I heard of a new book written by a scholar that was said to hate Paul almost as much as myself, so I went out and bought it. “How Jesus Became Christian” by Barrie Wilson. Here is a hint – don’t buy a book written by anybody who doesn’t have an adult name. “Barrie”!? I should not have been surprised to find the book intellectually immature.
Yes, any book that hates Paul isn’t all bad. But the attack is continued on against Jesus also. What is there to hate about Jesus, you might ask? Well, Jesus was not the Messiah. The argument here assumes that God is All Powerful and that if God had intended Jesus to be the Messiah, than God would have used every miraculous power to impose Jesus as Messiah. Apparently God should have been willing to kill anybody who stood in Jesus’ way. Because Jesus had failed to assert himself as a Messiah, that is, because he was not globally recognized as the Messiah, therefore, he in fact was not the Messiah. While the first part of the Book maintains that Christianity is a false Religion because of the misrepresentations of Paul, the book goes on to leave us the sad impression that even at the very most there had never been anything there anyway but the pretensions of an impostor messiah.
At least we are allowed a Historical Jesus … its not denied that there was some guy named Jesus who managed to start up a minor splinter of a Jewish Sect that lasted several centuries before it was forgotten by history. How inspiring.
In his last chapter concerning what we can salvage of Christianity, it is that we can acknowledge the Jesus was a Jew and out of respect for that, Christians should realize they should not be anti-Semitic. Hmmmmm. A Religion whose sole purpose would be to renounce itself in giving all respect to another Religion, or rather to an Ethnic Group with their own rather Exclusive God. Honestly, I don’t think it would work too well. Sooner or later the Gentiles would realize that they are giving respect to a Religion that returns to them no respect, even to the point of denying them a God! While the Jews have a God – the Only God – it is understood that there is nowhere recognized any God of the Gentiles, and that the One God that does exist, exists only for the Sons of Jacob. Really!? This is where Intellectual Maturity comes into play. If Jesus was nothing because he was NOT the Messiah, then does not the same argument have equal play in evaluating Jews and Judaism as a whole? If Judaism never produced a Messiah, then what need has it of any Gentile Respect? While it had been understood that Jesus WAS the Messiah, then Christians could be persuaded to begrudge the Jews some little bit of respect, which certainly has been the case as is shown by the Gentiles have accepted as Canonical Scripture the purely Jewish Books of the Old Testament. But in this new perspective, that Jesus was some itty-bitty footnote of forgotten Jewish History, than this is enough to consign all of Judaism to the Dustbin of Old Failed Ancient Religions, for as we see it today without any Sentimentality of Connection to an Authentic Christ, Judaism is only a Religion of an insular and selfish people who have survived apart only because of the intensity of their Hate which forbids them to let their sons or daughters marry anybody besides themselves. A Religion of Love they are not. They have succeeded only as a Religion of Ethnic Hate, and of those I am sure we have enough already.
Oh, but why can’t we all become Jews? Well, as they say, somebody has to pay retail.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Reasonableness of Pessimism and Barbarism
To simplify the difference between Civilized and Barbarian Institutions, we have only look at their regards for population density – Civilizations adopt institutions which maximize population density whereas Barbaric Institutions, while not overtly admitting so much, depend upon sustaining low densities of population. Now, to be clear on this, often Barbarism does not positively and consciously design institutions that would limit population, but rather it is the failure to adopt Civilized Institutions to deal with high levels of population density that thereby default to de facto barbarism – as soon as the effective Population Density exceeds the ability of Society to deal with the needs of a Dense Population, then checks to that population will more or less automatically take over. One does not have to positively plan for Wars, Plagues, Rebellions, murder and mayhem. Such things occur given the absence of Positive Institutions to prevent them. Barbarism, for the most part is simply the void of Civilization.
However, some Barbarism is in fact intentional. Institutions set up to Prevent the establishment of Civilized Institutions are in fact Barbarian. Much of Western Liberal Democracy is Barbaric, when one evaluates it for ultimate effect. Designed to strip most of the people of their share of wealth in order to concentrate all measures of value to the top few percent of the population, then providing for police and armies to control or to eventually murder off the greater part of the populations when they should go into rebellion… such is a conscious and intentional Barbarism. In America it is perfected, by making it a matter of Public Policy to deprive most of the people of Health Care, disease is given a free hand to sweep away unwanted Population Densities.
