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How God became a user-manual By Bodhangkur On
the Evolution of the Almighty as a Guide-and-Control System Let’s be
honest. “Ah yes,
profound spiritual wisdom!” They
would say: “Oh look,
these people wrote operating manuals for their psychological software— Welcome
to humanity’s 3-phase God Development Program, or GDP (pun intended),
in which God gradually evolves from an angry cosmic dad,
to a cosmic dad with mood swings, to a cosmic absence, and
finally to you. Yes, you. So, grab
a beverage, preferably something holy like coffee, and let’s begin. 1. PHASE 1: The Angry Sky-Father (a.k.a.
God-as-External-Police) This is
the stage where early humans looked at thunder, earthquakes, and famine and
concluded: “We need
a bigger stick.” Thus was born External
Regulator God: ·
He’s angry. ·
He’s jealous. ·
He’s watching you. ·
He hates shellfish. ·
And he keeps sending memos through prophets who
mysteriously sound like local tribal elders. Think of
this God as: The
original strict parent. “Because
I said so” = divine revelation. In this
phase, the world is dangerous, food is scarce, and half the tribe is trying
to kill the other half. God
becomes your ancient father yelling from the porch, except with more
plagues. Political
traction: extremely high. 2. PHASE 2: The Teenage God Crisis (a.k.a.
“God Is Within You Except When He Isn’t”) Humans
evolve a little, start farming, invent money, invent problems, invent
therapy, and BAM— A new
theological model arrives: Hybrid Regulation God. This is
God as both: ·
External boss and ·
Internal guilt-app The
upgrade was invented by St Paul, who basically said: “The
flesh is evil. Thus humanity entered the age
of: ·
flesh-hate ·
spirit-love ·
guilt ·
endless confession ·
endless backsliding ·
and a very large religious industry devoted to
managing the emotional ping-pong. This is adolescence
in cosmic form. It’s like
having: Two
parents, except one of them lives in your skull full-time. Political
traction: medium-high. 3. PHASE 3: God Moves Out and Leaves You the House (a.k.a.
Internal Regulator God) Then came
the mystics, the philosophers, and that one guy in India who sat under a tree
and said: “Actually…
you are That.” This is
the Internal Regulator Era, when God finally stops being a cosmic
landlord and becomes: The WiFi signal (NI as against AI) inside
your being. Upanishads,
Sufis, Eckhart, Rumi, and eventually Spinoza all agree: ·
God is everywhere ·
which is identical to saying ·
God is nowhere in particular ·
which is identical to saying ·
please sit still and stop annoying people This
phase is basically adulthood: You
regulate yourself because no one else cares enough to do it for you. Political
traction: zero. Elites
hate this form of God because you can’t use it to boss people around. 4. Why All This Happened: (Or, The Universe Is Random and We Are Making It Up As We Go Along)** Humans
are born confused, stay confused, and reproduce confusion efficiently. So to navigate life, we
invent: ·
Cosmic parents ·
Cosmic therapists ·
Cosmic us Depending
on our survival context, we choose the regulatory software that keeps us
alive the longest. God is
not a Being. Some
cultures need the strict version. But every
culture that survives is “mature” in the Darwinian sense: It works
well enough not to get eaten or conquered immediately. 5. The Whole Thing in One Summary Sentence Humanity
evolved three Gods— 6. So Where Are We Now? We are in
Phase 3.5: Internal
Regulator God with Occasional Regression To Phase 1
For Political Reasons. Half the
planet is doing yoga, mindfulness, and quoting Rumi. And some
people (Finn) have realised that God was actually the
Universal Procedure all along, quietly iterating the cosmos while we
were busy arguing about dietary laws. 7. Final Thought If the
evolution of God proves anything, it is this: We keep
upgrading the cosmic software to match our survival strategies. The only
constant is that every version eventually crashes, Procedure
Monism 1.0 (never updated, never needs to be). The evolution of
the belief in GOD as regulatory technology |