Salvador Freixedo: Defending Ourselves From the Gods
[It was with great delight that we received a copy of Espacio Compartido (Shared Space), the official bulletin of the IIEE (Institución de Investigación y Estudios Exobilógicos - Institute for Exobiological Study and Research), sent by our distinguished friend and colleague Ignacio Darnaude. Among its fascinating contents was a chapter from Salvador Freixedo's Defendámonos de los Dioses - Beware of the Gods - the landmark book I translated in the very early 1990s upon learning that such an important book to the study of ufology remained unavailable in English, although the late Gordon Creighton had set out to provide the field with a translation.
Ramón Nava Osorio at Espacio Compartido has selected the eighth chapter of this massive work for inclusion in issue #80 of his publication.
Having failed at securing a U.S. or U.K. publisher for the book, my translation has languished on a 3.5 disk for nearly 25 years. Following Mr. Nava's lead, I am sharing the eighth chapter of Beware of the Gods with Inexplicata's readership. In view of the current direction of UFO studies, Freixedo's conclusions will probably upset those looking for a nuts-and-bolts and extraterrestrial answer to the riddle, and may offend those with a religious outlook. -- Scott Corrales]
Chapter Eight: Defending Ourselves from the Gods
By Salvador Freixedo
From the book Beware of the Gods (Defendámonos de los Dioses)
Spain: Editorial Quintá, 1980
I will kick off this chapter with two strange statements:
1. If certain gods (*) choose to interfere in a person's life, this person will have practically no means of preventing it and shall be at the mercy of what the god has in store for him/her.
Stated so simply, this affirmation sounds terrifying, but no matter how harsh it seems, it is something that has occurred throughout the millennia. This fatalism (which is clearly manifested in the lives of certain humans) has been sublimated or explained away in a thousand ways by all religions, but they have been unable to avoid it, because the gods they invoke are precisely those who bring it about, no matter how much they claim to be "fathers" or "benefactors". Logically, they are the ones who see fit now and then to send us "saviors" to keep us from despair when faced with so many adverse situations and so much pain and inevitable suffering in our lives. This pain and suffering is also their work, and it is accepted and endured by us as if it were something appended to our lives and our life on this planet.
The second statement serves to counteract the first and to give us no small relief after the disquieting feeling produced by the first one:
2. The gods hardly ever take an interest in the private lives of humans, and rarely tend to interfere with a particular individual.
At first glance, it would seem that this statement runs contrary to what we have been saying all along, but this is not the case at all. The gods are quite interested in humanity taken as a whole, or at least in large, homogeneous social groups, but take little interest in particular individuals, with the exception of those who can exert great influence over many people. In the same way that humans take little interest in a given cow, pig or rabbit, we have always been concerned with improving these species in order to increase their yield. As I have said repeatedly, the best way to study, at a glance, the relationship of gods with men, is by comparing it to our treatment of the animal world. As hard as this is to take, it is nonetheless the truth.
(*) I say "certain gods" because most of them cannot interfere. Only those with great power interfere, as well as others whose level of existence or degree of evolution are closer to our own, and can therefore find the barrier which separates us easier to
Penetrate.
But let's go back to the subject of how we can best defend ourselves from the meddling of the gods in our lives, particularly our private lives.
"Under water, the dumbest fish can bite the smartest man" is a well-known axiom. In our world, humans are in our own element, and if we remain within it, the gods, no matter who they are or how they manifest themselves, will have a hard time interfering in our lives because they are out of their natural environment. Although this sounds strange, their natural environment is also a physical one, just as they are physical themselves, no matter that the physical rules that govern them are unknown to us, and that their psychic powers are much more developed than our own.
The logical outcome of all this is the first rule that we must follow in defending ourselves from them:
I. We must not go beyond the limits of our human environment, or stated in other words, we must not try to enter into theirs.
