Category Archives: Worldview

The Space God

23 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in mythology, Uncategorized, Worldview

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Ancient gods were physical, and as such, constrained. If not exactly human, they did have boundaries to their existence. They operated in realms. Athena was the goddess of Athens. Delphi had an oracle, etc. Now over time as enterprising peoples tried to extend their influence, it made sense to have the dominion of their Gods extend as well, which meant they had to go up. Mount Olympus, said to be the home of the 12 Greek gods of the pantheon, was the highest peak in Greece at 9,500 ft. Likewise, Moses ascended Mount Sinai, at 7,500 ft. the highest peak in the area. There is a strong correlation between claims of hegemony and the height from which their gods operate. When a mountain was no longer tall enough it seems, the notion of heaven was assumed. This is coincidental with the notion of exclusivity of God.

Early on, the Hebrews did not deny the existence of other gods even as they admonished adherents to ‘not have any other gods’ before their own. Their thinking evolved from henotheism (preferring one god among several) to monotheism (there is only one true god). I call the latter the ‘space God’. This is not to make fun but rather to help you imagine where the ultimate physical god has to dwell. A constrained physical God in outer space won’t actually see very much. How can He actually know everything?

Physical gods are by definition bounded. To extend the dominon of a nation, therefore, the bounds of your God have to be extended. Thus, the association of the constrained God being integrated with the unbounded members of the Trinity, i.e. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, mitigates these limitations. This is a brilliant theology that introduces mysterious dimensions to inspire respect in the ‘otherness’ of God. Being watched over by a Jealous, Righteous and Just God necessarily introduces a sense of dread in the faithful. Dread validates the existence of an omniscient deity, which motivates the subordination of others, and so the myth feeds on itself. While cogent and historically persistent, this explanation does nothing to solve the problem of coexistence in an ever more heterogeneous population with the diversity of beliefs.

Monotheism is necessarily tied up with territorial favoritism. To Americans, to be Christian means being bounded by the domains of America. We have to start recognizing this as theocratic imperialism. It is the extension of the bounds of the Christian God to cover other lands at the expense of local gods. If this sounds obvious, stop to ask yourself if you can extract the God from the locale. I don’t mean the metaphysical God behind Jesus. Rather, can you remove notions of geography, whether it is ‘the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’, or ‘the land of the free’ from the evangelical message? I don’t think you can. In fact, built into ‘the Great Commission’, i.e. Jesus’ directive to ‘go into all the world and preach the gospel’, is necessarily a geographical expansionist mindset. It means ‘propagate Christ-god to all geographies’. Sounds like standard missionary work, doesn’t it? What is the problem, you ask? Why is this intolerant?

My point is not self-evident. Let me add some contrast to the belief in domain-exclusive gods (and I will try to be succinct for the sake of impact). Imagine, for a moment, that belief has everything to do with a locale but nothing to do with a specific god like Apollo, Osiris or Jesus having to necessarily be in that locale. Assume that all cultures have mythologies that communicate worldview via stories, which in turn exemplify desired behaviors. In this chain of belief, we have a cosmology, shared values and desired outcomes.

Now work backward from this: what are the scalable outcomes desired? The values required to support them? Based on this, create the supporting scared stories (or mythology). From this perspective, you see, you cannot take heroes or gods to be literally physical, but you can experience them in the imagination. They are a metaphor and as such, there is no competition across geographies implied. Proselytizing is not a zero-sum game in the naming of your God(s).

The competition will be in the domain of values and behaviors. If there are conflicts, the resolution is a dialog about the behaviors and values themselves and how they can be adjusted to allow for co-existence. It is hard to imagine a ‘religious’ value in this context that cannot be accommodated for the sake of loving your neighbor. Stories are then revised as a response to the accommodation, and cultures can move on from anachronistic stories that no longer serve the purpose. In other words, the outcome justifies the narrative, not the other way around. In this model, you may have very different gods ‘existing’ in the minds of the believers without having to be territorial about it. Because belief is what motivates people to act, there is a very real impact via the outcomes. 521 Main Street can believe in one God, while 523 believes in another god. Compatibility of values will make the coexistence of the gods voluntary. These are the gods of Main Street, not outer space.

