Asking an atheist what he will do when he arrives at the Pearly Gates is bound to be a non-starter. Gay Byrne, Irish TV presenter, regularly asks his guests this question, so Stephen Fry must have prepared this reply;
“I’ll say: bone
cancer in children, what’s that about? How dare you how dare you create a
world where there is such misery that’s not our fault? It's not right. It’s utterly,
utterly evil. Why should I respect a
capricious, mean minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full
of injustice and pain?"
He's out and he's proud and he's very very loud. Thank God someone is prepared to care and be outraged.
I'm speaking from the heart when I say that. A family member of a friend, an only child of 12, is in hospital with bone cancer. His parents have just been given one day to make the following 'choice': allowing their child to be mutilated (his lung removed, his kidneys poisoned, his hearing destroyed) because if not he will certainly die very quickly, but then again with this 'treatment' he will probably die anyway. If they don't act, they risk feeling responsible for not trying, if they do, for mutilating and causing even more suffering to the child they love with all their being. Faced with such a 'choice', whatever they choose, they fall into the abyss. Whatever the ancient and recent past events leading up to this, and any imaginable transformation in the future, it's a diabolical illness, a diabolical choice, and for those who love, living this experience is hell. We all pass through hell on earth to some extent or other, and some stay there to the end of their days.
In the 12th and 13th Century Cathars were prevalant in Southern Europe, in particular the Languedoc region of France. As Christians who had not been got at by the Roman Church of the time, they believed in women priests, understood reincarnation and that human life on earth is composed of body, soul
and spirit. They rejected the prevailing religious climate that 'God is in his heaven and all is well with the world' (sound-bite from R. Browning), including any evils the Pope and his gang planned to perform in the name of God. For the Cathars it sufficed to take one look at the world to know that God was in his heaven but the other guy was in charge of the world. Their response was to do all they could to connect themselves to God in terms of their personal 'inner' spiritual work, to aim for a 'good end' to their life when they would be returned to their true home, to help others through their active and loving social work, and to take 'consolation' from the beauties of the world when they could.
Stephen Fry has joined the ranks of those who are stopped by the following kind of logic:
Maxim:
God is omnipotent, God is love
- If God is omnipotent, he can therefore allow or or prevent suffering, he can cause it or heal it.
- A loving God would not cause horrific pointless suffering, or allow it to continue without intervening, or design a life that is inherently one of suffering and injustice.
- This is not consistent with a loving God.
- He could be either omnipotent or unloving, but he cannot be both.
- If he is omnipotent, then can rail against him (should he exist) and if loving, then he must be powerless.
The Cathars too faced this choice. Either a loving God 'allowed' the world to be governed by evil, or the evil one was as powerful as God; they chose the latter interpretation, much to the horror of the Catholic Church. After all, at the most basic level God is Everything, there cannot be anything else, and it certainly did not hold with an evil one being as powerful as God. Both groups accused one another of being churches of Satan. Tragically for humanity and above all for the Cathars the possibility of continuing the debate on 'the problem of evil' and dualism was ended when the Pope and his hierarchies had all the Cathars tortured and killed.
I listen to and respect Stephen Fry as a compassionate fellow human being, but I'm
not too keen on accepting his wisdom on the nature of God, as he's never
really looked
into it. From what he says he's looked
out at it; in the same interview, he goes on to speak about the 'God' of today and the difference between this and the Greek gods, and he gives all the impressions of being learned man. If ever he managed to look deep
into his own soul, I guess he
didn't recognise anything of God in there either. But if he has not dedicated his life to the search, sought out the knowledge, thought about it and made it live in a special way, then he can't help me on questions of God.
Logic is logic, but at each stage of the process, the premises can be in need of adjustment, and the reasoning can be called into question, as can the final conclusion of such a process; in this case that God is highly unlikely or does not exist, the position of an atheist.
Stephen Fry's definition of God, the one he rejects, is pretty crude. I reject his idea of God too. What can this kind of God be? A sort of 'someone up there' behind the master controls of the Cosmos, who dominates and dictates our world down here, who sees everything and sees to everything, from the inside of our heads to the outer reaches of the planet to ensure we all exist in a state of perfect, suffer-free justice? Anything less, and we rail against him, that's the price of being an omnipotent, omniscient omnipresent pure-love dictator. Or is he sadistic and careless creator of a bad world which he abandons? But is this what humanity is talking about when it talks of God, is it even what God meant in history and is it what it means now? Is this what individuals experience when they experience the spiritual and dare to call it God? Is it the right maxim from which to start the logic process?
