A very small universe

I hardly know where to start with this.  There are just so many threads to pull on, but one has to start somewhere.

My problem is 'god' (or 'God' if you prefer).  Suppose someone were to ask you 'do you believe in god'?  Maybe they are expecting a simple 'yes' or 'no'.  Maybe they insist on a simple 'yes' or 'no' - after all, you either do or you don't, right?  My problem is this: it all depends on what you mean by 'god', or even, put another way, it depends on which 'god' you mean.

Of course in the minds of some people there is only one.  Then Christians (most of them at least) insist on there being a trinity and have declared that it is heresy to call the three names of the trinity 'aspects' of a single god.  So there is just the one, but one equals three - perfect sense.

However I'd prefer to unwrap this puzzle a bit.  Although there are a fair few people who seem to content to claim that they 'know' god, I'd say that the best they can do is interpret such a being through the pin-hole of their own mind.  Rather like the bit in 'Dogma' when Metatron explains that it took several goes a creating Adam before they figured out that he couldn't cope with hearing the voice of god, it's hard to imagine that a human mind that struggles to grasp a vast eleven-dimensional super-string universe would fare any better at coming to terms with the mind that created it.

I'd contend that most humans struggling with the notion of god reduce him/her/it to their own dimensions, and the paucity of their own imagination. It is rather like when, through respect for ancient thinkers, Western thought tried to fit the world into four elements rather than the hundred plus (if we include all the transient ones) we know of now.  This analogy also conjures up the possibility that all these encounters with 'god' are actually encounters with a whole slew of entities that appear to humans as god-like.  The Buddhist and Hindu world views (which are themselves just metaphorical) admit layers upon layers of beings that exist outside the human realm and have different types of interaction with that realm.

Ok - so suppose you force a clarification and insist that 'God' means a single creator-god that came before everything and willed everything into being.  Does the existence of such a being exclude the possibility of all other types of 'celestial' (for want of a better word) beings?  Obviously not. Within Christianity you have angels and daemons.  Within Islam you have Djinn.  In other more imaginative world-views the types of strange entities seem only limited by human imagination.

Does power and knowledge guarantee benign intention towards humans?  Well, you only have to look at the history of mayhem and slaughter wrought by divine intervention to know that the 'love' of a deity can often be fatally tough love. Perhaps a deity loves a species rather than individuals.  Indeed who knows the complexities of the mind of such a being?  And does this deity have moods?

The doctrinaire materialists are very little better.  Their small world is extremely sad (at least those brought up within a Western Christian culture). It accepts the very narrow battle ground of atheism vs theism (something not even of their own creation) and then fights the battles the 'enemy' sets.  It is fatally reactionary and small minded.  The tragedy is that they have the window into a much bigger world within them - consciousness - yet they prefer to ignore it's implications.  They insist like mediaeval popes that no truth can exist outside their world view.

So, just as if someone had asked me 'are you a pink or a blue' without any explanation of the meaning, I feel forced to say 'I'm a yellow - I reject your dichotomy'.  I don't want either of these blind, blinkered views.  I want a view that explores beyond the next horizon rather than insisting that the next horizon is the edge of the world.