I was thinking about how it became common for people in the West to think that the more monotheism a religion has, the more intellectually superior it is, but my opinion is that it’s exactly the opposite, that monotheism is the first stupid idea an undeveloped mind of a fanatic will come up with, and rather than being all-encompassing and all-inclusive, it usually ends up being extremely reductionist and exclusive, quite hostile to any form of difference in opinion or understanding.

Trinity can be a sophisticated theistic way of illustrating God’s connection with the world and his interaction with human spirit. Any other stance will quickly degenerate into deism, removing God from any possibility of contact with the world other than the point of creation.

However, Hinduism shows the flexibility that is possible when someone doesn’t care about whether something is monotheistic or not, but whether it is a good explanation of reality or not. In Hinduism, you can have brahman, the transcendental Absolute, manifesting as both the Gods and the world, the Gods can manifest different aspects of brahman, and God-states are described as male-female couples, like Radha-Krishna or Shiva-Shakti, where male and female versions of the same spiritual state are described as behaviorally completely different. Also, God can choose to incarnate as his own worshipper in order to feel the taste of his own being from another perspective. There is also a concept of God incarnating together with his companions, basically Purusha-level spiritual beings who all participate in the same level of consciousness, in order to be able to manifest this level of consciousness on the physical plane.

All the while, the Hindus will have no problem with the statement that all Gods are brahman, or that an entire plane of existence is Krishna, or that God can simultaneously be personal, impersonal, incarnated, incarnated as a group of people simultaneously, incarnated in different aspects having a relationship, being pure knowledge and being a source of a special kind of ignorance (yogamaya).

Basically, that’s what you get when sophisticated minds explore complex ideas. They end up with stuff that actually makes you think, not just Allahu akbar like a zombie.

I often saw Muslims, who are silly enough to think that whoever has more monotheism wins, claiming that Christian belief in trinity is some kind of a polytheism.

It’s not, of course, it’s just one of the first real example of modern thinking in history, because today it isn’t uncommon to say that the same thing can be both wave and particle, or that a cat can be 50% alive. Apparently, a Muslim god can do everything except:

• be incarnated
• be incarnated while remaining in his original state
• be incarnated while remaining in his original state, and act as a spiritually uplifting and comforting force at the same time

Apparently, the only thing their God is capable of is sulking and killing, but that’s fine as long as he isn’t complex enough as to confuse his believers regarding his quantity.

After all, water is complex enough that it can be ice, water and steam in the same picture, but somehow such triune complexity is beyond Allah the akbar.

One of the main holes that the monotheistic religions dig for themselves consists of claims of their God’s greatness and power – in fact, he’s not merely powerful, he’s omnipotent. He can do anything that isn’t logically contradictory. And he’s so incredibly good, that when he gives a commandment, it’s the best possible thing and a cornerstone of any positive ethics.

And then someone says, OK, if this God is omnipotent, why is there evil in the world? The first thing an omnipotent good God would do is eradicate evil.

“Err… well, evil is the result of free will. You can’t have free beings if they are unable to use their freedom to choose to be evil and to do evil things. But God will eventually put things right when it all ends.”

Excuse me, but not all evil is due to human actions, evil or otherwise. The main causes of human suffering are inherent to the world God created – sickness, disease, natural disasters. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, plague, malaria, cholera, locusts – none of it has anything to do with human volition, so the argument stands.

In a desire to praise their God, they inadvertently do him a great disservice by blaming him for most of the evil in the world, and this isn’t any kind of rhetorical trickery that can be easily dismissed with some clever argument. It’s a serious problem for monotheism. What I will do now, is tell you how I would answer this conundrum.

I see God as both one of the forces that manifest their influence in this world, and an alternative to this world. God is not the supreme power in this world; in fact, this place seems to be designed as an alternative to God, a place where God’s influence is diminished to the point where it becomes possible to doubt his very existence. God occasionally manifests in this world as “light that is not overcome by darkness”, as this or that shining beacon of truth and light, but not as a sovereign ruler. In fact, I see no reason to believe that this world was at all created by God, or even that God had a hand in its making. I see it more like this: God is the highest reality, but this place here is not. In fact, it is probably the lowest illusion. It’s everything that is not God. It is limitation, ignorance, suffering and evil. It is the world of pain, death and ignorance, and is exactly opposite to the light and beauty that I know as God. I see God as a promise of what is possible if we remain faithful to beauty, knowledge, reality and truth, if we resist all temptations and cowardice and keep our faith until the end. I don’t see God as a white ape in the sky who will solve all my problems or else I’ll sulk and not believe in him. I don’t see God as a magician who will wave his hand and make all the difficulties disappear from the path of those who believe in him. I see him both as a way and as the goal, as truth which you need to choose, reality which you need to live, knowledge you need to gain, and eternity that will be yours if your choices in life are on the God-vector.