Yes, it does seem paradoxical, that ‘Democracy’ is used as a weapon against the people. We have only to notice that it is the Wealthiest and Most Selfish segments of the Population that are so espoused to Democracy – and we can conclude that this is because they have found a way to utterly control it and exploit it. How? Well, although the People do in fact vote, it is the Wealthy Controlling Classes that decide who it is that runs for office. Yes, there are Left Wings and Right Wings, but as I heard it recently described, they are all the wings of the Same Old Bird. I would trust Democracy so much more if the classes most engaged in advancing the Cause of Barbarism Exploitation were not so unequivocally in support of Democracy and for its spread to all of the World.
Indeed, to be cynical about it, perhaps it is their wish to impose a World Wide Democracy in order to weaken all traditional Institutions of Civilization where they had ever managed to take hold.
Why would anybody prefer Barbarism? Well, sorry to say, Barbarism is the Deal with the Devil. When Barbarism is able to exert itself, to eliminate the burden of high population densities, then the results for the few survivors can be rather appealing… for a generation or two until population pressures re-exert themselves. But at the close of major plagues or major wars, land opens up and labor becomes dear – everyone makes out like a bandit – Cheap Land and High Wages. Yes, the nine out of ten people who die wouldn’t like the deal they got, but they aren’t alive to complain. History only records the delight of the Survivors who find so much stuff to pick up and take home for themselves. Cities of Gold have collapsed in ruin, but the survivors, previously of the lowest classes, couldn’t be happier but to rummage through the rubble and grab a few candlesticks. The Glory of Freedom!
So, Barbarism does have an appeal… for the optimistic who take it for granted that they will be the one’s who will survive… sometimes hedging their bets with cellars full of horded food, guns and ammo. Then, additionally, these glorious moments of Barbarism are historically troubling, as they are recorded as something of Golden Ages. It is supposed that these People were Happy not because they were lucky survivors, but because they were Freedom Loving Warriors or some such blithering nonsense. Look at America today – their collective prosperity an accident of discovering a virtually empty continent at a time when Europe was destroying itself with a series of suicidal wars, but if you ask any American, they insist that America is great because they are such dedicated Barbarians – Freedom Loving People who will do anything to stifle institutions that would allow for Civilized levels of Population Density. Happy entirely by accident, they think it is because their Selfishness was some kind of a Virtue.
But the Problem with Barbarism’s Deal with the Devil, is that in the absence of any intentional institution for either providing for Population or for keeping Population within certain prescribed limits, then the cycle of massive de-population is bound to re-occur, not really requiring more than 4 or 5 generations… barely more than a hundred years. For instance, the Black Death carried away almost half the Europe’s Population, and while the surviving generation was somewhat left in shock, the next generation was ecstatically happy with their prosperity. Things were so Free and Easy that what were left of Civilized Institutions were seen as obtrusive and senselessly unnecessary. Love of Freedom won over any sense of Security in Order. But it didn’t take more than 200 years before population was again at dangerous levels, and without the previous respect for Civilized Institutions that had once been able to support such levels. There occurred the Fall of Catholic Civilization and the wars and rebellions have not really stopped ever since – Europe has been using internal conflict to keep its populations at moderate levels, never reaching the levels of Asian Societies. When Western Propaganda thanks its Armed Forces for Freedom and Happiness, it is True, but in a sense much more sinister than I am sure is intended – the true sense is “Thank You for Killing Yourselves and Each Other to make more room for the rest of us”.
So, anyway, there are those who suppose that the World is coming to a major traumatic cataclysm of Apocalyptic proportions that will carry away the vaster part of the troubling population levels, and that after this huge purge, this vast cleansing, the elect few survivors will be Happy. Well, yes, they will be. But I tend to see this pessimistically. The process is entirely negative. With no new Civilized Institutions put in place to guide the subsequent growth, the same disasters can be expected again, and perhaps even worse, as the Happy Glories of a fleeting Barbarian Golden Age serve only to discredit and remove whatever had remained of Civilized Institutions.
