The Lord's Prayer for Unbelievers Like Myself

Photo by Serhii Datsinko - Ukraine

For a while I’ve been intending to do some more writing about what Christian ideas mean to me as a person who doesn’t believe in the supernatural. Why not have a look at a central text - The Lord’s Prayer? This is found in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4.

“Our Father…”

I think it helps to draw meaning from this concept of “God the Father” if we acknowledge that it is an expression which originated in a patriarchal culture. The source and guiding principle of the universe might have been depicted as “The Mother”, but in this case it wasn’t, so what we have to ask is “What does the father figure mean to a culture in which a man was considered the head of the family?”

Our parents are the source of our existence. They came together and we were the result. So the father is a representation of the process by which we came into existence.

The father, in such a culture, is also the teacher of morals and the one who punishes us if we depart from them.

I don’t believe in the supernatural, but the term “God” is meaningful to me as a symbol.

First there is “God the Creator”. For me, this is a personification of the creative process of the universe whereby more complex and capable wholes come into existence. Somehow atoms came to be arranged in the meaningful form which allows me to exist as a complex intelligent entity sitting at my computer and typing this sentence. We know a lot more about this process now than we did when the Lord’s Prayer was first spoken, but it is still something worthy of the kind of awe we associate with the term “God”.

Then there is “God” as a motivating force in human behaviour - “God” as love. Here again we have something which brings into being more complex and capable wholes. While love is all too easily subsumed by conflicts of one kind or another - to the extent that there is such a thing as a friendship or a family or a tribe or a community, these are wholes which are greater than the sum of their parts made possible by love. Love being a form of communication characterised by openness, honesty, spontaneity and generosity.

“God” is seen as a teacher of morality and a judge. Love is the source of our morality. I believe we have an instinct for it which is born in us, and, if we are lucky, that is reinforced and encouraged by the example of those who love us. While we often suffer from experiences which are simply bad luck, we can also be taught lessons by life. We may make a selfish decision in which we neglect to recognise that our wellbeing rests within the wellbeing of those around us, and as a result life may teach us a lesson via negative consequences. I think “God the Judge” is a symbol for that process. Life could be imagined a bit like a video game. We have a certain capacity for love which can be recharged in positive encounters with others, like picking up power packs, and there are encounters with mischance and with the malevolence of others which may deplete us. There is a chance we may lose our way entirely. Maybe we will lose patience and “go over to the dark side” because it seems easier, less of a struggle. The idea of “God the Judge” is of someone who is keeping the score. Maybe there is no such entity, but our life situation and its consequences are real.

“…who art in heaven…”

To me, the word “heaven” represents a realm of potential which we can apprehend using our imagination. We can imagine what the human world would be like if it reached its creative potential, if love and reason ruled over all. In our world we see “God” as if “through a glass darkly”. Love shines out here and there amidst the darkness, but war and crime and depression and all the rest can easily seem to be the larger part of reality. And foolishness is more common than wisdom or reason. So we have to look to our imaginary vision of how things could be to see “God” clearly.

“…hallowed be thy name…”

“Hallowed” means “made holy”. As I’ve said, the creative principle of the universe is one which allows for the formation of more complex and capable wholes. “Holy” comes from the same source as the word “whole”. So that which is “holy” is that which is “whole” or “of the whole”. To heal is to “be made whole”. “God” is our symbol for all that “makes whole”.

“…Thy Kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”

The essence of the prayer is that the potential for wholeness - through love and reason - be realised in the world as it exists in our imagination.

“…Give us this day our daily bread…”

A plea that we are able to obtain the means to meet our daily physical needs, but this also could be a way of symbolising our emotional needs for hope, inspiration and love.

“…And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…”

One of the major threats to wholeness, of the individual or the group, is lack of forgiveness. 

Conscience acts as a guide to our behaviour, but a healthy relationship with the conscience requires self-acceptance and the flexibility it makes possible. If our self-acceptance is undermined to the extent that the conscience becomes an intolerable source of oppression, then we can go to war against it. Instead of doing what we know to be the best thing, we may deliberately do the opposite of what our conscience would tell us. This seems to me to be the best way to understand the extremes of human malevolence. There are acts of evil which have a pragmatic purpose. One might torture someone to get information to help one’s own side in a war. But some people commit such acts without such an external motive. How do we explain such sadism? The impulse is the exact opposite of the love impulse. Is it unreasonable to interpret malevolence, of which this is the purest form, as resentment at a conscience which demands loving behaviour when, because of undermined self-acceptance, there is no more love to give? If hatred of the conscience were not a motivating force there would be no point in wasting time, or risking one’s freedom, by inflicting suffering when one could spend that time and effort indulging in sensual pleasure.

So a healthy relationship with the conscience is one in which forgiveness for past transgressions frees us up to do better next time. Self-forgiveness is a major part of self-acceptance. By self-acceptance I don’t mean complacency, because our potential to improve is a key part of what is being accepted. To be self-accepting is to recognise that one has nothing to prove about one’s self and thus be able to open up to intrinsic motivations for doing things rather than ones rooted in maintaining a fragile sense of pride.

And clearly the functioning of human groups require forgiveness amongst their members. It won’t work if there is an imbalance here, with some forgiving all the time and others always being the ones whose misbehaviour is being forgiven. So it is linked : “…forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us…” (the unforgiving don’t get forgiven) and followed by the next two lines which address the origins of the transgressions which might need to be forgiven.

“And lead us not into temptation…”

It’s all too easy to be tempted by opportunities to seek immediate gratification of some desire even when we know that the longer term consequences will be harmful to both ourselves and others. So there is a plea to limit such tests. Since I’m not looking at this as something involving a supernatural being, I would see this as an intention to develop the spirit of stoicism as an defence against impulsiveness.

