God Seeking and God Sought

“I just have trouble with a notion of a God.” He said, seriously.

‘But the Big Bang is a kind of God,isn’t it. The latest name for ‘creator’ or ‘creation’. 

“I guess you could say but I don’t believe in this being of God interested in our affairs so to speak.” His hair was combed and he was well dressed, casually so but groomed. Soft spoken

“I get that but this experience I’m in might well be a God dream.” I said, “I know I’m not God but this may be God and like a program their may or may not be an administrator. That’s a whole other question.”

“Intellectually, I can’t disagree with that. I don’t know either way.” He said.

“ The issue of ‘faith’ is that you can’t experience something perhaps if you don’t believe in it. The scientific mind shows that. All that electron wave particle business.  I find the aetheist ‘closed minded’.  There’s simply no convincing her of anything not in her sensuality. The sensualism is sexy. There needs to be a crack in the comfort before you even question it. I don’t have any need per se to challenge them. But I feel a need to answer their arrogant assumption that there is no God. In this incredible universe of billions of stars you’re going to say there’s not even the possibility of a candy stripped polka dotted God of Gods, God almighty, It’s highly irrational to maintain such a position. But they do.”

“But religious people speak as if they know what God wants and says,” he rightly noted.

“Oh they do. Some are as big a wanker and aetheists are.  Arrogant.  Literalists.  Even the Bible must be interpreted. Collectively humans have been ‘told’ by God to ‘breathe’ and they do so at birth but beyond that there’s no absolute really.  Even understanding the meaning of love or lust is a matter of experience age and understanding.”

“But a baby could just ‘breathe’ without a command from God or programming from God,” he said. 

“  Mysticism is something different. The question I was asked is which is more likely, that I’m a material being living in a spiritual plane or a spiritual being having a material sojourn.  I’m rather fond of the latter idea. There is this God man thought.  I can imagine and dream infinity but live in this finitude. That’s not the reall bugbear bit.”

“What is?’ He asked, still curious.

“The bit that really caught me though was the whole notion that as I was seeking God, God was seeking me. That Hound of Heaven poem. The divine dance. God as lover.  God’s not lost. I’m lost. I hold with in me the sense of a home, of coming home and love is like that. It’s an intuition or feeling, not really intellectual. But you have to be willing. If you turn your back on this thing it’s not going away but there is a door and the door handle is on the inside. I know that much.  Do you see what I mean.”

“I guess, in a way,” he said.

“ I’m not making it very easy or clear. I’m sorry about that. But the experience doens’t lend itself to words any more than human love does. Better told with art or music. Or equations.  Cathedrals are my favourite expression. These days it’s sometimes more likely to experience something God like coming out of mathematics or physics. Scientists are  more religious in their string theories and quantum understanding. I fear the social function of the church, as important as it is, has over ridden the contemplative.  The community is good.  

Are you sure it’s God you have difficulty with more than people or yourself. I doubt God is that difficult or even complicated. Loving God ironically makes loving myself and others easier.” I said.  We left off there. Maybe we’ll speak again, sometime.   

