god, one or zero?

I am quite interested in how people think and feel about God, religion, spirituality and such, and I subscribe to a wide spectrum of  blogs and Facebook pages related to these subjects. I guess you could say I am involved in an ongoing personal research project on the subject of “God”.

One such page I subscribe to on Facebook is called Faithless Daughter. It is by no means one of my favorite pages, but occasionally something is posted there that captures my interest.

The “About” section for this page states: “This page is aimed for the freedom of women from the patriarchal shackles religion has placed on humanity. ‘Remember The Suffragettes’.”

It then rambles on in the “Description” section: “We care because your Religion is like a bad disease and a mental disorder in the sense that it is delusional ignorance and the lack of knowledge. You want to improve knowledge – you start weeding out Religion” (sic)

And this later: “Please note that this page whilst addressing others religions is slanted towards exposing the inherently violent religion of islam – the admins are majority ex muslim.” (sic)

If you want to read more of this ponderous, wordy explanation of the mission of this page, go here.

Recently, I noticed this update on my newsfeed from Faithless Daughter:

“GOD is ONE”
sorry, you are wrong.
“GOD is ZERO”

I laughed a little at this because it seemed so absurd.  If “God” exists outside of our imaginations, isn’t it likely that God could be both one AND zero?  And if there is no “God”, couldn’t God still be imagined by human beings to be both one and/or zero?  Wait, WHAT?

Since all I have is my lived experience and my imagination to judge what is true and real, and all the words I have to describe “God” (including the word “God”) are limiting, why should I care if anyone says God is one or zero? Why does the author of this Facebook update care if someone says “GOD is ONE”? I suppose that she is trying to say that there IS no God by saying that God is “zero”, but I rather like the word “zero” as a way to describe God.

One of the definitions of “zero” given by the TheFreeDictionary.com is the following:

Linguistics: Of or relating to a morpheme that is expected by an established, regular paradigm but has no spoken or written form. Moose has a zero plural; that is, its plural is moose.

and another definition of “zero”:

Mathematics: a. The identity element for addition. b. A cardinal number indicating the absence of any or all units under consideration. c. An ordinal number indicating an initial point or origin. d. An argument at which the value of a function vanishes.

and one more:

Informal: Nothing; nil:

All of these definitions of “zero” have a certain appeal to me as possible descriptions of “God”. I suppose all we can do in our limited, human ways is attempt, or NOT attempt, to know, or NOT know, or to believe, or NOT believe in God.

God is pointed to, understood, described and worshipped in so many different ways depending upon one’s faith tradition or lack thereof, and one’s personality and imagination (or lack thereof). But what is ultimately important in my view is that we all have the freedom and the right to explore the subject of “God” in our own way, in our own time, or, if we choose, to NOT explore it. Ever.

Whether that means we completely reject any concept of God, or we buy into one of the Theistic religions of the world, we are free to espouse whatever ideas are right for us.  I am glad that someone out there thinks about “God” enough to say that God is one, and I am also glad that someone thinks about “God” passionately enough to reject that God is one and to assert that God is zero.