21 June

“Do you believe in God?” How did religion end up being thought of as ‘believing in’ things? To have ‘faith’ that what you ‘believe in’ is real? Like some sort of guessing competition. The atheists that oppose religion share exactly the same framework, they just ‘believe in’ different things. What if God and religion weren’t about belief in things at all? What if the patterns we see in society and in nature *are* God? My fascination with patterns - we, and plants and animals and objects etc. - are all directly involved in making the patterns that happen, but no individual or group ‘designs’ them. The pattern happens, but nobody did it. (Sound like God?) Whether it’s traffic patterns or Kiwi fruit or grocery statistics, patterns show us every day that our actions are shaped by something other, which we in turn shape back. We do them, but they do us, at the same time. Patterns are the outcome of each person or thing being implicated in all other things - it’s that implication which creates the pattern. Again, just how God is often described - as being in all things.