“…but deliver us from evil.”

Once again a positive focusing on the power of love, reason and wisdom, personified here as “God”, to heal our malevolent motivations, An opening up to all that might lead us back to wholeness.

This is needed to compliment forgiveness. Forgiveness can’t be expected in the absence of a move toward better behaviour.

“For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.”

The creative principle of life, expressed in inter-human affairs as love, is that through which everything becomes possible. In a limited sense it is possible to defy this principle, but such defiance is ultimately in vain as nothing worthwhile comes to us as a result. Selfishness is ultimately self-defeating, because we have far more to gain by working together for our mutual benefit. In this sense, that which we symbolise under the word “God” is the source of everything wonderful and the ruler of the system of which we are an expression.

"Amen"

“Amen” means “certainty”, “truth” and “verily”.

BOOK REVIEW : Atheism : The Dumbest Religion on Earth by Monk E. Mind

The first thing you should know about this book is that it was not written by a religious believer. We have probably all heard someone who identifies as a Christian claiming that atheism is really just another religion. And those whose worldview is founded on the concept that their religious belief is wisdom might well judge atheists to be foolish. So when you see a book with this title, the natural expectation is that it will be the work of a religious person who has become sick of atheists labelling them as the dupe of an irrational belief system and is indulging in an “I know you are but what am I?” comeback.

What we have here is an ex-atheist - he says he is countering arguments he himself used to make. For him, God is not a matter for belief or disbelief. Because belief and disbelief are for matters which can’t be definitively settled.

It’s all about semantics for Monk E. Mind.

All words he says refer to either objects or concepts. Objects have shape. Concepts describe the relationship between objects. To exist is to be an object with a location. Only objects exist. The universe and space are concepts, therefore they don’t exist. God would only refer to something existing if that something had a shape and a location.

The name Monk E. Mind seems appropriate for the author of this book as his authorial voice suggests nothing so much as a noisy little primate scampering around pulling mocking faces and hurling his faeces at anyone who comes close. His faeces in this case being his pseudo-reasoning and pedantry.

Monk E. Mind was also the author of a book called Rope Hypothesis and Thread Theory. The Rope Hypothesis is a physics model proposed by an engineer named Bill Gaede, who first came to public attention as an industrial spy for the Cubans. When I did a bit of reading and watched him on YouTube, I found that his philosophy is the same as that presented by Monk E. Mind in this book. Is Monk E. Mind a pseudonym for Gaede, or for a disciple of his? I don’t know. Gaede used his own name for his magnum opus Why God Doesn't Exist.

One of the key qualities needed by anyone who wishes to pursue a deeper understanding of any subject is humility. Boldness can be very useful for breaking free of unhelpful patterns of thought, but only the individual who has humility will be on the look out for their own errors and learn from them. Monk E. Mind is so full of the idea that his vision is superior - dancing and crowing about how remarkably stupid scientists are for believing in things like black holes - that he can’t see the obvious fallacies on which his arguments are based.

“People that do not define are using word magic,” he says. But what about those who make up their own definitions? Monk E. Mind has built a house of cards out of his own personal definitions for words.

Clear effective written communication requires that the writer and the reader agree on the definitions of the words being used. Dictionaries are there to help us to get on the same page. There is a kind of democracy about dictionaries in that it is in the best interest of the lexicographer to match what is meant by the majority of individuals when articulating a definition. People kicking up a fuss because they feel a word has not been defined in the way in which they intend it would hurt the reputation and sales of the dictionary.

If someone comes up with their own personal definition which doesn’t appear in any dictionary then the onus is on that definition to have, for us, an obvious advantage over the definitions used by as many as 1.5 billion other individuals (if we are communicating in English).

The argument Monk E. Mind presents rests entirely on his own definitions for words.

“Object : that which has shape.”

An ideal triangle doesn’t exist, but, by definition, it has shape. It’s a triangle. Shape is all it has.

Google’s definition is “a material thing that can be seen and touched.”

Of course you could object that objects can’t be seen by a blind man or that an object on the surface of the moon can’t be touched because it is too far away. But that would be silly, and lets not be silly.

“Concept : the relation between objects”

A concept isn’t necessarily a relation between objects. It can an relation between other concepts. A mathematical formula is a concept which is a relation between numbers. Numbers are concepts.

Google’s definition is “an abstract idea”.

So how do they define “abstract”? “(E)xisting in thought or as an idea but not having physical or concrete existence.”

So theories about gravity are abstract, but gravity itself is physical (it effects the movement of physical objects.) According to Monk E. Mind’s definition, gravity itself would be a concept presumably.

“Exist : object with location; something somewhere; physically present.”

So relationships between objects don’t exist? The planets exist, but the solar system doesn’t?

Google say that to exist is to “have objective reality or being”.

They define “objective” as “not dependent on the mind for existence; actual.”

Now remember Monk E. Mind is saying that only objects can exist and that objects are what have shape. Google allows the solar system to exist, because it isn’t dependent on the mind, even though it is not an object but a relationship between objects.

Gravity is not an object, but does it depend on the mind for its existence? If you jump off of a tall building you will splatter on the pavement whether you believe you will or not.

Most of us use the term “exist” to refer to relationships as well as objects. For us laws exist, even though they may have originated in the human mind. They exist because they can have consequences on our actions and the actions of others.

And most concepts of a monotheistic God can be understood as a universal system of law. For a pantheist like myself these are natural laws potentially accessible to science. To religious individuals God’s law may be moral in nature. But unless someone worships something like a golden calf, one’s God is a relationship rather than an object.

Bringing it closer to home - are you an object or a relationship? The human body has a border, but we are not simply our body. We are the whole process which animates that body. In the same way to speak of God is to speak of the whole process which animates the universe.

