Choose the God you believe in--and choose wisely

You can choose the God you believe in. Or you can choose to believe there’s no God. It’s your choice.

There is a fact of there matter. There may be a God. There may be many Gods. There may be no God. What you choose may be correct (consistent with the fact of the matter), or it may be wrong.

But it’s still a choice.

The Marketplace of Religions offers prepackaged Gods to believe in. Many come complete with rites and rituals, instruction books and storybooks, customer testimonials, gathering places, and communities of the like-minded. For those who choose no God, the Marketplace also offers prepackaged agnostic and atheistic belief systems, many with their own accessories.

Within any belief genre, individual believers, leaders, and groups customize the generic offering to meet their own needs and desires and to the demands of the Marketplace for innovation within the confines of brand identity.

The Marketplace gives everyone a lot to choose from.

Is it a choice?

Most people don’t consider that someone can choose what to believe—much less choose which God to believe in; and if they think belief a choice, they don’t think they can make that choice; and if they think they can make it, they don’t exercise their ability. Most people were taught (or more accurately, conditioned) to believe in a particular god, and they never break that conditioning. They accept the choice that was made for them by their parents and other ancestors.

But the God you believe in is undoubtedly a choice. The question to answer isn’t “Is it a choice?” but “Whose choice?” Your choice? An ancestor’s choice? Your community’s choice?

Make it your choice.

And choose wisely.

Choosing wisely

How do you choose wisely?

My answer is: choose the God and choose the practices that will help you to live the best life that you can live. When choosing a God, as in all things, “Believe not what is true, but what is helpful”

If you’ll live your best life being watched by a vigilant and intolerant God who threatens to torture you eternally or burn you to a crisp, then, by all means, choose that God, and live your good life under that God’s pitiless gaze.

If you’ll live the best life being under the loving eye of a God who accepts your failings and forgives your shortcomings, and teaches you the lessons that you need to in order you live the life you desire, then by all means, choose that God and live your good life in that God’s loving embraces.

If none of the prepackaged Gods suit you, you can choose to be creative: design the God that will serve you best, choose to believe in that God, and then act according to your belief.

For me, it starts with gratitude

I am grateful for the circumstances of my life. I’m grateful for the talents and abilities I’ve been given. I’m grateful for other gifts: personal characteristics, tendencies, and opportunities, for intelligence and for health, without which I would not have developed the other gifts I have been given into what I now possess.

I’m grateful for my very existence, for the existence of a world full of beauty and for the ability to see that beauty.

With all the gifts I’ve been given, none of them earned, it would be ungrateful not to say thank you.

But who shall I thank? Shall I thank the laws of physics? Shall I thank the process of evolution? Shall I thank the dark, and cold, empty and uncaring universe from which I emerged?

I need to give thanks, and I’ve chosen a God to receive my thanks. That God is as glad to receive my thanks as I am to offer them.

The God I’ve chosen

The God I’ve chosen is the perfect parent and the perfect friend.

That God is always there for me, available whenever I want company, full of love.

It is a God that forgives my mistakes and encourages me to forgive others as I’ve been forgiven, that loves me and encourages me to love as I’ve been loved.

The God that I’ve chosen doesn’t want me to obey, but to think; to do what is right because it is right and not because I fear Godly or human punishment; to educate myself so I can intelligently decide what is right.

The God that I’ve chosen doesn’t want to be worshiped, but to be loved and respected as one would love and respect a worthy parent or true friend.

The God that I’ve chosen loves and respects me in return.

The God I’ve chosen is the perfect God for me—by design.

That God may exist only in my imagination, but that’s real enough and good enough for me.

And it’s good enough for God.

PS: I believe that God helped me write this. I am certain that any errors are my own.

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Believe not what is true, but what is helpful

In an earlier post, I wrote about Mark Manson and some things that he’d written that I’d liked.

One of them was: “Believe not what is true, but what is helpful.”

Wait? What?

Shouldn’t you always and only believe what’s true?

Maybe not.

What’s helpful?

There’s a ton of stuff packed inside that question.

Helpful to whom?

Helpful over what timeframe?

Helpful in what context?

What if two things are both helpful? What then?

What if we think something is helpful, but it turns out that it’s not?

Never mind that complexity. Let’s assume we have a good idea of what’s helpful.

What’s true

The only thing I can know is true is that I experience consciousness. Same goes for you. Anything else could be an illusion.

But certain things are more-or-less likely to be true, or more or less likely to be reasonable approximations of what is true. Should our belief be based on the degree to which something is closer to being true?

The way the universe works, what’s true is often also helpful. And what’s outright false is generally unhelpful. But that’s not always true.

Most of what’s true is irrelevant. Consider two galaxies. It might be true that one is older, or more massive than the other. But for our purposes, the answer is irrelevant. Believe what you want. Or believe nothing. It doesn’t matter.

Some of what might be true is currently unknowable. There will eventually be a correct (or roughly correct) answer to the question: “What will the be the temperature on this day, next year, at this location?” But we really cannot know what it will be. We might make some reasonable guesses, but the true answer, at this point is unknown and unknowable. And what I believe may not change anything.

But now consider the question, “Will I finish this blog post?” The answer is also unknowable. There will eventually be a true answer. Either I will finish it, and it is true, or I die, and it is not true. Does it matter what I believe? In this case, it does.

If I believe I will not finish it, then there’s little sense in continuing to write it.

If I believe that I will finish it, then Predictive Processing says that it’s not only a good idea to keep working on it, but my belief in its future state will cause me to finish it.

Would it matter if I believed I would finish it in the next ten minutes? Or in the next hour?

It seems to me that believing that I will finish in the next ten minutes is not helpful. It put me under impossible pressure. Or it’s something I ignore. In any case, it’s not helpful. So I believe I’m best off not believing that.

But it seems that believing that I will finish in the next hour might be helpful. It’s not necessarily true, but it does seem helpful. So I’ll choose to believe that.

Belief in God

Pick a God, any God. Do I want to believe that that God exists?

If I pick a God that demonstrably cannot exist—say one that’s in this room right now and visible to me—then I see nothing useful in such a belief. To the contrary, I now must explain to myself why I can’t see a God that I have defined as one that I can see.

But if I pick a God that can exist—say a benevolent and invisible God that will help me get this post done in the next hour—believing in its existence might be helpful. Writing is often a lonely and uncertain business. It makes me feel better to think that I’ve got some help. It might not be true, but it’s certainly helpful.

So I’ll believe in that God. And I’ll believe it helped me get this post done.

Sure enough! It’s done.

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What I believe

I believe that what I believe determines what I do.

I believe that if I am not doing something that I believe that I want to do (writing, for example) that there must be one or more limiting beliefs in the way.

I believe that if I found and removed the limiting beliefs, then what I did would change.

I believe that I can believe anything—if only for a moment.

I believe that I can maintain some beliefs effortlessly and I can maintain others only with effort.

I believe apart from the effort to maintain some beliefs, changing what I do by changing my beliefs would be effortless.

I believe that it might be possible to maintain more beliefs effortlessly

I believe that I know things that I can’t articulate.

I believe that I can improve any part of my life, at any moment, by taking an inventory of what I believe, emphasizing the beliefs that are helpful, changing or removing beliefs that are unhelpful, and adding beliefs that would be helpful.

I have been doing that for most of the morning.

I believe my life has already improved.

I believe that this post is evidence.

I believe your life might improve if you did something like this.

I hope you do and I hope that it does.

If you so, and it does, I would like to hear about it.

Anyway, I believe that I would.

I believe that there’s a lot more to this idea than what I’ve written here.

I believe (and predict) that I am going to write some posts unpacking this idea.

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