.
It would be preferable to emplace Institutions for dealing with these uncomfortable levels of Population Density – planned economies, public health care, limiting child birth – putting the World on a strict budget. Nobody would really be happy, but everyone would live. Yes, hope could be planned for in the long term. By imposing a strict budget to limit new population increases, then more benefits could accrue as the overcrowded numbers decline over time in a controlled way. Or the political decision could be made to keep population always at a maximum… a dangerous balance on the razor’s edge. I think that China and India have met with the inevitable future of Civilization in that they have taken conscious and positive control of their population growths with various childbirth limiting programs.
But as reassuring it is to hope and believe for the best, unfortunately, the trajectory of decline toward War, Rebellion, Crime and Disease seems too steep to stop. There is not even the slightest hint of a move toward implementing Civilized Institutions. The Forces of Barbarism seem very much planted at the Helm, at least in West where the sworn Barbarians of Free Masonry have been calling all the shots for Centuries, even if somewhat below the Surface of Appearances. The East, while culturally and historically more inclined to adopt Civilized Institutions, will probably be unable to stand up to the West, which I suppose will not permit itself to die quietly, but will lash out at the rest of the World in a frenzy of Over-Powering Military Reaction. Then, if the East does survive better than the West, the appeal of Open Land and Scarcity of Labor will forestall any necessity for adopting Civilized Institutions, and the Cycle of Barbarism will re-emerge again, East or West.
In conclusion, Barbarism is so easy, and it’s Golden Ages occur again and again, everyone remembering the few Living, forgetting the many Dead, that there is never any great momentum established for putting in place Civilized Institutions. So, overall, I am rather pessimistic.
As a last word I should mention that the UFO Aliens captured at Roswell, New Mexico in the United States were purported to have written of their Civilization, some several million years old. Little has been hinted of their Civilization, and it is rumored that the primary reason why the United States denies the U.F.O. Aliens is because they suppose it necessary to deny and suppress any model or idea of that Civilization, which is not very similar to Liberal Democracy dominated by Corporate, Zionist and Gun Interests. (Besides, the Free Masons having done everything they could to discredit all of the World’s Civilizations, in order to install their own self serving Barbarism, that we could little expect them to allow the published detail of an Other Worldly Civilization, and particularly that of one that has succeeded so well and for so long.) But it’s been said that the U.F.O. Aliens deny that we Human Beings here on Earth have ever had even our first Civilization. As they said, if we would ever once tasted of Civilization, we certainly would never go back. But what I wish we could find out is what they, the Aliens, did some millions of years ago to spark their own Civilization. What was it that finally made them all work together, instead of doing what is so much more easy – to play “Last Man Standing Gets to Be Happy”. What makes living beings love one another instead of hording food and collecting guns?
However, some Barbarism is in fact intentional. Institutions set up to Prevent the establishment of Civilized Institutions are in fact Barbarian. Much of Western Liberal Democracy is Barbaric, when one evaluates it for ultimate effect. Designed to strip most of the people of their share of wealth in order to concentrate all measures of value to the top few percent of the population, then providing for police and armies to control or to eventually murder off the greater part of the populations when they should go into rebellion… such is a conscious and intentional Barbarism. In America it is perfected, by making it a matter of Public Policy to deprive most of the people of Health Care, disease is given a free hand to sweep away unwanted Population Densities.
Yes, it does seem paradoxical, that ‘Democracy’ is used as a weapon against the people. We have only to notice that it is the Wealthiest and Most Selfish segments of the Population that are so espoused to Democracy – and we can conclude that this is because they have found a way to utterly control it and exploit it. How? Well, although the People do in fact vote, it is the Wealthy Controlling Classes that decide who it is that runs for office. Yes, there are Left Wings and Right Wings, but as I heard it recently described, they are all the wings of the Same Old Bird. I would trust Democracy so much more if the classes most engaged in advancing the Cause of Barbarism Exploitation were not so unequivocally in support of Democracy and for its spread to all of the World.