One may have the view that the universe has no such coherent process, and even if we do have the view that it does, we may disagree greatly on the nature of that process, especially the degree to which it resembles a human personality. I don’t see an insistence that such a process doesn’t exist because it isn’t an object doing anything to silence debate on this topic.

“Because matter and motion are eternal, there was no first cause to motion or creation of matter, therefore no Creators are possible!”

Would Monk E. Mind tell a painter… a sculptor… an engineer… an architect… a movie maker… that creation is impossible? They know that they don’t create their own raw materials, but creation is the arrangement of raw materials into a new and meaningful whole.

Mr. Mind claims that matter can’t be created. I’m not particularly well-informed on science, but I do remember being taught at school that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We were also taught that matter is made out of energy and can break down to release that energy. So it makes sense to say that energy can’t be created, but if it changes and can have the form of elements which react with each other to form different kinds of matter and might lead to forms of matter which are alive and eventually living forms which are intelligent, then it seems to me that creation is something that can take place. Something more complex and meaningful can arise from something pre-existing. We see it in our own culture when individuals come together to form an organisation which is, in some way, more than the sum of themselves as parts. For creation to be the theme of life does not necessarily require that it ever had a beginning. One might believe in God as the eternal creative theme of a universe which has always existed.

The author claims that matter can’t be created. Can he prove it? And, if he can’t prove it, why should we not simply ignore his argument?

Ah, but science is not about proof, he insists. It is about explanation only.

“science: rational explanations for reality”

But how do we arrive at these rational explanations?

Google defines science as “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”

So that definition tells us how we can arrive at our rational explanation - “through observation and experiment”.

Monk E. Mind says :

“…you need to get over…the idea of facts, truth, proof and evidence. Reality is having none of it. These things are founded on the limited sensory system and the beliefs of man. They are opinions. Facts are the opinions from authority. What is true for you may not be true for your neighbor. Proof, which is based on evidence (observation), at best confirms what the person already believes.”

Only objects exist, according to the author. So love, energy, waves, circles, squares, magnetic fields, motion, the universe, numbers and the mind don’t exist, but rocks do. But on what basis does he make the claim that rocks exist if he doesn’t recognise facts, truth, proof or evidence (observation)? He can see them and feel them, but that is nothing but unreliable observation. And if truth is a useless concept, what, in his view, differentiates his ideas from those of others he rejects?

So he wants us to arrive at our goal - “rational explanations” - but rejects the method by which we are trying to get there. Maybe his rational explanations are going to come to him by divine revelation.

One fallacious form of argument is the argument from authority. That an idea is expressed by a person who has some form of social acknowledgement of expertise in an area doesn’t, in itself, make the idea more worthy of credence. It has to work in and of itself, regardless of the source.

The author says that there are no authorities, and challenges the reader to reject his explanations because he is “a Wal-Mart greeter” who “learned this from a shoe shine boy.”That would be all well and good if his explanations were sound and illuminating, but we need to be just as rigorous with the thinking of a Wal-Mart greeter as we would with someone like Richard Dawkins. If his new definitions of words are not useful, his lack of academic credentials won’t make them so.

“Any one person with the willingness to do so has the ability to learn anything that another human can learn.”The problem is that learning requires time and access to information. The ideas about physics expressed by someone with a PhD. in the subject may not be completely reliable, because humans are fallible and science is a process of elimination of unsatisfactory explanations, but the advantage they have over the average Wal-Mart greeter is that the time they have been able to devote to their study is not severely limited by the time requirements of supporting themselves with a low paying job, and they have been able to engage in discourse with others knowledgeable in the field. They may also have had the chance to do experiments. Having said that, if the Wal-Mart greeter can express something that makes the physicist slap his head and cry “How could I have missed something so obvious?!?” of course we will pay attention.

Let’s get to the title of the book. On what basis does Monk E. Mind come to the conclusion that atheism is a religion? Unsurprisingly, he starts by making up his own definition for the word “religion”.

“religion: irrational explanations for reality”

What do we mean by “explanations”? According to Google, an explanation is “a statement or account that makes something clear.”

Given how mystical many religions are and the degree to which their dogma, rather than making things clear, tends to need its own explanation, this hardly seems a satisfactory definition.

Google gives us : “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods”.

Sounds more like the religions I’ve come in contact with.

Ah, but how to troll the atheists without finding some dishonest way to equate them with that which they reject?

To demonstrate his contention that atheism is a religion he points to a Supreme Court judgement and a dictionary definition. This indicates that some people consider it a religion, but unless they can produce a reason why they consider it a religion which is based on a definition on which we can all agree, this is an empty argument from authority. The soundest argument he has here perhaps is that official forms often have a question about the person’s religion which give one option “Atheism” and another option “No Religion.” The existence of such forms proves nothing, but if someone who identifies as an atheist ticks the “Atheism” box rather than the “No Religion” box, one could reasonably ask why they are accomodating the false listing of atheism as a religion when they have the option of having nothing to do with this error by simply ticking “No Religion.” This is a small point.

Now I’ll indulge in a little armchair psychoanalysis. Monk E. Mind is contemptuous of atheists, who he presents as hypocrites for criticising others for having a faith-based belief system when that is what they have themselves. He lumps atheists together and he lumps scientists together, claiming that they believe in magic. The individual in a state of severe denial often projects the disowned aspect of their own psyche onto the world around them, showing a diminished acknowledgement of differences between individuals within the groups onto which they are projecting. Monk E. Mind is arguing that we should seek easily visualisable explanations for what happens in the world around us and that we not bother to test these explanations experimentally. That is what religious people did in a pre-scientific era. Perhaps his exasperation with others is a projection of his subconscious fear that his game of semantics may be “the dumbest religion on Earth.”