— Roy Zuniga
Redmond, WA
July 2017

An Ontology

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in mythology, Uncategorized, Worldview

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Intro

Why talk about the ontology of art when such high-minded thoughts are a distraction to creating art work? The simple answer is that, with limited time left on earth, I want to create meaningful works. This begs the question of what makes great art. I’ve asserted elsewhere that it is the sense of presence in the works. Here I will expand on that, striving to understand what draws us into the works existentially.

Before I start, I should articulate a disclaimer about the scope of my assertions. Using a big word like ‘Ontology’ is risky because immediately your position is compared with the long history on the topic that includes the greatest minds since Socrates. What you’ll find here is a layman’s musings about being. Not only do I not have the training or time to be a scholar, I also don’t want to invest much life energy into exploring all the rabbit trails in the history of philosophy. I have too many works of art that are languishing unfinished as it is.

Moreover, it is my belief that an understanding of what causes a masterpiece to exist should be understandable by the common person. It should be more accessible, like a catechism or the stories of mythology, than like the polemics of a Princeton or Oxford.

Another reason to be humble about assertions of being is what I’ve called elsewhere ‘the n-level problem’. This was noted when I recounted my exit from Christianity. You see, even if we could assert that wounds St. Thomas touched were, in fact, those of a resurrected Christ, the very fact that Christ could be resurrected makes any other supernatural phenomena possible, such that Christ himself could have been impersonated, used or deceived by a higher power. Likewise, angelic beings might have indeed appeared to Mary and the Shepherds and said what is asserted they said. There is no way to guarantee, however, that those beings weren’t on some drunken hazing exercise to play games with humans, the way the Greek gods mucked around with them.

Once you assert higher beings who can read our thoughts, be teleported, raised from the dead, transmuted, etc. there’s no way to morally qualify them, or distinguish the good from the bad. The earth gods might have been played for fools by higher beings, just like they play with humans. Thus, if you assert the possibility of miracles and higher beings, you are also picking a side by your own faith alone. It is necessarily a personal choice, just like you chose which church to attend.

The same principle applies not only to assertions about god(s) but also to assertions about our own being. It is conceivable that genetic engineers can create a new form of life and introduce that into a laboratory experiment where existing forms of life encounter it. These creatures do not have the cognitive capacity to understand that the new creature was introduced by man. They might be so primitive as to not have senses, like eyes, for example, to detect the presence of observers. They have sensors of various types that enable them to survive. The natural, i.e. non-manmade creatures must figure out whether the new arrivals are friend or foe, etc. Let’s assume in the end they all get along, and the new creatures coexist with the old. That is, the natural creatures have no notion that the new fellas are synthetic, and the synthetic ones were engineered to not know or care about their origins.

If we cannot deny the possibility of such a hybrid experiment, who can categorically affirm that we ourselves are not the subjects of an analogous experiment by higher beings we can’t detect? We might lack the faculties to see higher beings that could, hypothetically, be engineering our own existence to watch and learn what happens.

Why is it, for example, that we are wired for story? All cultures use mythology, even in secular sectors, to drive behavior. The story ‘interface’ to our minds and psyches can be used periodically to ‘program’ entire populations and thus steer history, as evident in the construction of pyramids or the Third Reich. Stories to humans are like so much sugar water stimulating populations of slimy creatures to act.

So rather than explain Being as something integral, as an object that can be described, I’d rather describe a phenomenology of interactions between higher and lower beings to the extent they can be experienced. I look at the interaction between creator and created, and as we’ll see below, between artist and his work.

By phenomena I mean interactions like prayer. I’ve covered interaction with ‘the Universe’ previously with the notion of Uranthom, so I won’t revisit it now. Here, we’ll look at ourselves as the higher beings in relation to our creations, one of which is art. Certain art has ontological standing in relation to both the creator and the observers. While the principles may apply to other domains, in what follows, I’m thinking of paintings specifically, not sculpture or art installations.

The Existence of Art

What if Van Gogh had the idea for Starry Night but never executed on it, would the art exist? Of course not, because with art the idea is not complete until it is realized, and the realization necessarily evolves the idea further.