Indeed, to be cynical about it, perhaps it is their wish to impose a World Wide Democracy in order to weaken all traditional Institutions of Civilization where they had ever managed to take hold.
Why would anybody prefer Barbarism? Well, sorry to say, Barbarism is the Deal with the Devil. When Barbarism is able to exert itself, to eliminate the burden of high population densities, then the results for the few survivors can be rather appealing… for a generation or two until population pressures re-exert themselves. But at the close of major plagues or major wars, land opens up and labor becomes dear – everyone makes out like a bandit – Cheap Land and High Wages. Yes, the nine out of ten people who die wouldn’t like the deal they got, but they aren’t alive to complain. History only records the delight of the Survivors who find so much stuff to pick up and take home for themselves. Cities of Gold have collapsed in ruin, but the survivors, previously of the lowest classes, couldn’t be happier but to rummage through the rubble and grab a few candlesticks. The Glory of Freedom!
So, Barbarism does have an appeal… for the optimistic who take it for granted that they will be the one’s who will survive… sometimes hedging their bets with cellars full of horded food, guns and ammo. Then, additionally, these glorious moments of Barbarism are historically troubling, as they are recorded as something of Golden Ages. It is supposed that these People were Happy not because they were lucky survivors, but because they were Freedom Loving Warriors or some such blithering nonsense. Look at America today – their collective prosperity an accident of discovering a virtually empty continent at a time when Europe was destroying itself with a series of suicidal wars, but if you ask any American, they insist that America is great because they are such dedicated Barbarians – Freedom Loving People who will do anything to stifle institutions that would allow for Civilized levels of Population Density. Happy entirely by accident, they think it is because their Selfishness was some kind of a Virtue.
But the Problem with Barbarism’s Deal with the Devil, is that in the absence of any intentional institution for either providing for Population or for keeping Population within certain prescribed limits, then the cycle of massive de-population is bound to re-occur, not really requiring more than 4 or 5 generations… barely more than a hundred years. For instance, the Black Death carried away almost half the Europe’s Population, and while the surviving generation was somewhat left in shock, the next generation was ecstatically happy with their prosperity. Things were so Free and Easy that what were left of Civilized Institutions were seen as obtrusive and senselessly unnecessary. Love of Freedom won over any sense of Security in Order. But it didn’t take more than 200 years before population was again at dangerous levels, and without the previous respect for Civilized Institutions that had once been able to support such levels. There occurred the Fall of Catholic Civilization and the wars and rebellions have not really stopped ever since – Europe has been using internal conflict to keep its populations at moderate levels, never reaching the levels of Asian Societies. When Western Propaganda thanks its Armed Forces for Freedom and Happiness, it is True, but in a sense much more sinister than I am sure is intended – the true sense is “Thank You for Killing Yourselves and Each Other to make more room for the rest of us”.
So, anyway, there are those who suppose that the World is coming to a major traumatic cataclysm of Apocalyptic proportions that will carry away the vaster part of the troubling population levels, and that after this huge purge, this vast cleansing, the elect few survivors will be Happy. Well, yes, they will be. But I tend to see this pessimistically. The process is entirely negative. With no new Civilized Institutions put in place to guide the subsequent growth, the same disasters can be expected again, and perhaps even worse, as the Happy Glories of a fleeting Barbarian Golden Age serve only to discredit and remove whatever had remained of Civilized Institutions.
.
It would be preferable to emplace Institutions for dealing with these uncomfortable levels of Population Density – planned economies, public health care, limiting child birth – putting the World on a strict budget. Nobody would really be happy, but everyone would live. Yes, hope could be planned for in the long term. By imposing a strict budget to limit new population increases, then more benefits could accrue as the overcrowded numbers decline over time in a controlled way. Or the political decision could be made to keep population always at a maximum… a dangerous balance on the razor’s edge. I think that China and India have met with the inevitable future of Civilization in that they have taken conscious and positive control of their population growths with various childbirth limiting programs.