Freud's Last Session, a play by Mark St. Germain

Freud’s Last Session, a play by Mark St. Germain is showing at Pacific Theatre, April 24 to May 30, 12th and Hemlock, Vancouver.  We loved it.  I am a psychiatrist so that made the play a must see. Anything with Freud is required viewing by our ilk.  What made it especially a treat was that it was really a discussion and debate between CS Lewis, the Christian theologian and S. Freud, atheist psychoanalyst.  Just hearing the writing of Mark St. Germain as it touched on the key issues of the 20th century, sex,  suffering, war, life after death, biology, destiny, was so refreshing.  I read the discussions of even 50 years ago and realize that as reality television talk show video game society we have collectively lost the level of communication that was normative one time when people actually relied on discussion as communication.
The play is situated within an amazing set thanks to Carolyn Rapanos.  Ewayne Frayne played CS Lewis and Ron Reed played Freud.  If ever you've imagined  historical characters, you can appreciate how enjoyable it is when they come alive for you so you forget it’s a play and forget they are actors.  That’s what this was like. Frayne and Reed made both great men come alive and as well made them acutely human and terribly real.  Mark St. Germain’s writing has a wisdom and compassion that leaves one appreciating both antagonists as equal and together.  There is none of the simplistic reductionism so common today. None of the comic book writing.  It’s that real and human. Director Morris Ertman brought out the very best in the play and these amazing actors.
I left feeling better about life,  enriched and uplifted.  I was even thankful to be a psychiatrist and even more thankful to be a Christian.  Sigmund Freud and CS Lewis have contributed so much to my understanding of life.  I had gone to the play with friends and we talked about the play long after it was over.
The intermittent playing of the old radio on the set,  with news of Hitler and invasion of Poland,  was a poignant touch that grounded the actors discussion in the stark reality of that time.   Gas masks  and air raid sirens punctuated the play.   I personally can be so complacent in Canada forgetting that much of the ideologies I’ve learned from were crafted in a fiery cauldron.  These men weren’t like intellectual activists today. They were struggling with life and facing death coming to conclusions which not surprisingly have outlived them.
A truly remarkable play.  I’m so thankful that Pacific Theatre chose this pearl for the last of their season.