I don’t think we need to trouble ourselves much with this book. It is full of ideas. Ideas are not objects. Ideas are concepts. Only objects exist. Concepts don’t exist. There’s nothing to see here.

[This review has been heavily revised as a result of feedback from the author.]

Who Are the Meek and How Do They Inherit the Earth?

Photo by wisitporn.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” Matthew 5:5

There is an old joke that goes : “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth (if it’s O.K. with the rest of you guys.)”

Meekness is often exploited. It seems as if the aggressive are more likely to get what they want.

There are different interpretations of this passage.

Jeremy Griffith, the author of Freedom : The End of the Human Condition, says that “the meek” are “the more innocent”, by which he means those of us who have been more nurtured and are thus less insecure and more honest in our thinking and less aggressive in our nature. By “…inherit the earth” he thinks Jesus meant that these individuals will “…have to lead humanity home to a human-condition-free world.”

Jordan Peterson, on the other hand, claims that a better translation of the Greek word ήμερος usually translated as “meek” is “those who have weapons and the ability to use them but are determined to keep them sheathed”. Those who take the right path are those who integrate their shadow, who acknowledge the dark side of their nature but do not succumb to it, gaining strength from their encounter with it. He is afraid that we may assume that meek is synonymous with “weak” :

Here is a guide to how the Greek word is generally translated.

Here is some discussion of Peterson’s interpretation.

One problem I have with both interpretations is the failure to acknowledge the meaning of the word “inherit”. An inheritance is something unearned which falls to us. Now it may have been earned in some instances, in the sense that someone may put us in their will because we have been of service to them or we may be written out of a will because we have done something to offend a family member. But none of this is intrinsic to the meaning of the word “inheritance”. The passage doesn’t say “the meek will earn (or win) the earth”.

I think we have to look at the context to get a better understanding.

This is the third in what are known as the Beautitudes. Jesus tells us that eight particular classes of people are “blessed” or “fortunate”. He then tells his followers that all of them are “blessed” or “fortunate” if they are persecuted because of him.

He first claims “blessedness” for the “poor in spirit” and then for “those who mourn”. Clearly these are not those who are blessed with good fortune in the world as it currently stands.

I think that, to understand the Beatitudes, we have to recognise that Jesus was an apocalypticist, i.e. a person who believed that some event was going to occur which would overturn the established social order and usher in some kind of paradise on earth. (I recognise that it is more popular to interpret the concept of a “Kingdom of Heaven” as some ethereal place we go to when we die, but that doesn’t make so much sense to me.)

The Beatitudes make sense in the framework of two worlds - the social world we know, with its injustices, its dishonesty and its oppressive power relationships - and a potential world of honesty and love which lies buried beneath its repressions.

Sermon on the Mount 1 Le Sainte Bible Traduction nouvelle selon la Vulgate par Mm J -J Bourasse et P Janvier Tours Alfred Mame et Fils 2 1866 3 France 4 Gustave Dor
Engraving photographed by ruskpp.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:3

Perhaps the “poor in spirit” are those who have been very wounded by their experiences of life. They have little spirit left in them. But in a world of love their wounds will be healed and they will be free of oppression. In terms of a transition to the new world, they have the advantage - “the blessing” - of not being invested in the old.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” 5:4

To be in mourning is not a form of righteousness that one pursues. As with being “poor in spirit” it is a disadvantage in the old world, but one which makes us less invested in it. We fixate on loving relationships which we have lost, through the death of the loved one or through a breakdown in the relationship. In a world where everybody loves everybody else, it will be easy to let go of the past and live in the present.

“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” 5:5

No amount of power or aggression can keep the old world from dying. Terrible destruction can occur. Nothing can necessarily protect anyone. But, only a healthy society will not eventually fall. If such a healthy loving truthful world comes into existence, it will belong to the meek as much as to anyone else. The point is that the powerful and aggressive try to hang onto the world, and, individually, they always fail. They can postpone the new world, but they can never have a world of their own which persists.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” 5:6

Those who long for a world in which we treat each other well, are not invested in a world in which we don’t. So, once again, we have a group of people who have nothing to lose and everything to gain in a transition from the old world to the new world.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” 5:7

Again, things don’t always work this way in the old world. But mercy is clearly the path to the new world. Our divisions keep us trapped in the old world. As William Blake put it : “Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the gates of paradise.”

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” 5:8

I think this is where we come to what Griffith calls “the innocent”. As very young children we were aligned to the world of love. If God is the creative theme of the universe which is manifested in human behaviour as love, then children can “see God”. This is the source of their “enthusiasm”, i.e. “the god within”. It is the wounds of life, which sow the seeds of internal division and breed resentment, which “hide the face of God” from us. In a world in which these divisions are healed with understanding, everyone will live in full awareness that they are manifestations of this creative force.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.” 5:9

This is similar to 5:7. Peace between warring factions is keeping us in the old world. Those who can resolve conflicts are architects of the new world. The reward falls to all, not just to those who behave this way. It isn’t about pursuing righteous behaviour in order to pass a test and get a reward, it is about being a manifestation of a social process from which the whole of humanity benefits.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 5:10

The old world is threatened by honesty and is insecure in it’s sense of its own worth, so those who tell the truth or act in a way which shows up the old world’s corrupt behaviour tend to be persecuted. It is necessary to keep the vision of the new world in mind in order to not give in to this pressure.

Another interpretation could be put on this sentence. Some people are persecuted because of a false sense of righteousness (what William Blake called “Moral Virtue”). A good example might be people who are persecuted for their sexuality. Someone who is in a loving gay relationship is being honest and loving - requirements of the new world - and someone who tries to persecuted them in the belief that they are deviating from righteousness, by not adopting dishonesty and suppressing their love, is part of the old world. The new world is for the person being thus persecuted as it is for all who have been persecuted.