All of those who attempt to become "elevated" in this life are in fact, entering their realm. Those who seek trance states, no matter what kind; those who climb certain mountains at certain times of the year to enter into contact with them; those who prepare their minds with religious or magical rituals (we mustn't forget that magic is just another facet of religion); all of these people are venturing into the realm of the gods, or if not precisely into their realm, at least toward the marches of the human world, where the gods manifest themselves with greater ease and where humans can no longer avail themselves efficiently of their greatest defensive weapon--their intelligence.
I stated earlier that it is, in a certain way, perilous to physically approach some preachers. "founders", illuminati and mystics who are so abundant in our own time. The reason is the same: by doing so we are entering their realm and subjecting ourselves, unwittingly, to their emanations (radiation of a physical sort), similar in a way to that which is inflicted upon a turkey in a microwave oven, and in another sense, to those which are produced from the top of the antenna of a radio station. No one questions that after a while, the turkey gets cooked; but on the other hand, no one suspects that the brains (particularly teenage brains) of those who are in contact with illuminati, are also being "cooked" by the waves that issue from the minds of these tools of the gods, and after a while, they will no longer be able to think for themselves but merely repeat robotically whatever they have been told. This is the case with thousands of youths who have been captivated by the thousands of sects that swarm around the planet. Psychologists are studying in earnest the system by which such thorough brain washing is achieved, and particularly, how to achieve detoxification and deprogramming. But they shall not find it until they keep in mind that which is being said here.
Another great means of defense from the gods, which we have spoken of earlier, is
II. Not to surrender our minds to anyone, ever.
The mind must always be free and ready at the service of human beings to tell them what are the circumstances of the moment and what it is that he or she must do. Many humans, baffled by what they saw or felt at a particular moment, surrendered their minds and were later unable to judge and see that the things they had been told and practice were senseless. This is the case with religious fanatics and with those who are not religious fanatics, but simply those who are the faithful of all religions. As children they accepted a faith that was planted in their souls like an instinct and another cultural element, and were no longer able to question it or subject it to rational analysis in later life. They simply accepted it like one accepts language, tastes or love of country.
This business of not yielding one's mind to anyone is of great importance in which the large urban masses and society in general are manipulated like herds by the all-powerful communications media such as television and radio, skillfully manipulated by experts in the manipulation of minds. The mind must be kept in a state of readiness and should not be turned over to religious leaders, sports idols, the doctors that treat us or anybody else. All of them can be wrong, and at a given moment--even if it is unconsciously--they can act in their own interests, taking advantage of our gullibility. Each person's mind must be the judge at the very end, of individual actions. Turning it over to another to follow what he says blindly is an act of mental suicide that runs contrary to the great commandment of evolution, which is one of the fundamental laws of the Cosmos.
As years went by and I became decidedly convinced that I had spent a fair portion of my existence on this world with my life devoted to a senseless cause (on account of the "surrender of mind" which I'd done in my adolescence), I have become more conscious of the importance of not turning over one's mind to anyone and of using it to analyze all events that concern me more or less. In order for the reader to see how far this attitude of mine goes, I shall proceed to retell an anecdote that took place some seven years ago in Mexico City.
I was at a séance, which I had attended in search of a person that allegedly practiced psychometry (*) with a great degree of accuracy.
(*) Psychometry is the name given in parapsychology to the ability of some psychics to describe many of the qualities of the owners of the objects that the psychic is holding in his hands, or events related to such objects.
The medium leading the séance (who gave me the impression of being a fake from the very start) requested that all of us seated around her held hands to form a chain. Right away, the one at the end of the chain intoned something that was apparently an important step of the séance's ritual: "I open my intelligence to the spirits who wish to appear in this session and yield my mind to their teachings". Everyone was mechanically repeating the same phrase. When it was my turn, I said without a scrap of hesitation: "I pass."
The medium discreetly opened an eye to see who the dissenter was. When I was told in hushed tones that it was necessary for me to say something so as not to "break the chain", I said: "I yield my mind to no one, because I want it to be alert to what's going on in here." Naturally, in the presence of such a heretic, the spirits chose not to manifest themselves in that séance.