Neither is a work masterful until it has a presence when observed. By presence I mean the sense the viewer has, when in front of certain masterworks, that they are having an encounter with a personality or domain that is ‘other’ than the physical place they are standing in. For example, standing in front of a Rembrandt portrait at a museum, I had the distinct impression I was encountering a being from another place and time who ‘spoke’ to me in ways that cannot be fully articulated. It’s true that powerful 3D movie on a big screen may have an immersive effect of presence also, so I’m not disparaging other types of art. I’ll stick with the domain of paintings here.

What makes one work have that state or being that others do not have? To me, Van Gogh’s art is more powerful than Gauguin’s. Why? Gauguin is telling a story of a journey, provoking viewers with colorful figures that ask questions. These figures are like mythical characters, like those in Aesop’s fables. Van Gogh, on the other hand, just recognizes a certain existence in his subjects that comes from deep empathy. He lived with coal miners, he took care of the destitute, he was passionate about people. Gauguin cared mostly about himself, abandoning people – even his wife and kids – in the pursuit of art. The difference comes across. Gauguin is more calculated and cerebral it seems to me.

Van Gogh’s emotion came from a real connectedness, one that in some ways was fully consummated by him as he faced rejection. Like the isolated Michelangelo painting his marvelous nudes on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, art became an alternate reality Van Gogh could immerse himself in. His passion is evident in his brush work. It is not representation, but action, a visual assertion of life and existence. This comes from someone who had been fired as a minister of Jesus for being too close to the poor. Van Gogh lived among them, in a miner’s shack.

To paint like Van Gogh is to express the essentials of being. The vocabulary is vibrant and simple. We have to empathize at an existential level. We are not thinking about answering specific philosophical questions about, for example, where we come from or where we are going (as with Gauguin’s work). In Van Gogh’s work, we are present with no strings attached. There is an inevitability about viewing his works that is disarming, that draws you into his intensity.

Great art does that. It draws us into a presence that otherwise would not be experienced at that place. Put a cover over the art, and that presence is gone. This the alchemy of aesthetic moments, where everyday experience becomes extraordinary. To me, these works have a type of existence.

Art facilitates an experience that is not necessarily reproducible by making more of its kind but rather is always recognizable in the masterful instance. You cannot paint as Van Gogh did, with his colors, brush strokes, motives, etc. and necessarily have, at the end of the effort, a masterwork. In other words, the essence of great art is not in the materials or the technique, although these are necessary elements to the masterful whole. There also has to be an audience to experience the presence.

If an instance (even if the very first instance) of a painting in a style can be more masterful than others in that genre, it only follows that someone may later produce another piece of even greater quality. If by the application of fresh colors in a superlative execution an expert managed to surpass a Van Gogh with a work in his style, then the Van Gogh would be diminished regardless of being the inventor of the style. This is like the young Leonardo surpassing Verrocchio with the painting of an angel in a single collaborative work.

Of course, for collectors who know Van Gogh, a work by the master’s hand would have more value just because Van Gogh painted it. In other words, they are assigning value to authorship. This valuation criterion is external to the work and the pure artistic experience the viewer may have with it. I don’t count knowledge of authorship as a distinguishing characteristic of masterpieces. Artistic ‘parentage’, if we can call it that, is interesting information, but in a strict sense, not part of the being of the work as we’re calling it out here, i.e. that spark between the viewer and the work we call presence.

One could argue that Van Gogh enthusiasts can’t really separate the experience from the knowledge of the authorship. Let’s say, however, a previously unknown Van Gogh is found and is then copied with such superlative execution that the result is a better Van Gogh than what he himself originally painted. Maybe the original was a misfire, a good idea painted on a bad day for Van Gogh. And let’s say the impersonating artist actually pulls it off so well, that there is an experience of presence of the same quality as to be had with Van Gogh’s other works. If the experience is there, it must be recognized as such, apart from knowledge of the hand who made it.

Thus, because it is conceivable that someone could paint a more impactful and better-executed version of the masterpiece, we can assert that the essential idea of a great work, while not available to experience apart from an execution, nevertheless exists apart from a specific execution, as it did in the mind of Vincent, when he decided to paint it. Moreover, a work can exist in more than one execution, as in Velazquez’ multiple copies of the portrait of Don Luis de Gongora. When a concept instantiated multiple times in high quality, no one instance can be said to be less real than the other. In other words, the masterwork is co-dependent with at least one execution, and not restricted to a given instance.

