WILL THE REAL GOD PLEASE STAND UP?

‘God made Man in his image, and Man, being a gentleman, returned the favour.’ Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The one thing on the subject of God that both Judæo-Christian-Muslim religions and ‘science’ believe in is that He is, or isn’t, was or wasn’t a geezer like thee and me.

What he appears to be, in both cases, is wishful thinking born of mistranslation.

An enduring mystery for religionists, and a useful justification for career atheists and materialists, is why God would let things go as they have. How could he let the little children suffer if he is all-powerful? Why has his only apparent intervention been to send the occasional prophet or messiah?

Humans have always assigned responsibilities to other entities to keep them from getting the blame for things, or to excuse failures and lapses.

Early Man had wind-gods, water-sprites, lords of chaos, auguries and portents. His modern equivalents have climate change, market economics, selfish genes, Higgs-Boson particles and immigration.

No wonder we are in  a bit of a mess with all these supernatural agencies ranged against us.

What can we poor weak specimens do against the fates that besiege us? We know that we came in to being by a process of divine command or mere accident and mechanical evolution. Only the high priests of God or genetic engineering can change the programme or the will of God.

Those things are beyond us. We need the prophets and the BBC to make it simple for us by constant repetition and neatly packaged parable.

If God made us in his own image, was he a craven, dopey, credulous, racist, monetarist, centrist, leftist, rightist, Darwinist, liberal, pædophile, serial monogamist, climate denying celebrity chef, drone operator, spy and atheist? He’d have to be all these things and more – some of them good.

Or must it be that we are missing a point somewhere?

In the learned texts swept away by the current religion of materialism, God, who purportedly made us in his image, was (is) immortal and invisible…

Science says nothing is immortal and anything which is not visible can be made so by more powerful instruments.

But the human spirit is not a minute particle. It is what has conceived and guided all of the above. It is the elephant in the room: not too small to be detected, but too big to be seen.

We should remind ourselves that ancient works such as the Veda, the Torah and the Old Testament were not part of some sectarian marketing promo. They were efforts to sum up the totality of Man’s understanding of the universe in which he lived. Far from initiatives to swell the faithful, they were simply distillations of what passed in those days for the height of scientific and historical knowledge, laced with quotes from authorities to add the force of peer review to their conclusions, and a bit of practical advice in the form of public health infomercials on food, family and fornication.

There were no specialisms then; those with knowledge, those who studied the world and the life forms around them, did so in a holistic way. They also didn’t represent any faction against another, except that in their small world of influence, they shared their knowledge with those of their own tribe and neighbours.

To that degree, they tried to write down and pass on those understandings that had been gathered and disseminated orally since the dawn of the quest for such.

Without the necessity to impose an alternative world view, they were as honest and embracive as they could be, a proposition reinforced by the experiences and pillars of understanding shared by diverse texts from various remote cultures and regions of the globe. If their dates vary, reports of visitations from outsiders are consistent from the Dogons to the Olmecs to the Israelites, and most people of the Earth have a race record of a great flood.

For thousands of years, observers and thinkers had added to these stores of knowledge. These were not ignorant savages. They represented the vanguard of the human quest to get to the bottom of things. They described their discoveries in the terms of their times; they used metaphor and similes to express the previously unexpressable and they called upon myths to provide working hypotheses.

Like the symbolic Adam and Eve, they were led more than once up the garden path, but they were among the giants upon whose shoulders Newton and the genuine fathers of science were enabled to see beyond the rabbit-proof fence.

Unfortunately, since his time, science has turned from the pure pursuit of knowledge to a dogmatic belief system. Much of Newton’s work was dismissed as not fitting in with the creation myths and anti-God stance that lay at the foundations of the newly institutionalised subject, and the conclusions that had informed and guided human existence from cave-dwelling to civilisation, from dark age to renaissance, were discredited and overruled by those whose gnostic-fascism led them to believe that they alone, of all mankind, were possessed of the requisite degree of godliness to lay down the law about what was right, wrong and even possible; what is normal and what is paranormal; what is real and what is delusion; what existed within the respectability of ‘science’ and what was beyond the newly creosoted pale.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository

GOD THE BUILDER – What took him so long?