The indiscriminate "yielding of mind" presupposes that all super or extrahuman beings are good or beneficial toward Man and will act accordingly. As we have seen throughout this entire book, this point of view is totally ingenuous.
The third piece of advice for defending ourselves from the gods could be in a certain way contrary to what Moses was told on the stone tablets: "Worship Me." Knowing Yahweh as we do, this will help us to formulate our own commandment:
III. Do not invoke anyone. Do not summon anyone in order to venerate them. Do not stoop before any man-god or any thing-god to worship or hold rites.
The true God of the Universe, the Supreme Intelligence totally unfathomable in its entirety to the human mind, does not go around demanding the constant adoration of it creations or signs of their affection like some jealous lover. This jibes with the concept that Christianity has of God: a very powerful "dude" who resembles us closely in both our positive and negative aspects. It is logical that such a god would require devotion, worship and even gifts. But the True God is not a beggar; the True God continues his ceaseless task of creating and taking pleasure in how his creatures unfold each according to its own nature, without any need for them to constantly turn to Him to thank him or ask Him not to condemn them to some eternal punishment.
In enunciating this commandment we are venturing into an area in which the nascent cosmic theology meets the old dogmatic theology and clashes with it head-on.
When someone is invoked, their presence is being propitiated on the one hand while on the other, they are being encouraged to manifest themselves and on many occasions, the mental energy of their followers is physically boosting a god's power to become manifest. On the other hand, personal psychic power is being spent, lowering its resistance to external influences and making it more willing to accept the "message" or commands of a god in a docile manner.
In human life, a normal adult doesn't run back to his father every other step to seek advice, simply because one must make one's own decisions, and these decisions are in fact made, with little thought that one is offending one's father even if he still lives. In religion, on the other hand, we have been indoctrinated and conditioned to have no confidence in ourselves and to consult with God endlessly, to check what his will is at that very moment and in practice to follow the guidelines that his self-appointed representatives have already laid out.
The best worship that we can give God is the proper use of all the creatures of nature, something which has been totally disregarded in Christianity, with the abuse of nature being something that has no connection to religion, according to Christian doctrinaires. The respect for life--in all of its manifestations--is a basic tenet in some Eastern religions. In Christianity, this respect applies only to human life: irrationally and out of control concerning abortion, and by contrast, very lax when it comes to "punishing the criminal". It is common for fervent Christians to be advocates of capital punishment and partial to "holy wars" in defense of moral causes and "sacred honor" or "religious beliefs".
These pious savages of the 20th century have no qualms about executing anyone who is not of a like mind. Proofs of this were the countless deaths by firing squad carried out by the nationalists during General Franco's "Glorious Crusade". It is true that the opposition was probably guilty of worse savagery, but at least their leaders did not engage in Spiritual Exercises or referred to themselves as "crusaders".
By saying that we should not invoke or prostrate ourselves before anyone, I am in no way proposing atheism. I have stated elsewhere that the diehard atheist seems to display little intelligence. What I am trying to do is to raise all of humanity to an adult level, leaving behind a childish notion of God, as if God were a being that is playing hide-and-seek with us while we are permanently chasing after him,
The invocation to God--the real and not the Biblical God--shall be conducted in a much more rational and even more dignified way in the future, without the characteristics that many of these adorations and invocations currently feature, which can be designated as humiliating to the nature of the human being ( I don't believe that God wishes to humiliate the dignity of any of his creatures at any time) and even overtones of masochism.
On the other hand, the importance of this "no-invocation" concept lies in that the summoner--for that is the etymological meaning of "invoke"--is sooner or later heard, just as Christ said it. But in this case he is heard to his own detriment, as he is summoning someone that could well end up by taking advantage of the unsuspecting invoker. This has been the case with humanity throughout millennia, with the different religions and different gods that each one of them invoked.
Man searched then and has always searched for the Supreme Cause, the true GOD, and the different religions offered him a distorted image of that GOD, personalized by some being or another, who in the long run benefitted from mortal invocations, taking advantage of the energy he was receiving from them to manifest itself under one guise or another.
