God exists because my grandparents are still alive, though they are alive by good mutt-style survival genetics and the rigors of modern medicine. They practice what they preach, and live simply with the least amount of consumption. They work as hard as they can, which isn't very hard at that age but is harder than I work some days. And they breathe every breath with God, they eat every meal with Him, they wake every morning and go to bed every night (in separate beds) with His Holy Presence. They vote with Him on their mind, they get from here to there with Him as their co-pilot.
They aren't alone.
So many people have similar beliefs, with the details differing. My bet is that many have the same ten commandments hung in their hallway, and many follow them to some degree. And that many obey any article of truth wrapped in faith.
And that includes stupid, stupid things. Wrong-headed awful stupid things that make no sense. Totally wrong things that cost lives, things that kill men.
They live according to their faith, which includes a whole lot of good bits. Helping neighbors and family, giving time and effort to those who can't provide for themselves. Feeding and clothing one another. Dealing with the factory closures and the loss of economy in ways the government can't, with a caring and a selflessness that can only occur in someone who knows their reward isn't in this life.
God exerts control over the entire political process in America, and not one avowed atheist will ever be elected to a position of any authority because our very vows rely on some faith in some God. The God of the pentacostal holy ghost tent revival circuit, the one that makes so much noise about Obama Bin Laden and Hillarity Clinton, the one who pushes social agenda with a fervor normally reserved for violence and better suited to revenge. The God that Bush clothes himself in when he needs to appear humble. That God is the one that is guiding us steadily to our end.
There's a spectrum of Gods there, though, from the benign sterile God of protestants to the golden God of Catholicism, from the grimy sweat of a summertime tent revival to the cool Methodist distance. But all of them exist, just like racism exists, just like hate exists, just like love, sometimes, exists.
Our rational heads harbor a rational fear of this irrational God, and we do our best to laugh at it, to decry belief in it as a backward thing, a superstitious fallacy, a childlike retardation of common sense. We take on God with our intellect, and we win, handily, because the greatest enemy of faith is reason.
And maybe we're smart enough to stop at God, and not carry that reason to our other invisible constraints, the ones that make up our laws and our money. Maybe we're so smart that no slippery slopes exist, and our wills are stronger than our instinct. But like the God who controls the Senate, our reason has as many shades of gray as there exist between black and white, and there's always someone wanting to break the machine and become God themselves, set fire to the rights of others and find some new way by violence or coercion that reeks of the old God minus the faith. Some people lack the will to maintain reason in the face of reality.
Which is to say, God exists maybe as a stopgap, some sort of fragile marker on our ascent from animal to pure reason that is there to protect us from the worst intentions. Willful ignorance, a knowing audience. Yes, it's not magic, it's just an illusion. The same illusion that binds us to paper-as-money, law-as-control, might-as-right. The same God that puts my grandparents to bed at night and bombs Iraq in the morning serves as a warning that the best sort of faith and law can be guaranteed to be read with the worst sort of evil intent, and that any math can be corrupted by perception, or by design. We're not ready for a world without God, then, unless we're ready to measure our worth as biological entities, as psychological beings, with the same cold hand that calculates our taxes, disregarding any faith that binds the contracts between ourselves and society. Do we then become our worth in grain, alone save for our wits and our capability as animals?
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