God Shuffled His Feet

The existence of God is something that has been disputed ever since it emerged as a concept. What is both frustrating and undeniably convenient is the fact that the existence of a Judeo-Christian God-like entity is impossible either to prove or disprove, despite the tireless efforts of Nietzsche and Fénelon. Actually, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was established solely to point out this fact, and to demonstrate that our all-too-precious faith can be placed unshakeably in anything, however absurd.
But if we take a step outside of our Western enculturation and look at God differently, thinking of him in a more Eastern, mystical sense, we are confronted with the curiously familiar idea of Brahman, or the divine transcendental ground of all being, time, matter, energy, and space. Brahman encompasses the entirety of everything, and the invisible systems through which they work. What is convenient about Brahman is that it does exist, it absolutely has to, nihilism and solipsism aside. The existence of Brahman is impossible to disprove (except possible for Zeno), and descriptions of it in Hindu scriptures ring bells of “the First and the Last” and “Alpha and Omega.”
What I’m getting at here is a loosened definition of God—no two people can entirely agree on their conceptions of God as it is. Sure, we can all cling to the idol of God we shaped in our minds as children, a shaky image of a smiling, fatherly divine face that the infantile find comforting. But this is a mental security blanket, I think, and detrimental to one’s spirituality. How can you truly know God if the God you think you know is different from the God your priest thinks he knows?
But God as Brahman, and not as a man-like entity, or a paradoxical trinity… Brahman can only be one thing, and if God is not Brahman then God at the very least is contained within Brahman, being a part of existence. But would this not make God a subordinate being to Brahman, and go against the definition of God?
Brahman definitely exists, if anything does. God might exist, but if he truly adheres to the expectations of Judeo-Christian tradition than he exists as a being inferior to the universe itself. Brahman is the universe itself, and therefore the best candidate for Godhood.
There’s just so much about the God I grew up with that I don’t really get. Certain Christian sects believe that God made man “in his own image.” Aside from the fact that we’re clearly not Gods, I have to ask why God would make chimpanzees 98% in his own image? And then continue to stratify the genetics of the primates further and further from his own, filling in the remainder of their genetic code with animal DNA, which so closely resembles God DNA… I just find it unlikely that this is the case.
As I find it unlikely that God is sitting atop a cloud keeping a log of all of our sins and good deeds. What I do find likely is that the scribes of antiquity, much like the writers of today, felt an urge for an artistic flourish and indulged it in clever metaphors, hyperbole, and, most importantly, personification. God is the personification of nature, the makeshift explanation for phenomena which science has yet to enlighten. Moses was a smart and influential man in his time, and when his contemporaries asked him to explain things, he did the best he could as a poet to inform them. Thus we have the Creation story, an elegantly crafted poetic explanation for where life came from.
Was Moses a prophet, and did God speak to him? Whichever definition you use for God, the answer is a resounding yes. In the sense of God as Brahman, God speaks to all of us, all the time; prophets are merely those who listen. Moses saw an imperfect world and decided to take action—he was blessed both with capability and with wisdom, and combined these traits to liberate Israel. God commanded him to only in the sense that Moses himself recognized what was right and wrong in the situation through what had been shown to him, and felt he had to take action.
If the Judeo-Christian God exists, and he manifested himself to Moses in a burning bush (a thought amusing to potheads, especially since Hindus just on the other side of Mesopotamia were consuming cannabis ritualistically for spiritual enlightenment) and truly showed to him visions of the Creation, which Moses reproduced in the Bible’s record as infallible fact and truth, then half of the findings of science and archaeology in the past 400 years would have to be bullshit, and our human sense of logic overwhelmingly fallible.
But if we assume that we are not idiots and that sense makes sense, and re-examine the situation with God being Brahman, hypothetically, then we are left with a little more wiggle room. God blessed Moses with a capable mind and a sense of duty: seeing manifest in reality (the face of God) a need for action, Moses took action. Being a man of wisdom and faith, he did so claiming an authority higher than his own, an unchallengable one.
Just what Moses’ concept of God was I can’t be sure. I know that our dear grandfather Abraham was very much onto something when he made the leap from idolatry to monotheism: the oneness and unity of God is central to Brahmanism, which developed in the Indus Valley shortly before Abraham’s covenant was made. Now, just what took place between Abraham and God is impossible to know, especially considering that neither one ever existed for sure. Couldn’t it be possible that Moses took some artistic license with what happened?
It’s not unheard of, at that time. Poets and storytellers were definitely emerging as a central aspect of people’s histories and cultures—The Epic of Gilgamesh was written 200 years before the Torah, and do we doubt that either one enjoys a certain amount of embellishment?