“In the beginning Man created God, and in the image of Man created He him.”
Ian Anderson, “Aqualung”
They lost me at the personification. I never could get past it. Amid all that is, in the vast and indescribable cosmos, space dust and starshine and towering sequoias that crack the sky, they chose the naked ape as the revelation and manifestation, and my gut reaction was and ever will be, “No, I don’t think so.”
I was listening to a podcast featuring Rupert Sheldrake, proponent of the concept of morphic resonance, which I don’t really understand, in which he and host Charles Eisenstein take aim at scientific reductionism and the idea that if it can’t be measured it doesn’t matter.
The reductionist worldview is at odds with the notion of God.
I, too, am at odds with the notion of God, specifically the notion of an anthropomorphic God, more specifically still of a gendered anthropomorphic God. Yet I am also at odds with the reductionists, and the idea of a world — a cosmos — denatured and divested of the sacred.
“I don’t believe you, you got the whole damned thing all wrong.
Ian Anderson, “Wind Up”
He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday”
I want to hold space for the sacred, for the inherent value of the world, the anima mundi. Can I do this without also holding space for the notion of God?
I hope so. Because I cannot seem to rehabilitate the word God — it will always and forever be the pissed off old man with jealousy issues — but I do have a visceral sense of the sacred, that ineffable quality that defies reductionism, rather like Sheldrake’s morphic fields, which — insofar as I can tell — hold the knowledge of the living world through time and across generations within accessible fields of awareness.
Which may be nothing more than a complicated way of saying “God.”
ps pirro 
The bad news, apparently, for us writers, is that the most important things, the only real truths, cannot be expressed in words, or even known by ‘separate’ individuals. It was only when I realized that time is just a mental construct, an arbitrary labelling, and doesn’t actually exist (and physicists are starting to come to the same conclusion) that I realized this. We only ‘know’ anything, such as the existence of our selves, or of gods, in the context of our absurdly simplistic models of reality, which are no more representative of actual reality than a map is a representation of a territory. That’s actually the opposite of saying that things only exist in our heads, in ‘consciousness’ — it’s saying there is no (separate) us, no consciousness, no time, only Eternal Everything, which, as long as we imagine ourselves as separate, we cannot imagine.
Yes. Our reliance on language becomes part of the paradox. “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal name.” And yet we write, and write some more. Words are my hammer. I pound and I pound on what is not and never will be a nail.
Peggy, the last two sentences of your comment are absolutely brilliant. Poetry!