So how does this apocalypse, this death of the old world and birth of the new take place?

What makes the most sense to me is that the human race has always been engaged in a kind of collective improvisation to find the path to the new world. Art, philosophy, religion, science… These are all ways in which our minds and our hearts have been engaged in a process of trying to sort ourselves out. We make mistakes, we strive to learn from them and compensate for them. We examine the world around us and try to better understand where we come from.

Photo by smileus.

Think of us as a computer trying to work out the bugs in its own programming. We can even see this in the evolution of different religions. We can see Jesus as someone trying to compensate for the flaws in Judaism, just as Judaism was an attempt to compensate for flaws in various pagan belief systems. It’s all a part of a process of trying to find something which works. And, in the modern world, we have new abilities and new problems not dreamt of in Jesus’ time.

The advantage we have is that this collective improvisation is taking place at an exponential rate. We can share ideas very quickly and with minimum censorship.

What should we do? Participate in the process. Speak what we feel to be the truth. Listen to the ideas expressed by others and test them for flaws. The conceptual framework of understanding which ushers in a new world will be the one which passes the test of such scrutiny. And we will know it because it works, because it heals conflict and spreads wellbeing wherever it is expressed. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:16

Every day we see evidence of how rotten the old world is - lies and corruption are exposed. It’s time for the new world to find itself amidst the collapse of the old. It can only grow out of open, honest, spontaneous and generous interaction between individuals. Dogmatic utopias constructed through social programming or the impositions of more laws are part of the old world. We will know the truth by the fact that it sets us free from all that.

Photo by Gleb TV.

BOOK REVIEW : The Murder of Christ by Wilhelm Reich

This book by controversial psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich is unlikely to appeal to traditional Christian believers. Reich theorises that Jesus must have had sex with one or more of the women who surrounded him during his ministry. If Jesus was a naturally loving individual, Reich concludes, he must have exhibited the free genital expression intrinsic to a healthy character structure. 

Reich was not a traditional believer. He views Jesus as a man whose presence had a profound impact on the world because he was so healthy and the rest of us are so sick. The very tendency to interpret his specialness as something otherworldly, something supernatural, and to create myths of magical events such as virgin birth and resurrection from the dead around his memory, is evidence of how alienated we are from the functioning of our own bodies. 

We are born with primary instincts which direct us toward loving behaviour through the pleasurable streaming of the life energy in our bodies. But we are born into a society which is antagonistic to such feelings. The frustration of the primary instincts causes them to be re-channelled into secondary drives. These can take many forms, including various kinds of egotism, aggression, anxieties, etc.

What Reich admits he cannot explain is how this occurred in the beginning. The story of Adam and Eve gives this change from healthy functioning to antagonism towards the free operation of the life force, i.e. God, a mythological expression. We are caught in a terrible trap and that trap is our own neurotic character structure, which alienates us from each other and from nature. In the first chapter Reich gives a description of The Trap and the various ways we try to reconcile ourselves to imprisonment within it. Religion is one source of solace, a promise of a life outside the trap after death.

But Reich presents Jesus as a man who never entered The Trap. A man with a healthy character structure, a man who unselfconsciously gave expression to our original loving instincts. His wisdom was the honest clear thinking anyone would exhibit who was not impeded by the fears and frustrations that come with being divided against one’s own life energy.

Central to this condition is fear of our sexual feelings. This is the hook on which our loving instincts get snagged.

In Western culture things have changed a lot since Reich’s death in 1957. We are more honest about sexuality. He played a role in opening things up. It was he who coined the term “Sexual Revolution”. But that doesn’t mean that the problem he highlighted is any the less with us. What he felt was repressed in us was not so much sex itself but the loving expression of “the genital embrace”. It’s possible to have sex several times a day and still be a denizen of The Trap. Reich uses the term “four-lettering” to describe compulsive neurotic sex - the “wham bam thank you ma’am” kind of copulation that is all the world away from the gentle process which builds slowly and naturally to an orgasm which frees the soul to meld with that of one’s partner.

Maybe attitudes to adolescent sexuality are more enlightened than they were in Reich’s day. He talks of the sexual agony of the adolescent. This is something I could identify with. Even though I had sexually liberal parents, I was greatly disturbed by the onrush of powerful sexual desires at puberty. I remember wishing at one point that my sexual desires could be medically removed, because they were such a source of terrible anxiety. Why? I don’t know. Reich felt that young people were psychologically damaged by the sex negative attitudes of parents, teachers and the church, which caused them to fight against and repress their sexual desires instead of expressing them in a healthy way. Thus one generation of sexual cripples cripples the next.

Once again, the fact that young people today are more sexually active would not necessarily be a positive sign for Reich. Compulsive unloving sex is just another neurotic symptom.

In this book, which was written only a few years before he was imprisoned and died, Reich doesn’t try to make a carefully reasoned or evidenced argument about human nature or about the life and death of Jesus. This is written more in the mode of the prophet crying in the wilderness. His early work was supported with references to case studies and anthropological research. Here he simply states what he strongly believes to be true and it is up to us to either feel that it makes sense of our own experience and what we have read in the gospels about Jesus or that it doesn’t. Given that, in the middle of his career, Reich claimed to have discovered scientific evidence of the life energy, which he called “orgone” - evidence which was taken seriously by very few other scientists - perhaps this less scientific approach is preferable. One need not agree with everything Reich says to gain from the stimulation of his iconoclastic thought. We all need to be shaken up from time to time.

