My statements on God, omnipotent or otherwise, could only have been a Temptation to pointless but entertaining debate, since it is well known I do not subscribe to the Christian God concept in any way, shape, form or manner, but rather consider it absurdly simplistic.

To expect an ultimate and almighty God to be intimately and personally concerned with the tiny details of your own little life is an attempt to cram the entire infinite stack of universes into a very narrow space - simplifying infinite complexity by denying it entirely. Of course, the infinite complexity reserves the right to remind you of its presence any time it pleases, as with a lightning bolt.

This is not to say the near-side collective consciousness does not take an interest in your personal life, just as you take an interest in specific components of your body. You could interpret this collective as a "personal God", but not as an ultimate God, just a next step consciousness, itself an element of a collective on the infinitely long path to becoming God - a journey in which all entities are engaged, whether they like it not.

An important step for our mode of consciousness is called by Christians "The Fall from Grace" - ejection from the Garden of Eden - partaking of the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. "Behold, he has become as we" - God. In other words, achievement of a level of consciousness making you responsible for your own progress on the path to becoming God.

A central point of Christianity is to try to turn back and make God once again fully responsible under the banner of "Redemption". "He who believith in me shall have eternal life" - no other requirement. I'm sorry, there is no backsliding on the Path and no redemption save that you make yourself. Embrace Karma, for Karma will most certainly embrace you.

You needn't quote biblical passages as authority, for I hold that all books are written by men and women, edited and revised, always from an imperfect understanding and with an eye to the politics and economy of time and place. There is no book that is the Word of God, nor even a parody thereof. There is no evidence such a thing has ever existed or will ever exist.

In the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who accidently achieved enlightnment while taking a meditation break from writing yet another massive volume of theological argument, "All that I have written seems to me nothing but straw - compared with what I have seen and what has been revealed to me." No details, since he wrote no more.

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Nothing, to know itself, divided itself into Everything, that it might recombine in all the infinite ways.

Everything, recombined negative to positive, ying to yang, masculine to feminine, and all the other equal polarities, cancels to Nothing.

Don't worry about this happening any time soon for it is all simultaneous and coincidental - time and space are simply conceits of our imperfect mode of perception.

All that has ever been is forever.

There is Nothing.

No, I don't know if Tommy did write that, he said it. After enlightnment he never wrote again, at least not anything theological. The book he was writing at the time was abandoned where it sat. You can get all the cites you want by doing a Google search on "Thomas Aquinas" "nothing but straw".

Well, Pete Townshend got it elsewhere. Aleister Crowley expounded on this stuff and explained it 100 ways from Sunday back around 1900, but made no claim to being original. He extracted from ancient philosophies.

Nothing = Everything
Everything = Nothing
Zero = Infinity

In observable space, you may notice that life and consciousness continue to become more and more complex with the passage of time. From molecules to cells to fungus to fish with organized nervous systems, and beyond. Now increasingly complex social structures organized by high speed communications - human "cells" begin to congeal into a super-organism.

Is not what we experience here below a shadow of higher orders? "As above, so below". The tendency to organize into organisms of greater and greater complexity would prevail, until a level where all are One, and One is God, no?

Now, lets take a look at a practical item, "reincarnation". Of course, if you subscribe to "scientific reality", you simply discount any and all stories of people with seeming knowledge of past events, posessing characteristics of people who have died, or levels of knowledge they should not have at their age, but this stuff keeps bubbling up anyway.

So our conciousnesses are cells, so to speak, of a larger far more complex collective consciousness. As with the body, cells are continuously dying and being created anew. So the elements of a person disassociate at various levels upon death, and the material of consciousness (soul, if you would) returns to the collective where it contributes to the collective's advancement.

New cells are created, and they incorporate stuff that has returned, so collective experience is gradually incorporated into new cells. Now, perhaps sometimes the stuff used hasn't had time to properly mix, like cards returned to the deck for a new deal, but the shuffle isn't that good, so some sequences in the deck are the same as in the old deal. It's a new person, but the new person incorporates some direct awareness of one who has returned.

All this stuff has been worked on for thousands of years by many cultures, and there's a fair degree of consensus in esoteric texts worldwide. Most of it takes a lot of digging though, because it's been obscured by the curse of "Organized Religion". All of this stuff detracts from the power structure of "authority".

The enlightment of Saint Thomas certainly wsn't welcomed by the church, but he kept quiet so they let it ride. No organizational religious structure controls the "gateway to heaven", it's an entirely individual thing and they cannot control it (but they sure want you to think they can), and no book contains the whole truth and final word. We're just learning, bit by bit, and "authority" is trying to burn it as we do.

. . it follows that All is included within God. If you say God is not All, then you are placing limits on God.

Of course, in the Pagan viewpoint, placing limits on god is routine. You draw a line around the hunk of All you wish to deal with and give it a name and personality. Now you have a "god" (an aspect of nature or natural forces or human characteristics or whatever you want to deal with) defined in a way which allows you to describe it's relationship with other similarly defined entities and how they relate to humanity, all in human terms. Such deliberately circumscribed definitions do not, however, invalidate All, which they are defined parts of.

So are you limiting God in the Pagan manner, or is God limitless, thus All Encompasing?

In particular parasites are minimalist because they aren't complete. They cannot be regarded without their host. All other life is just as interdependent, though not so immediately so.

A human body is made up of a great many separate lifeforms, and some are pretty independent too. The whole cannot survive without all the parts. Where do you want to draw the line to individuate this? A white blood cell probably feels pretty individual. It's all in how you want to look at it.

No living being can survive without the others. Even simple single celled photosynthetic plants cannot survive alone, because they'd eventually drown in their own waste product, oxygen, and at points in the distant past came fairly close. Fortunately, some fungi like item developed into larger and more complex critters called "animals" to sop up some of that oxygen (yes, fungi are genetically considered animals).

So taking the world organism as a whole, since that's the smallest viable unit, it is growing in complexity. Increasing diversity is part of that, as is the development of it's leading edge cells, which we are pleased to presume are ourselves.