Para. 1 – 4: Because the violence inherent in the Abrahamic monotheistic religions
has contributed to bringing the human race to the brink of extinction, it is
necessary to examine the basis for their existence and for their claims to
authority over humanity.
Para. 5 – 7: The
existence of several conflicting Abrahamic monotheistic religions is proof that
all are false, because no Abrahamic god, if real, would permit the existence or
worship of other gods, which would necessarily
be “false gods” (delusions).
Para. 8 – 19: The Abrahamic
doctrines that God is not only omniscient and supremely wise, but also totally
and exclusively benevolent, conflict with the doctrine that God is the
all-powerful creator and ruler of the Universe—because the Universe includes Evil: malevolence, violence, destruction, and suffering, which should have been
excluded from it by God’s wisdom and benevolence. Therefore, if the first two doctrines are
true, the third is false, and vice versa.
And therefore the Abrahamic religions, which (in their present forms)
promulgate the simultaneous truth of all three, are false.
Para. 20 – 45: The
insight that religion is a psychological phenomenon is based on observable
facts and logical inferences; and the psychology worked out by the psychiatrist
Carl Gustav Jung is the most credible explanation for religious beliefs. (Jung did not make this claim—I do.)
Para. 20 – 30: The
principal elements of Jungian psychology, especially the Archetypes of the
Collective Unconscious, provide the basis of this insight.
Para. 31 – 45: Everywhere and at all times of which scholarship has cognizance, the contents of the
unconscious mind have been perceived by the ego and projected onto supposed physical and metaphysical worlds as the supernatural entities
of religions. The psychic mechanism that
accomplishes or gives form to these projections is the innate and universal
human tendency to personify (anthropomorphize) everything that human beings
perceive: things of the material, physical world of time and space that we seem
to have in common, as well as things (including the archetypes) that seem to
originate in human minds or elsewhere.
Para. 46 – 48: Innate
xenophobia and the predatory instinct, two results of the evolution of the
human species, are the sources of the violence authorized and mandated by the
Abrahamic religions through their claims to sole and exclusive reality and
authority, in contrast to other religions.
These things make Abrahamic monotheism a danger to the human race.
Para. 49 – 50: Summary
and conclusion.
ON
HUMAN SUFFERING AND THE CONCEPT OF GOD
The kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21
Para. 1 – 4: The violence inherent in the Abrahamic monotheistic religions makes it necessary to examine the basis for their existence and for their claims to authority over humanity.
1. Monotheism is the belief that there is only one god. Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic religions that trace their origins
back to the mythic Hebrew patriarch Abraham. In our time, the
world powers characterized by the monotheistic “Abrahamic” religions, as well as Russian and Chinese atheism, are waging a
war to the death among themselves for dominion over human minds and for control
of the resources of the earth. Because
the consequences of this struggle may include the destruction of most of
humanity, it is necessary to analyze their common, though mutually exclusive,
claims to supremacy.
1.1. For the present, I
will focus on the problems and difficulties inherent in monotheism, because we are all born pre-disposed to believe in
some sort of supernatural being or force; and because monotheistic religions, even though they lack the inner logical consistency of atheism, have
marginalized (through the historical accident of technological superiority) all
other kinds of belief. Technology,
however, is only the means; the cause, the motor, is the innate instinct of
aggression—the compulsion to dominate and control or destroy others, which the Abrahamic religions, like the Russian and Chinese atheistic totalitarian systems, have incorporated and institutionalized. In this way, Abrahamic monotheism has become
a threat to the human race.
2. In relation to human
beliefs, two things are universal: The first is our tendency to perceive,
produce, or figure to ourselves images of at least one overwhelmingly powerful
supernatural personality. According to
the Abrahamic religions in their present forms, only one of these personalities
exists. Using their English-language
names, in order from the earliest to the latest, the Judaic deity is called
“Yaweh;” the Christian deity is called “God;” and the Islamic deity is called
“Allah.” In this essay I will use the
term “God” to refer to any and every monotheistic deity, but without implying
that any such entity exists, except as a component or function of the minds of those that
believe in it.
2.1. Christianity
developed out of Judaism, and Islam developed out of both of the older
religions, so that their histories and ideas partly overlap. In each case the later religion claims to
have attained the full and final revelation of the one true god. In each case the older religion denies this
claim. Nevertheless, as varieties of
Abrahamic monotheism, they have much in common, and that is what I will discuss
in this essay.
2.2. The Abrahamic
“God” is believed to be “perfect” and “transcendent”: eternal, infinite,
omnipotent, omniscient and all-good (a concept that includes absolute
benevolence); and it demands that the entire human race recognize it and
worship it and obey it as the sole and unique possessor of these
attributes.
2.3. The second
universal characteristic of human beliefs
(because from birth we depend on others) is the need to believe in this
powerful personality as the creator, source, and cause of everything, especially of
things that we cannot obtain for ourselves, and as an explanation for why
things happen beyond our control and expectations. These things include the origin of the world
as well as natural and man-made disasters, accidents, tragedies, and the
suffering caused by other people.