Likewise, we don’t know who really initiated what is known as The Iliad and The Odyssey. These works were transmitted orally over many years, so that the version we know today may have been honed by many authors in the retelling. Nevertheless, the work has an existence beyond the vagaries of specific words that changed from one recounting to another.

Beyond the idea and its execution, it would all be for naught if there wasn’t an appreciative audience. If the rest of humanity disappeared and a tribe happens to eventually wander into the ruins of Amsterdam, and they valued a shapely designer garbage container more than Van Gogh paintings in the museum, would the paintings cease to be masterpieces? To the natives, the answer would seem obvious: the garbage container is much more useful. Experience is necessarily part of the presence of the work, so that the existence of a masterpiece cannot be independent, but is rather relative to its visibility in the culture. Adherents of ISIS had no problem destroying ancient Assyrian bulls and other artifacts because to them, they were no more valuable than a garbage can is to us. Yet somehow over the span of history, we must affirm that artifacts that were masterpieces to ancient cultures are worthy of protection.

So far, most of this seems obvious. There seems to be a synergy between the idea and the realization, each of which is not complete without the other. The idea necessarily came before the execution, was then modified by it, and can, in turn, inspire additional ideas for execution. If there is continuity of being between us and the rest of creation, is there some parallelism we can draw out of the ‘masterpiece’ ontology of art for the sake of understanding human experience. It seems to me that the three factors elucidated above, i.e. the idea, the execution and the acceptance, also apply to people.

Perhaps God cannot know us apart from the instances of people in the community. The idea, or better said, the ‘hunch’ of a person in the mind of God, is not the person. The struggle to produce a masterpiece person and community is evident in the ambitions of civilization and may be a categorical imperative. The driving force behind humanity’s continual self-realization towards excellence maps to the ‘mind of the artist’ so to speak, of him or herself being realized through excellence. Realizing this elevated intention without hindering others can be considered the moral life. We have to be careful because our the collective choices of intent determine the reality orchestrated.  Moreover, if the execution impacts the idea, then we are shaping the mind of God, such that it cannot exist apart from creation, nor can He/She.

— Roy Zuniga
Langley, WA
July 16, 2017

A Universal Process for a Personal Worldview

02 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by in art, mythology, Uncategorized, Worldview

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

My worldview guides me, as does yours. I believe in expressing intent as the basis for experience. This world view is also a process that can be applied by everyone. The key is to let ‘the Universe’ have its say in how our intent is fulfilled, considering the intent of others in our domain, and trusting that a suitable outcome will be orchestrated. This is fundamentally a positive outlook. It is also simple. The goal is to have humanity spend less time rationalizing manmade theological problems, and more time actually experiencing life. Nature is in danger from those who don’t know her, who don’t know how connected they really are to her.

I am approaching topics of ultimacy from the personal experience of what works. Praying to Uranthom works for me. Reflexive prayer, i.e. the notion that all spoken prayer for our own benefit, reinforces my intent. Understanding self is so important because being aligned with what makes you tick is the best possible experience for you as an existential ‘node’ in this collective and connected existence. If physical creatures can achieve a ‘heavenly’ experience on earth, why look forward to a non-corporeal existence? Consciousness without physicality is a hell. Whether our souls go to ‘Heaven’ or blend back into a mystical cosmic consciousness, I do not know. I am confident that the Universe that makes Uranthom possible will have a suitable resolution of my consciousness existence.

We get into trouble when we make ‘authoritative’ and exclusive assertions about God the way both Muslim and Christian theologians have over the ages. Conflict arises when the respective believers take the God-speculation literally and defend mutually exclusive absolutes. The line of thought that tries to define God is a dead end. We can be believers without absolutes. In this mode, all world views are necessarily individualistic, which is what I think happens anyway, even to those who believe in the ‘heaven first’ approach where guidance comes down from God.

If you find your mind caught in a web of theological conundrums, it may be helpful to trace back the chain of ideas that led to your beliefs. I did, and it led me to start fresh, from scratch. What kind of conundrums? For example, conflicting ideas about free will vs. predestination; obsession with a physical God who cannot be touched; someone we talk to but who never talks back.  Reconciling undeserved mishaps and tragedies with God’s good purpose for pious people. Talking about both love and eternal punishment in the same conversation. Advocating the never-ending exploitation of a finite earth. Advocating equality of genders while keeping the man as the ‘head.’ Preaching compassion and acceptance while attributing people’s sicknesses and disabilities to sin or laziness. Teaching forgiveness while always finding an enemy to fight. Asserting world peace is on the other side of a war. Thinking like this is making our planet sicker, and we need to change it.