An example of the importance of "no-invocation" can be found, among many others, in the "game" of Ouija. This dangerous game (of which there are many variants) consists of a board covered with letters, numbers and symbols. A planchette unconsciously propelled by the fingers of those present glides over the board's surface with ease. Questions are asked and the planchette begins to move toward the symbols or toward the letters, so that at the end more or less clear and definite replies to the questions can be obtained.
This game goes against the first piece of advice we offered, which was "not to enter into their realm". The Ouija board is at the edge of the border of human rationality and for this very reason; it is in a position where the gods can manifest themselves with greater ease. Aside from this and with even greater peril is the fact that the Ouija is an open invocation or invitation to the manifestation of these unknown, and in a certain way more intelligent, beings. As stated earlier, there are many more differences among them than there are among humans, and an invocation of this sort will probably not attract the more evolved and superior ones (simply because they are not interested) but the less evolved and inferior ones (out of curiosity toward our world or as a game) and in this case, the invokers are wide open to anything.
The mere fact of the invocation or invitation to materialize is what gives them the will and physical power to do so, which would probably not have occurred if humans had not made the task of crossing the barriers that separate us easier. This is the reason why the incidents occurred in these "esoteric" rites or games are so numerous, and why so many people have emerged psychologically damaged from them (the reader should know that the difficulty that these less-evolved beings have in crossing into our world is shared by us, probably in a greater degree, when crossing into theirs. However, we can do so through the use of physical or mental exercises, the use of drugs, etc.).
Finally, we can say that the invoker exposes himself to becoming a "host", as is said in certain initiatic circles. This means that the god could become addicted, exclusively and habitually, to a certain type of energy that it extracts from a given summoner, coming back time and again because of the taste it has developed for this humans particular emanations. On the other hand, a "rapport" could take place between god and summoner; after several manifestations, the god can learn to extract the energy it needs from a given summoner (whether an invocation has been made or not) and become a "parasite" from that moment on, in light of the ease of extracting what it is that it wants (it is the same sort of "rapport" or special relationship that develops between a good hypnotist and the person that has been hypnotized several times by him. In spite of distances and with or without the patient's consent, the hypnotist can make him or her go into a hypnotic trance. The reason for this is that the hypnotist's brainwaves and those of his patient's are now some ways "in synch").
In these cases, which are more numerous than one would think, the human often contracts a more or less serious illness or infirmity that often resists the best efforts of doctors and the victim himself.
While many experts may feel that this is all absurd hypothesizing, they ought to pause and dwell for a moment upon a well-known (and hallowed) fact that confirms these "hypotheses" in their entirety. I am referring to the illnesses that all the Christian mystics have experienced as a matter of course, and there is no need to go around searching for physical causes to their maladies, as their biographers and their own autobiographies tell us clearly that "The Lord made them suffer to aid in their perfection and the salvation of other souls." The phrase issued by Christ to St. Theresa is a classic: "I treat my friends badly," making reference to the ailments, sufferings and "nights of the soul" that practically all mystics have been subjected to. They offered themselves like gentle sheep and the god leeches off them mercilessly but in a subtle way, sublimated by the explanations of "ascetic theology."
We have reached the significant conclusion that a mystic in a state of ecstasy (in any religion), with the suffering and joy clearly present on their features, forms the crowning moment in the relationship between a lesser god and a mortal. The god torments the willing human who offers his or her own pain, while the god reciprocates with a sort of psychic orgasm to keep the mystic from passing out and for their brain to continue emitting the vibrations that please the god so much.
With the subject of illness we have entered into the next piece of advice that I would offer the reader to fend off the interference of the gods in his or her life:
IV. Do not offer them your pain. Do not lend yourself to suffering. Reject pain for pain's sake and never seek it out. Rebel against the holy masochism that has been enthroned like a sacrament for centuries in the Christian Church.
Some might feel that these counsels are the quintessence of egotism, and would refute them by saying that life requires many moments of sacrifice. Parents must sacrifice a great deal to raise children until these are able to fend for themselves; one must sacrifice oneself for the sick, the elderly, etc., and not for religious reasons but out of a natural sense of ethics.
