"You are such a heathen, but you use the term God freely. What do you really believe about God?"
-Lee Hoover
Thanks for that easy question, Lee. Thus far I've written well over 100 books in a failed attempt to answer a portion of that question.
Belief is not something that sits well with my inquisitive mind.
God, the notion of a universal consciousness, a creator intelligence, an "unmoved mover," a "cause uncaused," a "conceptualization of power as an extra-natural, all-knowing entity," all of these notions sit very well with me."
In terms of a belief in God, that has always—in the few dozen religions I've studied—come down to specifics, specifics that forever seem to reek of Man, not God. The very specificity of monotheistic salvation, for instance, positively smells of Man and his petty hierarchies of soon-dead meat puppets.
Burton, a Jew-hater who liked the other Semite peoples, a Hindu mystic, Islamic Sufi, apostate Protestant, flirtatious Catholic and questing Gnostic, claimed that Man created God in his own image. To the extent that I agree with Burton on this, I take his notion further and realize that atheism—the fanatical belief in an unprovable negative, that there is, and can be, no God—is perhaps our most all-encompassing belief, belief in the sanctity of the human form and its attendant, and sometimes obscene, hungers.
I hope, Lee, that I have answered some portion of your question, as I am unqualified to answer it in its brief entirety.
Under the God of Things
“Why will you not admit that the universe is conscience intelligence since conscience intelligences are born from it?”- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.
“Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism.” - Vladimir Lenin
The latest measurement. Probably prove to be low as every time we get more powerful telescopes we find more.
"at least 2 trillion galaxies
perhaps 500 billion stars in the Milky Way
And another 500 billion stars in between each galaxy
This would mean an estimate of at least 2 trillion trillion stars in the visible universe."
These kind of numbers are unfathomable to me. They're really too large to get a handle on like you would a quart of milk, a mile of road or ten pounds of flour. They're just really, really big. If someone is going to take the attitude that there's no God he's going to have to come up with some sort of explanation on where all this stuff came from. I won't hold my breath.
Man the measure of all things. Make me laugh.
Jeremy Bentham's quote,
“Why will you not admit that the universe is conscience intelligence since conscience intelligences are born from it?”- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 B.C.
reminded me of a good book I read. Accelerando. Free copy online. It reads ok. Drags a slight amount in some areas but the ideas and concepts in it are super interesting. Basically humans and other species eventually turn themselves into computers as the amount of being capable of inhabiting an area is vastly higher if they are made of computational matter. So is the Universe actually using us as an intermediate step to uplift itself? Turn it's matter into being? The caterpillar to spawn the moth?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(novel)