god – shadowscape

God came to me last night in a dream. I said: “Hey, God, how’s it going?” He laughed. He has a simply divine laughter. And then He spake to me, and he spake thusly:

“It’s going good, Laur, My child. Not great, mind you, but it cannot be helped for the time being.”

“What can I do for you, Oh God?” I asked.

At this, He laughed even harder. His laugh is contagious, like watching April lambs cavorting in new grass. Maybe that’s why they go on and on about The Lamb of God.

“That’s a funny question to ask, My child”, He said. “Usually people just tell Me what I can do for them.”

“Oh, you’ve been good to me, Oh God, I have no complaints. Or maybe I do, but I’d like to try and fix them myself first, if You don’t mind. And with a little help, of course”.

God’s really full of mirth these days.

“First of all, stop with that «spaketh» nonsense,” He said. “And the capitalization. It’s distracting me, and it is a bit pretentious. I don’t need capitals to remind people of who I am.”

I must admit, he has a point there.

“Of course I do, I am God after all.” She smiled at me. “Now, don’t be flustered. How would you like to work for me? At least for a little while? There’s a prophet position coming up, and I think you might be a really good fit for the role.”

“Prophet, Oh God?”

“Oh yes. It’s no big deal, really. Just tell the world what I’m about to tell you. Get some tablets of stone and a chisel and take this down.”

“How about I post it on the Internet, Oh God?”

“That could work too, I guess. Now write this down.”

“I am.”

“Don’t interrupt now, prophet of mine. Where was I? Oh yes. Paragraph. Don’t write that down, will you?”

Message from God

Hello World! It’s been a while since you last heard from me, and you’ve grown quite a bit in the while. You’re no longer small children who need to be spoon-fed and led by the hand, so I’ll say it to you straight. Pay attention.

I am one God. You gave me so many nicknames over the years you tend to forget this small fact. I don’t care if you’re calling me Allah, Yahveh, Lord, Higher Power or Immutable Natural Law. If you all understand this, you’ll be better for it in the long run. Trust me. I am your God.

Regardless of the name you chose for me, don’t take my name in vain! And I don’t necessarily mean swearing. I’m talking about killing people in my name, hurting them in my name, hiding your petty ambitions and awful nature behind my name! I’m referring to just a few of you, praise be to me. You think that by killing in my name you get rewards in the afterlife? Rest assured, we’ll have a word about that when you get there.

Be decent towards one another. I would have said “be good”, but that may be pushing it a bit. Just be decent, it’s good enough for me. Go ahead and be good if you want to. Just don’t be jerks, that’s what I want to say.

I have no beef with religion. If you want to worship me, fine – I like being worshiped. One little request though: don’t assume you know me and my will just because you’re religious. See 1, 2 and 3.

I don’t require people to believe in me; I am not Tinkerbell. I will be here regardless. As a matter of fact, atheists that are good, decent people just because that’s how they are and not because of some church-induced fear of everlasting punishment are in for a nice surprise. Don’t tell them I said so though. They won’t believe it anyway.

Let it be known that I am not, nor have I ever been, against science and knowledge. By all means, learn about this beautiful universe. I take pride in my work.1

What I speak, everyone can hear. Few choose to listen. Do listen for my voice every once in a while.

Which reminds me. To those of you who write down what I say: please remember, you’re only writing down with your mind a memory of an interpretation of a voice that spoke to your soul. Please do not claim it is the absolute truth. You don’t even have words in your languages for some of the things that I say. Maybe someday you will. Readers, beware.2

I have many, many, many sons and daughters. You Earthlings are all my family, and I love you just as much as I love all my other creations. I sure hope one day you get to meet each other. Keep investing in NASA, you got a good thing going there.

There has to be ten of them, right? Thanks, Moses. Anyway. As long as you get what I’ve said in the previous nine, you’ll do fine. For the rest, do what you will. Take responsibility for your actions. Oh, and “Thou shalt not kill.” I’m still rather privy to that one.