The story of the life and murder of Christ is, arguably, the most important story in Western history. Even those of us who are not Christians know its major events. It permeates our culture. It doesn’t matter that Reich is no Biblical scholar. Even if this were a fictional story, it is one which embodies the central human dilemma. Reich is using the basics of the story as a way of contemplating and illustrating the human condition. And he doesn’t hide the fact that he identifies aspects of his own situation with that of Christ. He too, at least in his own mind, is a speaker of truths unwelcome to the authority figures of his time. He too had reluctantly taken on a leadership role.

Reich presents Christ as a man who only gradually discovers that he is special. He has to learn that others are not free in the way that he is. His psychological freedom and loving nature make him very attractive to those around him. He wants to help them. But he doesn’t understand that their character structure is such that they will suck up whatever love he shows them and then resent him because they can’t be like him. They will seduce him into becoming a leader - into marching on Jerusalem - but it will all be for nothing. He will be killed because those with a sick character structure always have a murderous resentment for those who are still truly alive inside themselves.

It is this tendency which is the central subject of the book. For Reich, the murder of Christ is something that happens all over the world ever day. Christ was an embodiment of our original loving instincts as they are expressed in the body. And the Murder of Christ continues through the stifling of the expression of those instincts in every child. Who is the murderer of Christ? Reich points the finger at all of us.

Like Listen Little Man!, another book Reich wrote in the latter part of his life when he was at the centre of much hostility, The Murder of Christ is often a harshly accusatory book, but we may gain much through our encounter with its thorniness. Today we know more about the chemistry of love. We know that there are forms of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, which cause our bodies to produce the chemical Oxytocin. The experience of this chemical in our blood stream, which produces warm feelings of affection and bonding and thus, no doubt, works to melt the rigidity of our angry, frightened or resentful ego structure, is perhaps what Reich and his patients experienced as the flow of “orgone energy”. Perhaps it is true that a significant element in the dark side of our life as humans - aggression, sexual predation, greed, depression, loneliness - arises through a fear of bodily sensations which, were we less troubled by them, could lead us to a more loving society.

Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich and Ilse Ollendorff in Maine

BOOK REVIEW : Make Christianity Great Again by Leroy Grey

I received a free review copy of this ebook because the author read a review I wrote of Jesus, Interrupted : Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible & Why We Don’t Know about Them by Bart D. Ehrman. Ehrman is a respected Biblical scholar and one need not be a believer in order to find his book interesting. In fact Ehrman was no longer a believer when he wrote it. Leroy Grey’s book, on the other hand, exists very much within the born again Christian paradigm. I am not a Christian and never have been. My life philosophy has been heavily influenced by concepts expressed by Jesus as recorded in the gospels, but I don’t believe in the supernatural and see those words, and many of the stories which have come to surround the figure of Jesus, as a poetic expression of existential psychological principles.

I see three distinct problems with the title of this book :

1. The link to a political slogan cheapens the subject matter. (The link to Donald Trump is conscious, as is indicated by the book’s description on Amazon : “…just as President Trump has called all loyal, patriotic Americans to Make America Great Again…” Political slogans are propaganda, regardless of which party or candidate they are used to drum up support for. They are an attempt to bypass critical assessment by a crude appeal to emotions. If the aim of this book is to encourage critical assessment of the mainstream churches’ interpretation of the Christian message, then it hardly seems appropriate to associate it with a form of discourse aimed at bypassing such thought. 

2. When was Christianity great? If, as Grey claims, the mainstream churches are not founded on a true assessment of Christ’s teachings, then clearly he is not claiming the power and popularity of those churches as Christianity’s greatness. Was Christianity great in the very beginning when it had only a small number of followers? Maybe, but smallness and lack of immediate influence is not what we usually define as greatness. Wouldn’t a more appropriate title be something like Restoring Truth to Christianity?

3. The title is liable to leave mainstream Christians feeling like they have been the victim of a bait-and-switch. Since the popular conception of Christianity is associated with the mainstream churches, believers in those churches are liable to assume that this is a book about making what they believe in “great again”. But then when they read the book, they may feel that it is about trying to destroy Christianity as they know it.

In placing an emphasis on personal experience of God through meditation, Grey takes a position similar to that of the gnostics. He presents this as an alternative to the fragmentation of Christendom into thousands of seperate denominations. Maybe. There are others who recommend personal experience of God through the ingestion of psychedelics as a way to bring us together. (Leroy isn’t advocating the use of such substances, but he did use them before becoming a born-again Christian.) Such dreams of social divisions healed are yet to prove themselves, but I’m always curious to see what comes of them. If something works for people, more power to them.

Grey places a lot of emphasis on a religious experience he had in which he was “taken to Heaven alive”, saw a bank of angels and received a mission to foster community and help others to experience such communion with God. Such experiences are not so uncommon apparently. There seems to be a potential for them built into the human brain. Once again, the use of psychedelics has been known to facility this phenomena, though this was apparently not the case with Grey at that time. Of course, the fact that someone experiences something like this does not mean that what appears to be happening conforms to any external reality. I don’t know how we could prove that it doesn’t, but it is perfectly reasonable to interpret it as the equivalent of a very vivid dream. That life-changing insights might arise from such an experience makes sense when we consider the fear-based conservatism characteristic of much of our thinking. We tend to settle into habits of thought and belief which protect us from uncertainty. Genuinely original, out-of-the-box, thinking might confront us with some horrific truth about ourselves which we find unbearable. We might discover that everything we ever “knew” about ourselves was wrong. But a spiritual experience like that described by Grey can temporarily eliminate that box we have such trouble thinking outside of. For some people, the catalyst is a near-death experience. If you fall off a cliff and you know you are going to die, then there isn’t much point keeping up the habits of mental self-protection. By the time you miraculously land safely in a soft bush, you’ve already seen the bright light of a reality unfiltered by conceptual thought, and the ordinary has revealed itself as magical by comparison to that deadening day-to-day dogmatism. And the answers to the big questions of our life may be quite obvious with those barriers removed.