But as reassuring it is to hope and believe for the best, unfortunately, the trajectory of decline toward War, Rebellion, Crime and Disease seems too steep to stop. There is not even the slightest hint of a move toward implementing Civilized Institutions. The Forces of Barbarism seem very much planted at the Helm, at least in West where the sworn Barbarians of Free Masonry have been calling all the shots for Centuries, even if somewhat below the Surface of Appearances. The East, while culturally and historically more inclined to adopt Civilized Institutions, will probably be unable to stand up to the West, which I suppose will not permit itself to die quietly, but will lash out at the rest of the World in a frenzy of Over-Powering Military Reaction. Then, if the East does survive better than the West, the appeal of Open Land and Scarcity of Labor will forestall any necessity for adopting Civilized Institutions, and the Cycle of Barbarism will re-emerge again, East or West.
In conclusion, Barbarism is so easy, and it’s Golden Ages occur again and again, everyone remembering the few Living, forgetting the many Dead, that there is never any great momentum established for putting in place Civilized Institutions. So, overall, I am rather pessimistic.
As a last word I should mention that the UFO Aliens captured at Roswell, New Mexico in the United States were purported to have written of their Civilization, some several million years old. Little has been hinted of their Civilization, and it is rumored that the primary reason why the United States denies the U.F.O. Aliens is because they suppose it necessary to deny and suppress any model or idea of that Civilization, which is not very similar to Liberal Democracy dominated by Corporate, Zionist and Gun Interests. (Besides, the Free Masons having done everything they could to discredit all of the World’s Civilizations, in order to install their own self serving Barbarism, that we could little expect them to allow the published detail of an Other Worldly Civilization, and particularly that of one that has succeeded so well and for so long.) But it’s been said that the U.F.O. Aliens deny that we Human Beings here on Earth have ever had even our first Civilization. As they said, if we would ever once tasted of Civilization, we certainly would never go back. But what I wish we could find out is what they, the Aliens, did some millions of years ago to spark their own Civilization. What was it that finally made them all work together, instead of doing what is so much more easy – to play “Last Man Standing Gets to Be Happy”. What makes living beings love one another instead of hording food and collecting guns?
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Creating a Better God
Perhaps the reason there are so many Atheists is because Atheism seems so plausible, that so many people see no clear signs of there being a God. But the real problem may be that they do not know what to look for, that their very conception of what God is or would be misleads them. They may not be looking in the right place, or they may not know what they are looking for, not realizing that they passed it over because they did not recognize it when they saw it, as in the expression “they would not know God if He were to bite them on the ass”. So we need to ask ourselves if there is another way of anticipating or visualizing God besides the traditional way. How might God be hiding from our expectations?
Well, first let’s look at our traditional way of conceiving of God? In the West God is envisioned as a collection of all positive absolutes – All Powerful, All Loving, All Knowing, and All Decisive, the Grand Being behind the notion that everything has meaning, and that everything has a purpose, and all is as it should be. Because of God we live in the ‘best of all possible world’s’. Rich people use such a notion of God to justify and entrench their privileges, while also concluding that God must have His reasons for hating the poor. The Poor themselves more often than not suppose God is either testing them with challenges or building their character by providing them with a kind of resistance training.
Well, such a God must be up against a huge barrage of constraints, because it seems clear enough to most people, that we live in a very complexly troubled world. If some people do seem blessed, then we can hardly determine any good reason for it, and those who are apparently under some curse, well, they too may seem all too blameless. And it had never been much better but had probably been even worse most of the time – an odd condition for the Best of All Possible World’s under the dominion of a Wise and Good God. So what is God’s problem?
First, let’s become clearer on what we suppose is the nature of God. Many spiritualist traditions envision God as ethereal and spiritual, and this in contradistinction to the idea that the World is material and basic. The early Christians, and the Greek Philosophers with their Platonic notions of the Logos, actually agreed on this issue, of God being Ethereal – made of the substance of thought and dreams.
Here is where we should apply some common sense. Here we need to ask ourselves what influences what. Does Thought influence Matter or does Matter influence Thought? Well, isn’t it easier to suppose that massive structures of gravitational electromagnetic clusters could more easily influence the vague nebulous Mists of the Ethereal then to believe that such insubstantial wisps of quasi-nothingness could affect the massive solids of the World? It seems likely we have been looking at this Theology completely backwards, seeing cause and effect in mirror image, supposing that the Spiritual was the Creative Element, indeed, that God, the Core of Spirit, was the Ultimate Creator, when, quite actually, the Spiritual has been the created product of the Material. It’s the substance which influences the spiritual and not the other way around. We’ve had it backwards.
