One With God

There is a long scale from faith to rationality. I'm going to give a general outline of the major points before delving into the real problem here.


Pure Faith - where one adamantly refuses to intellectually question whether or not something is true or admit any kind of evidence
Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to intellectually question whether or not something is true but only accept subjective evidence or subjective criteria for validity of that evidence
Absolute Subjective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to absolutely know the truth by subjective evidence
Objective Evidentual Faith - where one is willing to question intellectually matters of religion with objective evidence or objective standards of evidence
Absolute Objective Evidentual Faith - where one claims to know the truth by objective evidence

Lastly I think we have agnosticism and skepticism which I think is best characterized by the refusal to accept any evidence whatever on any basis. We won't be much considering these two here, I do elsewhere.


The point of providing the scale is also the point of providing the basis for a discussion of the meaning "One With God" or "God Realizations" and perhaps "Self-Realization" when given a religous tone.

Some people will claim to have reached God by pure faith - they simply know they have received the truth by pure faith.
Some people claim that it is impossible to do such things and that they know so from pure reason.
There is a scale similar to the epistemic scale above - differing kinds of evidence are presented for the one-ness with god.

These are similar to the claims to prophecy - you can accept a prophet by pure faith or by evidence of the truth of their prophecies. (Prophecy, though, passes away for what was once a surprise becomes obvious after it happens...) or by whether or not the prophet "resonates with you."

I'd like to think that there must be some kind of objective standard for these things although I think the matter is not that simple.

I regard relationships with God as similar in character in some respects with relationships with people. There is no good science of relationships with people per se - psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc. - all attempt to be sciences of people and relationships among people. Clearly politics would be another such in the list. I think the best example of "scientific relationships with people" are actually negative in our world - war and gambling. We have a great science of war and similarly a great science of gambling (lying and telling other people lies). This is likely just a question of the character of our people. There should also be a science of love and I suspect if people were to spend as much effort knowing how to love one another as we do knowing how to kill or cheat one another, we would have a much better world indeed.

God relationships are different. God is super-personal - not like one person, but not unlike one person - simply beyond us people. Nevertheless, I believe there is an art and science to God-knowledge just as there is an art-and-science to people-relationships. To make friends, you make gestures of friendship, to make love you make gestures of love. God is similar in that God provides a means to relationship by living with us, inside us, beside us. This makes it more difficult than other relationships but easier, but we're moving too fast.

The problem of determining THAT there is an art-science of God-relating is different from deciding what the content of it is.

What I want to reject here though is the idea that there is no such art-science of God-relationship.

Throughout time there have been people we think of as prophets or people specifically people who are closer to God than our common man. The "big names" come to mind - Mohammed, Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, Elijah, Ramakrishna, Ghandi, etc.

Of course it is possible to doubt that these people had any closer a relationship with God than any one else. And of course it is possible to try to be picky among them - is Christ a better prophet than Buddha? Is Mohammed better than Moses? Is Lao Tzu better than Ramakrishna?

One thing we can say is that each of the major religious traditions has its archetypical example of the successfully-God-related person and each provides a method for following their example and attaining a similar God-Relationship. (In the case where God is not the correct word we have cognates "supreme peace" "truth" "englightenment" to take its place).

So we have a model of religion:

An Archetype
A Method
A Supreme Goal

We could make a grid but it wouldn't be that complicated so we can suffice ourselves knowing that the grid could exist.

So here we have the question of deciding on a method, an archetype and a supreme goal.

Religion need not be this way. We could doggedly insist on defining our own religion. Perhaps we could have a religion without a goal or method or archetype or various combinations of them.

Some forms of buddhism I think of this way - without goal or archetype, but only method. Some forms of Christianity I think of as without method but having Archetype and Goal.

I think there must be a way of deciding whether and which things we need to have what we call a religion.

If not, we have to agree that any religion must be arbitrary - why should listen to Mohammed's prophecy? Why should we take on the devotion of Krishna? Why should we follow the example of Christ? Why should we follow Buddha's Golden path?

It should be noted that any answer to such questions will have to use reasons which are not necessarily themselves dependent on the evidence from the "inside" of those religious traditions. I mean, it would be unfair to point out that Buddhism gives a way of avoiding the demons one encounters in the Bardo as a purpose for choosing the path of Buddha since in order to be worried about the Bardo, you have to have adopted a certain amount of the Buddhist tradition. Similar considerations apply to each of the world religious movements. The christian can't assume that oneness with God is the supreme goal without knowing that God is available for one-ness and how would we know that without assuming something about God given to us by Christ?

I think there must still be an answer to this. But it is not the same type of answer to which we are accustomed - a yes or no, true or false, black and white answer. For us to choose an archetype, we have to choose one with which we somehow identify. Can we choose who we identify with or do we decide that? Choosing methods, similar questions apply. Not every method is good for every player in chess, why assume that there is only one method for attaining the highest goal?

Goals don't have what normally are considered "scientific methods for determining them" but some common considerations apply. We want happiness, peace, joy, a cessation of pain, etc. We want our children and families to be happy. The more illumined among us (again from my point of view) want everyone to have these things - knowing that no one truly has peace until we all do. But the question of goal-choosing is a person-relative problem. The question is not "What is the Goal?" but rather "What is MY GOAL?" - that is, what do YOU WANT.

For this you have to decide for yourself. And if you are pragmatic, you then you will also (probably) choose a method - to have failed to choose a method will have been to chosen a kind of anti-method which is itself a kind of method. For definitive methods, you may or may not want an archetype.

But this is not to reject the notion of Goal and Archetype and Method.

Being human, I make a few assumptions about you - along the lines of those outlined above - that you have goals that are somewhat "rational" in that they are themselves fundamentally desirable. If these things don't appeal to you, I may have nothing interesting in common with you. We may not even be sufficiently similar for it to be worthwhile for you to read what follows. In fact, I may not want you to read any further than this - please adopt my goals, they're good ones - happiness, peace, joy, cessation of pain and universal compassion.

If you -do- share these goals, then I think there is a (perhaps many) method(s) for attaining them and archetypes which have by their various methods.

For that we must wait another week, I fear. For now all I hope to have resolved is that there is a simple and rational set of questions underlying religion:

What should we attempt to attain as a highest goal?
How should we attempt to attain them?
Has anyone ever done this before that might be helpful?

And that answers to these question have a fundamentally rational - even scientific - method for determining their answers.

We call this science Ethics.