With God on Our Side

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

The above excerpt from Bob Dylan's "With God on Our Side" brings to light an interesting influence of religious belief. If you'll permit me, I am going to refer back to last weeks post, where I attempted to define "God". God, as I see it, refers to any supernatural being, typically with several human-like qualities (e.g. emotion, desire, will, etc.) This is the type of God to which I am categorically opposed. This is the God(s) of Institutionalized religion. And for some people, this is what they mean when they say that they are "spiritual". Now, as I said in my last post, there are a whole category of people who call themselves "spiritual" but whom I would call atheists. These people define "God" as the highest power known in the universe. The "highest" power in the universe, for atheists, is life.

In this way, and if you choose to use the term "God", though I do not, "God" is on OUR side. But it isn't on OUR side against other nations, people, or even creatures. Life is inclusive of all life on earth, and if you will call this "God", then the "will" of "God" is to procreate, and to avoid suffering whilst alive (in that order of importance). Suffering is in fact Nature's way of telling us that we are doing something we shouldn't do (usually). And so to be truly good citizens of our nation, planet, and even universe, we must do everything possible to not cause suffering to ourselves or other beings. Only in the pursuit of that goal, the alleviation of suffering, can we ever claim to have any sort of "God" on our side.

Defining "God"

Defining "God" is a challenging prospect -- nearly as difficult as defining "belief". Really, "God" is a blanket nominal that has come to represent many things. To the ancient Greeks, the Gods were just one of many supernatural beings, which often took forms quite similar to humans, though with extra powers. Today, in Western Society, there is a rising trend of being "spiritual" rather than "religious".
Though I can't be for certain, what I think these people are trying to say is, "I believe in a higher, supreme power, but not as it is described by any institutional religions." There are also those who claim that God is "Love" or any number of human emotions which represent "God". Are these things truly Gods? Is there a difference between Zeus, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Brahman, a "higher power", or a "natural energy"? Defining myself as an atheist or antithiest, I am defining myself as the opposite of a theist, but to understand what a theist is, one must understand what a God is.
The difference, as I see it, between a character like the Christian God and a label such as "love" or "natural energies", is that the former has his/it's own will, whereas the latter does not. A God, in the institutionalized sense of the word, has desire. There is something you must do for God. There are rules you must obey or even missions you must accomplish. A "natural energy" makes no such request of it's followers. It has no will or desire, it simply is. It is the woven fabric of the universe that is beyond our power to comprehend, or at least, that is what I think these "spiritual" people are describing to me.
So really, God for anybody is the highest possible power. Institutional Gods are generally modeled after human beings, complete with all of our flaws (wrath, vengeance, and in the case of Zeus even lust). They also tend to be warped by those who evangelize in their names. More "spiritual" Gods, on the other hand, are in my opinion simply an attempt to describe powers which we don't understand. These descriptions do not even necessarily make any assumptions about supernatural powers.
God is everything, the universe, all of it. And in this case, plain old secularists have taken the institutional word and warped to simply describe one's perception of the universe, be it optimistic or pessimistic.
These "Gods", I can deal with. But "anti-institutional-traditional-dieties" is a rather long nomer, and so I think I'll just stick with "atheist".