Clarifications on Personifications and Deifications

Dear friends, I talk a lot, and I say a lot. Some of you have noticed that I, at times, contradict myself. That's okay, so does the Bible. I would like to clarify an issue that was brought to my attention today. I have written several times of not believing in a "God Entity" and would like to make a retraction for clarity's sake. I do indeed believe in something outside of the universe. In our series of big bangs and big crashes and evolutionary cycles, there had to be something that started it. That something, is my God. I do not however believe in a personified God. Giving God human qualities is not something I think is practical. I will often joke that my God is a prankster, and if God has to have human qualities, I hope one of them is a sense of humor. I do, however, believe that there is something that I am ignorant of, a power that exists outside my ability to perceive. To me, it's neither here nor there that God be personified.

What do I mean by personified? I don't think or believe that God needs the ability to smile, run, think, or love as we do to be God, and be my God, or to be a God with which I can have a relationship. In poetry, we give the sun the power to smile over the earth, because we can relate to that much more simply, gently, and warmly than we can a phrase like, "The heat and light produced by the sun fall on the Earth." It's much more comfortable to imagine it smiling, and in a way it does. It makes the sun active and personal, and brings us closer to it. The parallel I hope to make, is that the sun isn't actively conscious of what it is doing, but it does it anyways, and we perceive it happily. We project on it qualities it does not have in order to bring it into our world, include it in our understanding. I am okay with God being that way too. Whatever it is, I am comfortable speaking in terms of personable qualities, like Creator. Whether the things accomplished by the power that lies outside of my understanding actively and cognitively creates, or only functionally creates like the Sun, the job is still done, and I welcome it into my realm of understanding, despite the ignorance that it lies without.