The most powerful thing in the world, everyone feels in a fashion is the world itself. And everyone feels that the world itself has something to do with oneself. And what one does about the feeling that the world has something to do with oneself, is one’s religion in action.

This means that everybody has religion; for everybody has some attitude to what he sees as the mightiest thing there is. The fact that the religion may be incomplete or wrong, doesn’t mean there is no religion.

For everyone, the world is something making for good and making for bad; for pleasure and pain; for hope and fear. So much as we see the most powerful thing in the world making for good, for hope, we see it as beneficent, beautiful, kind, and so on: we love it. So much as we see the most powerful thing making for bad or fear, we see it as maleficent, ugly, cruel; and every notion of God has had some feeling about God’s goodness and God’s terror.

Religions may be divided as those worshipping less than the world, the world itself, and “more than the world.” When a people or a person has worshipped less than the world, it has been because something less than the world has been taken to be the biggest thing in it; when something equal to the world has been worshipped, it has been because this world—quite rightly—was taken as equivalent to the most powerful thing in it; and when something “more than the world” has been worshipped—a God which created the world but is away from it, too—it has still been because this somewhat apart God has been seen as the most powerful thing “in the world.”

I have said before that religion is humor. The mind of every person has in it the immeasurable, the inconceivable, the completely-disorderly-infinite, the multifarious unthinkable. When this existent, infinite concord and discord is represented in all its puzzlingness by something of a specific kind—a wafer, a cross, a cloth, a book, a song—there is humor in it; for the unsymmetrical vast has been given order, while a feeling of the unsymmetrical vast, or cosmically ugly, remains.

It is well that the immeasurable in its terror and puzzlingness be made intimate. For the immeasurable is the intimate, too. Without the intimate, definite, homely, the inconceivable and endless and unthinkable could not exist. All religion is, therefore, a kind of poetic humor and humorous poetry. We decide that the boundless, the unformed, the inconceivably formed, is before us in a room, in a house, in a church, on the street.

The God of the Bible is a humorous and grand creation and existence. He is in an ark, and he has made all the stars. He is infinitely powerful, content; but he smites down a single person who says a bad thing of him. He creates the evil doer, knows that he will do evil, warns him that he will do evil, and punishes him when he does it.

There should be no hesitation to call the world meaningless or ridiculous or empty. For it presents such a discord, such a seeming lack of purpose, such indecision, confusion, that scolding it, laughing at it, is in order. “What’s it all for?” one can ask, and say, “There doesn’t seem to be any reason.” But the meaningless has meaning found in it. (A person may not know why he is taking a walk; yet he does know why he is putting on his coat, since it is cold outside.) Meaning is found in the world, which can still be seen as meaningless. The immeasurable, vast world, seemingly having no purpose, can have a child tremendously excited about the loss of a doll. And the seeing of the child’s intense disturbance about the loss of a doll, against the background of the mighty endless and the gigantic boundless, is humorous. And to see that mighty endless personified, given feelings, with the mighty endless still present, is also humor, and poetic sentiment.

We can take anything to be God. Anything can say that the whole world went to make it, and that therefore the cause of the world is to be found in it; for purpose is also cause. We all see ourselves as God in some way. The trouble is that our notion of our imperfections, our meannesses, our ridiculous appearances, our weaknesses, our trivialities, is not allied, made one, with our notion of ourselves as God. This is improper; and interferes with the correct use of ourselves as God.

For God is a humorous idea, and every person taking himself to be God should have much humor. Large humor comes from much knowledge. Much knowledge comes from wanting to know much besides oneself. So because God has to be humorous, he must know more than himself in the narrow sense, and so be more than himself. However, this desire to be more than oneself cannot be reconciled with the desire to have oneself purely, alone; and so people who declare themselves God, think themselves God (there have been more such than is realized), go away from the true notion of God as perfection in triviality, slatternliness in infinity, mishmash in space, and messiness in the eternal. To be God, one must welcome the imperfect devotedly, and the scrambled, the helter-skelter, with reverence. One must be a very homely, average, weak, invalid, not-God, to be God. For God, if he is not God, isn’t everything; and God has to be everything. To be everything, he has to be everything which isn’t God. And any person who sees this, can set himself up as God, with the best matter-of-factness, everyday debonairness, and charming absence of abstract magnificence. God is really a democratic idea; and God is multiple in ways not yet blithely, soberly realized. A humorous, poetic, important, and religious question is, How can we have God in us without being what is in us? If one is solemn here, the whole point is gone.

For a person to be oneself, accepting deeply and casually what isn’t oneself, is to be all the God there is. God has to be weak, human, animal, wretched, because he has to be anything. We are, because we have to be anything. God has to be anything. Therefore, if we welcome our being anything, we’re acting pretty divinely. It should do.