Spelunking

"Oku no hitobito to onazi youni, watashitachi wa kami-sama ga ikiteorareru koto wo shite imasu."  For any missionary who served in Japan back when the six lesson manuals were being used before the introduction of Preach My Gospel, those words are indelibly imprinted in your memory.  "Like many other people, we believe that God lives/exists."  The following paragraphs went on to describe the characteristics of God in order to begin to give a foundation for what we believed.  These foundation principles set the stage upon which everything else was predicated.

As we propose that there is a God, it is absolutely essential that we define what that statement even means.  What is a god?  What are the defining characteristics of such an entity?  If this is to be the basis for your world view, shouldn't you know the answers to these questions?  There is an overwhelming lack of interest or discussion among many people of the world today.  Is it truly worship to give obeisance to an ephemeral quasi-concept that one hasn't even tried to grasp or comprehend?

One defining trait often given to deity is immense power, even omnipotence.  Can something actually be omnipotent?  What does that even mean?  No wonder ontology is such a shunned field.  Apparently simple questions quickly end up widening the tiny rabbit hole into a gaping, sucking maw.  One question leads to another, and another, and another....each of which seems to need an answer before the prior can be fully complete.  Do we give up in despair and proclaim the whole issue to be too complex, too vague, too unknowable?  How far down the hole do we even need to go? Should we let the priests and academics fight it out; just tell me a pretty message and make me feel good and I'll trust you that there is something behind the curtain?

I think it is absolutely vital to take a dip in the pool of being; swim around for a bit, test the waters.  Even if one does not wish to take a theological view of existence, at some point one must define the foundation of their principles.  Failing to do so inevitably dooms one to be a marionette tangled in the strings of the world stage, pulled hither and thither by the movements of actors.  There are few things more pitiful than an individual who has lost their agency because their blindness has uprooted them and they have been swept from any moorings that could hold them steady.