Raquel Welch, 1,000,000 years BC.

The Old Testament description of building our world in a week is regularly invoked by lazy pundits, and swallowed by lazier listeners, as not only ridiculing the Christian godhead, but as a justification for dispensing entirely with Man’s rich spiritual heritage.

In its own way though, it is no more absurd than any other attempt to explain or rewrite history.

Nowadays it would be told in a different way – by one of those earnest historians who have spent so much time gazing at bygone times that they have loosed their moorings and now speak of the past in the present tense. Accompanied by as many flashes and crashes as can be contrived, and waving their arms frantically to gain our notoriously fickle attention, they would say something to the effect of: ‘So Jehovah is out on his own. Genetics tell us that his father was probably a mason, and his mother a flower-arranger. He’s looking at the empty firmament, and he wants to interact with it; to have a creation event.’

But the author of Genesis and the TV pundit are both imposing their concepts, their mores, and their second-hand ideas in the name of reporting or analysis.

If Jehovah was a god in the terms in which he is described elsewhere, he wouldn’t have needed nearly as long to do the job. He could have said, ‘Let there be whatever’ on the Monday and lo, he could have putteth His feet up for the rest of the week. The time period was put in there to sex up the document; to overwhelm the reader with the sheer number of things brought into being at one celestial throne-sitting.

People always ask creative types: ‘How long did it take you to do that?’ He knew no good would come of telling them it was done in the twinkling of an eye. The time put in is what gives it its value.

And time is at the heart of the dilemma here – the great debate between the creationist and the already-there-ist. If he built the place in a week and put the first people in it by Friday, how do you explain the fact that, between the formation of the Earth and the arrival of Raquel Welch in a rudely fashioned Mesozoic bikini, dinosaurs had been roaming the place for donkey’s years unmolested by anything even vaguely humanoid?

Rather than dismissing it out of hand, there are a number of ways you could come at this. For example, if Jehovah brought time into being when he was doing all that other stuff, then the whole frame of reference changes.

Maybe, on the other hand, the Earth didn’t get up to speed straight away, allowing for much longer days in which he could not only get the work done here but take time off to quote for other jobs. If Adam was on his own for much of that time, it’s not unlikely that the trilobites, dinosaurs and scary-toothed tigers failed to run across him. He might well have cleaved to Raquel, given half a chance, but the fact is that the whole story is being intentionally misinterpreted by both sides for their own ends.

A mere couple of thousand years ago you couldn’t move for gods − plural, specialised, all-powerful and not. Old Jehovah, as his name suggests, was what he was, but he was not what he was later cracked up to be.

Just as the gods on Mount Olympus concerned themselves with the beings and the doings of Rome, so he was the god-in-chief of the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers at the period under discussion. To the people living therein he was the lord their god, and he never claimed any other wasness.

Then the Jews, the Mohammedans and the Christians went over to the new-fangled idea of a single God in charge of everything and, in the ensuing muddle, Jehovah ceased to was what he was, becoming what he was not, first in his own land and later, thanks to a confection dreamed up in Rome, all over the world. An easy mistake to make since, like Jehovah, the Christian god is what He is, but what He is is not so jealous or bad-tempered as his namesake, but rather more all-seeing, all-knowing and all-forgiving, at least up to a point. It’s likely this case of mistaken identity has had much to do with the disappointment that has caused the falling off in congregations in recent times.

It’s all you can do to get Him to smite anyone, and He lets people get away with murder, while keeping the faithful under uncomfortable and unwarranted surveillance; God the builder become God the chief-constable.

The worldwide dissemination of the New Testament inevitably caused numerous confusions, with or without the tinkering and mistranslations with which it has been plagued. As it was, people set its stories and parables in landscapes of their own experience. But the biggest confusion came from combining the Old and New Testaments together as if the former had any part in Christianity beyond being the foundation from which Jesus Christ was to break away.

He wanted everyone to ‘turn the other cheek’. It was some kind of Middle-Eastern Mr Angry  who demanded an eye for an eye. There’s no conflict until you try to reconcile the non-Christian Old Testament with the more or less entirely Christian New.

From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository