The Characteristics of God

So now you have a workable definition of God. To put a bit of context on it, imagine yourself as a cell in a human body. You are a part of the body, no doubt, and even contribute to the nature of the body, but you are not the body. Nor do the characteristics you use to define yourself and your neighbouring cells be used to describe the whole body. In the same way, the characteristics of God are on a different scale entirely from human characteristics.

So what do you use to describe God, and to comprehend Him? You can't say things like "He is Kind", or "He is Powerful" or "He sees everything", because these descriptions bring Him down to the scale of humans, and we lose the God-level qualities we want to examine.

What people did, was to take these qualities and bring them down to a comprehensible level. The qualities themselves got anthromorphosized in the process, but that couldn't be helped. Let's take an example.

One of the characteristics of God is, "God Exists". By our Universal Set definition, this means that every entity we know also exists on one plane or the other. Now, to better describe this characteristic, you anthromorphosize it, give it a name: Vishnu. Whatever features Vishnu has are basically symbolic references to this characteristic of Existing.

Let's take one more: "Everything which is within God ends at some point in time." And give this one a name : Shiva. To make things easier to understand, Shiva just gets called 'The God of Destruction', and all the qualities of Ending get assigned to Him. Ever noticed how, when things end - lives, projects, dreams, places, ideas - there is a kind of cruel grace to the end? A
kind of - dare we say it - Dance to them? Notice how, the End of one thing contains within it the Seed of the birth of a new beginning? You might say, perhaps, that the Child of the End is the Beginning. Maybe that is why the Seed of the Beginning, within Shiva, is worshipped. The Beginning (another characteristic of God) can be personified in two ways. Let me take one of
them, and call it Ganesha. Always remember that a good beginning is one that remembers all the past (like an Elephant, let us say).
I hope this conveys some of the idea. Separating the symbolism from the ritual is a very complicated task, compounded by the fact that we are dealing with millenia of mutations of the philosophies. That was necessary, because everyone picks up what he can understand, and treats it as the entire body of religion.