In the Beginning...

A belief in the existence of a God is assumed here.

God is understood to be the unequivocal standard of intrinsic value. God is good. As a matter of fact, God is all that is good. This does not make God subjective; God is simply the definition of what is good. If God is eternal, eternal is good. If God is true, truth is good. If God is love, love is good.

I don't really want get caught up in trying to define God, or argue God's existence. I want more to talk about people. People who believe, or claim to believe, in God. People I grew up knowing as "the church". To understand "the church" however, one must understand what the church is about, and that assumes a limited understanding of God, who is essentially, by definition, unknowable in any proximal sense of entirely. Yet there is much of God that is knowable and accessible. Most of what is accessible of God is made so through God’s creation, which is, coincidentally, the greatest testament to God's existence. Nothing can come of nothing, so if the assent is made that an entity of eternal being created the finite universe, it follows that the universe was created out of said being. Therefore, God must be present, in part, in God's creation.

God is not a he or a she. God is God. Hence the annoying repetition for the time being. Without getting into gender confusing issues of psychological identities and whatnot, it is fair to say that, biologically speaking, God has no need of gender defining attributes. God did not create the universe as the Greek pantheon, through excessive copulation, rather God created all, everything, using the only eternal substance available: namely God, and specifically, through verifiable communication (verifiable because we exist, not because I can show you any more evidence than is available to you wherever you are right now).

God is definitive, but there are some distinctions to made between who God is and what God does. The attributes of God, or who God is, are the defined characteristics or objective standards that God’s existence sets forth. The actions of God come from God's attributes. Sometimes God's actions (or more accurately God's perceived actions, or inaction) are confused as God’s character and consequently God is then perceived, in humanity’s limited scope, to be fallible, incompetent, absent, or at worst, non-existent in the affairs of God’s universe. However, if the characteristic attributes of God are good, then all that stems from those attributes must also be good, and as such, must certainly exist. These are some strenuous thought aerobics, like performing mind circles, so bear with me.

First the assent is made that God is. God exists. Which sets the foremost standard that by existing God is good. This needs to be known; to be is a good thing, for God, and for God's creation. It is the first principal to acknowledge in order to make the assent to every other principal embodied by God; God is good because God exists, and God exits because God is good. This comes back to the definition of who God is as the definitive standard of creation, the foremost of which is necessarily existence. If God's existence is a problem for you, this is not going to solve that problem. Once that assent is made however, and one can see that God exists as the standard for good, there are a number of questions that arise from the apparent contradictions in existence. The foremost of which is sin. How can sin exist in a universe created by a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, being that is characteristically perfect by the very means of existing? What is sin? What about the church? I'm already asking way too many questions than your or my attention span will merit in one sitting. So we have at least some direction for the future, should it exist, which would be good, or so I think.

None of this is new. I'm simply warming up the thought process(es) I'll be following for a bit. It's a little rusty to be sure... so I anticipate that I'll be making some retractions and changes as I think along the way. Hopefully I have some time yet to figure at least some of this stuff out... a lot of time. And a lot of help along the way.

- TPS