God Revisited on Commercial Street

I am sitting on the terrace of the East Van Comedy Club looking at the sun setting in the distance.  Perhaps thats a fitting place to consider God in today's often godless society.
I’ve stopped here because it’s a good place for dogs. They set out dog water dishes at either end of the terrace.  Gilbert is tied to a bicycle post next to me. He loves Commercial Drive.  It’s a dog friendly community with lots of folk walking their dogs.  Now he’s lying in wait to meet and greet passers by.
I’ve been to St. James Anglican this morning. Good to see Father Mark and Father Mathew.  Karen and Matisse were there.  Kevin, AJ, the boys and Kendra were there. I loved that the Women’s Auxilliary had it’s sale after church. I’m stocked up with Christmas Bread, home made marmalade. I got the boys and Kendra hand knitted togues which Kevin sized for me.
(The waitress just brought me a Cafe’ Latte. Now she has brought gumbo.  Looks delicious.  Looking at it I think I’ll take to calling the stews I make ‘gumbo’.  Seems more descriptively true.  I know I started out to Revisit “God” but I’m going to take a break and eat this gumbo while it’s hot. There’s snow on the ground and it’s been quite cold indeed.  My beard helps but this gumbo should really hit the spot, Mmm, the food here is hot and Godly.  In Winter I'll go to a 'hot heaven' before a 'cool' heaven")
Now that I am ‘sated’ with very delicious gumbo and fresh baked bread with herbal butter, I might consider the subject of God differently than one might starving and under siege.  There's always 911 prayers and lot of the preachers speak from fear rather than love.
God is one, i.e. God is all.  Or God is none.  That’s the one and zero conception with the line going through the centre to create the symbol of infinity. I can conceptualize the finite and perhaps even consider infinity though mostly the latter I consider in cartesian mathematical terms.  I don’t know that man can truly conceptualize the infinite certainly not as he does the finite.  I’m ever changing as well with a sense of some kind of unchanginess.  This is even more apparent as I grow older and myself hardly recognize myself as the once young man.  The waitress is very young and no doubt looks at me like I looked at old ladies at her age.  I look at the young as young but not as I do the very old which for me are the 90 year olds.  It’s relative. But not all things are relative and 'it is what it is' is only as true as 'it isn't what it isn't'.
All such concepts weren’t readily available to the ancients.  The world was once pagan or ‘polytheistic’ and our ‘secular’ society is increasingly appearing little different from any ‘polytheistic society’.  In the Roman sense the Gods were named and personalized whereas in the secular society they may well be addictions.  Bachus rules the alcoholic.  In Medieval times the polytheism was limited to ‘demons’.  Today we have Ford and Fararri.  We call our Gods nationalities and corporations but it’s only when we limited the definition of ‘religion’ to a ‘god based faith’ do we exclude the comparative ‘religion’ of ‘communism’.  It claimed to be ‘godless’ but it was nonetheless a cult of personality with Lenin and Che little different than Kennedy and Reagan.  Nationalities are God like to those who are 'secular'.
I appreciate the interconnectedness of everything materially.  I understand as a scientist the significance of fractals, the universality of atoms and DNA.  The ‘atomic’ theory of universal interconnectedness goes back to the Greeks in Pre Christian times. Yet I learned in a theological lecture at a seminary that St. John’s ‘In the beginning was the word”  referred to the notion that we are all made of the ‘god stuff’.  Created in “God’s Image’ is essentially being the dream stuff of God.  Today Holograms give us capacity to understand this universality.  Certainly the movie “Matrix’ taking off from the findings of Hummarabi texts helps one appreciate that ‘to dream is the rub”.  Dr. Carl Jung expressed the idea that we were joined by the “universal unconscious”. This was in essence an idea from the Vedantas and expressed by Buddha.  We are the sound made by the celestial spheres.  Waves and particles.
(there is a young man who has sat down with two young women who have accents and would appear to be travellers. His voice has become louder and more raucous despite the fact that he’s drinking coffee. He’s irritating, nonetheless as he struts his intellect in hope that the girls will want his cock.  It’s not what he is saying that irritates but rather the loudness and the tone as he talks authoritatively about generalities but mostly wants he wants someone to unzipp his fly. I celebrate his youth.  He is with two beautiful women and I am  alone with a computer and a dog. My irritation is likely envy. )
Talking and thinking about God is what one does when lust is not more readily available.  Football players and warriors aren’t known for their intellectualism however Marcus Aurelius’s memoir is as sensitive a writing as one might find. He speaks of the stoics and today we’d call this a treatise on minimalism.
Under every idea - right now it’s the hegemony of Climate Change and politics of the Middle East and China and America - under all these is an issue of God.
I liked that the desire for uniformity went with the idea that those who were ‘contrarian’ somehow lessened the benefits that collective thanks and praise could bring to a community.  So the Christians, the contrarians, for their first 300 years offended the secular or polygamous Roman empire.  Now Christians are offending the secular society again.  Meanwhile my Christian friend demands and gets overtly angry with anyone who doesn't share his 'narrowest' certainty about Christianity.  I have several Christian friends and they're all more 'certain' than each other about Christianity.  The devil is in the details.  Agreement is like herding cats.  It's so hard to agree with these disagreeable certainties.   The tower of babble is such a  very human story.
