Against Monotheism

I recently found this lost in my emails. 

I wrote it in 2009, during my last semester at divinity school, about a year before I realized I was a nonbeliever.

They tell me that God is One.  But I keep wondering, whether,

God being One,

He might also be many other numbers.

If "this and this are the words of the living Torah," then the one God is also Two.

If God is the dilemma and the resolution, then the two God is also Three.

And so on, right?

If God is One with those who suffer, then isn't God also Six Million?  Twelve Million?

Isn't God 12 children every minute?

If God rests where "two gather in His name" at the same time as "three gather in His name" somewhere else, while I "sit alone in meditative stillness," and you and a few others sit at "the table before God," then God is any number between One and I'm-not-sure.

And they tell me that God is One, but not in the same way that one is one.  Not the same way that I am one, or that the world is one.  The One that stands above all numbers.  Is that number still really one?  Can a number lie on and above the number line?  Perhaps that number is actually None, or just some number we haven't invented yet.

They tell me that God is One.  But I keep wondering, who,

who made One so goddamn important?  Since when was there ever really

One Truth?  Since when did all of this make sense and add up to One?

I've seen fragments, I've seen composites, but I've never seen or thought an Absolute Whole.

Is this ridiculous?  I'm not saying that there's no unity; I'm just saying that not everything fits into a perfect unity. 

Yes- we live in one "world.'

Yes- we are all interconnected, interdependent, interpenetrating.

Yes- we may indeed all have one source.

But that is different than "God is One." 

God is One, to me, means one purpose.  God is One, to me, means one truth.

God is One, to me, means one that is the best, over all others which are less-than.

God is One means my One, and perhaps your One but an indirect way, and his and her One is just way off.

God is One, to me, means the subsuming of particulars in the One, a higher unity

that cancels far more regularly than it keeps.

I'm just trying to say that Oneness is just our trip, our obsession.  The world might have other plans.