I once read an amusing, if blasphemous, anecdote that goes back to perhaps the earliest Civilization, the Sumerian. It seems that one citizen had discerned a contradiction between all of the sacrifices to the Gods being asked of the public and the subservience to the Gods that was also being demanded. So there written on one of the small clay tablets was the thought that if God had to beg his food like a dog, then God should be whipped like a dog, and taught to do tricks for his dinner just like any other dog. Perhaps there is some truth here, although our Mesopotamian Friend hardly had presented much of an expansive argument. But lets stay with the metaphor for awhile, that is, comparing God with Man’s Best Friend. What if God really needed to be trained, cultivated, nourished – not being seen at his best unless treated as a cherished pet and given a certain degree of discipline and character formation?
Yes, God may consist in the Ethereal and Spiritual, but all of the real power may be with the Material, and if God ever attains to any significant power it is because this power had been imparted by the Material World. Indeed, the Vedas, the World’s most ancient Religious Literature, states clearly that God’s Power comes from Sacrifice – that it is Man that energizes God and not the other way around.
This may help us to better understand Religious History and our own Religious Current Events. When a Civilization can get together in a common prayer and a common religious Vision, then, in a sense, God becomes Solidified. With so many people thinking similarly, the Collective Consciousness crystallizes a God of the People’s Moral Consensus. God is a Collective Phenomena.
What happens when Barbarism and Individualism reigns? What happens when education breaks down and all unifying culture collapses in skepticism or just plain ignorance? Well, if there ever had been a God, then that God simply evaporates. Yes, each individual may have his own Religion and his own God, but without the Multiplier Effect of Common Communal Belief, then each person’s separate God is too small to matter. It is like a hundred thousand batteries that if wired together would out-surge a bolt of lightening bolt, but just one little single cell battery isn’t enough to run a toy.
But in Ages and Cultures that had a great degree of Religious Unity and Intensity, then a certain amount of Power was communicated into the Spirit World and that power became manifested in Saints, that found a way to tap into it, and Spiritual Apparitions which are probably to be best compared to condensations of Ethereal Substance or Flash Points. Or, if we are hesitant to attribute any quality of Matter to the Spirit, then we can limit these manifestations of Spirit to being phenomena of Consciousness – that these Divine Apparitions may consist in the quasi-substance of what we would otherwise call Delusion – the Substance of Dreams, of Visions, of Thought Itself.
Yes, yes, yes… it is objected that if something is not Material then it is not real. Science equates delusional phenomena with random and arbitrary nothingness. But if a phenomena contains elements of coherent order, substantial or not, then that very coherent order is in itself something of meaning which needs to be respected and understood. We need to have more respect for such Objective Experience, and so if a thousand people all have the very same experience, even if only subjective, even if dismissible as just a Common Delusion, or Collective Hallucination, then the reality of that consensus needs to be valued and appreciated, and if Science has not yet found the tools to quantify such a phenomena, then that is an indictment of Science, and not Religion. After all, Galileo would be the first condemn as silly any person who maintained that Empirical Phenomena was to be discounted only because an investigating Philosopher was unable to assemble a means of verification. Galileo invented the Telescope to make his Research quantifiably possible. Today’s scientists need to stop their endless bitching and invent the Telescope of the Spirit. So much consensus regarding empirical subjective experience cannot be random and of nothing.
