well as collective, multiple, but often mashed up in a few single names. This is the parameter through which we live. This has God, that hasn't, this is reasonable, that is not, this I'll consider, that I'll ignore, this exists and is real and important, while that is false, irrelevant, meaningless. Take this question to semiotics. If you say "God is good", isn't that a statement about the whole world? When you say "According to..." (science, god, your dad) doesn't that tell us a lot about how you see the world? If you talk about "nature", what is nature if not something completely imagined by you from what you see in the world that escapes your artifice? God is exactly like so, a projection, but nevertheless real in itself, completely contraditory in which it is an imagination of something we can't imagine, that escapes our power of conception, it is the accident that even if meaningless is nevertheless true. And how do we relate to this accident? What is the historical narrative that grounds our doing, that makes us think something is worthwhile, or that a particular approach is better than the other? When atheists talk about God, even to show its contradictions or villainy, they must understand they are talking about how they relate to their universe. And when Christians or other theists defend a given perspective on God to an atheist, they are missing what is the ultimate signifier of these atheists.

God is not a concept, not an idea, not an invention, our conception of it is an invention. But God is whatever comes before us, whatever taught us the signs we use to talk about things, regardless on how you name it or whether you like it or not, just like life is and it was not our idea to be alive, but we are nevertheless here and doing things and inventing reasons for us to be here that would justify what we do. To talk of God is to talk about this process itself, not of a thing that can be named or defined, but about how each one of us name it and relate to this process of understanding the world we live, how we act, how we relate to our thoughts, emotions, our visions of time, memory and death and also the geographic, political and historical thread that sustain our societies, the way we think of our family, our posessions, our relation to animals and plants and, afterall, all there is to see and to touch.