God, the father, God the son, and God the holy spirit, the 3 in 1 God offended the Jews who believed in the One God, the God of the jews and mostly considered him God the Father.
Now I’ve been encountering more and more Moslems who are in the news because a significant percentage of them are radical and fundamentalist.  When Christian fundamentalists limited themselves to televangelism they were of no concern to the majority. The same was true for the Muslims but when they began beheading everyone who didn’t convert they became like Religious Communists.  The communists, mostly the Russian and Chinese variants of ‘atheism’ have a combined killing of a hundred million in the last hundred years, about a million a year. They make the Nazi’s look like amateurs.  No Christian group, even the witch hunting spanish inquisition, did anything like the Communists when it came to killing. The French Revolution numbers were infinitesimal.  Muslim radicals haven’t killed nearly so many but they’re the Rock Stars of death right now though the communists are still killing in Ukraine and China.
Meanwhile we're aborting babies with a frenzy of killing and the Canadian government is literally orgasming over the idea of Euthansia. The courts cream at the idea of legitimizing suicide.  No wonder the Pope called this a Culture of Death.
But what is life. Is it finite or infinite. Do I end with my death. I don’t know with any certainty. Even Houdini couldn’t get a message back with any certainty. I really don't believe in the infinity of my finitude but figure i'll muddle along waking no doubt in some variation of this life dream.  I suspect I'll be accountable to 'retribution' and 'karma' and that I may come back as a frog or burn in a fiery bath or play harp badly on a cloud.  All outcomes are possible.  Death is significant no matter how the government would reduce all individuals to numbers and accounting as subtraction.
So the Council of Nicea was an attempt to get equal agreement among Christians on the nature of God. Was God the Father equal to God the Son and where did the Holy Spirit fit in.  We have many denominations of protestantism in addition to the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodx.  The Muslims have Sunni and Shiites like the Jews have their Ashkenazi and the other one, the one that’s more eastern.  Buddhist war , actually kill each other, all vegetarians though, over who owns a Buddhist temple.  Hindus have long fought the Siks. Divisiveness is at nature human.
It’s really a bit like soccer fans or hockey fans at the grass roots.
I know God.  I know God is loving.  I have lived this and reasoned this.  I’ve long left atheism behind given the overwhelming scientific evidence that they’re collectively less healthy and well. Yet there are the gays who are less healthy and well in some groups solely because of their marginalization. The rich and mainstream , the ‘winners’, are normally healthiest.
I pray.  I was raised Christian.  I meditate. I have a direct consciousness of something one might call a ‘higher power’.  I don’t ‘feel’ this as polygamous or even as ‘trinitarian’.  I accept the trinitarian nature of God as easily as I accept the make up of DNA.  Does it matter to my ‘faith’ or my function.
But the question arises because the Aetheists , what my friend calls ‘anti-theist’, the Communists, and Radical Muslims, like the Radical Feminists, and the Radical Climate Change Cult, all seem to be looking for a fight.  Mostly people want a bigger slice of the pie and today the pie is money.
I’ve vowed ‘to live and let live’.  I believe in God. I”m a Christian.  I am probably also an evangelist because I ‘advertise’ my Christianity not that differently than I do my Canadianism.  I’m called a Patriot which is like being an Evangelist. I’m not going to knock on your door or consider it a ‘win’ if you convert to my religion. I’m certainly not going to behead you if you don’t agree, put you in a gas chamber or rant at you ad infinitum about the victimship of women or the terrible plight of black people or how the chinese are much maligned or even how Americans are difficult to live beside. I’m not that way inclined.
I rather like my company and the company of my dog and I like to sit alone with my ‘imaginary friend, called God”.   I really don't think God is imaginary though.  Everything but God seems more the imaginary.  Actually I don’t talk to God as ‘God’ but rather call him Lord. I don’t think of God as feminine anymore than I think of the earth as Feminine.  I haven’t this whole issue with ‘gender’ or ‘race’ or football teams. I didn’t know today was the Grey Cup.  I’m personally wondering which hotel I’m going to stay in in Turkey in a few weeks.
Now I’m going to walk the dog.
I think God is more ‘yes’ than ‘no’ too.  I love St. John of the Cross and “nada’.  God is not anything of this world.  God is transcendent and more. God is more ‘mystery’ too, so I’m a big fan of the medieval ‘Cloud of Unknowing’.  I think a lot of Evangelicals spout their ignorance with their certainty over uncertainties.    I am a scientist so I worry when people speak without the basic understanding of ‘thesis’ , antithesis, synthesis, Hegel, Black Boxes and  ideas that beget ideas.  ‘Evolution’ may not be darwinian per-se but it is a process of learning and learning on learning.
(The guy in the next table is saying he’s an ‘artist’.  Actually he’s saying he ’s a contractor. An illustrator.  )
I like that he’s ‘thinking out loud’.  The group is having fun. I remember being in such groups, sharing ideas. Good CAFE SOCIETY.  I forgive him his raucous laugh and loud voice.  I hope they come together too. Really.
Time to walk more with Gilbert

