Eh tu, God?

Dear Friends:

I am not going to try and mislead you like some of the snake-oil salesmen I write about in my book "An Exploration of Religion," but rather to entice you to read it and make up your own mind!

It's available over there on the left side of the page!

This might be one of the most important articles you will ever read in your life! (Or it might be a total piece of crap that should be thrown in the garbage!) 

At this point I would say the odds are about 50 - 50!

The reason for this book's importance lies in the fact that it addresses the very nature of God, religion and the meaning of life! (Hey, if you're gonna go big............!)

Religion, as anyone will tell you, is a product of human imagination, and its main purpose is to help people lessen the pain, suffering and mental anguish of everyday living.

Unfortunately this concept, while pure at first, was soon hijacked by a bunch of unscrupulous con artists who quickly turned the idea into a cult... and spread their scam far and wide throughout the land! (Since it was such a great hoax people naturally invented different versions of it that eventually became the three major religions [Christianity, Judaism, Islam] from a Western point of view... as well as the Eastern philosophies and dozens and dozens of minor players in the competition for the hearts, minds and soul of the great unwashed masses!)

Basically the whole concept of God can be reduced to a simple yes or no statement!

There is either a GOD...... or there is not!

If we take the position of atheists like Dr. Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchen that there is no Deity, Cosmic Consciousness or Mother Nature behind the scene.... and the whole universe is just here by dumb luck or blind chance, then all is for naught and whether we are here or not doesn't really matter!

The other side of the coin is that there IS something lurking in the background and the universe, and our lives, means something, rather than nothing! 

This gives us the choice of a mainstream religion that is followed by the masses (which we have already discounted)...... or we can listen to someone like Baruch Spinoza who took the position that  the spirit (us) is a part of an all encompassing divine presence.

In other words God, while not an actual part of this reality, exists in some form outside of... or separate from....  this actuality, and we are a small part of (or expression of) that presence!

God seems to be infused into the very fabric of all living matter in the universe (as opposed to lumps of dead matter like rocks and water and air and fire...... which we called the classical elements) and depends on the strength of that connection to determine "awareness" or "consciousness!" 

This can vary from the cosmic connection to the basic cell of a tree or amoeba... right up to the cognition/consciousness of one of the higher animals or even humans themselves! (This depends on the type and quality of an entities relationship with this Divine presence. In spite of the Cosmic connection a dog will always be a dog, and  a human must always be a human!) 

BUT!

While consciousness/awareness might be explained by this connection to a "higher power" the main stumbling block for scientists and philosophers was in determining just how this relationship manifested itself!

Riding in to save us is a hypothesis by Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose that states that this connection is through tiny "microtubules" that exist in every living cell.

A review and update of a controversial 20-year-old theory of consciousness published in Physics of Life Reviews claims that consciousness derives from deeper level, finer scale activities inside neurons. The recent discovery of quantum vibrations in "microtubules" inside neurons corroborates this theory, according to review authors Stuart Hameroff and Sir Roger Penrose. They suggest that EEG rhythms (brain waves) also derive from deeper level microtubule vibrations.

The theory, called "orchestrated objective reduction" ('Orch OR'), was first put forward in the mid-1990s when they suggested that quantum vibrational computations in microtubules were "orchestrated" by synaptic inputs stored in microtubules by a "Higher Power" or Cosmic Consciousness!" 

This theory has started to gain increased attention in the past several years and just might be the "missing link" between us, this world..... and the next!

The way I see it anyway!