An atheist named himself God

God Quest Bennett was born 30 years ago. His parents named him Jordan Micah Bennett, and that was the name the software engineer/artificial intelligence researcher had used legally up to 2020, the year he changed his name. He kept his father’s surname and added his mother’s maiden name for his middle name.

The name change had absolutely nothing to do with COVID-19, the pandemic that has been turning the world upside down since then, despite the widespread belief that there is an ever-present, omnificent, omniscient God who created the universe, sits on high, and rules jealously. He had been mulling the idea since 2015 and, in 2016, he published a paper in which he replaced “the old God concept, to a modern one: anything of human level intelligence or greater”.

It had occurred to him after much thought to redefine the “archaic” concept of god, which, to him “is any non-omniscient thing that has human intelligence and more”. “In other words, we are all gods. Once we have human intelligence or more, we are all gods,” he declared. He was not satisfied with only being god, he wanted to put it down on paper to inspire people not to believe that there is just one almighty godhead.

Citing the late Kevin Smith’s bloody church drama that unfolded in Montego Bay last October, Bennett told Family and Religion that, if people did not believe in this one godhead, it would not have happened. They would not regard Smith as this biblical and all-powerful god. “If more people saw themselves as powerful thinkers, powerful gods, I doubt that case would have made the news,” he surmised.

He said, when he went to have his name changed, the process “was quite smooth, no pushback, no drawback”. One employee, however, remarked that it was the first time she had seen god since she had been working there. “But we have been seeing god all along within ourselves,” he told Family and Religion, as per his definition. But, did his father agree?

OPPOSITION

“My father is quite militant so he was opposed to it … he has come to accept it. It’s in the past now.” And, “My mother was worried at first,” he shared. But, it was a brief period of worry, “couple of days”, he said. He did not get any extreme reaction from friends and associates, and the general public did not take him on. Yet, he had some encounters with people who said he was flying into the face of God, but, “it is normally from people who do not know I don’t subscribe to the worldview concept of God”, he said.

God Bennett then, is an atheist, a man who does not believe in the existence of that one almighty entity whom we must praise, worship and obey. He does not subscribe to any religion or denomination, as religion is not even a benevolent movement, although some do charitable things. “But such churches can be replaced with much more useful paradigms,” he told Family and Religion.

He said, in essence, where there is religion, there is much sadness, poverty, lack of education, and underdevelopment. He drew on the example of Jamaica with its high number of churches coexisting with its high level of crime. “Generally, the trend indicates that the more religiosity there is, the more sadness there is”, and that is why he is redefining the concept of God.

Thus, he is embracing and emanating ‘non-believism’, a term he said he has coined. He believes in nothing from a religious perspective, as belief is to accept something without any supporting evidence. Therefore, religion has no evidence of the existence of such an almighty godhead, religion is faith-based, guesswork, and that is not science.

Science has its foundation in evidence. It can be questioned and tested. It holds true regardless of what you believe in, Bennett said, because it is evidential. It cannot be tested, thus there is no scientific evidence that the Christian God and other almighty gods exist. So, there is no such thing as salvation. “Today, there is no scientific evidence of any Bible, etc, gods, creators of our universe, but normal humans are actual candidates describable as gods,” he postulated.

So, who is God Bennett in the scheme of things? He said he is just another “unfolding” human being who has come out of the concept of evolution which can be scientifically explained. In essence, we are all evolving gods, not beings who were created by only one godhead. And what does he intend to accomplish by the change of name? He wants to provoke thought and inspire people to be deep thinkers.

“The single message I am aiming to achieve is that humans are gods and we are the only ones responsible for solving our own problems,” he claimed, effectively throwing the messianic mentality of religion, as we know it, back into the unfolding universe. His existence and hereafter are not in the hands of any messiah who has come or is yet to come.