I don't understand how you can approach the question of God, the divine, the spiritual, without serious dedication, without discernment and all kinds of clear thinking. How can you lump all religions and traditions and history of religion and history of the misinterpretation of religions together as 'religion' and call God and religion 'them', the illogical deceivers who do evil in the name of religion, and call the atheists 'us'?
Such thinking, and such thinkers tell me next to nothing about God. As with any science or field of knowledge, we need underpinning principles and knowledge to be able to understand and to do our own experiments. Those who have no experience or memory of the divine, are unable to 'see' or recognise (re-cognize, re-think) the divine in themselves or the world around them, and do not seek to do so, are not going to be the experts who can explain God to us, or the ones to inform us reliably that God does not exist because he is logically impossible.
The hardest thing to understand is that while we can follow scientific 'Method' to explore the spiritual, we cannot use most of its current methods or tools. Our senses for the outer world are given to us ready formed. The tools we need to continue on to the God realm exist only as a potential, as a kind of 'seed', which must be discovered within us, planted, given conditions necessary for growth. We have to discover, ignite, develop, refine these tools of self and God-discovery, it's an
active process.
We have been given something, as part of our nature, which we can choose to activate, and which we can choose to work on. The choice and the hard graft is up to us. Our senses are given to us, the ready-meals of the world of consciousness, but in the case of becoming conscious of our true nature and of God, we have to inform ourselves from the very beginning on how to grow our own food from seed and from scratch, and we have to work the land. So much easier to grab a ready meal and throw it in the microwave. So tempting to think that's all there is. If we set out to become the self sufficient 'farmers' of our knowledge of God, we have to start from the mud and muck, we have to learn everything again, but the rewards are not only good nourishment, but self -sufficiency and independence, sometimes called freedom by philosophers. This is the area of 'thinking plus', of raised or heightened states of consciousness (love, prayer reflection, art, music soul-searching, multiple forms of meditation, pausing our thoughts, thinking to the source of our thoughts...). In particular, it's the area of 'thinking about thinking', of turning our attention inwards, using inner thinking tools to explore, and of being in a state of attentiveness to receive the answers to our questions, our burning questions.
There are very few people who have understood and practised this in the past, very few who understand and practice it now, fewer still who succeed to any great extent, but these are the people to whom we must turn if we want to know enough to set off on our own path, rather than bumbling along a pre-thought out path to atheism. If you continue on this path, to atheism, you will not find God. A path to atheism is not a path to God, atheism is not God, that must be obvious to the most minor logician.
Perhaps in our space-time world, and in our time, God is not 'someone up there'. but exists within us, 'down here'. Pretty much all religions and spiritual traditions maintain that human beings on earth contain a spark or drop of the divine. This would make God here and now, is a highly individual matter, even if, on another plane, God Eternal is the same as he ever was. This does not mean God on earth is nothing but a multitude of subjective opinions and therefore has no objective truth. God is to be found somewhere in the region of the individual truth of the individual human being, and as the 'ground of all being', the set-up of the world, its substance and its possibilities.
If this spark or drop of the divine within us is not longed for, searched, 'discovered' if we don't become conscious of it, and this consciousness is not the start of a process of spiritual development of consciousness, then the 'God in us' does not manifest, remains potential. For as long as the divine does not develop in us, then God may be in heaven, but he sleeps on earth. While God sleeps, devils come out to play. Even if the set-up is good, without Love at the controls of each one of us, other deeds are done, and quite other things created, and quite other consequences set in motion.
Socrates said 'know yourself' and so did Christ. There's a lot more in there than we think. Perhaps intolerable suffering will make us try harder to 'realize' God in ourselves, to have the knowledge and to think, and to have the possibility to act to end the suffering, pain and injustice we meet on earth. The Cathars understood that our world was taken over by the devil, and worked hard to purify themselves and to help others purify themselves in order to be able to escape it. Perhaps we could also work on illuminating and transforming our own 'world' and so together 'The' world, rather than escaping it? That's what I'm working on.
