If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
A Chinese student asks me if I believe in fate. He says everyone in his class does.
This is interesting, and I’ve pondered it before. There are not many theists in China. Yet even those who do not believe in God believe in fate: in karma. They believe in karma throughout East and South Asia.
Yet how can there be fate without God? Fate implies the existence of a cosmic, omnipotent and omniscient will. Without a God, the universe should be random and meaningless. There should be no justice.
My student, presented with this assertion, agrees.
In other words, everyone is really a theist. All believe in God’s existence, and all see God as a will; which is to say, a person. We are divided only by semantic confusion. And by denial of what we know in our hearts to be true.
There are, in this world, two kinds of people: those who accept the existence of God, and those who try to deny it. Never the twain shall meet; these are perfectly incompatible views, like humans and zombies. The instant you accept the existence of the absolute, it is necessarily of absolute importance. Those who do not see it are, at charitable best, insane. They are not in the conversation.
Deniers, similarly, cannot tolerate believers. Ultimately, the existence of God is certain and accessible to reason. To deny God is therefore to turn from God, to dodge the truth.
People turn from God because they are conscious of doing wrong, or want to do wrong. They don’t want to accept the existence of divine justice. They want to get away with it; like Adam and Eve hiding in the bushes. Religion is a “religious dictatorship.” Anyone who asserts the existence of God, genuinely claims to believe it, is a threat to them, and must be shut down. Churches burned, Christmas markets attacked.
The most obvious tactic is to infiltrate any convenient religious body themselves, and seek to subvert it. This is the Pharisee gambit; they are common in every religion. I became all too familiar with them studying religion in grad school. Within the department, you gained approval by saying the most outrageously skeptical and irreligious thing. The sincerely religious were mocked as ignorant.
I thank God I escaped that. But it was not easy. Most higher education is cult-like.
A random comment seen on Twitter, in response to a local school banning Mother’s Day: “woke destroys everything good.”
A simple statement, but truth is usually simple. I think it is deeply true.
Begin with the premise, known and accepted from ancient times, that the purpose of human life is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is so regardless of your particular religion, regardless even of whether you are a monotheist, a secularist, or a pagan. The absolute value of these three things is intrinsic, self-evident and beyond argument. You simply cannot coherently say that good is not good, or truth is not true. The response to beauty is immediate, unmediated, not a matter for judgment or doubt. The monotheisms merely posit a personal God as the ultimate source and essence of all three.
Now we see a contrary spirit, roaming the landscape as if to devour, a rough beast; which we currently call “woke.” It targets these three, goodness, truth, and beauty, as if a guided missile.
Begin with motherhood; for the present epidemic seems to have begun here. It is an emblem of the good. In a healthy culture, motherhood is inviolate. Remember “motherhood and apple pie?” This is why the cow is sacred in India: as a symbol of motherhood. Individual mothers fall short, but motherhood itself is an image of selfless love, of wanting the best for the other; and this is the essence of the Good. Perhaps even more, the child’s reverence for the mother or father is an image of the proper loving attitude towards the divine. Which is why we pray the “Our Father.”
And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
For comparison, it is because they do not nurture their young that serpents and reptiles have become, everywhere, a symbol of moral evil.
Sometime in the early 1960s, the culture turned against motherhood and children. Witness feminism. The premise of feminism is that motherhood is bad; all else follows from this. And this was reinforced, suddenly, with a concern over “overpopulation.” Having children was bad. Indeed, they should be actively done away with. And then we have abortion. Now actually glorified as a kind of sacrament. We are now moving on to genital mutilation of children to ensure that the next generation is infertile.
Homosexuality became admirable, largely or entirely because it does not lead to motherhood and children.
Parallel is the attack on “conventional morality,” i.e., morality as such, and the common constructivist claim of moral relativism. Churches are vandalized; priests and ministers jailed; crosses replaced by snowflakes. We are now “spiritual, but not religious.” Why the difference? Religion implies a commitment to moral conduct.
The term “woke” is itself an attack on truth. It means here the opposite of its literal meaning. The “woke” become like NPCs. If they think for themselves, if they diverge even slightly from the “narrative”—and this term is itself a denial of truth—they are no longer “woke.” They are like sleepwalkers, in sum. The concept of a “zombie apocalypse” has so captured the popular imagination in recent decades because it is exactly what we are experiencing, day to day.
