The Axiom of Deity

This is at least one possible extension of the Axiom of Romance, the Axiom of Causality, the Axiom of Esthetics, and so on. One can choose to believe in God (irrationally). One can choose to believe that there is no God (irrationally). One can choose to believe that we don't know if there is or isn't a God (true but pointless). These are the only choices that seem to be available, at least before one starts to modify one's irrational selection with equally arbitrary attributes of the Deity one may or may not choose to believe in.

What to do?

I cannot say what you should do, but I personally choose to believe in Deity, as a direct extension of the Axiom of Romance. Indeed, it is the Axiom of Romance and something more, an empirical thing. The one thing that I cannot deny is the reality of my own existence because it is what I am experiencing at every instant of my awareness. Decartes logical extrapolation of Deity on the basis of this single undoubtable fact was invalid logically, of course - no better than asserting ``God exists'' or ``God does not exist'' since no empirical evidence could ever suffice to validate the hypothesis to any being but God!

This leads us to consider a puzzle. What would existence be to Deity. Surely we would not consider pure mechanism, a Universe with no awareness whatsoever that worked like clockwork only, to be alive at all, let alone Deity. No, to the Selves that Are our sensory stream of perception and reason, the clockwork itself is at best inferred, the existential reality is the awareness itself. Deity, to me at least, must be that romantic ideal of Self awareness.

This, in turn, leads us back to the Laws of Thought, to set theory and all the rest. We introduced the concept of $\mu$, of no-thing, as a placeholder for nonexistence itself as a contradiction of a Universal set, of that which exists. Existence and non-existence cannot co-exist, they are the ultimately mutually exclusive alternatives.

This leads us to an interesting syllogism, the one that is perhaps the absolute heart of Zen enlightenment, the whole point of the problem of One Hand Clapping and all the rest. In the instant of my awareness of Self, whatever and however and whoever that Self might be, existence is and hence non-existence is not. Deity, as I perceive it, is that existence itself. God is that which Is, which must be perceived to be as without the perception one cannot infer anything at all in a Universe that is known empirically. There is no time, no space, no cause, no structure, no life in non-existence, there is nothing at all - $\mu$ cannot exist in the presence of any thing on both an empirical and on a rational basis.

Thus an interesting, romantic truth that is the core of my belief system, one that supercedes even the miracle of apparently living in an apparently causal Universe, is the ongoing observation of Not-$\mu$ that characterizes my awareness, a state that I equate with Deity on purely romantic grounds.

Mind you, I do not ascribe any particular properties or characteristics to that Deity except on the basis of romance. We cannot know God by means of science, we cannot know God by means of the idiots that the world has called ``prophets'' (who generally got nearly everything wrong according to most of the axioms that underlie my system of beliefs, at any rate). We know God only at the core of our instantaneous awareness of Self, an awareness that must be shared by God. Consequently the impulses that arise from that awareness, the choices that the cusp of Self guides one to, the romantic overlay of compassion and purpose that the Light Within gives to a life - they can none of them be proven, but they do serve to make my life a far richer experience than one of mere clockwork.