THE RANDLE REPORT

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