“Political correctness,” a term that emerged in the 1970s in its current sense, as a shorthand for adherence to “woke” doctrine, is a systematic reversal of the meaning of words, an assault on truth and truth-telling. A spade must not be called a spade. “Exceptional children” are now not the most intelligent or talented, but the least. “Gender-affirming care” destroys one’s gender. “Pro-choice” strips the child, the father, the grandparents of all choice. “Reproductive rights” deny men’s reproductive rights. “Equity” means inequality. “Social justice” means systemic social injustice. “Anti-racism” means racism. “Antifascism” means fascism. “Community” means alienation from your neighbours in favour of strangers who share some political interest. “Health care” means killing, of unborn children or, more recently and increasingly, the old, the poor, the despondent.
The “deplatforming,” the “unfriending,” the censoring, the cancelling, and the “hate laws,” are also an assault on truth, because it is only through free discussion that truth can be sought or known. Now everyone must guard their speech, and anyone who seems to say what they actually believe is, for that reason, and apparently no other, condemned, perhaps fired. Witness Tucker Carlson. Witness Joe Rogan. Witness Trump Derangement Syndrome.
As for the assault on beauty: feminism made a virtue out of making oneself appear ugly. The current issue of “fat shaming” is in this mold: one is now obliged to accept a woman’s declaration that she is beautiful, regardless of one’s own senses. But then, just as often, if you say she is beautiful, you are harassing her. And this is surely at least a part of the current celebration of crossdressing: the bottom line is that Dylan Mulvaney and other “drag queens” are grotesque, a parody of feminine beauty.
As for the beauty of art, that has been under attack since perhaps R. Mutt in 1917. Witness more recently the pulling down of statues, of public art, the burning down of beautiful churches, the assaults on paintings in the galleries of Europe.
Many attribute it all to George Soros or to Klaus Schweib and the WEF. But this is not an adequate explanation. Even if they plan evil, these people would not have the power to do so much. They are themselves zombies. The real culprit has to be a powerful spirit with a capability for mind control, for possession, fascination, or ecstasy; these are the characteristics of the pagan gods, the daemons, the obsessions. And a spirit bent systematically on evil and the destruction of man. Perhaps you can, as the Rolling Stones once sang, guess his name. There is a spirit of destruction in the universe, who hates God and mankind.
The term “woke” is a funny little tipoff here. It seems borrowed from the Gnostics, the Satanic heresy that has dogged the monotheisms throughout the centuries. Gnostics imagine themselves superior to the general run of mankind, because they are “awake,” possessing secret knowledge. This puts them above concerns like morality or truth that delude the common rabble. They can create their own morality, invent their own truths. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment was the type. Hitler was apparently an acolyte. Self-styled “elites,” along with those who have been pampered growing up, are particularly vulnerable to such thinking.
Where does this all lead? We must have faith. God is in control, and evil is self-limiting. It will go so far, and then it will collapse.
Seiko, a 45-year-old man living with depression and chronic anxiety, insists his parent are stupid, not evil. And how can it be their fault if they are evil?
Od’s response:
You puzzle over how you could blame your parents for being stupid. “I doubt if stupid people can make themselves less stupid.”
Those raised in a dysfunctional family will go to almost any lengths not to blame their parents. Accepting that your parents are at fault is the essence of the cure.
It is possible for people to be deliberately stupid, and many people choose to be stupid.
Here’s how.
Have you ever watched a movie? You know that what you saw was not really happening. It was just light playing on a screen. Even the story was all made up. You even knew that nothing bad would happen to the hero, because most movies have a happy ending. Yet you got engrossed in the story and kept watching, forgetting where you were and your real life, for an hour or two. You imagined it was all really happening.
This is what narcissists do all the time. They decide what they want to be true, and then simply choose to believe it. They live in a movie they are writing, directing, and starring in.
It follows that a commitment to truth no matter where it leads is the antidote to being raised by narcissists. It is necessary to break through a series of delusions and denials with which you have been raised. Especially about your parents.
So narcissists are not born stupid. They usually choose to be stupid, to turn away from truth, in early adolescence.
Seiko thinks the modern world and all its technology is too complicated for him. He yearns to live in the jungle, or like Canada’s First Nations.
Od:
I understand your concern, but I don’t think you have the real problem pinpointed. It is not with technology, but with society. Our society has its values wrong; most people are to some degree delusional, in denial. Your instincts are right to want to get away from it.
This is also a projection of the fact that the society in which you grew up, your family, had its values wrong. You need to get away from all society to think things through, and you know this by instinct. You need, not nature, but solitude.
The antidote to being raised with false values is a commitment to true values—to the good--wherever it leads.
I think it is unwise to jump quickly into some new “community,” even if one is available. You are vulnerable to being exploited by some new dysfunctional community or individual narcissist who spins you a comfortable new delusion. Without a grounding in reality, you are unable to detect this. This is how cults develop. You need first to establish a solid sense of what is true and false, right and wrong.
In the old Christian monasteries, when you joined, you were required to observe a period of enforced isolation and silence.
Cults do the opposite: they never want you to be alone. They fear independent thought.
Edvard Munch, Anxiety
Seiko persists in denying the existence of God, and, like all atheists, inconsistently also blaming him for all evil.
Od:
There is no need here to discuss the existence of God. I think this has become a distraction. What is important is to accept the existence of right and wrong. Whether or not God exists, surely you agree that it would be wrong to rape the next woman you meet? That it would be wrong to kill the next person who annoys you?
No?
Then would it be wrong for the next person you meet to kill you? Or to rape you? Perhaps if he is homosexual?
No objections?
Can you agree that the world should be better than it is?
Immediately, then, you are accepting the reality of right and wrong. That is all that matters: right is right and wrong is wrong, and people are capable of doing either.
I think you want to introduce God as a scapegoat. Then perhaps you can blame him, and avoid blaming your parents.
Forget God, then: your parents are fully responsible for their own actions.
But supposing, on the other hand, that God does exist. It does not follow that he is responsible for the actions of your parents, any more than a parent is responsible if he lets his son drive the car, and the son gets into an accident. Nor is the car manufacturer responsible. Humans have moral agency. We know this, because we know we do. We know we make conscious choices. Why that is so is irrelevant. We cannot blame God for our own choices; or those of our parents.
Why did God allow us to make choices? Because he does not see us as objects, mere toys to play with. Martin Buber speaks of an “I-thou” relationship, far more meaningful than an “I-it” relationship. No doubt you can understand that I love my wife in a different and more important sense than I might love a good meal, or a soft couch, or a gadget.
To suppose your parents themselves had no choice in how they raised you, that it was all God’s fault, or the fault of some genetic flaw they were born with, or the fault of their own upbringing, is to reduce them to robots, without moral agency. Is that respectful?
You ask, what purpose does hell serve? The answer is one word: justice.
"whoever believes in nature, disbelieves in God – for Nature is the work of the devil" - William Blake
As noted previously in this space, atheists—and perhaps some nominal Christians—have the bizarre belief that Christians think God is an invisible old man on a cloud, a “sky father.”
This concept is not in the Bible. Jesus does address God as “Father”; but the Christian God is a Trinity, Father. Son, and Holy Spirit, and the most correct way to represent him is as the Son, because this is how he chose to reveal himself to us.
And he is not in the sky. “The Kingdom of Heaven” or “The Kingdom of God” is among us, not in the sky. Here’s how perverse that notion is: Ephesians actually refers to the Devil as “the ruler of the kingdom of the air.” (Ephesians 2:2) Demons are “the spirits of the air.” The sky and clouds are the realm of Satan.
Pondering where this notion of a “sky father” comes from, I think it is a confusion in the popular mind of God with the classical polytheistic god Zeus or Jupiter. “Jupiter” comes etymologically from the IndoEuropean “sky father.” As he is the god of thunder, he is naturally imagined as seated in the clouds. He is sometimes referred to as “father of the gods.”
He took a little child, and set him in the midst of them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such little child in my name, receives me, and whoever receives me, doesn't receive me, but him who sent me." ( -- Mark 9: 36-7)
Friend Xerxes has mocked the proponents of Intelligent Design for believing in “an invisible God up in the sky.”