God is not someone who’s so powerful that he can make all the horrors of this world go away. God is someone who is the eternal beauty and wonder beyond this world, whom none of the horrors of this world can touch, and who is an alternative to be chosen and a way to be lived.

God is limited. He is limited by his nature and by his word. He is not in both good and evil; no, evil is something that goes beyond the limits of God, it leaves God to depart into the sphere of nothingness, the great void beyond all that is real, beautiful, true and worthy. And if God allowed there to be a place where the laws would be such that He is not the supreme power, then such place can indeed be, but don’t blame God if this place is evil, and don’t blame God for not being here, because that is by design, and evil is what you get if you remove God from your life.

One might ask what I find objectionable in Christianity. It’s an easy question to answer. What I find objectionable is that they canonize people like Theresa of Calcutta, that they sanctify groveling before God, that they sanctify humility and vilify power. Essentially, Jesus is what Hinduism and Buddhism would aspire to produce as the end-result of their teachings, but Christianity would be aghast at the very thought, because He is God, and they are worms. That’s what I find objectionable about Christianity, that it is shocked and aghast at all the things that I find to be the greatest parts of my personal spiritual practice.

Sure, there are versions of Hinduism, like the Gaudiya Vaishnavas, who are basically the Hindu version of Islam, who would find nothing objectionable about the Abrahamic approach to God, but that’s because they took their theology from Islam and their theological understanding of Krishna is indistinguishable from the Islamic understanding of Allah, if you ignore their extensive use of visual aids like statues and images. Their concept is that God is one, he is a person who lives in some very physical description of heaven surrounded by his worshipers, he’s the ultimate lawmaker and judge and if someone has a problem with that, there’s reincarnation in lower forms, instead of hell, but the basic principles are all similar. That is so because their cult was born under Islamic rule, and as someone who has Bosnia in his neighborhood I know what a country looks like after centuries of Islamic rule.

Their worst crime, in my mind, is that they stole Krishna, and turned him into something contemptible, into a faggot deity with the vile character of Allah.

Krishna is an example used by Vyasa, probably the smartest man of all times, in order to carve pathways into a human mind that will make it possible to understand God – what God is like, what would God do, what would God say, how would God react to something, how would certain people react to Him. It’s a masterpiece of the highest order, there are very few things like it in the history of literature. Tolkien, for instance, used similar literary means to illustrate his views on spirituality, in a very subtle but profound way. Krishna is something of a blend between Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas and those two silly Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, who are always planning some fuckery and getting themselves into trouble. He’s the super-sage who impromptu pulls Bhagavad-gita out of his sleeve just because his friend needed some advice on the battlefield. He’s the exiled heir to the throne who was forced to live with foster parents in some village while his parents were imprisoned in a dungeon by his demon uncle; growing up, he killed the bastard and restored order. He’s the super-warrior who kicked so much ass he became a legend, and was best friends with another super ass-kicker, Arjuna, and they both combine incredible power with incredible poise and grace; they are relaxed and funny yet deep, gentle yet horribly powerful, illustrating both similarities and differences between the aspects of Vishnu and Shiva, allowing each other the opportunity to show a subtle relationship between two major Gods that are not revealed in interactions with mere humans. What you can see, for instance, is God’s distress and anguish when his friend vows to do something that is almost certain to get him killed, and he walks in circles, distressed, talking to himself about how he, too, will then choose to die because a third of his being is in Arjuna and what draw is there in this world without him? You have Arjuna, who had to make a choice between Krishna (who vowed not to fight) and his vast army, to fight alongside him in a war, and he immediately chose Krishna. When Krishna later asked what the hell that was about, Arjuna smiled and answered that it’s a great opportunity for him to catch up to Krishna’s high score because he won’t be able to do anything but watch him kick an enormous amount of ass from the best seat in town.

God is funny. There’s an explosive, bright spark of humor and joy in His smile that can light up the whole world, that can dry all tears, because it shows that light, consciousness, bliss, reality that is beyond this videogame of an illusion that we take so seriously here. It is true that heaven is full of souls who worship God, but that’s not because he’s a narcissistic asshole who wouldn’t have it any other way, it’s because he’s so incredibly fucking cool there’s nothing better in the whole world than just looking at him do things his way, showing what God is all about, what absolute reality is all about, what it looks like, what it feels like, and when you look at it, you don’t just look at it, because a light in your own being reacts to him and grows brighter, and as you glow worshiping Him His light grows within you and at one point you lose the difference, you no longer see it as you worshiping His light and beauty and love and power and reality and greatness, because as you worship the highest reality you become realized, as in, turned into that which is real. You become enlightened, as in, filled with light, becoming of light. You understand that that brahman, that factor of all that is cool and great about the Gods, that brahman am I, I am That, and that is the moment where I both fall to my knees before God and I am God, because in God everything is first-person, everything is I, and everything is now, it is the eternity beyond space and time and limitation of any kind.

That’s what I find objectionable in Christianity, that it finds enlightenment to be something sinful.