Confronted with these things, human beings cannot avoid, cannot resist,
cannot prevent themselves from asking “Why?”—and in the absence of any clear
and immediate natural explanation, they resort to a supernatural one: it is
God’s will, which must not be questioned.
3. Because the concept
of God is so bound up in the question of the origin of the world/universe for
many people, I will digress for the space of one para-graph: It should be noted here that to ask “Why” and
“How” is a uniquely human behavior; questions of causation and motivation are
uniquely human concepts, arising from the human brain’s reactions to and
adaptations to the conditions of life on the planet, and may have great
survival value. But many questions, such
as those of the origin of the universe, have no perceptible survival value now
and may never have any. And even if they
did, it is entirely possible that for this type of question there may be no
answer or explanation now or ever. Certainly
the universe has no obligation to provide any. One may infer therefore that the Kalamitous argument for the existence
of a god is nugatory. (See the essay/blog post “About the ‘Kalam’ Cosmological Argument” elsewhere in this blog.)
3.1. On the other hand,
the ways that we treat one another are demonstrably influenced, re-inforced, or
modified by our monotheistic concept of the deity. For this reason, we should ask, and try to
answer, all relevant questions about it.
4. The compulsion to ask
“Why?” and the supposed revelation of God’s will as the answer are the reasons
for which all cultures have practiced religions: a religion is the set of
beliefs, values, and practices through which an individual or a group relates
to its god or gods. Throughout human
history, different social groups have espoused different religions, and every
society has believed that its religion provides the most efficacious means to
approach and appease the god or gods.
(The polytheistic Greeks and Romans of Antiquity were exceptions to the
rule of exclusivity—on a few occasions they welcomed foreign cults.)
4.1. But the belief in
the exclusive possession of the truth, a truth that mandates and authorizes the
subjugation or extermination of all other groups, is especially characteristic
of the Abrahamic religions, each of which has attempted repeatedly to eradicate
and extirpate other religions and to exterminate their adherents, in obedience
to a supposed divine command.
Para. 5 – 7: The existence of several conflicting Abrahamic monotheistic religions is proof that all are false, because no Abrahamic god, if real, would permit the existence or worship of other gods, which would necessarily be delusions.
5. Unfortunately
for monotheists, the
fact of multiple mutually exclusive monotheistic religions presents a problem: If there were only one God, all-knowing, all-powerful, and
all-good, that required that all human beings should receive its unique
revelations, why would this divinity allow many disparate concepts of itself to
exist? Necessarily, if one of these
concepts is true, then all the other concepts must be false. Why would the one true divinity allow
numerous conflicting (and therefore false) concepts of itself to exist? And yet they do exist.
6. If there were only
one real, objectively existing deity such as the Abrahamic God, that insists on
being known, adored, proclaimed, and imposed on all peoples, to the exclusion
of all else, wouldn’t this divinity permit only one religion, the one that
correctly worshiped the one true deity, itself?
(“Real, objectively existing” means “transcending both the human mind
and the physical, material world of space and time, that we seem to have in
common; existing and acting independently of, and outside as well as inside,
the human psyche.”) In this case,
wouldn’t all human beings share the same religion?
6.1. What reason would
the one true God have for creating or permitting mutually hostile religions,
only one of which could be true and acceptable, and for setting social groups
against each other and fomenting cruel “holy wars” throughout human history,
like those that we see emanating from the Middle East today? What would an all-wise, all-good, and
all-powerful God gain by causing such conflict?
Unless God were a perverse, sadistic power that desired to cause
conflict, and enjoyed the suffering that results from it, all people would
share the same religion. But we
don’t.
7. Therefore, given the almost universal conflicts, each having a religious dimension, throughout the last three thousand years or more, with their persecutions, enslavements, massacres, and genocides, monotheists are faced with a dilemma: either they must accept that there is no single all-powerful, benevolent God who is to be worshiped in the only one correct way—or they must admit that the one existing true God desires that humanity suffer the internecine conflicts, the violence and the physical and emotional pain that historically it has suffered. In the absence of any factual evidence except human suffering, which alternative is more probable or believable?
Para. 8 – 19: The Abrahamic doctrines that God is not only omniscient and supremely wise, but also totally and exclusively benevolent, conflict with the doctrine that God is the all-powerful creator and ruler of the Universe—because the Universe includes malevolence, violence, and suffering, which should have been excluded from it by God’s wisdom and benevolence. Therefore, if the first two doctrines are true, the third is false, and vice versa. And therefore the Abrahamic religions, which promulgate the simultaneous truth of all three, are false.