Only atheists believe in this God.
The Christian God is not in the sky, but in the Kingdom of Heaven. Where is the Kingdom of Heaven? “Within you,” or “Among you.” At the end of time, it will appear as a city, New Jerusalem. He is not invisible; he is incarnate as Jesus. Even in the Old Testament, he appeared as a burning bush, a pillar of smoke, a pillar of fire, a hand. Moses was not permitted to see his face. In the New Testament, he appears as a dove. Jesus says in the gospel reading, he appears to us at all times: as children, as the poor and those in need. As the shekhinah, he is apparent in all things.
I find Jordan Peterson’s thinking hard to follow. Should I make the effort to figure out what he is trying to say? Is it liable to be anything of substance, or will I be wasting a great deal of time?
The odds are I will be wasting my time. Being able to think clearly and being able to express yourself clearly are almost the same thing.
But I took the time to try to untangle his thinking in this brief interview with Andrew Klavan. Klavan is trying to pin Peterson down on whether he believes in God.
In the talk, I do not think Peterson is trying to be deliberately obscure. Many academics are; enough double-talk and people do not realize you are talking nonsense. Peterson is not like this. Utter sincerity seems to be his dominant trait. It is what is so attractive about him. It is why, I think, he has become so popular and famous; nobody is used to hearing an academic speak so honestly.
His problem is that, as a social scientist, he does not have the mental tools to handle metaphysical questions, like the existence and nature of God. He almost seems to understand this himself.
“Does God exist? How would I know? I can’t know, and neither can anyone else.”
In fact, the existence of God is knowable in a dozen ways. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says
“Created in God's image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of ‘converging and convincing arguments,’ which allow us to attain certainty about the truth.”
That is, there are various philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Peterson’s problem is that there are no, and can be no, scientific proofs for the existence of God—and the only thing he understands is science. There can be no scientific proofs of the existence of God, because science deals only with physical objects, and God is not a physical object.
As though to explain the impossibility, almost as if he understand the problem, Peterson goes on to speak of the objective and the subjective.
“I don’t understand the relationship between the objective and the subjective. I don’t understand consciousness. From the objective perspective, it’s nothing.”
Because he speaks from a scientific perspective, Peterson is confusing “objective,” “physical,” and “real”; he is assuming they all mean the same thing. Science cannot tell them apart.
The objective is that which exists independently of our experience of it. It abides when we are not witnessing it. For example, the physical world does not cease to exist when we close our eyes.
The physical is what we perceive with our senses: smell, taste, touch, sight, hearing.
The real is not “what exists,” although it seems to mean that. Everything conceivable necessarily exists--as a concept, as a perception. We say something is “real” when it exists in the same category of existence we think it does. If we think it exists as a physical object, but it exists only as a concept, it is “unreal.” But on the other hand, we do not call happiness “unreal” because it does not exist as a physical object.
Peterson:
“Religious experience is subjective, but it is a human universal. It is transpersonal, but it is subjective. We don’t have a category for the transpersonal subjective.”
It is science that does not have a category for the “transpersonal subjective.” But Peterson is wrong on his terminology. God is not subjective—he is objective. He exists when we are not thinking of him. “Transpersonal” means “objective.” By “subjective,” Peterson really means “non-physical.”
God exists in the non-physical, i.e., spiritual, objective realm. As does heaven, hell, and the angels and saints. As does love, sin, morality, other consciousnesses, and most of what is important in life.
And Peterson, as a social scientist, cannot account for any of it. He is trapped in the world of inanimate things.
So, by extension, is psychology, and social sciences, in general.
This point is not really open to debate. Leaving aside direct experience (and why should we?), there are at least a half-dozen sound philosophical proofs for God's existence; some enumerate several dozen. Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Pascal, the Kalam Cosmological argument; go have a look. It may be possible to remain unconvinced by all of them, but cumulatively, they mean that God's existence is a good deal more certain than any other item of human knowledge. Nobody seems to loudly doubt the existence of the material world, or of other people, or of the truths of science, or of himself. Why God?
Some complain, of Descartes's proof, that it leaves us with a supposed “mind-body” problem. Personally, I have never seen why positing the existence of two distinct types of thing is a problem. But never mind. If so, Berkeley resolved it neatly—by rejecting the existence of the body.