Trace the origin any one of these ideas and you find they go far back, some thousands of years. The writers we read were influenced by ideas they might not properly credit. The Christian worldview goes back to the Greek philosophers, the Stoics, Christianity, kings since Charlemagne who believed in the divine right, the Protestant Reformers, and American conservatism. For example, we celebrate Easter because it recalls Christ’s death and resurrection. Why did He have to die? Shed blood was the atonement for sin. Why can blood atone? Because of pagan beliefs that God(s) demand it for transgression, and to earn favor. Why did Christ specifically have to die? Because he is God incarnate, and as such can atone all of humankind. Why does God have to be incarnate? Because of the theological tradition that requires God to be involved in human affairs, and the certainty that God(s) have to exist somewhere physically, like the Greek pantheon on Olympus. Change your worldview, and you change your destiny.

The tumor of over analyzed worldview tends to grow bigger as each generation tries to sort out one conundrum or the other, resulting in more spaghetti theology. Topics like ‘how do I stay out of hell?’ and other questions become irrelevant. That is all a huge distraction that myopic and weak-willed theologians debate ad-infinitum. Like addicts, they can no longer recognize the simple life and how good it can be. To those invested with years of study of treatises and intellectual traditions, real happiness and peace are a sign of apathy! They can not recognize a completed human being if she was sitting next to them in Sunday morning pew because such people are only expected in heaven. We could play their game and argue with every position that has been taken since Socrates. I do not have the life-energy to do that. Theology for its own sake only produces secure employment for professional mental wrestlers. We have to keep it simple. We can just snip that chain of beliefs at the source, let the weight of conundrums fall to the floor. Life goes on, and we can experiment with alternate foundational principles.

The fundamental worldview question we have to answer is ‘how should we live?’ I have arrived, for now, at a process build on existence as an experience of intent. Intent is simply an affirmation of the desired outcome. This is just a hunch, but so far, it is working for me, manifesting peace of mind and a good life. Note that intent is not the same as will. To will something implies a certain coercion, even if it is your own actions, which is a more aggressive stance that may in fact work against you.

Intent is a passive internal assertion that can be either be silent or can also be reinforced through vocalization, by saying it aloud (as in prayer). Lack of vocalization does not diminish the power of the intent. The ‘Universe’ realizes your intent based on an orchestration process that is opaque to us. I do not see the value of postulating what ‘God’ or ‘the Universe’ thinks and does since by definition it is beyond our grasp. This is why I invented the notion of Uranthom, which is my abstraction layer to what happens ‘out there’.

We express intent many times a day, thinking ‘yes I want a new shirt’, or ‘we pray for a new school for those missionaries, amen!’, or ‘I’d like to sleep in this morning’, or ‘I’d like to be paired with a woman (or man) like that’, or ‘my energy is better spent painting’, for example. We often try to execute on the intent, and this is where we should rather pause and listen to the Universe. Mindfulness is important before taking action, as is patience. I call it ‘manifesting’, which simply means that given some time for processing, those outcomes you intend will be orchestrated along with the intent of others for a more satisfactory resolution. It may not be exactly what you had in mind to start, but examining those desires in light of the outcomes, you will find a good state, one, which inevitably leads to new intent. Thus life evolves in a dialectic with Uranthom, the receptor of our expressions of intent.

If you have a communal intent, like ‘I wish to go to the ball game with my friends’, or ‘we need supporters to donate money to pay for fuel for the ship’, then expressing it helps align the intent of others. The expression can be a post on social media or a prayer in church. Because intent is bubbling up regardless of whether you are in a religious house or not, we do not distinguish between prayer and other expressions of intent. Intent that aligns with that of others is more likely to be realized. This is a driver for social awareness and political action, because, without the expression of an alignment on values, we are not likely to get our way.