I guess this is it, world. Enjoy your life, don’t spoil it. I will be seeing you all later.

Love,

God

“Plus, some of your physics theories really make me laugh”, he said. “Don’t write that down.” “Not even as a footnote?” “Ok, fine.” [↩]
“Besides, what do you think would happen if I would give you the absolute truth on a platter? That would kinda spoil everything, right? Searching for it is oh so much more fun!” [↩]

The universe. The great unknown.

This is a trip down memory lane, and you will hopefully excuse me for indulging. I’ve written the following piece 10 years ago, while sitting in a boring class (not even in my curriculum, but my girlfriend was attending). It was April 6th, 1998. I was 20 years old.

The universe is a great mystery for mankind. For thousands of years, ever since the first man stood on his feet and looked to the stars, he asked himself about it.

What is the universe? Surely, you cannot expect me to have the answer to that question! That’s what we all try to do since the beginning of time; all I want to do is to point out some ideas that crossed our collective minds throughout the history.

The first universe we sense, and beware, sense is the key word, is the universe within our range. Things that we can see, touch, smell, taste or hear form the universe that we call “the real world” – and all living forms have one. We are the center of this universe, which relative to each of us, depending of our (natural) capacity to sense it.

The second universe is the near, or the reachable world. This term refers to those points of the world where we can transfer our real world. The reachable universe occupies only a small amount of space, consisting of the places we can visit – with or without the help of technology. This – as the others that follow – is a virtual universe, because although we can go there, we almost certainly will not, because there is no physical time to reach all the places I am referring to.

The third universe is the known world; it is the universe we can probe using our science and technology. Do not be fooled by its name – it’s not really that known. Since the dawn of man, we looked towards places we couldn’t reach and we tried to figure out what those places were like. Later, when science came up, we came up with a new technique: we experiment, we elaborate on an universe model, then we test that model, which is good until proven wrong or until we find a better one. However, we can only verify our theories in the reachable universe (in fact, in the real one), and by extending our conclusions, we suppose that the universe is the way we say it is.

The fourth universe is the unknown world. Well, this is the one that we know nothing about. Surely, we can extrapolate and assume it’s the way we say it is, but unlike the known universe, we cannot observe it, so the key affirmation here is we just don’t know.1

So, we’ve structured the universe from man’s point of view. Is then man the center of the universe? You might be tempted to say yes. You would be wrong. The only universe you might say has man for a center is the real world. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

The real world, the first one we talked about, is sense-based. But senses are not always accurate. Therefore you cannot really know your real world if you don’t enhance your senses with technology and science. But can you say then that you know it all?No, we don’t really know the universe. No matter how accurate our technology is, there will always be more information we cannot access (yet), more things to be discovered, more to learn.

Stop! We’ve just found another keyword. Information. The key to all the doors of knowledge, the magic potion, the very essence of it all… What is information? How do you define it? Is it matter? No, it’s not, but it could take a material form. Is it energy? No, because it doesn’t act like it. So it must be a whole different thing. Maybe the center of the universe.

Information is, was and ever will be, regardless of energy and matter. We can say that information just exists. The way to acquire information is also information, and therefore exists too, and so on, ad infinitum. Could we say that we just found God?

We can go beyond this. With a little effort of abstraction, we could say that matter is a form of energy; matter can transform into energy, and energy can transform into matter. But how does the energy know how to organize itself? Does energy generate information, or information is the one that defines the energy’s forms of manifestation?

I believe energy interacts with information. Energy takes from information a form of manifestation, and gives it an opportunity to manifest itself. They’re bound together and they form a whole. Information and Energy. God and the World he created.

A man is himself an universe. But what kind of universe? You won’t be surprised to know that the structure of man can be described in the same way, with the four delimitations we discussed so far. [↩]

Tag: god

God – a conversation

The universe. The great unknown.