God as cosmic architect, "arch-builder." French, 13th century.
Some assert that Hume exploded all such proofs, by denying the very relationship of cause to effect. I think his argument is tautological. But if you accept Hume, this deals proofs of God only a glancing blow; on the other hand, it entirely invalidates science.
Some assert that Hume exploded the use of miracles as proof, by arguing that miracles are so intrinsically unlikely we must dismiss all such accounts. But no philosopher relies on miracles as their proof of God. And Hume's argument here is also tautological: if we dismiss all claims of miracle as improbable, how do we establish how probable they actually are?
Richard Dawkins asserts, at this point, “Which God?” as if this is a real problem. No, it is a nonsensical question. God is by definition the Supreme Being. There can be only one, and the name one uses is conceptually irrelevant. Monotheists necessarily do not believe it is possible to worship different Gods. Nor, for that matter, do polytheists—the Romans uncontroversially identified their Jupiter with the Greek Zeus and the Carthaginian Baal, their Mercury with the Greek Hermes and the German Wotan, and so on and on. There is a limited, universally recognized, pantheon. Only atheists are apparently confused by this.
Hittite "weather god," i.e., Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, or Thor. All the same guy.
So, there is a God. And the fact of there being a God is an overwhelming fact. It changes everything. If there is a God, nothing is random, nothing is chance, nothing is secret, and nothing is too improbable to have happened. If there is a God, nothing else matters, but understanding him and his will for us. It is surpassingly odd that we are not all hard at work at this.
A friend, more or less an atheist, having recently watched a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair, asks some questions on religion. I respond.
How can you believe in God? I'd like to, but I can't.
One of the biggest lies we are all handed these days is the claim that the existence of God is in some doubt. No faith is required on this score. Almost all the great philosophers since Aristotle, 2,300 years ago, have given proofs of God's existence. You can ignore them, but it takes a supreme effort of will to reject them all. We have far stronger reasons to believe in the existence of God than in the existence of the word we perceive through our physical senses, or in our own existence. Yet nobody ever questions those, do they?
The real issue is usually that people do not want to believe in God. Look at Hitchens. He is clearly angry at God. How much sense would it make to be angry at a nonexistent entity?
Pas le Dieu des philosophes.
Can't we at least keep religion out of politics?
No problem. The concept of the separation of church and state is a specifically Christian one. It comes from the New Testament--”render unto Caesar what is Caesar's; render unto God what is God's.” “No man can serve two masters,” and so forth. The point, of course, is that true Christians should reject politics, not that true politicians should reject Christianity. The implicit suspicion of the political enterprise that this Christian idea produced has led directly to making governments in Christian countries more honest, less intrusive, and more respectful of human rights than governments anywhere else.
But this separation of church and state necessarily does not mean religion should not be heard from in the public square. If that happens, we lose the true separation of church and state: there is no longer the independent check on government that the separation is meant to provide, and the religious are no longer free to be fully, expressively religious. And it certainly also does not mean that the devout should be excluded from public service. That, too, is not the separation of church and state, but its opposite, a belief system sponsored and enforced by the state.
God's penmanship
Hitchens won the recent debate with Blair—arguing that religion has not been a force for good in the world. Not my opinion--by audience poll. Isn't he right? Look at the Indian parochial schools, the priest abuse scandals, September 11, Iraq, Afghanistan... need I go on?
Taking your examples in turn:
Indian parochial schools—the churches are being scapegoated now because they were the only folks back then who cared enough about Indian kids to give them an education. Those now levelling crazy accusations against the churches would have been the same “progressives” then forcing sterilization on the native people and leaving their children to starve or die of TB. There is precious little hard evidence of any kind of sexual abuse in the residential schools, and it is almost certain that the level of sexual abuse in the residential schools was lower than it is in the average public school, not to mention the average exclusive upper class residential school.