Happiness comes from a realization that as you let go, and the manifestations are real, you stop being frustrated about what happens (or doesn’t happen), and start being present to recognize and enjoy goodness. This is parity for the assurance religious people feel when they believe ‘it’s all in God’s hands’. This mindset does not come overnight, especially if you are mired in the conundrums your ancestors fed you with our mother’s milk. Intent that aligns with that of others is more likely to be realized. As is intent that aligns with the progression of the Universe towards harmony, (this assertion, by the way, is an expression of my own intent). If we all share that intent, it will be. The simplicity of the model is the conscious expression (internal or external) of your intent, coupled with a letting go so ‘the Universe’ can manifest that intent.

This all sounds so simple and even mystical. What about all those conundrums that theologians and philosophers have spent lifetimes debating. Are we going to address those questions? I believe a lot of it gets sorted out on its own when you pivot on intent. For example, we don’t have to account for an all knowing God, since ‘God’ knows through our experience. I don’t believe in a God object, a person-like entity who somehow both sits on a throne and at the same time knows everything everywhere and has all power as Christian doctrine affirms. God may, in fact, have some of those attributes, but it is in a distributed fashion.

It is my hunch – and you don’t have to believe this, it’s just my way of dealing with categories of thought that need an accounting – that the ‘the Universe’ achieves omnipresence and omniscience through physical instances of people and other creatures who are embedded within it. ‘Creation’ is a mechanism for self-discovery. Good and evil are really just relative ideas based on the quality of the outcome of intent. Suffering is not a consequence of sin, but rather a consequence of intent and actions that don’t align with a viable existence. Mistaken experiments fail, people learn and change their intent. Look at the Chinese stance towards pollution. They have gone from not caring about it to engineering forest cities. We just have to learn from misguided policies, improve, and move onward towards a healthy expression of a society that doesn’t leave people behind.

Predestination is a moot point, since you are the agent of destiny, if you intend it, it was meant to be. As you realize it, it is also known. As the universe experiences and understands itself through each one of us, this universal consciousness grows. As we expand our experience, we expand the instantiation of knowledge of that area. And we move on. Now don’t ask me about the mechanics of all this. It’s just a myth that helps me explain things I don’t understand, as all good myths do. All this assumes positive intent and has yet to be proven. What will be the intent that wins out in an over-populated world?

Now don’t ask me about the mechanics of all this. It’s just a myth that helps me explain things I don’t understand, as all good myths do. All this assumes positive intent and has yet to be ultimately proven good by humanity. What intent will win out in an over-populated world?

Since you are so important in this whole evolutionary process, it is important to understand the criteria by which you affirm intent. This is the domain of values. Decisions are based on what you consider worthwhile. Some of these are instinctual and innate. We naturally want intimacy or a fun night out with the guys (or gals). We dote on our children by nature. Some behaviors are learned. We defer to elders, distrust strangers or hate to accept help from others. Some values are ideological, such as patriotism and loyalty to a class structure.

Good values come from a common humanity. Despite all the theological conundrums, good values undergird every major religion and provide the redemptive glue that gives them longevity. This is where ‘culture forming’ or ‘cultural engineering’ come into play. What you call it depends on your temperament, but the gist is the same: we understand the dynamics of how humans internalize worldviews, i.e. through prevalent myths, which program the depths of the mind that impact the process and scope of decision making. The arts define these myths, and thus through art, we can change the operating system of the psyche.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Community Mythology is a technique that uses the arts to ‘craft’ a world view into a culture. The idea is that we collectively agree on the set of behaviors, and their underlying values, our common humanity, as colored by the experience of mistaken communities of the past (such as the Nazi experiment). A group comes to mythic awareness by recognizing when cultural artifacts, such as movies, advertising, and political rhetoric are impacting their value system. Awareness is the pre-requisite to a conscious decision process, a kind of ‘pre-qualification’ of the values we let into our intentional decision making. Allowing certain values into our lives is itself an intent.

Make no mistake about it, this a powerful ideological cocktail. The power of the Universe is harnessed with intent, and intent shapes its destiny with humans. Mis-guided collective intent results in ‘evil’, and people consequently suffer. Properly guided intent results in goodness for all those involved. Based on values we deem to be sacred, we have to express our intent, and then, as the saying goes, let go ‘and let God’.

— Roy Zuniga
Langley, WA