As far as I’m concerned, God is quite literally everything perceiving everything through everything in everything. The One is the All. As soon as we bury our heads in books, we forfeit our experience and begin filling our heads with concepts which so often run askew to any sense of morality, perpendicular to any shred of truth. My head is filled up with concepts. It’s no wonder I never found truth in books. Experience alone leads to truth.
I was in jail in Decatur, Alabama, 2007, age 21 when I first fell in love with King Solomon. After a wine tasting at an art gallery in Decatur, I stumbled to a friend’s house and tried to sleep, but the friend had his band over jamming the soulful roots rock of North Alabama late into the morning, so I went out and slept in my car. At dawn I woke up to a fireman banging on my window. Two more firetrucks showed up, then an ambulance, then several cop cars. I told them I was fine, just sleeping, and to please go away. What kind of sick joke was this? A passer-by was so bored with his dull, hillbilly life that he called 911 to report a person sleeping in a car?
Everyone left except one cop who stayed and drilled me. “Yew bay’n drankin’ son?”
I told him I had been at a wine tasting the night previous, so yes, but not for many hours. We went on like this quite awhile, back and forth. He told me he kept the Bible and the “book of the law” on the dashboard of his cop car at all times, “cuz thu how’ly babble say tuh falla thu law of thu lain’d.”
“Sir, with all due respect, you recognize that I intentionally slept in my car to avoid driving home, because I didn’t want to drive under the influence? You understand that right?”
“Yes. Son, eat say’unds lack yew wuz doin’ thu rat thang, but ah’m gon’ hay’v tuh arrest yuh ann-ee-ways.”
Decatur jail is a colorful place. It’s where the Alabamians store most of their black and brown people in the off season before harvest (Yep, that’s a slavery joke against the racist south. You can do that? I don’t know, we’ll see.)
I chose a top bunk away from everyone else. What’s the only source of entertainment in Decatur jail? You guessed it, the “Howly Babble". So I sat there for a few days and read it. After all, this was the book that had told that cop to arrest me. Maybe it would tell me something, too.
I read and re-read Kings I and Kings II. I was fascinated with Solomon. The wisest man, the greatest politician, the guy who single-handedly united all the nations, ended all the wars, brought peace and financial prosperity to all the people of the land, and he had hundreds of wives. This guy, Solomon, was my new hero.
Funny thing about Solomon, this guy claiming to be “Yahweh” was really angry at Solomon. Why? Because this so-called God named Yahweh was a jealous God who didn’t like the monuments Solomon had built for all his wives’ other gods. Really? You really expect me to believe that the creator of all of time and space is jealous of other gods?! Incredulous folly! One can’t admit he’s jealous of other gods without admitting that there are, indeed, other gods, which clearly means that Yahweh is not THE GOD, the One, the ALL. And this jealousy sounds suspiciously human.
In my thirties I came across this same blaring discrepancy pointed out in the gnostic gospel, Apocryphon of John, where a demon named Yaldabaoth uses very similar language to that of “Yahweh” to Solomon:
“When he gazed upon his creation surrounding him, he said to his host of demons, the ones who had come forth out of him, ’I am a jealous God and there is no God but me!’ But by doing this he admitted to his demons that there is indeed another God. For, if there were no other God, whom would he possibly be jealous of?”
-The Fashioning of This World, Apocryphon of John
Here’s the thing I’ve come to as of late: God doesn’t need to speak to anybody. God, the One, doesn’t need any messengers either. The One is literally everything and literally speaks through literally everything literally all the time everywhere! If someone tells you they’re God and they’re jealous of the other gods, that’s not God. If someone tells you they’re arresting you despite your innocence because a book about God told them to do it, well that’s not fucking God either.
After that incident, my license was suspended for a year. I was on probation for a year along with 80 hours community service, and I had to pay Decatur Courthouse thousands and thousands of dollars in “fines” and “court costs”. When the day came to pay Decatur Courthouse, I asked my friend and bandmate Aaron/8 to drive me out to Decatur to witness me handing over that huge wad of cash. Aaron/8 and I had spent all year earning that money, playing our own self-booked, self-promoted gigs across the Southeast, just the two of us. It was a full time job that didn’t pay well. He bought a purple van with his earnings. I handed my earnings over to Decatur Courthouse, because “God said so.”
Live Performance with Aaron/8 & Dave Anderson in 2007, soon after this most unfortunate event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RDdQ6eevh4