The “priest abuse scandals”--any reputable studies show the rate of sexual abuse of minors among the Catholic clergy is lower than the rate of sexual abuse of minors among clergy of other denominations, which is probably lower again than the rate of sexual abuse of minors among the general population. The detected rate among Catholic clergy since about 1980 is very close to zero. The only reason Catholic priests are in the news in this regard is because journalists and the secularizing elites in general hate Catholicism, and are determined to pin something on them. This is payback for the Church opposing abortion. Secular elites always at least secretly hate religion, and will move against it whenever they feel they can get away with it—religions, with their insistence on moral behaviour, are checks against the will and the free rein of the powerful. It is interesting and not coincidental that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used exactly the same charges against the Catholic priesthood: that they must be sexual perverts and child molesters.
September 11—not to endorse the act or the people who committed it, who were common garden-variety assassins, losers just wanting to be famous, but Arab Muslims are fundamentally on the defensive here. It was Western secularism and Western feminism that attacked first, objecting systematically to pious Muslim traditions such as veiling and the separation of the sexes. Because they are relatively powerless, Muslims and Arabs resort to terrorism, as the relatively powerless have throughout history: as my Irish ancestors did in their day, or Ukrainian resistance fighters did under Nazi occupation, or John Brown in his. A nasty and a sad business, with many innocent victims; but it is not religion that has caused the conflict. It is secularism and feminism. If you wiped out religion, people would just find another fulcrum for their prejudices; and this result would itself be no more a just solution to the problem than wiping out the Jews would have been a just solution. Would you blame the Jews for the war?
Iraq--Saddam Hussein's regime was a secularist regime that modelled itself first on Hitler, then on Stalin. Saddam himself modelled his public image on Stalin right down to the moustache. The official creed of his Ba'athist was not just secularism, but atheism; seems odd then to blame Iraq on religion. He made a show of embracing Islam late in his career, when it looked like enlisting the support of the devout might be to his political benefit. Same for Muammar
So the solution to the problem of war and conflict is obvious: get rid of secularism, and get rid of Marxism.
Like World War II and the Cold War, it was secularism that caused the Iraq War. Sadly, though, the Americans, when they came in, thanks to feminism, failed to respect religious and cultural norms all that much better than Saddam did. Rumsfeld went on public record to say the Iraqis would not be allowed to have a religious government if they voted for it. If the Americans had not insisted on imposing secularism and feminism, I suspect the war in Iraq could have been over about when that famous banner on an American ship said it was (“Mission Accomplished”).
Afghanistan is the same story, only more so: first the Soviets ploughed into Afghanistan attempting to wipe out all their religious and cultural traditions in the name of secularism, Marxism, and atheism. The Taliban formed in defence against this attack. As soon as the Russians were driven out, Western feminism almost immediately began demanding a new invasion. NATO finally did it, if not in direct response, and once there took up right where the Soviets left off, trying their best to wipe out the only two institutions in Afghanistan that still worked, the family and the mosque. Thank feminism and secularism for the deaths and the terrible financial cost.
Somewhat similarly, the clericalist regime in Iran came to power as an immediate reaction to an aggressively secularizing, “modernizing” (and much less democratic) government under the Shah.
You may go on. More anti-religious charges, by all means. This is fun.
The bird is the word.
How do you see God...as man, child, Holy Ghost? When I had faith I believed in a huge thumb just waiting in his vengeful way to crush me for any action, thought or deed done accidentally or on purpose. As I grew older, as a dictator.
Christians have been given by God himself a very clear picture of God as God wishes us to think of him. We should see him as a thirtyish Jewish man, probably brawny, having been a carpenter, and bearded. And most perfectly portrayed at the moment that he died for us, nailed on a cross—the essential event of history.
God is of course, pure spirit, and so does not really “look like” anything. If he has a physical body, it is the created universe as a whole, which, while fallen, still expresses his nature. But it is very useful to have a mental image for contemplation, and this is the one he has given us.
He also chose to appear to us as a white dove, so that is necessarily a legitimate image. He has chosen to appear as a hand or finger pointing or writing, so your own image is pretty good. In Cebu, it is traditional to portray him as a child—as we do at Christmas. Also correct. A flame or a burning bush is also a good image. So is a lamb. All express some symbolic truth about him.
Then there is the old man with a beard. The justification for that depiction is that the Bible refers to him several times as “the Ancient of Days”; and Jesus refers to God frequently as “Father.” It's okay, given that we are supposed to think of God as our father, but it seems to me it is actually much less defensible theologically. It flirts with breaking the OT prohibition against specific depictions of the Creator. Why go there?