I agree entirely with this line of thought, but the reader should realize that all these sacrifices are aimed toward human beings; they are efforts to remedy the weaknesses of beings like ourselves who need our aid because of special circumstances or because of the normal course of nature. They are not aimed at God, and therein lies the difference. There is nothing unusual about one human helping another even at the cost of his own pain, but it is very unusual and inexplicable that God should exact pain and sacrifice from inferior beings such as humans. It is something that humanity--or at least those men and women who have the time and ability to meditate about life a little deeper--should have reflected upon a long time ago: why is the role of pain, self-denial and sacrifice so important in all religions? Why must humans sacrifice for all the different gods we believe in, and not only that, sacrifice animals too, as the religious leaders of all times have told us? How did Judaism differentiate itself from other religions in this respect (with its sacrifice of the animals demanded by Yahweh) and later on Christianity, with the cruel sacrifice of its founder, the hallowing of the forsaking of pleasure in the ascetic path and the sublimation of pain and death in the Christian choice of its ubiquitous symbol, the cross?
If the Christian god were really a father, why should he demand of his children suffering and the cross? All the explanations that Christianity and other religions give us to solve this mystery are inconsistent and fade away when examined without fanaticism and prejudice. To make humans come into the world already guilty of a sin and to threaten them immediately with eternal hellfire are aberrations fit only for sick minds and it is high time that civilized humans rid themselves of them once and for all.
The only explanation for the mystery of pain is the one being offered throughout the length of this book: God does not want human pain, but the gods do (because they benefit from it in some way or another). The problem resides in that Men confuse these gods with the Supreme Universal Energy, and attribute to it what has been caused by the others. To restate Christ's assertion that, "Wherever the corpses are, there shall the vultures gather," we could say that "Where ever there is human pain, the gods surely gather." The habitual sightings of UFOs during great disasters (earthquakes is particular) and wars (there was unusually heavy UFO activity during the Falklands War, and the reader must keep in mind the mysterious "foo fighters" of the Korean War) should give humans pause, including those myopic "ufologists" that either ignore these facts or would rather not consider them because they contradict the theory of the alleged kindness of our visitors. UFOs are there in those moments either because they are the cause of the occurrence (made to seem natural on many occasions) or have gathered there in haste to take advantage of a truly natural disaster.
"To lose one's faith" has a tragic religious connotation, because it is practically synonymous with "eternal damnation". This will be the fifth piece of advice that I'll give my readers to free themselves from the meddling of the gods in their lives:
V. Do away with dogmas and rites. Put aside traditional beliefs having to do with the Beyond and with the way one ought to envision life.
As long as humanity is strapped to the capricious commandments of the different gods it currently believes in, and as long as we continue to believe that these commandments are above what out reason and common sense tell us, we will continue to be easy prey for them, since we bare our souls in all good will to their dictates and desires. For this reason humans must reach a religious "coming of age", rejecting those parts of Christian dogma that go against common sense. To do this most Christians would have to rethink their faith, something which they have probably never done before. Once more, we would have to believe that the grim doctrinaire axiom of: "Believe, don't think" is fatally heeded and practiced by all religions with the consequences we have seen throughout this book.
The truth is that having had to accept as normal aberrations that go against our common sense and the most basic dictates of reason for generation after generation, humanity has accepted things that go against the most basic notions of equity as just, and has swallowed absurd statements that do not stand up to the most elemental analysis as sacred articles of faith.
I do not mean to say by this that everything that Christianity asks us to believe or practice is false or absurd. On the contrary, I am strongly in agreement that there are valid commandments at the bosom of Christianity. The problem is that they are given to us mixed in with dogmas that repel reason. No one can deny the validity of the commandment to love one's neighbor, the respect for parents or the prohibition on lying or stealing, etc. But side by side with these valid principles, common to other religions and to the most basic natural ethics, stand beliefs like the existence of an eternal hell, a God converted not only into a man but into wine as well, an infallible human authority and an immediate heaven after this life, which will be practically like a country club exclusively for those who have believed the incredible things that Christianity has forced us to believe in.
