Marcus Garvey on God

God

There is a God and we believe in Him. He is not a person nor a physical being. He is spirit and He is universal intelligence. Never deny that there is a God. God being universal intelligence created the universe out of that intelligence. It is intelligence that creates. Man is a part of the creation of universal intelligence and man was created in the image and likeness of God only by his intelligence. It is the intelligence of man that is like God, but man's intelligence is only a unitary particle of God's universal intelligence.

God out of His universal intelligence made matter and made mind. That matter is made by God and man is matter as well as mind; then man must be in the image of God, because nothing could exist without God. As God made the universe out of His universal knowledge or intelligence so man in his unitary knowledge or intelligence can make a typewriter, an automobile or a chair, but cannot make the universe because his unitary intelligence is not as much or as great as universal intelligence. All the unitary intelligence of the universe goes to make God who is the embodiment of all intelligence, so no man can be as great as God because he is only a unit of God and God is the whole.

No man therefore can measure God nor ask God questions because he is not as intelligent as God and therefore cannot understand God. It is presumptuous therefore, when man questions God from his limited unitary intelligence.

Man never dies. Nothing dies. Man is made of body and spirit. The spirit is God. It is intelligence. The body of man is matter. It changes from living matter in the man to other matter in the soil. It is always the same matter. It doesn't die in the sense of how we understand death. It changes. When man sleeps and passes away in the flesh he goes to earth that lives on, out of which other men and things are formed. All matter is related so man is related to earth and earth related to man. We eat ourselves over and over again. When we eat the apple, the banana, the fig, the cherry, the grape, when we drink the water, we are eating and drinking ourselves over and over again, so nothing is lost and nothing dies, so do not be afraid of death, because what you call death is only change and you are still in the universe either in the spirit of God to whom your spirit goes after the change or as matter which goes on forever.

You are related to the flower, to the beautiful rose, to the trees, to the fish and to other animals just as you are related to God.

All of you sprung from God who is universal intelligence. Do not be more cowardly than the rose, the apple, the coconut, the sheep, the fish or the cow to do that which all must, and which we call death, to die. If you are going to weep to die then the rose should weep to die. If you weep you are a coward. Die like a man because you are not lost, you are still there. You only weep because you are a glutton, because you think you will not get any more to eat and drink and any more happy times; just as you have been feeding upon things, and other beings who came here before you, so someone else must feed on you to make creation true, otherwise God would not be fair to everybody and everything, and God is fair and just and no respecter of persons or things.

Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons, edited by Robert A. Hill and Barbara Bair (University of California Press, 1987), Pages 221-222.

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