"I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter in law against her mother in law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me." -Mathew 10:34-38 "There's a kind of complacency that passes for spirituality. This is best described as a spiritual materialism. Effete and pleasant, well mannered and inoffensive. Quaint, really. Yet it forgets well that all of the manners of chivalry came from fear and respect. We shake hands to show trust with clasping of weapons bearing right hands. There was always suspicion about the left handed for this reason. Long before the Jews and the Homosexuals we were suspicious about the left handed and even more so the devious twins. Worse were the hermaphrodites. And finally, the Christians. Christians are frightening awful people. They have a code of living and they alter the very nature of the community. When there's an orgy happening with all manner of drugs and alcohol and rape and pillage worst thing to bring to the party or have the party meet is a Christian. They're not a board room coffee clutch sort. It's not surprising to me that Emperor Constantine had an overnight conversion copied from the story of St. Paul, not even bothering to be original, because he needed the troops. The Roman army, these most disciplined and bloodthirsty of men had been infested with Christianity. Christians are in general "peaceniks". They're like the Buddhists right now warring with the Moslems and killing each other with rocket launchers and AK47's in Thailand and Cambodia. Everyone loves peace especially businessmen but not all the greatest families and countries of this world who make their money most from ammunition and guns. They're the drug pushers of war. And like Steppenwolf, I say, "Goddam the pusher man!" Still the English and allied troops of Great Britain saved us all from Hitler and Naziism. Christians rescued the jews and homosexuals and Poles from Auschwitz. It was the Dutch Christians who opened their attics to Jews and Christians who flew the spitfires in the Battle of Britain. It was Christian women who were the assassins in the French underground. They fought like St. Joan of Arc, that greatest of killing transvestite catholic saints. When the Communists of Russia killed 50 millions for their secular atheist regime, when the Chinese Communist atheists killed 80 million, and the Pol Pot atheist secular communist killed millions it was always Christians who intervened and put a stop to the slaughter of god hating men and women the world over.     And yes, we all love St. Francis. He's the most pleasant sort of Christian subversive. Long before Occupy Wall Street St. Francis with far clearer vision was offering the world an alternative to hoarding and fight. Sure we'd all like to talk to birds but as Christians when there's a job to be done we're the first one's to pick up whatever tools are needed to do the job. Christians are Martha and Mary. We meditate and pray but then we act. As Christians we are only required to turn our cheeks 70 times 70 times. There's clearly a limit to neglecting a problem. There is always a place for prayer but we are God's hands and feet. Christianity can be cozy and warm and sentimental. There's a Rockwell sort of picturesque quality to Christianity especially before Christmas when the lights are coming out. But the birth of Christ was followed by Herod massacring countless children under the age of 2. Telling the family that you are Christian is more disturbing and unsettling than saying you're planning on having a sex change. It's far more important than changing your vote from Liberal to Conservative or Democrat to Republican. It's a bit more than cutting your hair and getting your face pierced. Becoming a Christian is the most shocking disturbing event in a person's life. It's no wonder Christians are persecuted everywhere and laws are forever being enacted against them. Christians kick ass!