As long as the human mind is unable to cast aside such absurdities, they will continue to be sick and unable to evolve in order for Man to occupy his rightful place as a rational being on this planet and in the Cosmos.
This leads us by the hand to another piece of advice that grows logically and naturally from the preceding one:
VI. Become de-traumatized. Free the soul of all fear and anguish and the wrongheaded deformations which misleading Christian beliefs (and ultimately, the gods) have taught us throughout our lives and throughout the centuries.
Our minds are ill. Just like the minds of many people are deeply affected by a trauma or fright they received while very young, so is humanity's collective mind and ability for dispassionate thinking been affected. It would seem that we inherit this trait in our genes, which is why in the infancy of all cultures, the gods frightened us and left us with the complex of "not being able", that we are "unworthy", and that we need them and must place ourselves at their service. As a result of this complex, humanity has wasted a fair part of its energies over the centuries in "serving God" (rather than develop and improve the planet), and as a result of this inability to think calmly--and of this misunderstood "service to God"--humanity has made for itself the most disastrous and horrifying history that one could imagine.
Our minds are truly ill, as we are unable to agree upon the most basic things that would help this planet to run better. More and more are beginning to believe that there is a genetic preprogramming that forces us to fight and live in perpetual discord. Students of human history from the conflict perspective have no other explanation for the foolish patterns of conduct of humanity over the centuries.
Our minds and souls are sick, and for that reason it is vital that we subject them to a process of deep catharsis. And this cleansing must start by eliminating all the false axioms that are implanted into us at birth and which later on, religions, countries and families--three "sacred" institutions--will reinforce in our minds.
In fact they are only a strategy to keep humans from evolving, fighting constantly, placing our lives at the "service of God" and stunting our rise to the status of supermen.
Once achieved, we shall be ready to take the next positive step that will defend us even more against the power of the gods:
VII. Instate a new system of values. Organize new priorities for life, not according to the wishes of any god but according to the needs of the human race.
But we shall never reach this new system of values if we do not follow the fifth and sixth steps outlined here. As long as we continue to think that some things are sinful because the go against "the will of God", when they are in fact useful to humanity as a whole and do not offend anyone in particular, we will not be able to shake off the yoke of the gods.
This awakening of human conscience and the arrival at an adulthood in which we now feel capable to assume our own responsibilities, without any need for asking the "representatives of God" if we can do it or not, should lead us to write new commandments, much more generic in nature, in which the dignity and common sense of the human being are respected. We must to this without having to refer to bibles or infallible entities; we must do it by agreeing among ourselves, like we have agreed to do many other things.
In a kind of world parliament, humans will have to get together to agree on what is best for humanity and what is not best, and those will be the new commandments and new dogmas. We must study the true "natural law" versus the other "natural law" which theologians have spoken of so much and which religious authorities have manipulated in their benefit.
The sacredness that these religious authorities have built into many things and actions in human life will cease to be, if humans agree that such "sacred" action or thing is detrimental to humanity. The only sacred thing on Earth is life itself and its proper evolution. God will no doubt with anything that humans agree to in harmony, no matter how these decisions may go against all those things that the doctrinaires have declared sacred.
These new commandments will be much more relative and adaptable to the needs of men, because they will no longer be subjected to the "desires" of any god, but rather in the interest of human beings. Although someone might suggest that they should no longer be called commandments, since they are only the wishes of men, they are remain commandments of God, because the true God--the intelligence that rules the Cosmos--only wants the proper evolution of the human being and that of every creature on the planet. And if humans took the time to study what this evolution is all about, they would come closer to abiding with the "will of God" than by making sacrifices or following absurd rituals to the false gods who have deceived them for millennia.
All this philosophy was genially summed up by a peasant interviewed by the newspaper El País on his 95th birthday: "If it's good for Mankind, keep it coming!", to which he added: "Religious rites are nothing more than insults against God and man."
