Book of Change

The Answer

 

What is the question? Well, the big question is “Is there a God?” The answer is “Yes.” But whose god? Of course the second questions are, “Who is this guy? And why should I believe him?”

          Answer #1: Yes, but mine of course.

          Answer #2: I am a 72-year old guy with a PhD in organizational psychology, 40 years work experience and even more life experience than you. I am also a son of the aforementioned God.

​          Let me expand on the latter. My life experience includes four wives and 7 kids. I pondered question #1 as I got up very late (retired) and walked past the guest room where my 42-year old wife was walking naked on the treadmill. This also helps answer the question because you should be so lucky. Am I some rich guy who lives in a mansion? Kind of. My name is Rich. The standing joke with my wife is that she always wanted to marry a “rich” guy. I recently sold my house which had 4,000 square feet and was situated on 20+ acres of woodlands located in some foothills. The place came with a horse barn and a few horses. Why sell it? I got rid of the house and the ex-wife because I came around to understanding both were a pain in the ass. So, I traded in the ex-wife for a younger and more affection one (much to ex-wife’s chagrin) and bought a new place with half the floor space and a very small (low maintenance) lot – both in the city.

​          So back to question #1. My doctorate studies in organizational psychology helped me answer the question from the perspective of organized religion. Let me start by asking you a question. How can there be so many religions, which all proclaim that their representatives are the same sons or daughters of God, be right and the others aren’t? The answer is obvious. All of them are wrong. And if there is no one “son of God,” then where does that leave us? The answer my friend is that there is a God (singular) and we are all the children of said God. So I am a “son” of God, as are you a son or daughter.

​          No, I am not part of or starting some cult. By the way, all modern-day religions are cults. They all ripped of some other religion. For example – Jews, Christians and Muslims are all “People of the Book.” How ironic that all three claim to be descendants of Abraham and all three believe in the Old Testament. It gets even more perverse when you consider all of the downstream cults lay claim to having the only Son of God. The Jews await the Messiah, the Christians have him in Jesus and the Muslims have Mohammed.  The downstream groups all claim their competitors are wrong and must therefore be punished now or in the afterlife. The Muslims split into the Sunni and Shia. The Christians split into the Catholics and Protestants. The Jews have their own problems with the  Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist movements.

​          It gets more bizarre with the Christians who have decried later so-called “cult” groups like the Seventh Day Adventists, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Unification Church, Christian Science, and Jehovah's Witness. From my point-of-view, most of the aforementioned religions are cults by definition because they all claim that God gave them license to supersede their own parent groups.

          But I digress! The real question is not “Is there a God?” The real question is who is he or she? Given that there are 10,000 religions (Wikipedia), the answer is that he or she sure gets around. Which basically proves the point that God exists as a universal need for all of humanity. Humanity just has not resolved the question of which God it is.