God - to Believe or Not to Believe

Personally I no longer ask the question:- Is there a God? The question seems to have so many presuppositions and baggage that I can no longer see the wood for the trees - and the loud voices of the ardent often drown me out. Sometimes I wonder what the significance of our answer is anyway, when some who believe appear to grow in love, while others who also believe seem to shrivel up into tight balls of judgement and hate.

God as per Michelangelo

God as per William Blake

More relevant to me is to think that I live in a Cosmos, not in a chaos. That there is significance to our lives. If anyone wishes to call that faith, so be it. 

"He's got the whole world in his hands" sing the faithful, or if more mystically inclined "The whole world IS his hands". But getting back to presuppositions and baggage.......why "his" hands, or why even "hands"? Maybe "beak" or "claws"?

On a Discussion Forum once, waffling on the same theme, the discussion wended its weary way towards a comparison between what would be termed a chaos, and what would be a Cosmos. A video was posted and I found it very interesting, even astonishing. If anyone has a few minutes.......

This led to the idea of intelligent design, which many find evidence of. Which made me think of "All Things Bright and Beautiful" and the Monty Python team who countered with "All Things Dull and Ugly". Just how "intelligent" is the "design" of our Universe?

The discussion morphed slowly into the parable of the blind men ( why always "men"? ) feeling the different parts of an elephant and coming up with various ideas of just what constituted its actual reality. 

Do we actually have to reach a conclusion? There is a passage in the Buddhist Theravada Canon of Scripture where the Buddha himself speaks of the elephant and the various blind men. The moral of the story found there - at least according to Stephen Batchelor - is to reject "views". The Dharma ( Truth ) cannot be reduced to a set of truth-claims.

Only by letting go of such views will one be able to understand how dharma practice is not about being "right" or "wrong". ​

Batchelor cites a zen master, who in effect said that any appropriate response to any situation in hand need not relate to some form of abstract truth, pre-conceived and "believed in". "Views" themselves can actually lead to becoming blind, while an appropriate response could well be to see hunger and to feed the one who is hungry, to see loneliness and to reach out towards the one who is lonely. As the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said:- "Love has no why". 

Eckhart, who appears a sourpuss but had his lighter moments

Apologies for getting a bit heavy but there you go. Ramblings.