What response are readers likely to have to this account? We don’t have any evidence that it actually happened, certainly none that some celestial being is the true source of the message expressed in Grey’s book. This could be seen as an unfounded claim to authority. It’s like when Neale Donald Walsch wrote Conversations with God. Conversations with My Deeper Self just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it can be so much easier for writers to claim to be taking the Archangel Gabriel’s dictation than to stand or fail on the quality of the ideas they are expressing. The only real authority is truth. If I tell you that 2 + 2 = 4, my voice carries authority because I can demonstrate the truth of what I say with four bottle caps. Spiritual insight is not quite as clear cut as that, but the general principal still applies. Spiritual wisdom, like a valid scientific theory, turns mystery into something comprehensible. Our ability to see some important aspect of reality of which we were previously blind is the evidence which gives the wisdom its authority. Don’t tell me about the day God spoke to you. Don’t tell me about how many years you’ve meditated. That’s important to you, but it carries no weight with me. Tell me something that causes the scales to fall from my eyes and nothing else matters.

Grey believes that the doctrine of the Trinity is a lie. His argument seems to rest on the idea that the oneness between God and Jesus expressed in the Trinity concept is exclusive and thus a denial of our ability to be one with God too. Maybe it is my ignorance of traditional church doctrine on the Trinity, but I can’t see why the idea that God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are different manifestations of a single entity precludes our ability to also achieve oneness with them. “Our oneness with God and Jesus Christ is a oneness with their Perspective, their Purposes and their personality, infusing us with more love, more peace, more forgiveness, more patience, more of all the fruits of the Spirit. And all this leads to greater unity between brothers and sisters in Christ.” This seems very reasonable, and I do realise that fighting over interpretations of the Trinity is one of the things which has divided the church, but I can’t see any reason why the two ideas are necessarily in conflict. Let’s say God is love. Jesus was a man who lived love to the full, thus he was a manifestation of love in human form. The holy spirit is love in us, which brings us together just as Grey describes. The three are different, but the same in that they are all love. Is this not how the concept of the Trinity is supposed to work? Again, maybe I’m just ignorant of doctrine, but it all just seems like arguing over semantics.

Grey claims that God wants Christians to seperate from the world and form specifically Christian communities. This is how he interprets II Corinthians 6:17 : “Come out from among them and be seperate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.” But then he says that this was the example set by Jesus when he and his followers went on the road rather than being fixtures in society, but surely what they did was the opposite of Paul’s advice. They went out and mixed with the unbelievers and they touched the unclean. How else could they bring salvation to those who most needed it?

I have nothing personally against born again Christians forming their own communities. I often tend to find such people a little bit creepy, so if they want to keep to themselves, that’s fine. But I think it is important to recognise the risks of it turning into something unhealthy as we have seen in many self-isolating religious cults. Ideology has a way of interfering with honest communication, and honest communication, i.e. love, is the soul of community. We can see this problem arising from “politically correct” political philosophies which motivate the repression of all that is not accepted by them. Is this not also a danger with religious ideology? What if Grey has a fixed idea of what God wants and others feel differently but keep their feelings to themselves for fear of disrupting the harmony of the group? Without ideology all that is needed is for people to express themselves honestly, because there is no right belief or right way to feel.

If one is insecure in self and particularly insecure in one’s own belief system, then it makes sense one might feel more comfortable with the reinforcement of being surrounded by like-minded people. For me the goal is individuation - bringing all aspects of my self together into a harmonious and secure integrated whole. Mixing with people who think and behave differently from myself is important toward that goal, because the friction that arises as a result is how I become more aware of those aspects of myself I have yet to own and make peace with.

Grey claims the churches have rejected Christ’s command to “not be called teachers” (Matthew 23:10). I think the point he is trying to make here is that the Holy Spirit is the teacher and it is not the role of ministers or priests to teach so much as to help the individual to open up to instruction from their own inner manifestation of the Holy Spirit. This is a little bit like what I have said above about authority. That which illuminates has its own authority and it is important for us to avoid getting an inflated sense of our own importance while serving the interests of that authority and those who can benefit from knowledge of it.

Grey’s advocacy of meditation makes sense. It plays an important role in many religions. The benefits of stilling the mind and opening up to inner guidance are well established. I never had the discipline for it myself. I just get bored and give up. But clearly it works for others.

However, as with Grey’s story about going to heaven, he can’t expect his personal experience of God’s voice during meditation to carry any weight with others unless what he claims God told him makes sense to them. An account of an experience others did not share does not carry intrinsic authority. But, if God really does have a message for us which we can hear when we meditate, then perhaps it is possible for others to test it out and experience it for themselves. What I like about this approach is that it undercuts human authority structures. If one believes in the kind of God Grey believes in, then the authority comes in there, but it cuts out the middle man. It should be the role of a teacher to make themselves unnecessary. If Grey’s meditation method gives people a hot line to the big man, then they will no longer have any need for him, his books or his webinars. This should be the deepest wish of any teacher, that their students will grow up and leave them behind.

Grey argues a lot against the interpretation that Jesus was God. I’m sympathetic to this, because, to me, Jesus was just a very wise and psychologically healthy man. I don’t believe there was anything supernatural about him at all. But it seems as if Grey downplays the scriptural “evidence” for the argument that Jesus was God. He doesn’t mention two key passages in the Gospel of John  : “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1 and “The Word became flesh and lived for a while among us.” John 1:14. Is it not understandable that if Word = God and Word Made Flesh = Jesus, then Jesus = God Made Flesh? Personally, I don’t take it literally but see it as a way of acknowledging the archetypal connections between Jesus the man and God the theological concept. I’m not a Christian though. If Grey is going to persuade dyed-in-the wool believers in the Trinity, it seems like it would be a good idea to tackle this early passage in John head on.