8. Behind the previous questions is a more fundamental problem: The monotheistic dogma that God is all-powerful necessitates the belief that the deity causes everything, and “everything” includes even Evil: malevolence, violence, destruction, and suffering; yet the equally dogmatic insistence that God is all-good forces the Abrahamic theologians to deny that conclusion. This blatant contradiction undermines and vitiates their monotheism. All their attempts to circumvent it have been untenable, as I shall now demonstrate.
9. The traditional
attempt to deny God’s responsibility for human destruction and suffering claims
that an evil entity, Satan or the Devil (assisted by his subordinates, the
demons, or other evil spirits), causes these things either directly or through
the manipulation of gullible and egotistical people; but—leaving aside, for the
moment, the questions of why and how the Devil (or Evil) came to exist—this is
to advance an idea that contradicts the doctrines that God is all-powerful and
all-good. If the Devil causes human suffering
without the consent of God, then the Devil’s power defies that of God—that
means that God has little or no power over the Devil—and therefore God is not
all-powerful. It could even mean that in
effect we have not one God, but two, for the Devil would be a powerful evil
god, as in Manichaeism or as in Zoroastrianism.
10. On the other hand,
if God is omnipotent, then the Devil (if there is one) operates only with God’s
permission, as in the Abrahamic “Book of Genesis,” “Book of Job,” and Quran. And if God gives permission to cause
destruction and suffering, then God is not completely and exclusively
benevolent; God is not all-good. This is
the conclusion at which the Swiss psychiatrist, scholar, and cultural
anthropologist Carl Gustav Jung arrived, as explained in his Answer to
Job—although, as a scientist, he was concerned only with “the
God-image in the human psyche,” and not with the supposed absolute truth of any theology.
11. Jung’s conclusion is
not surprising, because his father, both of his grand-fathers, and no less than
eight uncles on both sides of his family were clergy-men of the Swiss Reformed
Church, a strict Calvinist sect within the Evangel-ical group of Fundamentalist
Protestant Christianity since 1549; and his conclusion is what “Reformed”
theology simultaneously implies and denies. (Evangelicals believe that only the Protestant Bible, excluding
traditional teachings and ecclesiastical authority, is valid as the source of
Christian doctrine: Martin Luther’s “sola scriptura.” Fundamentalists, Muslim as well as Christian, believe that the sacred scriptures of their religion are direct communications from the only real god, and that these are therefore literally true and correct and binding on all human beings. They reject as false and valueless all empirical evidence and all logical reasoning, including all conclusions of scientific investigations, that do not support the believer’s theology.)
11.1. Fundamentalist theology asserts that the deity creates sentient beings—us—whom it not only deprives of the capacity to choose Good over Evil, but whom it also actively deceives into choosing Evil—after having already fore-doomed them (us) to eternal torment in Hell for not choosing Good over Evil. This is why Jesus is quoted as praying, “Our Father Who art in Heaven, ... lead us not into temptation....” (et ne nos inducas in tentationem....). And it is clearly stated in Jean Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, Chapters 21 through 24, especially Sections 12 and 13 of Chapter 24. Something very similar to this can be found in the Islamic Quran, Chapter 2, verses 7 through 21. Logically, therefore, if the word “good” has any meaning at all, this is a “God” who is not “All-Good.”
11.2. (I focus on
Fundamentalism here not only because of its relation to Jung, but also because
fundamentalist Evangelicanism has been, after funda-mentalist Islam, the most
extreme and the most aggressively proselytized Abrahamic religion. But, except for certain special pleading among
different theological groups, what I describe here as Fundamentalist
theology applies to all Abrahamic religions, including Islam. And all references to “God,” are to be
construed as references to the Hebraic/Judaic “Yaweh” and to the Islamic
“Allah” as well.)
11.3. But at this point
we must address The Elephant In The Room: What constitutes “Good,” and what
constitutes “Evil”? Keeping in mind that
we have only mundane human language with which to reason about abstract, even
metaphysical, things, we may provisionally define “Good” as that which is
worthy of praise, reverence, and loyalty.
And “Evil” may be defined provisionally as that which is worthy of
condemnation and rejection. But on what
basis? Why? For Abrahamic monotheists, “Good” is that
which obeys God’s will; and “Evil” is that which resists, rejects, or disobeys
God’s will. Why? Because the Abrahamic God is the omnipotent
and omniscient Creator of everything, and therefore is the owner and the master
and the judge of everything, not subject to any judgment from any source or by
any standard.
11.4. And, according to Abrahamic theology, God’s will is
that we, His weak, subordinate, and inferior creatures, must adore and submit
and obey, especially because our little minds and languages are really suitable
only to the human affairs out of which they evolved, even when we say, as we
must, that the Abrahamic God transcends (i. e., includes) both “Good” and
“Evil.” (Or, as Yaweh demonstrated for
Job, Might makes Right.)
11.5. But what about
us, God’s creatures? Are we “evil,” even
“depraved,” as Fundamentalist theology, following the Abrahamic prophets,
insists? The Abrahamic God—who has known
everything, past, present, and future, from before the Creation; for whom
nothing is impossible and to whom nothing is forbidden—created everything by an
act of will informed by perfect fore-knowledge of the future; and by that act
of Creation, God’s will pre-determined everything—down to the least impulse,
thought, and act of every creature.
11.6. Necessarily, by
the terms of Abrahamic theology, nothing has been done or can be done without
God’s foreknowledge and will; God’s will, manifest in the act of Creation, has
determined whatever is done. This conjunction of foreknowledge and will means
that every creature was created specifically to do exactly what it does. Every creature obeys God’s will because that
is the only thing that it can do, having been created in the divine
foreknowledge that it would do just that and nothing else.
11.7. But if everything
necessarily obeys God’s will, then nothing is evil; there is no “Evil.” And if there is no Evil, then there is no
basis, other than God’s arbitrary whim, for condemning sinners to Hell; after
all, they have had no alternative but to do God’s will. Yet God does condemn them. Fundamental-ists call this dispensation
“just,” which it is not, and they also call it “His
pleasure”—two word-choices that I find provocative and disturbing.
11.8. These
contradictions are the rock on which Abrahamic monotheism shatters. Fundamentalist theologians
have tried to evade it by inventing different varieties, shades,
exceptions, suspensions, abeyances, or special cases of divine will (e.g., the distinctions between “predestination” and
“predetermination,” and between “single predestination” and “double
predestination,” in addition to the doctrines of “partial fore-knowledge,”
“Free Will,” and “reprobation,” and “Abrogation” and even “False Hadiths,”
etc.), supported by appeals to diverse and disparate authorities. But all that is casuistry, like the rules
that boys make up during back-lot ball games.
11.9. So what is “Evil,”
and what is “Good”? We weak, vulnerable,
contin-gent and dependent human beings, can know “Good” only as that which
tends to nurture and protect, and “Evil” only as that which tends to inflict
suffering and to destroy. It may be
objected that any earthly application of this is relative and subjective, to a
degree; but as vulnerable, necessitous, and supposedly pre-determined creatures, we have
no alternative. So, insofar as the
Abrahamic God, by any name—“Yaweh,” or “God,” or “Allah”—tends to inflict
suffering and to destroy, this deity is not “Good.” I am right to say this, because even if I
were created a pre-determined being, I am sentient and in possession of an
innate and undeniable sense of justice.
12. A typical
theological attempt to evade Jung’s conclusion claims that God wants to “test”
us through our suffering—but that claim involves a denial of the doctrine that
God is omniscient as well as the one that God is all-good: a person is tested
when the tester does not know something, and needs to use the test to obtain
information. (A test is a procedure
devised and carried out to reveal something hitherto unknown or
indeterminate.) If God
tests us, that means that God does not know something; and, in that case, God
is not all-knowing. On the other hand, if
the “tester” has fore-knowledge of the results of the “test,” as, for example,
through divine omniscience, then the procedure is not a “test” at all—it is
only a demonstration of divine omniscience.
13. A clever apologist
might try to evade the latter conclusion by claiming that God “tests” us in
order to make us find out something about ourselves—and here the doctrine of
“Free Will” is often invoked—but God’s tests involve severe suffering,
emotional as well as physical. And this
suffering is inflicted not only on the person who is tested, but on other
persons as well: family members, loved ones, by-standers . . . whole
populations, millions of people, in fact.
Why would a benevolent and omniscient God require and inflict such suffering? Furthermore, an all-powerful God could
achieve anything simply by willing it.
Why would a benevolent and all-powerful God resort to this extreme of
pain and suffering?
14. One way in which the
doctrine of “Free Will” is problematic for God’s multiple perfections deserves
a little amplification here: According to the Abrahamic theologians, when
millions of victims are tortured to death or die of disease or starvation,
well, that is simply because everyone, even a genocidal sociopath—a Hitler or a
Stalin, a Mao Dze-dung, an Idi Amin, a Pol Pot, a Kim Jong-Un, a Boko Haram, a Baghdadi or some
other warlord—must be allowed to exercise his “Free Will” to choose between
Good and Evil. Is this the dispensation
of a deity that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good?
15. This objection also
applies to the idea that suffering is the punishment for sin: How is it that an
omniscient and omnipotent God waits for a genocidal dictator, or even for an
otherwise insignificant person (a drunk driver, or an abusive parent or spouse,
or a greedy and irresponsible financial officer in a multi-billion-dollar
corporation), to sin in a way that causes immeasurable pain to any number of
other persons, and only then (according to the Prophets and the Preachers)
punishes the sinner by destroying someone else—a loved one—or by inflicting the
occasional famine, or flood, or earthquake, or plague, or economic collapse on
an entire region? And, egregiously, only
in some cases, as if at random, but not in others? Yet the Abrahamic sacred literature is made
up of these stories.
16. Once again, God
would have demonstrated that God is neither omniscient nor all-good. And to answer that “perhaps there is no other
way” is to admit that God is not all-powerful. Clearly, Abrahamic monotheism, concocted of superstitions, contradictions, and factitious rationalizations, is neither intellectually respectable nor believable.
17. There is another
possible solution to the dilemma, although I hesitate to mention it, because to
do so in areas of the world accessible to fanatics of the Abrahamic religions
is to risk being slaughtered by murderous jihadist savages: I refer to
polytheism, the idea that there are many gods, not just one. Many ancient religions worshiped more than
one god; and Shinto, Hinduism, and a number of other Asian and African
religions, like those that gave rise to Voodoo and Candomblé, still do. The existence of numerous divinities, each
with its own nature, preferences, and aims, might very well explain the
existence of the many conflicts in the world.
17.1 I do not propose polytheism as the true explanation for the conditions
under which we live, but I ask: Which theology, of all those described above,
best fits the evidence available to us?
Which of them is the most probable or believable?
18. Apparently none of them
are.
19. In that case, how can these questions be answered? How can these logical objections be met? How can religious belief be justified? What follows here is the best that I can do; if anyone has a better answer that can be demonstrated, I would like to know it.
Para. 20 – 30: Religion is a psychological phenomenon; and the psychology worked out by the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung is the most credible explanation for religious beliefs. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious in Jungian psychology provide the basis of this insight.
20. Perhaps the solution
to the problem of what to believe, and why, is to be sought not in
over-elaborated theologies, casuistically patched up to explain away the
contradictions and illogicalities of primitive beliefs, but in the study of the
human mind. At present this is dominated
by two schools of psycho-logy. In spite
of their differences, both agree that in addition to the relatively continuous
(though never complete) awareness of ourselves and our physical surroundings
that we call “consciousness,” there is another dimension of which we are
usually not aware, called “the unconscious psyche.”
21. As for their
differences: one school, Freudian psychoanalysis, is frankly atheistic,
locating the source of all human behavior in the sexual instinct, and of all
human problems specifically in early sexual trauma or in sexual
frustration.
21.1. The other school,
the analytical psychology or “psychology of the unconscious” of Carl Gustav
Jung, posits an on-going and unending drive toward self-realization and
enlarged awareness, called “individuation.”
For those who are willing to engage in this process of
self-transformation, the goal of “individuation” is to become as nearly
complete, whole, and harmonious a personality as possible; it is perfectly
expressed in a popular slogan: “Be all that you can be.” This involves a progressive recognition,
reconciliation, and integration of the various conflicting impulses, both good
and evil, both conscious and unconscious, that move us.
22. In relation to the
idea of God, Jungian psychology seems to be the more convincing approach, since
(a) it involves more than a single primitive bio-logical urge, and (b) unlike
the Freudian view, Jungian psychology does not simply deny the existence of God.
23. But in order to
explain how Jungian thought is relevant to the mono-theistic concept of God, it
is necessary to remind the reader of some of the principal elements of
analytical psychology. Any summary /
condensation will inevitably involve omissions and simplifications, but the
following paragraphs represent my current understanding.
24. In numerous books
and papers, Jung disseminated his evolving concepts of the psyche—among them
the collective unconscious, the archetypes, the feeling-toned complexes, and
the tendency to perceive spontaneous visual and other manifestations that
emerge from the unconscious.
24.1. As I understand
it, the word “psyche” is Jung’s term for the total human cognitive (mental) and
affective (emotional) functioning, comprising an individual’s personal
consciousness (everything that one is aware of at a given moment, especially as
it relates to one’s body, its history, and its surroundings), the personal
unconscious (everything an individual has forgotten or repressed), and the
collective unconscious (everything that is not in the individual con-sciousness
or the personal unconscious, but is the result of the evolution of the human
species: all the ideas, instincts, and behaviors that it is possible for people
to have, all the forms, paths, or manifestations of energy [libido, which is
much more than simply sexual impulses] that make possible the various ways in
which individuals function).
25. The boundaries
between these areas are not fixed or impermeable—“contents” (ideas, feelings, memories, feeling-toned complexes,
and archetypes) pass from one area to another every day. We forget; we remember forgotten things; we
lose our self-control because we are overcome by memories of previous stressful
or traumatic events (this is the activation of the complexes, which are
originally formed in conscious experiences);
. . . and we find ourselves in archetypal situations.
25.1. “Archetypes” are
unconscious inborn behavioral programs into which libido can flow; they are the
genetically transmitted potential and propensity for the human being to
function (perceive, feel, think, act) in a particular way; they are the psychic
equivalent or aspect of instincts; they could be described as any instinct
peculiar to sentient, conscious beings and therefore culturally significant;
they make up the (mythic) way that human beings unconsciously categorize the
world before the development of philosophy or science. And they are innate like the faculty of human
language, the propensity to believe in super-natural forces, and the
spontaneous sexual instinct. And like
the compulsion to ask, “Why?”