These new dogmas will be much more generic and respectful of the Divinity, and will make no attempt to define or analyze it, recognizing that our brain is incapable of encompassing an Intelligence and Power that have been able to set in motion the myriad worlds we see spinning over our heads at night. We will believe a lot less things, but will expect a lot more, because the Cosmic God, the Universal God, has no wrath, is not impatient, and certainly has no eternal torments in mind for this fantastic speck of dust known as Man.
Speaking thus, we reach the final counsel that will aid mortals in defending themselves from the gods:
VIII. WE MUST RADICALLY ALTER OUR CONCEPT OF GOD
This is of great importance and is at the roots of the transformation that humanity will undergo in the next few decades. In fact, this great transformation has already begun, and there are signs of it everywhere.
The reader will have to excuse several quotes from my book Por qué agoniza el cristianismo ("The reason for christiany's dying") in which I devoted two whole chapters to explain what christianity's notion of God was and what my own was. I recommend this book to readers who would like to delve deeper into this very important subject.
"I wish to make it very clear that I believe that there is "something"--unreachable in its entirety by my mind--that constitutes the Essence of the Cosmos and that fills it all yet is different from all. In other words, I believe that there is a God, but this God that I have deduced by reasoning is entirely different from the biblical God.
"The very word "God" constitutes a real problem for theology, and the most advanced theologians agree on this, oddly enough. We must always bear in mind that all religious concepts and ideas are the work of man, not God. Just as Gabriel Vahanian observes: "religion was not invented by God but by humans." Naturally, man pours into his religious ideas all his ignorance, failures and limitations. The very first glimmer of these limitations can be found in the word "God" and in the different concepts we have when we say it.
"I confess that more than words or clear concepts to define Him, what I have in my mind are voids to explain a reality that eludes me, which is the reason I prefer to explain my idea of Him in negative terms, stating what He is not.
"God is neither a person, nor does he have sons (much less a mother), nor is he a judge, pardoner, nor is vengeful, wrathful (rage being one of the seven deadly sins), nor is he one thing or another. These are all purely human terms applied to God with the same logic that the words "tender", "sensible", "resentful" or "tame" could be applied to a bridge--once can do so only in a very remote and semi-poetic way, but to describe a bridge one must employ completely different terms.
"The great difference is that we know the bridge very well, while we don't know God at all or know him poorly and from afar, which is why we lack the adjectives to define him. This has been the great sin of theologians of all religions: the lack of respect with which they have treated God. Believing to know Him intimately, they have defined him and have given us an idea of Him that is entirely cartoonish if not downright ribald, even blasphemous. The god of the Pentateuch and the god of Christian theology is a genuine monster.
"The wrathful god, the vengeful god, the god that becomes taken with a particular people and forgets or mistreats others, the
god that allows millions to starve to death, the god in whose name wars were made and empires and continents were conquered, the god whose faith was spread by the sword and defended by the bonfire, the god who delighted in the pomp of his vicars, the god that "inspired" his prophets to curse and anathemize those who dissented, the god that imposes the cross and suffering as the only means of reaching him, the god that has hells to punish this poor shade called man, that god is a menace to humanity, that god is a sort of insult to the human mind, that god has no rational explanation...that god is dying in the minds of men.
"This is no more, no less, than the essence of the famous theology of the "death of God" that some years ago shook the conscience of thinking Christians and unleashed waves of indignation and protest from those who could not understand what it was all about.
"The man of our generation has realized that God cannot be that way and has set out to look for him along other paths. The mind of today's man is making an enormous effort to conceive an image of God that is closer to reality; an idea in which God is not so humanized and distorted...
"In a simple and attentive reading of the Pentateuch we discover immediately that the god we encounter there--the Yahweh that appeared to Abraham and Moses--is an vengeful, cruel, capricious individual, fixated on a single nation and fierce against others who were supposedly also his children , jealous of other gods (gods that did not exist, to judge from the teachings of Yahweh himself), intolerant, impatient, unfulfiller of promises, tireless demander of bloody sacrifices (with which he did little more than emulate the "false gods" of the neighboring tribes), strange in his way of showing himself, confusing and contradictory in his message to men, issuer of absurd petitions, erratic in his behavior, demanding, ruthless in his punishments, blind to the other inhabitants of the world, and finally, too similar to man in his virtues and vices. But we not only have a right to expect virtue from the God who is the source of all beauty and the kindness that all humans seek out, but all of them in large amounts and an utter absence of the negative and bad things we find in the Yahweh of the Pentateuch.
