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Religion has always had a relevance to the culture that I identify with, Bolivia. God is included in the arts as well as in other manifestations of intellectual achievement. People get comfortable with the existence of God by the fact of feeling saved and identified with it. Sometimes they do not really believe in God, as they simply believe to believe, or perhaps to feel like they belong to their own culture. What this paradox makes clear is that belief in itself is a reflexive attitude: it is never a case of simply believing - one has to believe in belief itself. They believe in God, myself included, not unifying or making the appearance familiar under the guise of God, but to think in God as learning all over again of how to see life, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image and act a privileged thing related to God. In South America in general, religion is more of a cultural approach to God rather than a religion itself. The practice of the Christian religion is very common and has a lot of casual actions linked to the practice of the everyday: To pray before lunch, to always have a Bible in home, to decorate institutional spaces with specific religious motifs such as the cross, to go to the church every Sunday or having Sunday as an official Christian holiday, to travel for several days into a Christian community house far away from the city center to renew your beliefs in God or to even dance in the name of the Virgin of a town in the Carnival. The latter is extremely important to the development of the cultural aspect of Bolivia.
The carnival is a period of public revelry that occurs regularly every year, typically during the week before Lent in Roman Catholic countries, mostly South Americans. The carnival involves processions, music, dancing, and the use of masquerades. The inherent motives of the different dances are focused on the devotion to the Virgin of the town where the celebrations are happening. Each dances incorporate religious symbolism. Rio Carnival in Brazil celebrates the Virgin of Copacabana, in which the idea is to get everybody soaked with buckets of water and limes, dancing samba that is a symbolic representation of the Brazilian culture. In a different style, the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, originally an indigenous festival, focuses on the celebration of a Christian ritual around the Virgin of Candelaria (Virgin of Socavón) where dancers wearing diverse customs from specific traditional dances dance over the streets of Oruro unto the Church of Socavón to pray. In this case, God exists because he is being instantiated formally, incorporated as a physical representation, Christian decorations added to the customs and dances ideas, as well as a psychological representation, to dance in the name of a Virgin. The culture suggests a reason to believe in God.
Thus, God exists if and only if the concept of God is instantiated. Instantiated in terms of the conception of God according to which God is a being supernaturally endowed with knowledge, power and moral perfection, pointing out that we are concerned that any being in this planet has such qualities.
But then, how can we prove the existence of God? For Christians, the Bible is their absolute reference. The Bible showcases the actions and purposes of God in the world, with all his creations based on the collection of all the canonical texts, considered sacred, which defined the different religious groups, divided between the Old Testament and the New Testament. In general, I see the Bible as the perception of the moral conduct of the man, within the range of good and evil. The Bible establishes the morality in the human-soul, the spiritual part of a human being. The standpoint of morality, to be concerned, is the standpoint of the will which is infinite not merely in itself but for itself. The Bible, historically, was imposted to the indigenous when the Spaniards arrived to America. They showed the Bible to Atahualpa, the first Inca from the Inca Empire, who took it, did not understand it and subsequently threw it to the ground. This resulted in him being killed. It is then probable that my perception and conception of God has different qualities than the one conceived originally.
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| Los funerales de Atahualpa, Luis Montero, oil on canvas, 1868 |
So far the Bible demonstrates to us the power of God, arguing that God is supremely perfect. Nevertheless something perfect cannot exist simply because an imagined place in which everything is perfect is defined as an utopia. Though perfection is explained as having all the required or desirable elements, qualities, or characteristics; as good as it is possible to be, it can. God in this case is perfect because we imagine in that perfection trying to make it to exist, especially insofar as it asserts ideal forms as an absolute and eternal reality of which the phenomena of the world are in an imperfect and transitory reflection. All things then in this physical world work in their existence to approach their perfection, such as one of the examples to see Gods perfection, nature.
The natural world is like a machine in the sense that it interacts in an intricate and even mathematically precise manner. This phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations, compose the general conception of nature. When one experiences nature through the eyes of inner perception, there is nothing commonplace in this kingdom. Such an approach to the creation of nature requires reverence. One can conceive creation on condition that the created being recover itself, tear itself away from the creator in order to close in on itself immediately and assume its being; it is in this sense then that a tree can exist as distinct from its author. But if this act of creation is to be continued indefinitely, if the created being is to be supported even in its inmost parts, if it does not have its own independence, if it is in itself only not nothingness, then the creature or thing is in no way distinguished from its creator, it is absorbed by its; we are dealing with a false transcendence, and the creator can not have even an illusion of getting out of its subjectivity. In contrast to a casual or indifferent attitude, the sensitive individual looks upon nature as a sacred creation of God that deserves to be valued and revered, concluding that the natural world was produced by a supernatural force.
This nonexistence of a supernatural force, that even logically would impossible to be described, is greater than can be explained. Reflection upon what is merely possible does not tell us much about. We invent a supreme God through fiction. To perceive, to conceive, to imagine: these are the three modes of consciousness by which the idea of the existence of God can be conceived through objects or things created by nature. Thus, no object can exist without having defined its individuality, we must understood to mean without having an infinite number of specific relationships with an infinite number of other objects. The two worlds then, the real and imaginary one, are composed on the same objects, that only the grouping and the interpretation of these objects vary. God exists then in our imaginary ideal of a perfect thing, and that’s why God never will be useless because we need that imaginary perfection.
There is something that make us exist, and that’s for sure. This unexplained motif of existence is what I call God. We exist without a reason, without a cause, and without a necessity in this world, from nothing through nothing to nothing. The man materializes himself the world to exist, to encounter himself, and only afterwards to define himself. To speak on an act without a reason is to speak of an act which would lack the intentional structure of every act. If there is no act without reason, there is not the sense that we can say that there is no phenomenon without a reason. In order to become a reason, the reason must be experienced as such. The motive is understood only by the end; that is, our actions are made by a non-existence or a divine presence. Reasons and motives have meaning only inside a projected complex which is precisely a complex of nonexistence. God made us exist for one unexplained reason then.
So far is it rational to believe in the existence of God? Existence at some point is the only thing we have in this world. The experience has been demonstrated by many facts that make us understand our existence: The cavemen at some point decided to draw what he was seeing, Stonehenge was built to symbolize something specific or even the religion that conceived the existence of God. As Pascal’s Wager goes between the existence or not existence of God, what makes to believe in God is by the fact that you stay gaining more support in the event that you are right.
Is then God an imaginary supernatural perfect being? Perhaps as fiction.