Existence of God in the Age of Reason

While Kant said that reason can not be used to study metaphysics, in practice there is in man's consciousness and unconditional moral obligation that only makes sense if belief in God, freedom and immortality are postulated. This is Kant's famous "CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE". It says that the feeling of "thou shalt" or 'thou shalt not" whatever the consequences requires:

1. A God who is entitled to command. Of course this may be an inner voice, like a 'wee small voice', or the 'collective unconscious' but ultimately it remains a 'moral' 'dictate'. Kant sees this experience as intrinsic to human nature and that the experience of command implies a commander as such.
   
2. Further he says that 'thou shalt' can only be said where 'thou canst' can also be said thereby implying 'freedom'. Morality as such says that I have the experience of 'freedom'. Even if I am a puppet actor in a play and my thoughts follow the actions of the play which is pre determined, my experience is of freedom since I 'feel' choice , in that I feel I 'must' make one decision or the other. This clearly is a matter of the 'MIND' which is as different from the brain as a rider is from the horse. Whether the rider is leading or the horse is however may be a matter of faith. The question of whether I am God or I am not God is an arbitrary decision for some but this is addressed specifically by the theologian Schlelermacher who knew and studied Kant.
   
3. Kant further says that the moral perfection that man feels obliged to seek cannot be found within the bounds of life so this implies what he calls an after life or at least another life. Plato was more for parallel existence and of course 'language' limits the expression of the experience. The native sense of afterlife and parallel is among us and certainly in dream we are within and without or transcendent or imminent. It's just that the very notion of perfection is to Kant not of a clearly "imperfect' world. The engineer knows this well in his 'tolerances' and 'approximations' of measurement. Perfection is a matter of mind and again it becomes a question of rider and horse and the relationship. St. Francis called his ride or body 'brother ass' . The universe we expeience is parallel in this sense and certainly the dualism of Descartes carries into the limits of the experiment as Heisenberg clearly showed that the experimenter affects the experiment. Mind impacts on brain while brain may no doubt set limits on the mind.
   

Romanticism is contrasted with Rationalism in that the universe to the romantic is a work of art and not a machine. Shleiermacher, the great theologian of Kant's day found that the starting point of religion is man's feeling of absolute dependence. I find this interesting because it essential says that the experience of God is directly proportional to one's humility. Humus or pride goes before a fall. Pride is to such a large extent fear driven. Yet I know my limits. I can't take back these wrinkles or levitate today and I can't do so many things I can 'imagine'. Despite my best prayers I can't restore the limb of the amputee, yet. I can imagine a world in which what I think occurs but in this world I am limited. I lack God like powers. I simply can't leap over tall buildings. In fact I'm hardly leaping any more at all. Pouncing maybe but not really leaping. And yet there's this creation I'm apart of. Perhaps some unknown part of my self creates this creation or the collective activity of our collective consciousness makes this creation but it's not me. I'm decidedly humble in relation to the world. Being in nature facing seas and winds and watching my life in general go different from what I intended, not that that was bad, but it's all taught me clearly that I'm not God. Not me. Wrong guy. If an alien arrived today and said show me to your leader I would gladly take him 'there' because he or she or it wouldn't be 'here'. I'm not the leader. I may think I am but I'm not.

Shleiermacher says that "God is given to us in feeling in an original way; and if we speak of an original revelation of God to man or in man , the meaning will always be just this, that along with the absolute dependence which characterizes not only man but all temporal existence, there is given to man also the immediate self consciousness of it, which becomes a consciousness of God."

It think that's brilliant. Schleiermacher gets an A in my book because as I contemplate my humility God grows in my consciousness. Certainly that's the experience of meditation.

 

It strikes me that 'lack' of 'belief' in God, a higher power, an over self, a creator or the other, or the mystery is quite 'irrational' . It's imminently sane to be a theist and even without Pascal's wager, somewhat insane to be an aetheist. I say this because the conventional aetheists I've talked have been desperately intent on their own 'saniety' while very clearly questioning mine, criticizing my belief and insisting that they are a priori right . While I respect that by the limitations of this reality I can't truly "know" , for 'yea but now we see through a glass darkly' I am bullied by their insistence that they do 'know'. As I've grown older and more experienced I have become more suspicious of anyone who insists they are right because that is by definition 'arrogance'. As a scientist I have a 'hypothesis' which I'll naturally argue and yet if I become emotionally invested in it, more often than not I'm really arguing the 'business' or 'politics' of science and have long left the 'truth' of the matter.

That said, I think I'm right in saying I think Kant and Schleiermacher are right and probably God is too.