"This is the image of God that assails us when we read the first few pages of the Bible. To those who say that it is a distorted view, we suggest that they continue reading the books that follow the Pentateuch so that they can see that the prophets and other ministers of Yahweh saw their god in the same light, which is why the speak incessantly of his wrath and vengeance...
"My God is neither here nor there. He does not "want", does not become "upset", does not "punish", has no need of "forgiving". All these are the attributes of human persons, and as I have already said, God is neither a man nor a person.
"Without a doubt, the child-human feels much safer with the idea of a God-father and feels lost and orphaned if deprived of it.
This is why I believe that the concept of presenting God as a father, stressing the point heavily, was a major achievement of Christianity and Christ. But since the times of Christianity’s inception, human psychology (particularly among the more evolved types) has changed a great deal
"I do not believe in the heaven that is portrayed in Christianity, an immediate and definitive heaven with a direct contemplation of God. This is another mammoth puerility of the world’s child-inhabitants. Upon coming back from life--just like children returning from school--humans want to find their mother-God at home. They have a need to hug her, know that she's there, tell her about the incidences of the classroom of life. But such a God-mother, God-father, God-person does not exist. God is entirely different.
"I feel much closer to God when I see his firm hand moving the giant machinery of the heavens or when we look into the fantastic landscapes that we encounter in the depths of matter, than when I read of the butchery and vengeance of the repulsive character that judeo-christianity has portrayed as the God of the Universe...
"I understand that many, hearing God spoken of in this manner, are unmoved or even feel a bit forsaken. The best that they can do is to go on picturing God in the manner that benefits their psyche the most. It matters little how we imagine Him. God is like He is and not as humans conceive Him. The only counsel I can give such people is that their idea of God should be stripped of all the hairshirts of "wrath", "justicemaker", "avenger", "demander of perpetual pain and sacrifice", that learned fanatics have imposed upon Him with the passing of time.
"To conclude the difficult task of expressing what my idea of God is, I will say that my God is Omnipotence, my God is Order (although the fantastic order of creation is sometimes inconceivable to our mosquito-sized viewpoint); my God is greatness (not pettiness, like the Christian god); my God is Light; my God is Beauty; my God is Love, a love that in this human stage of my existence I feel and return through my brother humans and through all creatures. And since my God is Love, I know that sooner or later, and in spite of my smallness and flaws, he will flood me with Himself...
In a "Final Exhortation" I restate these ideas, telling the reader:
"Mortal human, dust-mote, wisp of smoke, snow flake that shines for a moment in the night of time and in a second melts upon the ground, quit looking for God here and there! Do not set Him down anywhere, do not reduce him, do not make a caricature of Him, do nothing more! God lies in the infinite Universe that surrounds you and which is too vast for your small brain to comprehend. Stop chasing God like he was a naughty boy playing games with you! Stop the childish belief that you can only be happy is you latch on to Him like a talisman that protects you and brings you good luck! Stop torturing yourself with false notions of torment, punishment, demons, purgatories and hells, and feel the right of taking your place in the Cosmos!
"Look at yourself! You are a genuine child of God! Not by any redemption or salvation that anyone has bestowed upon you, but by the divinity in which your nature participates, and which you must evolve through the good use of your intelligence and heart."
My apologies to the reader for such a long self-quote, but aside from not being able to restate what I had already written, the ideas placed herein are the logical and natural culmination of everything that has been said in this chapter.
The final phrase of the quote, in which the reader is urged to his own evolution, will be the one that guides us into the final chapter of this book.
posted by Inexplicata (IHU) at 8:06 AM
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