26. Archetypes
constitute the collective unconscious mind, and therefore are not perceived
directly by consciousness; their existence is inferred from the many similar
situations, symbolic images, and other manifestations that occur in different cultures at
different times and places throughout human history.
26.1. But the archetype
is the impulse to a kind of behavior, not the image that symbolizes it in the
individual imagination or in the cultural tradition. Nor is it the “inherited memory” that some
popularizers claim it to be. (A memory
is the neuronal record of a moment in the life of an individual. Neither the moment nor the neuronal record of
it can be genetically trans-mitted.) In
brief, sexual attraction and activity (copulation, coitus) are the acting-out
of an instinct; the idea of marriage, and the impulse to realize it in our
lives as the reconciliation of contrary, complementary forces, are the manifestations of an archetype.
27. All of the
components of the psyche interact, and “individuation” is the growth in
wholeness and maturity that results from the back-and-forth dynamic and partial
interpenetration between consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the
collective unconscious.
28. These concepts are
relevant to religious belief in the following way: Jung warned that it is impossible to make
scientifically valid, verifiable statements about the objective existence of
God, the God of the theologians and believers; the closest that we can come to knowing
about God, he observed, is that we perceive images, symbols of the central,
dominant archetype of the collective unconscious (indeed of the whole
personality), and events that are by inference attributable to it.
29. This archetype, which
Jung called the archetype of wholeness, order, and meaning, and which he named
“the Self,” is like the center of gravity of a spiral galaxy—everything else in
the collective unconscious, as well as the ego-consciousness and the personal
unconscious, is held in orbit around it, in a never-completed and never-ending
process of approximation to it.
Therefore, it might also be called the original of the archetype of
“individuation.”
30. The images of the “Self,” (like the symbols of other archetypes, peripheral to it, that the personal consciousness encounters during the process of “individuation”) may appear in dreams, visions, fantasies, and hallucinations; they may also be manifested as voices or other physical sensations, as in kundalini yoga. Jung said that he was following the earliest Christian theo-logians when he called these things “the God-image in the human psyche.
Para. 31 – 45: Everywhere and at all times of which scholarship has cognizance, the contents of the unconscious mind have been perceived by the ego and projected onto supposed physical and metaphysical worlds as the supernatural entities of religions. The psychic mechanism that accomplishes or gives form to these projections is the innate and universal human tendency to personify (anthropomorphize) everything: things of the material, physical world of time and space that we seem to have in common, as well as things that seem to originate in human minds or elsewhere.
31. Although Jung cannot
be held responsible for the content of the following paragraphs, what I write
here is based on his insights. I present
my reasons below.
32. To say that an
archetype is all that we know of God is to say that what we call “God” is a
factor or a function of the human psyche.
One corollary of this is that we cannot avoid thinking of God as a personality;
we do this and we see and hear people doing this all around us every day. For example, the fact that we pray and obey
religious commandments and do “good deeds” in order to deserve rewards (good
things, “grace” and ultimately “Heaven”) and to avoid punishment (misfortunes,
the “fall from grace” and ultimately “Hell”), demonstrates that we conceive of
the deity as a personality that desires or requires things of us, and that can
be moved by our thoughts and actions.
33. In spite of the fact
that Abrahamic monotheists define “God” as a transcendent, omnipotent, omniscient and
exclusively benevolent supernatural entity, this divinity is conceived of or imagined as a personality like
ours; we ascribe to it a number of personal characteristics:
a. A sense of identity
(“I Am Who Am”);
b. Various desires (“Thou
shalt have no other gods before Me,” as well as multifarious Commandments and
literally thousands of Laws and taboos);
c. Sympathies and
antipathies (Abel over Cain; Jacob over Esau; Isaac over Ishmael [vice versa
for Muslims]; Noah and Lot and all the other favored “just men” of the
monotheists’ traditions; the designation of Chosen People or True Believers, in
contrast to other groups which are to be partly enslaved and partly
exterminated by systematic genocide so that their territories and their women
and the fruits of their labors may be taken by the Chosen People / True
Believers);
d. Irritability; feelings
that can be offended or pleased (“I the Lord thy God am a jealous God … ”);
e. Vengefulness, which we
call “punishment for sin” or “Divine Justice” ( “… punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the
third and fourth generation ….” )
34. As a description of
the supposed all-wise, all-powerful, all-good, transcendent creator of the
universe, this is a very limited and anthropo-morphic conception!
(Strangely, both the description and the fulsomeness of the approved
formulae for addressing the Deity seem to suggest the attitude that an abused
child is forced to adopt toward its abusive parent.) And yet that is how believers conceive of
God.