There seems to be a weird disconnect in Grey’s approach. He is claiming that the Christian church betrayed Jesus’ true message, and yet he often quotes from Paul’s letters as if they were an authentic account of how Christianity should be, even while pointing out that Paul was someone who was distorting Jesus’ message. This is particularly weird in a passage in which he claims that one of the foundations of Jesus’ message was “All Priests Equal Before God”. “There are to be no cultural or ethnic walls, no slavery, and no greater distinction given to male or female members of ‘Christ’s body, which is the Church.’ (Colossians 1:24) For ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ (Galatians 3:28). Again, compare this to Paul’s and most of Christianity’s position, in which women are not allowed to preach.” Paul wrote the letter to the Colossians and the letter to the Galatians, but Grey doesn’t acknowledge here that he is quoting Paul against Paul. (Later he tries to reconcile this inconsistency by saying that he views some of Paul’s statements as authentic expressions from God and others as Anti-Christian errors.) Surely the consistent position, if Paul corrupted Jesus’ message, would be to disqualify Paul as a source for true Christianity. Why does Grey not confine himself only to words actually attributed to Jesus himself? Perhaps because he needs to quote Paul to back up his own “God given?” prejudices in favour of Christian community which might not be sufficiently supported by quotes from Jesus.

Grey quotes 2 Chronicles 7:14 : “If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” He interprets “and seek my face” as a call to direct contact with God through meditation. This seems reasonable, but, from my own pantheistic perspective, I see “God” as an integrative, in the social realm - loving, principle within the natural processes of the universe, so I think to “seek the face of God” can be a call to look outward and perceive the integrative principals through which all creation comes into existence, just as much as it may be a call to look inward to find and be motivated by that principle within ourselves. Surely this is a necessary insurance against solipsistic wishful thinking. Haven’t we all seen too many out-of-control self-proclaimed “prophets” who looked only within themselves for guidance?

In defending his idea that we should seek God’s direct word through meditation, Grey says : “First, I must point out that Jesus says we must hear God’s Word. Not once does Jesus say we are to read the word of God - always we are to hear it.” Of course. He was speaking to people who were illiterate. And the word of God he was communicating was the new edition, most of it not having been communicated in the books of the Old Testament.

There is a key passage from which Grey quotes which is worth examining in its full context. Jesus has been accused of driving out demons by the power of Beelzebul : “Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, ‘Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand? And if I drive out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or again, how can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then he can plunder his house. Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. And so I tell you, every kind of sin or slander can be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come. Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognised by its fruit.’” Grey places great emphasis on the line “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters”, taking it out of context as support for his belief that Christians should gather together in separate communities. But Jesus is talking against that which divides. My own interpretation of this passage is that it is that “the Holy Spirit” is a way of referring to truth. That which is factually true is the essence, or spirit, of any whole (the words “holy” and “whole” come from the same root, so “holy” refers to wholeness or integrity). It is that which gives it its integrity. Lies divide us, because everyone can have their own lie, but the truth is the objective ground on which we can all come together. It is that on which we may agree, and, in agreeing, be one. So I think the bit about gathering is not a reference to geographical proximity, but a call to serve the cause of truthfulness, such that we can find common ground. No sin can fracture society and blight people’s lives like a lie can. Even when something as horrific as child sexual abuse occurs, the largest part of the psychological damage which results comes from the fact that the child’s experience is generally isolated within a network of lies which prevent the healing process.

For me, “God” is a mythological way of referring to integrity. All of life comes about because of the meaningful integration of matter. And our “soul” is our integrity, the coherence of all aspects of our being into a functional whole. What is described as being “born again” seems to me a sham - the adoption of an artificial state of discipline in which the new self is split off from the old “sinful” self. This seems to me to be the loss of the soul. There may be “spiritual” feelings, but they are dissociated, not the natural fleshy experiences of the healthy child. The more neurotic we are, the less emotionally healthy we are, the more alienated we are from integrity and thus the more likely it is to seem like something otherworldly and magical. A newborn is not disciplined, split off from - or at war with - its biological urges (“that sinful flesh”). If Jesus’ advice that we must be “born again” can mean anything to me it is that we can return to the playful and loving naturalness of the child by practicing unconditional self-acceptance. Idealism is the root of all evil, and the source of religion’s dark side. To look at ourselves and the world from an idealistic perspective - one which feels it should be looking at something of “God-like purity” - is to poison our relationship to ourselves and the world. The worst evils we humans commit - such as the deliberate infliction of suffering on the innocent and defenceless - is something we are driven to by the oppression of idealistic expectations which undermine our self-acceptance and kill our ability to feel love. What is most important is not high morals or “spirituality”, but honesty.

I’ve been very critical here, but I have to say that there is much in this book which I can sympathise with. Christianity as a religion is a travesty of the teachings we find in the gospels. The mainstream church’s brutal persecution of those who didn’t accept their dogma has been horrendous. The meditative approach to Jesus’s words which Grey proposes, and which was practiced in the past by many individuals as well as gnostic sects, is the only sensible approach for anyone who wants to use Jesus’ words as a pathway to some kind of enlightenment.

I would recommend this book to Christians who want to have their worldview challenged. (As a non-Christian, I’m not really in the target audience. I found it interesting and stimulating because I have a fascination with the psychology of religion as well as my own eccentric interpretation of the gospel message.) But I would suggest that they keep their critical faculties sharp. Just because someone is accurate in their criticism of others, doesn’t mean that they may not also be profoundly mistaken in their own cherished beliefs. And a lot of people who claimed God spoke to them have proven untrustworthy, sometimes dangerously so.