But if we accept that the Spiritual is secondary to the Material then there are serious Theological consequences to such thinking. First, we can decide that the Polytheists were right, or more right then the Monotheists. The Truth is that there probably was a contest between competing Gods, between the Spiritual Visions of competing peoples. The Greatest God would be that God with the greatest total sum of collective intensity supporting it. Yes, at the very deepest level where ‘God’ becomes thoughtless and unmodified, consisting in pure unelaborated spirit, then ‘God’ would have a certain sameness. But also, at this level, God would be providentially useless, or worse than useless, as in the Buddhist sense of encouraging nihilism by rewarding the pursuit of absolutely nothing at all. Reject the World, and abandon Society and live in the Bliss of Pure Meditation on God. It is the Intellectual equivalent to drug abuse, or even continuous sex abuse. It leads to some people indulging in Nothingness while other people must take up the slack and work that much harder. Its simply not fair. Oh, which is the reason why the East argues about Karma… that the Lazy have earned the right to be lazy and that those who work hard for society must have a lot of bad Karma. Again, we see how the Rich and the Privileged are adept at finding arguments to justify themselves. We must remember that our Mesopotamian friend was right about the God he compared to a dog, that it is not worth feeding unless we can get some tricks out of Him. God must be useful. Religion must be useful. And People should be useful.
The same way in which particles of iron dust are lined up and made coherent by the invisible influence of a magnet, so we can envision so many individual people being made into a Coherent Civilization by means of God and Religion. In this sense we are comparing God to Electricity, and with this acknowledgement and qualification, that we are ourselves responsible for having to generate the Power and even the Form of God by our own efforts and moral intuitions. The more we can all agree in this Moral Vision, the more coherent our Collective God will be. The Ultimate Quality of our Civilization depends upon our Collective Vision of God.
Well, first let’s look at our traditional way of conceiving of God? In the West God is envisioned as a collection of all positive absolutes – All Powerful, All Loving, All Knowing, and All Decisive, the Grand Being behind the notion that everything has meaning, and that everything has a purpose, and all is as it should be. Because of God we live in the ‘best of all possible world’s’. Rich people use such a notion of God to justify and entrench their privileges, while also concluding that God must have His reasons for hating the poor. The Poor themselves more often than not suppose God is either testing them with challenges or building their character by providing them with a kind of resistance training.
Well, such a God must be up against a huge barrage of constraints, because it seems clear enough to most people, that we live in a very complexly troubled world. If some people do seem blessed, then we can hardly determine any good reason for it, and those who are apparently under some curse, well, they too may seem all too blameless. And it had never been much better but had probably been even worse most of the time – an odd condition for the Best of All Possible World’s under the dominion of a Wise and Good God. So what is God’s problem?
First, let’s become clearer on what we suppose is the nature of God. Many spiritualist traditions envision God as ethereal and spiritual, and this in contradistinction to the idea that the World is material and basic. The early Christians, and the Greek Philosophers with their Platonic notions of the Logos, actually agreed on this issue, of God being Ethereal – made of the substance of thought and dreams.
Here is where we should apply some common sense. Here we need to ask ourselves what influences what. Does Thought influence Matter or does Matter influence Thought? Well, isn’t it easier to suppose that massive structures of gravitational electromagnetic clusters could more easily influence the vague nebulous Mists of the Ethereal then to believe that such insubstantial wisps of quasi-nothingness could affect the massive solids of the World? It seems likely we have been looking at this Theology completely backwards, seeing cause and effect in mirror image, supposing that the Spiritual was the Creative Element, indeed, that God, the Core of Spirit, was the Ultimate Creator, when, quite actually, the Spiritual has been the created product of the Material. It’s the substance which influences the spiritual and not the other way around. We’ve had it backwards.
I once read an amusing, if blasphemous, anecdote that goes back to perhaps the earliest Civilization, the Sumerian. It seems that one citizen had discerned a contradiction between all of the sacrifices to the Gods being asked of the public and the subservience to the Gods that was also being demanded. So there written on one of the small clay tablets was the thought that if God had to beg his food like a dog, then God should be whipped like a dog, and taught to do tricks for his dinner just like any other dog. Perhaps there is some truth here, although our Mesopotamian Friend hardly had presented much of an expansive argument. But lets stay with the metaphor for awhile, that is, comparing God with Man’s Best Friend. What if God really needed to be trained, cultivated, nourished – not being seen at his best unless treated as a cherished pet and given a certain degree of discipline and character formation?
Yes, God may consist in the Ethereal and Spiritual, but all of the real power may be with the Material, and if God ever attains to any significant power it is because this power had been imparted by the Material World. Indeed, the Vedas, the World’s most ancient Religious Literature, states clearly that God’s Power comes from Sacrifice – that it is Man that energizes God and not the other way around.
This may help us to better understand Religious History and our own Religious Current Events. When a Civilization can get together in a common prayer and a common religious Vision, then, in a sense, God becomes Solidified. With so many people thinking similarly, the Collective Consciousness crystallizes a God of the People’s Moral Consensus. God is a Collective Phenomena.
What happens when Barbarism and Individualism reigns? What happens when education breaks down and all unifying culture collapses in skepticism or just plain ignorance? Well, if there ever had been a God, then that God simply evaporates. Yes, each individual may have his own Religion and his own God, but without the Multiplier Effect of Common Communal Belief, then each person’s separate God is too small to matter. It is like a hundred thousand batteries that if wired together would out-surge a bolt of lightening bolt, but just one little single cell battery isn’t enough to run a toy.
But in Ages and Cultures that had a great degree of Religious Unity and Intensity, then a certain amount of Power was communicated into the Spirit World and that power became manifested in Saints, that found a way to tap into it, and Spiritual Apparitions which are probably to be best compared to condensations of Ethereal Substance or Flash Points. Or, if we are hesitant to attribute any quality of Matter to the Spirit, then we can limit these manifestations of Spirit to being phenomena of Consciousness – that these Divine Apparitions may consist in the quasi-substance of what we would otherwise call Delusion – the Substance of Dreams, of Visions, of Thought Itself.
Yes, yes, yes… it is objected that if something is not Material then it is not real. Science equates delusional phenomena with random and arbitrary nothingness. But if a phenomena contains elements of coherent order, substantial or not, then that very coherent order is in itself something of meaning which needs to be respected and understood. We need to have more respect for such Objective Experience, and so if a thousand people all have the very same experience, even if only subjective, even if dismissible as just a Common Delusion, or Collective Hallucination, then the reality of that consensus needs to be valued and appreciated, and if Science has not yet found the tools to quantify such a phenomena, then that is an indictment of Science, and not Religion. After all, Galileo would be the first condemn as silly any person who maintained that Empirical Phenomena was to be discounted only because an investigating Philosopher was unable to assemble a means of verification. Galileo invented the Telescope to make his Research quantifiably possible. Today’s scientists need to stop their endless bitching and invent the Telescope of the Spirit. So much consensus regarding empirical subjective experience cannot be random and of nothing.
But if we accept that the Spiritual is secondary to the Material then there are serious Theological consequences to such thinking. First, we can decide that the Polytheists were right, or more right then the Monotheists. The Truth is that there probably was a contest between competing Gods, between the Spiritual Visions of competing peoples. The Greatest God would be that God with the greatest total sum of collective intensity supporting it. Yes, at the very deepest level where ‘God’ becomes thoughtless and unmodified, consisting in pure unelaborated spirit, then ‘God’ would have a certain sameness. But also, at this level, God would be providentially useless, or worse than useless, as in the Buddhist sense of encouraging nihilism by rewarding the pursuit of absolutely nothing at all. Reject the World, and abandon Society and live in the Bliss of Pure Meditation on God. It is the Intellectual equivalent to drug abuse, or even continuous sex abuse. It leads to some people indulging in Nothingness while other people must take up the slack and work that much harder. Its simply not fair. Oh, which is the reason why the East argues about Karma… that the Lazy have earned the right to be lazy and that those who work hard for society must have a lot of bad Karma. Again, we see how the Rich and the Privileged are adept at finding arguments to justify themselves. We must remember that our Mesopotamian friend was right about the God he compared to a dog, that it is not worth feeding unless we can get some tricks out of Him. God must be useful. Religion must be useful. And People should be useful.
The same way in which particles of iron dust are lined up and made coherent by the invisible influence of a magnet, so we can envision so many individual people being made into a Coherent Civilization by means of God and Religion. In this sense we are comparing God to Electricity, and with this acknowledgement and qualification, that we are ourselves responsible for having to generate the Power and even the Form of God by our own efforts and moral intuitions. The more we can all agree in this Moral Vision, the more coherent our Collective God will be. The Ultimate Quality of our Civilization depends upon our Collective Vision of God.
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