For Round 8 I wrote some more non-fiction... um, it could be fiction. It's more of a theory, really. If I was studying for a PhD in Theology, this would be the subject of my Doctorate thesis, but I'm not, so I wrote a short essay instead. At its core it's about religious tolerance. So, deep thoughts:

As a religious person, there's a subject I have often pondered on but spoken only rarely of, and it is simply this: a Christian knows fully the Ultimate Truth, that there is but one God who created all the Universe and appeared to us in Jesus, and a Hindu knows full well the Sacred Knowledge that there are three gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva - and their progeny, a full pantheon. These faiths appear to be, at first glance, contradictory. How could two opposite Truths, both, be true?

While not everyone would go so far as to say that the other was wrong, I know Christians who do say so; and while I've never actually met a Hindu I would be surprised if there were not one who felt the Christian, Muslim, Judaic devotion to one God fallacious. That Hindu knows with a certainty as full and empowering as any you may experience that what you believe in is false. And so the entire nation of Sri Lanka goes to three-way civil war for decades, each to prove the other wrong, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of their believers. Christians, Muslims and Jews recognize that they all believe and worship the same god, but the whys and wherefores of that worship is contested and enough reason to sack a few major cities through the ages. Despite this, and through their inherent good, major religions carry on around the world, some with one god (but a different one), some with a pantheon, some with no god at all, and the Shinto tradition of eight million gods, the original religion of the Japanese island and still the most prevalent there.

The conclusion that I could come to, in the end, was that they all, we all, are right. My Truth is true and your Truth is also, true. And before you dismiss this as New Age hocus pocus and now we all join hands and sing songs of celestial unity let me lay down the scientific reasoning behind such a thought. I didn't just make this up, I have a good reason for it. A reason that is (um... indirectly) related to beards.

Beards are made of strands of keratin, a substance of fibrous protein molecules, that grow from follicles, which are glandular pits in the surface of mammalian skin and supply nutrients necessary for beard growth, nutrients that are carried by an iron/hydrogen/oxygen based blood stream from organs which carry out the breakdown of more complex ingested food particles, which arrive to the organism via a mouth to put the food into and hands to place the food into the mouth.

Oh yeah, you knew all that already. Ok, so now let's look all around our expansive and beautiful universe and find a physical location where God is sitting on a cloud, draped in a white robe with a beard growing from his face, and a refrigerator and a bathroom and a bed to sleep on. Right! God is not a physical person. And that was not just to knock the traditional Christian image of God, but to point out that this is the image of God painted by Italian painters during the 16th century (and other times, of course, but you get the idea).

A Christian looking upon the Creation recognizes a single source for all of it, and a Hindu has this concept broken into separate deities - but couldn't this pantheon be collectively looked upon as a single source? Just as surely as there is no physical bearded man in a white robe looking down over all of us from a cloud, nor is there a physical many-limbed dancer or red elephant with a broken tusk. And before anyone tries to derail me with the fact that Jesus is God come to earth in physical form, you should know that Hindus say the same thing about Rama and Krishna.

How many prophets have there been in all of Man's history, and how close were each of them to the Divine? What if all of them were Messengers? How many might have even been the same Messenger?

An interesting example of this thinking can be found in English law. Up until relatively recently, the court system in England defined religious worship only in terms of veneration and submission to a supreme being. It was not until about six or seven years ago that it was recognized that this definition excluded many major and laudable religions practiced not only around the world but inside of England. In striving to arrive at an accurate definition for religion, the UK Supreme Court unanimously voted on a new phrasing, cancelling any earlier strictly theistic requirement and stating instead that a religion must be seeking "to expand mankind's place in the universe and relationship with the infinite."

Now there's an interesting phraseology, and we're driving closer to the real point of my argument. Hasn't that been the major goal of religion since it first began? Seeking to understand man's place in the universe and relationship with the infinite?

The Hindu burning incense at the foot of Vishnu, the Catholic spinning the rosary at the foot of Christ, the Buddhist monk rising at dawn to meditate Compassion, the Native American boy performing the dance his father taught him, the Asian woman leaving offerings at the grave of her great-great-grandmother, each of them are plumbing the depths of that relationship with the infinite.

If God is not a physical being, if the concept of God encompasses All and Everything, the representation of separate facets of this reality for attention could be seen with validity as with the unit concept. Christian theologians even have debated for centuries if the Trinity is really One or Three. Since God is not a physical structure, couldn’t the answer be, both?

God is necessarily outside the framework of physical definition. Can there then be one definite answer as to what He "looks like"? The Bible says God created man in His image, but what I am positing here is that the understanding of "image" requires a conceptualization beyond merely the literal "seen with the eyes". Because, surely: You. Can. Not. See. God. With. Your. Eyes.

And so this train of thought pulls into the station. The images and representations of God are each of them accurate in their way, images and representations in seeking to understand and expand mankind's place in the universe and relationship with the infinite. Each of these religions are Truth, each one Mythology (which implies not fiction but the Great Belief, the richness of cultural tradition and a damn good story, to be found in every great religion).

Coming to this conclusion, I felt it significant enough to deserve a name. The obvious choice I plucked from my etymological stores was "pantheism" - so obvious a choice, that I thought possibly the term had already been coined. Lo and behold - a quick search turned it up: "pantheism - religious practice that admits or tolerates all gods". Hmm, well, I think I can attempt to add something to theology by rephrasing this a little: pantheism - belief that admits the validity of all theistic concepts, including the religious concept that there is no god or that god is not a being.

Now, at this point a certain caveat is in order - a line must be drawn just before total inclusiveness. There are those - few in number - who would go so far as to deify Satan and other such figures and harm others in their name. Why would this be condemnatory while other beliefs accepted? The answer is simply and precisely that the definition of religion contains the concept of expansion. To fall short of the most basic standards of decency is to constrict mankind's understanding and relationship with the universe, and is thus the reversal of religion. Pantheism cannot include elements that would seek to undermine the true place of God in uplifting human life.

As you look out upon our expansive and beautiful universe, if you see one god or none, a spiritual power, divine family, or maybe even a pantheon of homeless space gods, where this shows you the way to higher places, where this fulfills you and gives you strength or peace, where you find Truth and find it is good, this then is Truth for you, and it is good enough Truth for me, too.