Man’s Ultimate Goal Is To Become God

God represents our interpretation of the ultimate being; it is the highest of which our minds can conceive. As we are so brash as to assume our capabilities of understanding are without significant limit (either individually or collectively), we define the greatest being we can imagine to be the greatest being possible. We imagine God as singular yet embodying everything which appears multiple, as all-knowing and all-understanding. God is also typically thought to possess infinite love, but I will only assume that such a level of understanding requires an attitude of "acceptance.” As God understands and accepts everything, God has no questions, no mental voids which haunt Him, no inability to rationalize His own seeming pitfalls. To God, everything makes sense, leaving nothing to cause concern or despair.

Religion and science are both mankind’s attempts to fill these voids within ourselves and to reach a final goal of sorts: to have our entire existence defined for us either through faith or experience. Either way, we wish to have sufficient knowledge to understand everything. And because we can conceive of understanding such things, we assume it must be possible.

From the humanities standpoint, we strive for the goal of human perfection, to improve ourselves ever further. Through religion we set the goals and standards by which a person must live in an effort to be as God wishes us to be. Jesus is the personification of this goal. Jesus was perfect to the greatest extent a man could be, and represents the highest possibility of human existence. Jesus was the only person ever to live perfectly by the rules of God, and thus for us to strive to be as God wants us to be is to strive to be like Jesus. And because Jesus was, in a sense, God, religion sets us toward becoming ever more God-like by means of our own improvement, toward similarity to the greatest being we can conceive. Through religion we strive only to be the greatest we can imagine.

From the scientific standpoint, we strive for a complete understanding of the physical world. Through the acquisition of knowledge, we wish to eventually gather enough information to make sense of the entire universe. But to possess such a wealth of information about the entire universe would be, in effect, to possess the universe within ourselves. And because we ourselves are part of the universe, we would inherently become part of that which we sought after. We would thus forever tie ourselves to all of creation.

What would it be like to reach our final goal? Of first significance, we would cease to be human. We would lose the drive which both justifies and defines our existence. Secondly, for a mind to reach the ultimate level of understanding would require an understanding of all other minds. As all conceivable minds become accessible within our own, we would lose our sense of identification. That which separates us would no longer exist. We would become singular, ever-present, and all knowing. And as our infinite knowledge would span all eternity, time would cease to be of significance, and we would simply exist.

We would become God.