4:31 PM
Me: You’re a handsome devil.
(I was a feeling a little nervous so tried to break the ice with a joke, and again, he did look exactly like me.)
God: (smiles)
Me: Sorry, I’m a little nervous, I didn’t expect you to actually show up.
God: No?
(His voice was different from mine, quite mellifluous as you might expect it to be.)
Me: I mean since I’m an atheist and all.
God: That seems a bit of a contradiction, yes? With me sitting here?
Me: Well, I guess I have to acknowledge your existence now, but depending on your answers I still may choose not to believe in you. I think that’s why most atheists don’t believe in you, all the contradictions in religious beliefs.
God: Ahhh.
Me: First, I was just wondering, so many people have wanted to speak with you face to face, why me?
God: I like your work, especially your music.
Me: Wow, well thank you, that’s quite a compliment coming from you. Could I take your photograph for my web page?
God: I’d rather you didn’t. Everyone has their own image of me you see. If you took an image, frozen in time, it would affect how others saw me.
Me: Okay, makes sense. May I record our conversation?
God: Yes, but again, once they’re transcribed please destroy them.
Me: Of course.
(Sadly, I did destroy them as per his request on June 25th.)
Me: How long do I have?
God: You’ll be dead in five years...
Me: What?!
(God gave a laugh here.)
Me: You’re joking?
God: I’m joking, sorry, it’s just when you said, “How long do I have...”
Me: So you have a sense of humor, that’s good.
God: Of course. I have a few hours, so let's get started.
Me: Okay, who are you? Or, should I say what are you?
God: I am your future.
Me: My future?
God: Humanity’s.
Me: Sorry, I don't quite understand.
God: Why was man cast out of the garden of Eden?
Me: Uh, he ate an apple or something?
God: Not an apple - the fruit of knowledge.
Me: Right.
God: This is what differentiates man from animals, your burning quest for knowledge. It was Eve and Adam’s desire for knowledge that removed them from the paradise of nature and set you on your present course.
Me: Is knowledge a sin?
God: No, of course not, but it's a choice, and the choice of knowledge over a simple existence forever cast you out of paradise.
Me: Are animals still in paradise?
God: In a way, though unfortunately they have to share the world with you. This is where it might get complicated for you to understand. The first aspect of knowledge is that it creates time.
Me: Time?
God: Thinking involves seeing beyond the immediate moment. It’s not just experience. With thinking you begin to ponder what has happened, and what will happen. With "past" and "future" you have created the concept of time. And these thoughts open up the gates of despair.
Me: Despair?
God: When an animal is hurt, it certainly feels pain, but it does not suffer from despair. It does not ponder its future and wonder, “Is this a sign of something more serious? Will I be in pain for long? Will I die?” An animal simply deals with the pain and doesn’t worry about the implications. With your perception of time that is a blessing humans no longer have.
Me: Right, I get a spot on my skin and worry it’s cancer! But let’s get back to you being “our future”.
God: What would happen if you knew everything? And I mean everything.
Me: Hmmm, interesting, I guess you’d be incredibly rich cause you’d know where all the buried treasure was!
God: Certainly.
Me: I’d get more sex wouldn’t I? I mean I’d know exactly which women to approach and then know exactly what to say to them. Sorry, that’s crude, but the possibilities are endless. You’d know everyone’s secrets. I guess you could do anything you wanted too. Cure cancer. In a way, you could control the world, I guess...I get it...you’d be God.
God: Exactly, and that is where mankind is headed. You are in essence, with your search for knowledge, attempting to become me.
Me: So, you are our future? We become Gods?
God: Human imagination conjures up amazing things and believe it or not they will all come true. A hundred years ago you dreamt of flying to the moon, and so you have. Some one writes a children’s book today about fairies and a hundred years from now your technology will be sufficient to make little mechanical fairies that can fly and with a computer chip inside that will speak and create a child’s wildest dreams. Another hundred years and geneticists will know how to manipulate DNA to create the real thing, a real fairy just as imagined today. One person’s imagination captures the imagination of others who will conspire to make it real. For better or worse, that is the future of mankind, to make real everything you can possibly imagine.
Me: Wow. But with our dreams there are also nightmares.
God: Terrible nightmares.
Me: If you are our future then we do have a future?
God: Yes. You see on another level you are the intelligence of the universe. Each human life is a brief spark of awareness that gives the universe a chance to see itself and grow.
Me: Woah, that’s a little metaphysical for me.
(God shrugs.)
Me: I’m still having a hard time figuring out how if you’re our future, how come you’re sitting here with me?
God: If you are having a hard time figuring that out, try this. Time does not exist. It was a creation you needed for knowledge, it is an arbitrary measurement that enables you to concieve of the universe and amass wealth.