35. But this personality
can be recognized as a special case of our evidently innate and inevitable (i.
e., archetypal) tendency to personify (that is, to anthropomorphize) almost
everything: as children we personify dolls; we recognize our pets as
personalities; as adults we give personal names to boats, ships, airplanes,
other vehicles, and even to weapons; we create “smily faces” (yellow circles
that are interpreted as human faces because they contain two dots above a short
curved line), and they evolve into “emoticons” and “emojis.” Further, we personify cartoon animals (Mickey
Mouse, Bugs Bunny) and stuffed cloth animals (Teddy bears, Easter bunnies,
Winnie the Pooh), and even topographic features (the “Old Man of the Mountain”
and the “Sleeping Giant” of so many landscapes, the Lorelei, the Man in the
Moon, the “face” on Mars).
36. In addition, many
Christians claim to see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in clouds and in the
imperfections of tree trunks, walls, window panes, and screen doors. And of course the apparitions of angels, as
well as of the Virgin Mary at Guadalupe (Mexico), Lourdes, Fatima, and
Medjugorje, have all appeared as persons.
A clue to the nature of these Virgin Mothers may be seen in the fact
that none of them has ever given the least indication of knowing of the
existence of the others. Neither does
any of them say that her name is Mary, nor that her Son is Jesus of
Nazareth. As for the angels, Joan of
Arc’s “Voices,” two saints and an angel, promised that she would never come to
harm. But she was imprisoned,
interrogated, and burned alive. All of
this suggests that the apparitions are personifications of subjective psychic
phenomena.
37. Another strong piece
of evidence is the fact that we personify even Death. For modern English speakers, Death is “the
Grim Reaper,” who is imagined as a skeletal figure, draped in a long black robe
and hood, carrying an hourglass in one hand and a scythe in the other. For medieval Europe, Death was represented by
the animated skeletons of the “Danse Macabre” in church frescos, tomb carvings,
and wood-cuts, and as a character in homilies and literary works. Death also appears as a character in
traditional stories from cultures around the world.
37.1. One of the most recent examples of the personification of Death is “La Santa Muerte,” a Mexican and Meso-American atavism of pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan death cults that assumes the form of a perversion of the Roman Catholic cult of the veneration of saints. It is apparently a result of the massacres and atrocities that characterize the wars between rival Hispanic drug cartels and gangs. And the Thuggees of the Indian subcontinent worshiped (worship?) Death as the murderous goddess Kali, whose violent myths involve a whole slew (pun intended) of loves and deaths.
38. The reality of
personification is suggested also by the phenomenon of ghosts—under certain
circumstances that evoke fear, suggestibility or belief, images and sensations
arise in the minds of susceptible people, from the tendency of the conscious
mind to perceive personalities. If
ghosts were an objective, empirical phenomenon, everyone would see the same
ones in the same places. In fact, they
don’t. For example, of the more than two
million tourists who troop through the Tower of London every year, no one makes
a credible claim to have seen that old stand-by, the ghost of Anne Boleyn. We read or hear the same half-dozen old
stories over and over in books, maga-zines, and online websites, but no one
comes forward with reliable evidence of a new sighting of the ghost. And this is true of all ghost stories. It is logical, therefore, to conclude that
ghosts are mainly subjective psychic phenomena perceived as personalities.
39. All this means that
apparently we cannot avoid being confronted with personalities that emerge from
the unconscious; this fact is the origin of the life-like characters in novels
and plays as well as in bedtime and campfire stories—personalities, each with
its own definite traits. Indeed, I would
go so far as to say that we recognize other people as persons only through the
faculty of personifying. It is an
archetype, innate in all human beings.
40. The evidence
suggests, therefore, that what we call “God” (that is, our personification of
the archetype of the “Self ”) is a result of this tendency of the conscious mind
to perceive almost everything, including archetypes, as person-alities or
images of personalities. This may well be ultimately a result of our evolution
as social animals with fathers and mothers on whom, as infants, we helplessly
depend. The phenomenon would be
analogous to that of “imprinting” among the young of many species: the first
living thing or simulacrum that the new-born sees is taken as the parent and
model, and unquestioningly bonded with.
41. This idea is
supported by the fact that the structure of the mythological divine family
around a patriarchal figure and a matriarchal figure is almost universal,
although the descriptions of these figures vary greatly from culture to
culture. Obviously, this is easier to
see in the polytheistic religions.
Something of the variety of versions is suggested by the following: The Greeks called their patriarchal god
“All-Fathering Zeus” or “Zeus, Father of Gods and Men.” Readers of Greek myths are familiar with the
ups and downs and ins and outs of his relation-ship with his sister-wife-queen,
the goddess Hera. Zeus had a father,
Kronos, whom he overthrew; Kronos had overthrown his father, Ouranos, and
mother, Gaia. There were similar family
groups among the ancient Egyptians, who believed that the god Amon-Ra created
the universe by ejaculating his semen into the void—a quite literal
fathering.
