God, Not God, Dog

I got told off last night while we were watching the BBC's debate of 'What the World Thinks of God'. My views on the subject are predominantly secular and scientific (as if you didn't know) and I jokingly said Jonathan Miller was a real candidate for the post of supreme being. I was told that I was being blasphemous. Now I like Jonathan Miller, even he does take sometime to get to the point and this was one of the main problems with the show; none of the participants was allowed more than a minute or two to make a point and Jonathan Miller needs a lot longer than that. Also, the 'world-wide poll' was just a joke. As Mr. Miller said, to reduce such a complex subject down to a few bullet points is just ludicrous and makes people jump to conclusions without thinking about them in any depth.

I made a lot of ludicrous points regarding cosmology which I am afraid is the only place I can even begin to entertain the idea of a creator; obviously, I do not have the science to understand the implications of recent cosmological theory for the existence of a creator but the 'brane theory opens up the possibility of things (space, time, concepts) before the Big Bang and so why not things before those things ad infinitum. Extremism and local, personal beliefs are my problem. There is the problem with 'I am right and you are wrong' which is so obviously means that any belief system must account for Pluralism (word of the week - having replaced pragmatism). At least my wife is a pluralist but then again she says if you take the big three religions with their belief in the SAME GOD, you do not need to be a pluralist; even Hinduism can be seen as monotheistic in certain lights (officially I think it is seen as such in at least one country which prohibits pantheism - maybe Burma but I am not sure).

Strangely, I see the practical religions such as animism and dynamism as probably more valid even if they do have a far higher supernatural content than more iconic beliefs. In Bali you begin to believe in the spirits in the trees and fields and rivers. I really did believe that one of the local gods was keeping the plane in the air through a bought of turbulence on the way back. It took me weeks of reading Richard Dawkins books to get over this.