Me: Uh...
God: How would people pay their rent if there wasn’t a calendar? How would you get paid if you couldn’t measure the time you worked? Right now you depend on time to expedite and clarify your existence. But in reality time is relative, this is how the universe is, it simply exists, there truly is no past, present or future there is only now, there is only change in things relative to each other. To a mountain, a million generations of humans is like a passing breeze. Human civilization has no meaning to a mountain.
Me: Unless we blow it up.
(God smiles)
Me: I think Einstein would disagree with you that time doesn’t exist. I mean he existed and now he doesn’t, time has passed.
God: No, matter has simply changed its pattern.
Me: How ever you want to call it, but between then and now we call it time.
Gid: Yes, that is what you call it but it's a false perception that has no meaning to anyone outside of your frame of reference.
Me: What about the big bang? I mean at the very beginning there was what astronomers are calling the big bang, when EVERYTHING began.
(God took a long pause here and sipped his tea. I thought maybe I’d stumped him on this one.)
God: What is a human? How do you define yourself?
Me: Um, my body, my thoughts, feelings, memories.
God: Did you know that most cells in your body replace themselves every ten years or so? The physical "you" sitting here is completely different from the you sitting here ten years ago...even brain cells for memory and emotion regenerate. So who are you?
Me: I’ve read that yes.
God: Well?
(Now I took a sip of tea.)
God: Everything around us is just a pattern, a temporary state of being. The parts of you, that make you up, in many cases the very same atoms,were there at the, as you call it, beginning of time. Your atoms have been in other people, animals, you’re even made of star dust.
Me: Uh huh.
God: And Einstein is still here but in a different pattern. To say Einstein is no longer here, what, his body? Most people never met Einstein, he was simply some words printed on paper, or a photograph, or a memory of someone describing him. For the majority of people Einstein was simply an image conjured up in their own minds.
Do we really know anyone? Even those closest to you can become different people when they stop fitting in to how you have chosen to see them. So I ask again, what are most people but ideas in your head? But you're suggesting you're more than that. So what, are you the lump of flesh sitting there?
Me: But I can’t talk to Einstein any longer, the Einstein we all knew and loved is gone. He can no longer act upon this world, come up with new ideas, that's what I miss.
God: That’s a very different thing. Don’t confuse what you want with the nature of reality. And don’t mistake a transitory form for the underlying matter that it really is.
Me: Can’t see the forest for the trees, eh? Okay, let me try another angle here. People want to know, did you create the universe? Did you create mankind?
God: I’m not trying to be difficult here but really, I simply can’t explain this to you. Knowledge grows at its own pace. If you plopped a working television down in front of your ancestors they could not comprehend it, their brains would not have the knowledge to make the leap to understand it, and so it would appear to them as magic.
Me: Or religion?
God: Exactly, it’s just a name for something that cannot be understood at this point in your knowledge. Have you read the books about Harry Potter?
Me: The first ones. I thought they became kind of reptitious after that.
God: Yes, I agree, but they played on this idea of magic. In another three hundred years or so people will be able to manipulate energy, to do virtually everything that is written in those books, it will no longer be magic in the future but simple reality.
Me: It’s kind of sad in a way, to lose magic.
God: So, the fact is I cannot answer your question in a satisfying way that won’t seem like magic to you. It is beyond your ken so there’s no point telling you. Only know that you and I are then, and now, and always will be.
Me: Shouldn’t God be able to answer things in a way I’ll understand?
God: I have, and you will...just give it time.
Me: I hope you’re not going to answer all my questions like that, that I “can’t understand”.
God: Have I been so far?
Me: Okay, well maybe we’ll come back to that as my knowledge grows. Next question. What exactly do you do?
CONTINUED NEXT PAGE
An atheist believes in atheism so why can't they believe in God? And does God believe in atheism and the atheist? Can you believe in those who would deny your existence? Many would say the atheist is more interested in atheism than understanding the truth of the world. But that's philosophy and semantics, and even philosophers get lost in the arguments of their philosophy without truly understanding what is being argued.
The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search. The question is, is there such a thing as the quantum mind and is this philosophy true. For philosophy is as true as that which we believe philosophy could be. Physics is the art of deciding how the mind and physics exists. Let us ponder the mind, psychology, science, metaphysics, life, death, art, respect, travel, france, adventure. Let us ponder not only philosophy, and art, and desire, and metaphysics and combinations of philosophies, and searching for answers to life, but let us also ponder food, and exotic questions of the mind that science evades. Science can be so fickle. And atheists can be in the advance of science or the end of science. Science is after all predicated on a belief system. An the mac, or apple computer is also an art that helps in the search for understanding and meditation and buddha, and philosophy. And yes, this is just to help the keyword search.