This thread is an attempt to explain what convinced me that my independent faith, Exaltism, is reality. This might get long...
Exaltism as a word simply means an adherence to raise the status of things. Based on its pure etymology there shouldn't be much more to that. There is, however. We need to have serious dialogues on how to do exactly do that. In many ways Exaltism works perfect to describe how I see things, because nature is going through a transition right now and exalting itself, and we as humans are the primary driving force of that exaltation.
Yes, I know that many species are dying left and right because of our dominance. Many species would die regardless of our existence. It's part of the animal kingdom. Some species go extinct, others flourish and some change to adapt to new environments.
So where does that leave God? Humans are the wise man; we have found ways to create our own divinity. Some of God's characteristics is imbued in nature, such as the totality and potency of things, whereas other characteristics only exist in humans, such as our great way of developing utilities such as forks or knifes and our ability to unify with unlike people.
When I realized this I knew that part of my theology exists in the realm of pantheism, and the other? I don't know. There isn't a word to describe humankind's effects to become more divine. Or so I thought. The other half of divinity that we are creating is termed syntheism, which etymology literally means "creating God."
So, I am both a pantheist, or technically, panendeist if you want to get nitpicky, and syntheist. Pure syntheism appears to be a dangerous concept, however. This belief that humans will create a monotheistic God that will exist outside all spacetime and change our reality permanently sounds like the beginning of a dystopian sci-fi novel. The syntheists call this creation the Syntheos, or literally "the created God."
I don't see divinity like that at all! Nature is becoming God, all of it, in an ever-increasing pantheist-like fashion. And I call this God the Synverse. Literally meaning, "creating spacetime." Meaning, humans have a duty to keep existing and expanding their extropy - or order- until The Omniverse, which was once completely ruled over by almost infinite entropy, will be a balanced between entropy, or chaos, extropy, or order and the Verse, or spacetime and matter.
If I had to gauge how this is happening, where 0 is No Synverse, and 10 is complete Synverse, I would say before humans existed it was 0, after humans existed it was a 1, and after the creation of the global Internet it became a 2. A complete Synverse will take much time to develop, and becoming a ten on the Synverse scale means a lot of things, such as, living in a post-moral, post-theistic transtheistic society. This will take a long time and many more centuries to implement.
But what convinced me of something like this? Nobody told me to believe in a Synverse. I had to come up with this idea of God myself. I will tell you where this all began. I saw how humans were changing their environment, not only to necessitate the allocation of goods and services to people quicker, but also to allow humans to create better and faster than they ever had imagined. The typewriter was developed not too long ago, and now we have essentially developed something much more remarkably more efficient than a standard typewriter.
My theological worldview has always been in development since I was a young kid, and realizing what humans are capable of. Think about it, you can be a Christian and read the Bible, or you can be an Exaltist and pick up wisdom from any book you choose to learn from. What isn't important is what book you read, really, but what you learn from that book. So, I've developed a very keen sense early on with our development of a more divine God. Or God itself.
I didn't believe in Exaltism, or the Synverse, or pantheism or syntheism as a kid, I had to grow and develop these concepts myself, because I'm reaching a point in my theological development where nobody has seriously considered these viewpoints, except for futurists like Ray Kurzweil.
What ultimately convinced me of these beliefs was how wide my affect has become and how I look at "big picture" kind of concepts. My affect has always been wide and because of this I've adopted theologies that themselves express themselves with their own affect. I didn't believe in pantheism until I found a word that described the pantheist God, The Omniverse, and I didn't believe in the trinity of such until much more recently, when I adopted the idea that Entropy and Extropy themselves are part of the eternal order of things.
When I was a kid I always had these big concept ideas. To deify time, matter, and forces like gravity or electromagnetism but it wasn't until recently that I haven't really changed my opinion about this. All actions are in some way a force of Entropy and Extropy, and all Verses come from The Omniverse. Those beliefs alone are enough for me to deify those concepts. But it's more than that.
The Synverse is both an action and a being. It exists to create things. Humans are forever in the creation of their own Gods, with religions they invent, scriptures they write and the development of practices and rituals to perform. Who isn't to say in some way those Gods don't exist? Physically, no, they don't, and even though sometimes I want to I cannot and will not ever convert to Christianity, but in the minds and spirits of the believers they DO exist. They exalt something in specific, because while it's a nice idea to read every book you can, it's more important what books you actually read and read with proper context. That's why there's so many study Bibles out there. They give you the reference to understand even better.
So, I believe the local multiverse created our Universe. The Universe ultimately created us for our being to create action. And that action is extropy and is ultimately creating the being of the Synverse.
Do you now understand where I'm coming from?
As helpful it could be one day to convert to another religion, or to simply say "I'm Omnist and can go to any congregation", my own faith will always mean more to me than any other religion can put their own faith in. I have even found Christian denominations that I like but I turn my head against them, because my transtheistic pantheist concept will always mean more to me than simply saying, "Jesus died on a cross for you." My simple belief that we are creating God itself, while being remarkably simple and easy to understand, is so foreign to most people and theologies that I might be the only one on this forum that is truly espousing that kind of view.
So now I bring it back to you. What convinced you of your faith? The long answer for myself is the one I just described. The short answer however would be my affect and intuitive thinking. Many religions invent Gods but everything I've described, like The Omniverse, Entropy and Extropy are known concepts to actually exist in reality, and these things can and will be measured someday.
So, let's hear your side of this! Don't be shy.
