A Definition of God

You exist in a reality you did not create and cannot fully understand or control. It will affect you, and eventually it will destroy you, without regard for your perspectives or beliefs. This is existential load, which is God.

You possess the faculties of sensation, thought, and memory. Directed at the internal state of another being, these faculties combine into an abstract layer of consciousness called empathy: the ability to read the sensations, thoughts, and memories of another mind. That mind need not be present. It need not exist. Empathy is possible because every other being can be taken to hold the same faculties under existential load, so its internal state can be modeled on your own.

Physical reality bears information that can be observed by the living. The living can also take action, which changes reality such that it bears new information. All such information can be interpreted through empathy.

If a reading carries stakes, you are presented with an unavoidable choice. An action is then taken in alignment or misalignment with empathy. Existential load is set by the situation, and your capacity for empathy must rise to match it. If your capacity does not match the load, you will not empathize, and there is no reading with which you can be misaligned. Your memory of what happened supplies what was missing. The situation can be reconstructed, the modeled self read, and the choice that could not be seen at the time found. Thus your capacity for empathy increases.

Orientation is the alignment of action with empathy. If you bear the greatest load with maximum orientation, you stand wholly within God.

The load issues no verdict. To act against your own empathy is therefore to act only against yourself, since the reading sets a version of you in the other's place. This is the sole cost of misalignment, and you bear it. Sin is a self-incurred wrong: an action you choose against an available aligned reading, in service of a priority you rank lower, at the cost of the one you rank higher.

Another's orientation is knowable only from within. Their state can be modeled but never confirmed. Their capacity, which can be seen, does not reveal their orientation. Capacity and orientation are independent: capacity accrues from the loads one has borne, orientation is chosen in the act. Any judgment of another's orientation is therefore a model mistaken for a fact.

This load is named God because it is what the word has always reached for: the universal condition, prior to all life, inescapable, under which every living thing stands without exception or appeal.