What I Mean When I Say God
I feel like I mislead people when I talk about god, which I do a lot lately.
I don't want to talk about my own personal religious beliefs or practice, those are very private to me, but I want to talk about god as a philosophical or ontological concept. God as a science.
I don't believe in an anthropomorphic god with human qualities, or a personal god in the traditional sense, though I see personal relationships with god as very legitimate and anthropomorphic metaphors as very useful.
I believe that every religion is correct, fundamentally, because god exists in the capacity to fill the needs of different people. Religion is a cultural construction designed to allow connection to divinity in whatever mode best suits its practitioners. Religion should serve people, not the other way around. If a religion does not suit you, it is not because their god is not real, rather they are delivering god to you through a theological system that you are not built for. All gods are one in the same and they are all correct.
God is the driving force, the matter and substance through which all things exist, God permeates everything.
Pantheism is defined as "the belief that reality is identical with divinity, or that all-things compose an all-encompassing, immanent god". God is the sum of its parts and its parts are all of existence.
God is all creation and all destruction. It is vast, infinite, and undefinable.
And God is something all people have equal access to. A personal relationship with god is one and the same as a personal relationship with one's self and, by extension, all of humanity, and further, all of creation.
God can be felt in the connections we share with all other people.
God is a crowded room.