He is the opposite of a dictator. When Christopher Hitchens stood up in front of that audience in Toronto, and complained that God was a “kind of celestial dictator like Kim Jong-Il,” he was automatically disproving his point. If Christopher Hitchens stood up in front of a public audience in a real dictatorship, like North Korea, and complained about that dictatorship, do you think he would even have been permitted to finish his speech? Do you think you would ever see it on YouTube? And God is all-powerful. But what, exactly, did you see happen to Hitchens? Exactly nothing.
God will never violate our free will. This is the opposite of a dictator; dictatorship is all about violating free will. And religion, unlike the state, never compels anyone to do anything. A human dictator is a being who has no legitimate claim to power, but exercises power in almost all possible circumstances. God is a being who has every legitimate claim to all power, but almost never exercises it. God is the absolute opposite of the human dictator.
Despite this obvious truth, what becomes a problem for many people—and it was a problem for me too—is that, especially as we are growing up, unscrupulous and abusive powers, including politicians, parents, teachers, secular authorities of all kinds, bullies of all kinds, will whenever it is to their advantage co-opt for themselves supposed religious authority, and use falsifications of morality against the weak and impressionable to support their own control. Saddam is a good example: when a religious revival came along, he cynically tried to co-opt it, having a copy of the Qur'an written in his own blood, and putting the words “God is Great” on the Iraqi flag. Ghaddafi in Libya has done more or less the same. So, in effect, did the September 11 terrorists; in 1980, they would simply have done the same thing in the name of Marx. Precisely because he is not a dictator, God will not step in and prevent such abominations.
For anyone who has been abused, therefore, it becomes essential to understand that they might have been fed a load of crap growing up, more or less precisely to separate them from the comfort and protection that God and religion can give. It is essential not to rely on what we might have been told as a child, or indeed as an adult, but to make our own careful examination with ears and eyes and minds and hearts open. The devil himself can and will quote scripture.
Hell of a first step.
Who is He to say "I am not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs from under thy table"? How dare I be told I'm not good enough?? Who the hell (pun intended) was anyone to tell me this?
I had to look up that quote. Catholics do not use it. Apparently Anglican. A bit over the top to my taste; smacks to me of exaggerated false piety.
But, frankly, don't be silly. Of course you are not worthy to so much as gather crumbs from under his table. Reality check: he is God. You are not. The difference between being God and not being God is in principle infinite.
Modern psychologists and educators have done incalculable harm by pushing a cult of “self-esteem.” This is purely the devil's council: Lucifer fell for pride. Most people demonstrably have too much self-esteem, not too little. I recall a poll run by Time magazine some years ago, asking the general US public who they thought would go to heaven. Oprah Winfrey came third on the list. Mother Theresa came second. And first, by a large margin? Themselves.
Most people, in other words, have an opinion of themselves that is so high it is objectively delusional. They hardly need more encouragement in that direction.
From my own experience, contrary to everything we have been told, a lack of self-esteem is not the problem even for those of us who are depressed, or depressive, or have been abused. We don't need to be told we are always right—in fact, this approach is guaranteed to make depression worse. What we need, always, is to be reminded that right is right, wrong is wrong, truth is truth and lies are lies.
Bosch: Light at the end of the tunnel
How do you see heaven and hell? Real places where we are cognisant? Or otherwise?
I have a lot of personal opinions on the nature of heaven and hell, but that is what they are, personal opinions. I don't want to go into it here, not because I think Heaven is impossible or even difficult to conceive, but because any descriptions are highly likely to be misunderstood. Jesus himself resorted to parables, so I am unlikely to be able to do better.
They are real places, but not physical places as we understand “physical”--you are of course never going to see heaven with a telescope. They are outside of any limits of space and time. I believe we will be fully conscious in heaven or in hell, but “consciousness” will also be something different from “consciousness” as we use the term now. “We see now as through a glass darkly, but then face to face.”
The essential feature of heaven, of course, is that we will be directly and completely aware of the presence of God. The essential feature of hell is that we will be directly and completely aware of the absence of God.
Those who go to hell will actually choose to go there, just as Lucifer did.
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