42. And among the
monotheistic religions, Jesus claimed to be sent from his Father in Heaven, and
taught his disciples to address Yaweh in prayer as “Abba” or “Abun,” the
equivalent in Aramaic of “Father.” In
addition, at the baptism of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a
voice from Heaven described Jesus as “my beloved Son.” Furthermore, early Christian church councils
established that the Christian God was composed of three “Persons,” of whom the
first two were the “Father” and the “Son.”
43. In some polytheistic
religions, the matriarchal figure may be subordinate, and in others she may be
dominant, reflecting the social structure in which she arises; there are many
examples among the many goddesses of the Shakti tradition of the Hindu
religion. In classical Antiquity, she
appears as the domineering and vengeful goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, and in the
various avatars of the Greek goddess Artemis as well as the Diana of the
Ephesians, and was even imported into Rome from Asia Minor as the Great Mother
Goddess, Cybele, and from Egypt as the goddess Isis.
44. In monotheistic
religions she is revered though denied divine status (the Virgin Mary, the
mother of Jesus in Catholicism’s “Holy Family” and, in fact, all the Marian
apparitions; and one or two of the Prophet Muhammed’s wives in Islam), or she
is reduced to a metaphysical or mystical metaphor (the Holy Wisdom in the Kabbalah of Judaism and in some
strains of Christian mysticism, and the
Immaculate Conception in Catholicism).
45. An educated Westerner has only to think of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Norse, Hindu, Polynesian, African and Native American myths as well as Christianity; the basic pattern exists in myths all over the world. Again, which one, of all the possible concepts of the divinity mentioned above, is the most believable?
Para. 46 – 48: Innate xenophobia and the predatory instinct, two results of the evolution of the human species, are the sources of the violence authorized and mandated by the Abrahamic religions through their claims to sole and exclusive reality and authority, in contrast to other religions. These things make Abrahamic monotheism a danger to the human race.
46. For me the most
credible existing belief-system is Buddhism, which (strictly speaking) believes
in no objective transcendent Godhead personality (I would include Taoism and
the original, pure philosophy of Epicurus as credible also); the Buddhist
concept of the universe as an eternal cycle of generation and destruction is
both more logical and more compatible with much of contemporary astronomy and
astrophysics than are the Creation fables of the Abrahamic religions. Buddhism, Taoism, and the original
Epicureanism are also more realistic—more forgiving—in their understanding of
our basic daily needs and desires.
46.1. (Think of the many
taboos of the Abrahamic religions—dietary taboos, sexual taboos, taboos on
dress, taboos that prohibit freedom of thought, of expression, of association,
and even of movement within one’s own commun-ity. Think of the violent and cruel
punishments—whipping, disfigurement, mutilation, hanging, beheading, stoning,
crucifixion, burning alive—historic-ally inflicted on anyone who failed to
observe these taboos. And most, if not
all, are still imposed by law in Islamic states and Christianized African
countries today, as current news reports show.)
Other than Buddhism, Taoism, and Epicureanism, my answer to the question
of credibility is, “None.”
47. Unfortunately,
unlike the Buddhists (who are only beginning to wake up to the mortal threat of
subversive Islamic immiggression) every one of our monotheistic social groups
has believed that it must impose its own religion on the rest of the human
race, even if that means subjugating, torturing and slaughtering masses of
people simply because the beliefs and religious practices of one group differ
from those of another. I trace this
characteristic to innate xenophobia, the “Us-against-Them” instinct / archetype
in humanity, a result of the need to belong to a group in order to survive,
because we are born into a food chain as highly aggressive predators who are
individually weak, and who therefore need for our group to dominate the other
groups around us and exploit them before they can dominate and exploit us.
48. Among religions, the drive to dominate and exploit is especially true of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, each of which has justified its violence and cruelty as obedience to a supposed divine command to reduce the world to conformity with its god. I have read that it was also true of the ancient Egyptians; this is a reasonable idea, given that the Egyptians and the ancient Hebrews clashed and interacted with each other; and given the theories of some historians that the Hebrews’ monotheism was inspired by that of the Egyptian pharoah Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV).
Para. 49 – 50: Summary and conclusion.
49. The line of
reasoning followed here constitutes, for me, sufficient evidence that the God
of the Abrahamic theologians is the personification of a collective psychic
factor—it is not an empirically objective, extra-psychic, transcendent
entity. The conclusion is based on
demonstrable reality—that human beings cannot resist personifying things, and
furthermore, in attempting to answer the question of why things happen, cannot
avoid interpreting the personified images and symbols of the great archetype,
the “Self,” as an objectively existing (and aggressively demanding) God.
49.1. And, of course, if God is a psychic personification, then the Devil is one too. The Devil is the personification of an archetype, the potential and propensity for Evil (called the “Shadow” in relation to individuals and groups), even of the potential for Evil in the “Self.”
50. Failure to understand this has caused, and continues to cause, horrible suffering. Conversely, if every group and individual could understand this, there would be much less conflict and suffering in the world.
