Tom Ellis
2 min readJan 13, 2024

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You are wasting your time if you think your dyspeptic take on this topic will persuade any Christians at all--fundamentalist wackos or otherwise reasonable people (and I've met plenty of both kinds).

First of all, what exactly do YOU mean by "God"? It is an empty signifier, which people fill with whatever projections they wish to worship. I think of the concept of "God" as a personification of the Sacred that appeals (mostly) to people from western cultural traditions rooted in the Levant (that is, the bloody war zone where two monotheistic cults are duking it out as we speak, each thinking that THEIR tribal deity is the One True God, and therefore that their enemies are "the enemies of God" with whom reconciliation is blasphemy._ This leads to the next question: What is "the Sacred?" To this, I have no answer, other than Louis Armstrong's response to the dorky white journalist who asked him "What is Jazz?" His response is also mine, about the Sacred: "If you gotta ask, you'll never know." So "God" is just the Western way of personifying the unknowable Sacred; in the Far East, they do not personify the Sacred; rather they simply call it "Dharma" or "Tao."

And as Lao Tzu told us, "the Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Unfortunately, the God people of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam never understood this. As philosopher Alfred Korzybsky put it, " The map is not the territory, and the name is not this thing named." But it does not follow that "the territory"---the Sacred--does not exist! Even if it "exists" only in our own intuitions.

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Tom Ellis
Tom Ellis

Written by Tom Ellis

I am a retired English professor now living in Oregon, and a life-long environmental activist, Buddhist, and holistic philosopher.

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