Amen

Our columnist Boyd Clack explains what he says makes up the universe.

You will be aware of my belief that what we personify as ‘God’ is in fact everything.

By ‘everything’ I mean everything in every form that exists in the infinite, or not, expanse of physical being.

This explains omnipresence, of course, and ultimate responsibility.

As Voltaire put it: “What is the point of crying over spilt milk when it took all of the powers of the universe to spill it?”.

My worship of nature and our fellow creatures has made me refer to myself as a Pantheist before now, but in contemplating my ‘everything’ belief it dawns on me that the prefix ‘Pan’ does not refer to nature as such, but to ‘all’ or ‘everything’.

In my mind this confirms that a Pantheist is indeed an accurate description of my belief system.

‘Pan – All: Theist – believer in’.

I have been reliably informed by a theologian friend, that the word that most accurately embodies my belief structure is ‘Panentheist’ – a subtle but distinct extension of Pantheism to include the ‘all’ beyond the ‘all’ of just nature.

Over the last few days I have extrapolated a further detail of this belief.

In contemplating ‘Good and Evil’ I now realise that these things do not exist in a macrocosmic sense. So forget organised religion.

There is no great source of evil; no devil, evil is simply a mutation of human genealogy.

This seems so obvious to me now but I have been blind to its truth all my life.

I have fallen for the ‘we are playthings of dark mystical, universal powers and energy’s excuse’, more or less unquestioningly.

There is no objective evil.

We humans with our expanded brains and our inescapable impulse, or curse some may call it, to philosophise and create frameworks, have evolved the excuse of evil to explain the dark side of our own nature; the evolved nature of our species that is.

We have objectified it.

No devil, my friends, and since everything everywhere other than us is perfect, no ‘good’ either.

There is no need for a separate idea of goodness in an innocent universe.

Let’s stop talking of evil as an intangible malign force and accept that it is our own creation made to rationalise our own corrupted nature.

Amen.