God is not great?

I see the Dick n Dan show (aka Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett) has a new bum chum. I'm a bit behind the times but I finally see Christopher Hitchens book in the shops. I'm not being dragged into the cheap sensationalism of the title but I see that both Dick and Dan are having unreserved orgasms over the cover of this book and so i might just be bothered to get it from the library read it and then defaecate on it. How these idiots get so many trees taken down in their names astounds me. I got as far as actually reading some Dawkins (something I avoided all through my Zoology BSc) and I've read some Dennett and there is no doubt they are excellent minds .... with the added warning on the label that you don't exceed the stated dose and do not take them internally!

They suffer from the same error that the American government seem to suffer from. A bullet will kill the bad guy. [I can't argue with that]. And the bad guys are over there [ok if you say so]. So therefore lets strafe the area over there and we'll kill the bad guys ... [um no its not that simple.]

Problem with Dick n Dan and the new third man in the menage-a-trois Chris is that they don't even know what God is so how can they argue about it? As I've pointed out before Dick by his own (unintended) admission on a TV show in UK showed that he lacks the part of the brain that provides spiritual experience. Instead he concluded that spiritual experience is just brain activity - lets see how many more books he writes without brain activity. That is the level of the stupidity in their camp (pun?).

From what I've gathered already Chris's book isn't anything to do with God at all. Its an attack on Religion. I agree whole heartedly. I would extend his critique to all human groups! As I've done in this blog. The very notion of human society in any sense beyond the spontaneous co-operation and friendship of human's is a monster - it is no less than Aushwitz in disguise. The types of human society to treat with greatest suspicion are those arrogant enough to name themselves. I hope Chris can extend his analysis of the errors of group membership to the groups to which he belongs e.g. his intellectual bum chums n most notably Atheism.

Atheism is a nihilist group. It has no substance at all except the rejection of God. It is just another religion. The three bum-chums think there is a religion to be had in rationalism and scientific truth, but wasn't religion the problem? No human's are a profound problem to themselves - they love waving banners and calling themselves things and fighting the opposition. Our three antagonists here are just the same.

Its the 60 anniversary of the declaration of human rights. On radio a Burmese student recalled the day in 1968 when the junta began a terrible crack down on the protesting students. A girl, maybe only 14 or 15, climbed upon one of the tanks only to be blown back onto the street by the machine gun. What makes one man recall that moment with horror, and another presumably take his pay packet back to his own wife and daughter after a good days work? It is a question that has weighed on my own mind for years... especially after reading Barefoot Gen that is the moment I was finally changed forever. I walked into the library supposedly to find a job. The book caught my eye. I read the cartoon cover to cover and when I emerged from the library blinking in the sunlight, like an insect from its cocoon, the whole world was changed irrevocably. The buildings, the cities, our lives were like fragile paper that in a split second could all be vapourised by a falling bomb. There is no argument here just nihilation. There is nothing to say. That was 1996.

I realise this week that actually the evil lies in taking sides, in particular it is: our ego grasping a side. Whenever we take sides egotistically (i.e. as they do in all American films), that is pick up a weapon to protect a side we are taken in by the devil. It is exactly what Luke was learning in "The Empire Strikes Back". That anger and hatred draws you closer to the other side, makes you become that which you are opposed and hate. Those who seek to be good will make themselves evil if they stand egotistically against it. This is what Jesus taught us. While he could have summoned all the powers of Creation to decimate the puny Roman persecutors instead he did not fight. He showed them love and compassion even through his mortal doubt and final moments. This way he died free from the weaknesses of mere mortals. He had defeated death. Whether you believe in actual physical rebirth is irrelevant - the victory was had on the cross. What value is a physical existence when you have faced persecution and death without anger or fear!

The problem with Dick, Dan and Chris is that they are just ordinary people stuck in the up and down world of careers and family. They publish a book or two, have a few arguments, join a few societies, make a few speeches, write a few papers, defend their positions, have a few students, get married, work on their income, get a reputation and a name and just do all the ordinary territorial/survival things - their achievement when the bomb drops is no different from the worms and the birds.

In this increasingly secular world that is all our existences are becoming. A glass of wine over the TV in the evening and life's fine enough and that will do. And then death will come... What-ever (said in that whiney teen America way).

Listening again to the radio last week I was struck by a dramatisation of Joseph Black (the Scottish scientist 1728-1799) but it was the last bit of him musing on his death bed whether God was a mouse that struck me. One day I too will be on my deathbed staring at the inevitability that I will be finally passing into that void, and the question "what lies beyond" will no longer be an interesting intellectual question - but a most pressing urgency for me for in an hour or so I will be facing it.

There is no answer. We cannot answer with any confidence in those moments. There is nothing to say. Be it God or Nothing that awaits it makes no difference for neither of these things can be said or grasped by our small and conditional minds. In either case there is only the profound silence and the waiting to be engulfed by the incomprehensible. It is the avoidance of this which "makes cowards of us all" to quote Hamlet. There is only silence.

OK so I don't like silence more than the next man .. look at me writing into space here. I've had my glass of wine, watched the X factor final and delay going to bed. But there is no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of death, and no real escaping the incomprehensible nature of God. That is why the 3 voices mentioned above singing into the darkness are so pitiful, the slow motion replay of their atoms being vaporised as the nuclear radiation over excites the orbital configurations of their mortal existences. Is this what materialism and atheism and a world without God means to them?

Maybe God really is just a bad idea and its time to think up some better ideas. Sadly God is not an idea. He is not empirical either so no data there. He can't be see. He does even have a material form. He is an enigma. It is true that the non-believers give him a name and give people an earthly membership - but this is the weakness of the bomb-makers not of God. Yes God did create the universe. Yes God is present at this moment throughout the universe. Quite a conumdrum isn't it. Simpler if we just dismiss it rather than accept that maybe our minds are not big enough to grasp it. Too humbling.

Well I don't know for sure either, but I don't give up so easy. Those who make it to the higher realms only get there through astounding feats of goodness and self-mastery - it is not for those who satisfy themselves in worldly gains. Not a criticism just a fact. I realise last week also that it really is a matter of the red pill or the blue pill (from the Matrix). You can't do both. If you take the red pill however it will be a path that takes you to your limits - it is not easy at times and many fail and end up worse than if they had not taken the pill at all. God is not an easy path! I sometimes feel in moments of weakness that even if Heaven is as great as they say it is, it was not worth the difficulty of the path!

We all know what is Good. Arguing about God doesn't get us off the hook. We all know deep down what purity is. We all know what we should do. These are facts. All that remains is to avoid these facts or the face them. All our lives (I known mine is) is a huge exercise in running from what I know is true. I am running from myself. I am running from God. Does it matter whether God is great or not? Does it matter whether I am great or not?