The Unsent Letter to Sam Harris
To Sam, You say that there is no real God. But I can prove a God to you right now. You can be my God. Are you real? Do you exist? How then can there be no God? You only say there is no God which is beyond your ability to conceive, you have placed too much faith in your abilities.
I've never said this before, but I say this that it may increase faith in your consideration. Forget Pascal, forget bets. Forget claims of omniscience, omnipotence. When did man decide that God was an omniscient, omnipotent being? I see no reference to this in the main text. What I see are many claims, many claims which hold true. The scripture claims that the good will win out over the bad, that the light will win out over the darkness. All of reality claims this is the case, for wounds do heal, man does arise victorious in his battles, the fears of yesterday are nevermore.
Only for consideration, what if my God is the force of Goodness? No, not a goodness only in the matrix, not a goodness locked in an eternal war in the great wheel of karma, but a transcendent, supernatural goodness which exists in the future and can be brought into reality by man.
Whatever is the case of God, it appears that blaming him as the tyrant responsible for all sins has never been a reasonable claim in this world. For whatever reason, by our human conceptions, man alone has been given the keys to creation. God appears to be like Jesus on his way to Lazarus. He cannot reach him in time. Lazarus dies. But Christ still reaches him and victory of life over death is still attained. This is easy to observe, take for instance the image of Milton's paradise lost, the demons can only exist where God's light has not reached. So God is reaching, out in every direction, but he has these blind spots that he cannot access. He has not yet reached these areas of darkness. This is the great victory for men who do evil, who though stain their clothes with blood, they can rejoice in escaping wrath during the transition.
My God of Goodness is a God who promises to be the victor of the war, and it appears that He at present can only come into this world by means of the human vessel.
These are only the semantics and do not represent the moral issue at hand. The issue is not whether God exists, for Goodness most certainly does, but whether or not we worship, live for, and glorify God. Moreso even than this, the choice is not between whether or not Goodness exists, but whether or not in your pride, will you pretend Goodness does not exist and pretend that you are protected in this ignorance? If there is no totalitarian God, but there is a God, and He will be returning one day, do you think you will be able to tell him, "I didn't know.." You didn't know what exactly? You didn't know that there was a force of Goodness? Or, you didn't know that the force of Goodness would win out over the darkness?
God is a relationship of faith and trust in that which is not seen and beyond the known, yet God is known to those who are in service to Him. The force of God's Spirit has come through the many vessels that served it and poured through this reality we exist in, not only causing the miraculous, but also destroying all blindness and ignorance within that space, giving direct access to the Spirit of Revelation and the future.
My God has been saving the poor, downtrodden, the outcast, throughout all of human history. To those He could not reach in time will have their victory.
As the greatest of philosphers have noted, if there is no God, then there is the God of your conscience, and do you believe that you can lie to your own conscience?
There is no way to say it more clearly than this: believing that there is no force of Goodness which intends to help humanity is an ignorance greater than the conscious worship of Satan himself, for most often, even the wicked are not ignorant of God.
You have heard it said: God is Good, all the time. All the time, God is Good.