Or, yes dear, mommie IS going to die
Locamama posted an article here (Link) asking if God cares. Before my response to her she received a couple of others offering sympathy and encouragement. I answered her as bluntly as I could: no, God doesn't care.
That's perhaps a little too blunt, left as it is. So here, as a primer for the puzzled and confused, is a more detailed explanation of my point of view.
I've written on the topics of faith and theology many times, engaged in many discussions of those topics here on JU. My responses to the articles of others, and the majority of my own writings, have been engaged with rather more specific issues and not with such a general question as why God does not care. In my mind that's the default position, the commonsense ground from which debate starts, so I've assumed it not thought it through.
I want to make certain issues clear. Do I believe in a personal Saviour? Yes. Myself. I am my own Jesus. I've already given an explanation of that thought here (Link).
Do I belive in God? Yes, but not the God of the Christians, nor in their 'Jesus of Nazareth'. Which is not at all the same thing as saying that I deny the existence of their god. In brief, I acknowledge and respect the existence of the godform Jesus. The godform Jesus (as opposed to Jesus Christ, the Son of God) has been created from belief in and fervent attachment to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church as these have developed over the last two thousand years. The godform doesn't originate in these doctrines, it originates in the faith of believers and in their will that Jesus must exist and must be the Son of God because their faith insists these things are so.
As I've said elsewhere, many other times: desire informs will; will compels reason; reason determines the means to accomplish the ends determined by will. Reason has nothing to do with the formation of the will, and nothing to do with the selection of objects to which the will directs itself. Reason is the servant of the will and there is no necessity that reason should (practically) or ought (morally) to include in itself any comprehension of what motivates the will. This is so because what motivates the will is desire, and desire and reason are utterly opposed.
What motivates desire? To ask that question is to come full circle. What we desire tells us who we actually are. What we are determines what we desire. In the end what determines us as self-relexive actors, what determines the kind of person we are, is the outcome of every factor of environment, genetic endowment, and personal experience that constitutes what we recognise as our own narrative of existence. We think what we are and we are what we think. More importantly and accurately, we are what we do, and our doing is determined by our thinking. As my mother-in-law says - wherever you go, there you are.
Or, put another way by another and very different woman - either you like it or you haven't had enough.
In essence, my faith is Gnostic in form, with the addition of certain aspects of Thelemic and Chaos Magick - aspects I have described here (Link). Some have called the Gnostics the earliest Christians, and within the enormous variety of Gnostic texts there is some justification for that assertion. It's not a question that matters to me or one in which I have any interest. Gnosticism can be viewed as a window into the earliest forms of Christianity -but it also has things to say that go beyond Christianity and include it as only one variant of an overarching state of reality.
What appeals to me in Gnosticism is the enormous, the unimaginably immense, gulf between the Nameless and Bornless Creator, and the perceptions, hopes, aspirations, fears, longings, terrors, of those elements of the creation that are able to reflect on their own condition and the condition of the universe they find themselves in. Because that space, that freedom, is entirely absent in Christianity, and it was that absence that first started me on my long march away from my former faith.
My, my. A heretic and an apostate. How do I live with myself?
The cosmology of Gnosticism is not simple. Between God and Its (not his, or hers, but Its) creation exists a vast existential gulf. That gulf is filled by Intermediaries that are referred to as Aeons. An Aeon is at once a person and at the same time a spiritual region in which are concentrated types of spiritual force. The Aeons are, I believe, the originals of all Angels, Demons, spirits; and at the same time the source of all motivation, of all forms of spiritual or mental action, to which all those parts of the creation capable of carrying them out, are prey. As the Man Jesus said - "In my father's house are many mansions."
What is a 'mansion'? It's a place, an abode. An abode is at the same moment a location; and the length of time one abides there; and all the actions, thoughts, desires, griefs, joys, fears, victories, defeats, that are associated with that place and that time. An Aeon is, in the Greek sense, the abiding genius of a locality; it is the condition (as in the condition of the men that a place breeds) of being, and it is the temper of a time. An Aeon is a real person who, in other words, exhibits all those conditions and realities of being that are denied by both Sociology and Psychology.
And, fundamentally and absolutely, an Aeon is the Other of humanity. The Thing not understood, the Thing seperated from, the Thing denied.
The major religions of the world insist that good works on earth lead to bliss in heaven and that evil works lead to torment in hell. Their adherents say that this must be so because if it's not there is no Justice in God, and without such an attribute God cannot be God.
Nonsense.
There is no requirement upon God to be anything but Itself, and what Itself is, is incomprehensible to the mind of the created being. What is incomprehensible cannot be judged, nor even known except in its effects - and its effects will appear senseless and contradictory. Even in the realm of the physical sciences. No? You don't believe me? Consider the Deists.
Deists believe that God made the machine (the universe), set it running, and abandoned it to the functioning of its inherent principles, principles that could be revealed by natural reason and exploited for the benefit of Man (this was long before the time of Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, long before the days of quantum physics, in which light is both a wave and a packet at the same instant - depending on the perspective from which you view it). Einstein insisted that God doesn't play dice. I agree. God is less predictable than the fall of dice and utterly immune to our faculty of reason. IT, the Nameless and Bornless, is forever unknown to us and unknowable.
Theists (like our resident wannabe god-botherer and ineffably incompetent resident theologian, KFC) are insistent that God has a purpose for creation, that that purpose has been revealed through sacred texts, and can be known and comprehended by human beings. Which says far more about the arrogance of theists than it does about God. That purpose generally involves judging, and saving, and redeeming. They are welcome to their beliefs and I won't dispute them here.
I will say, simply, that according to my faith God is not a Judge, nor a Redeemer, and has no more interest in my affairs, or yours, than I have in the internal activities of an ant-hill. As I have said elsewhere, my God has no morality but an aesthetic. An aesthetic in which destruction and chaos is as valid as creation and order; an aesthetic in which the destruction of the earth and all it contains would carry the same order of importance as does a single brushstroke in relation to the canvas as a whole.
Do you care what happens to a virus? Do you care about the particular orbits of particular electrons around the nuclei of particular atoms? Such are we. But if It, the Source and Origin, is infinitely far removed from us and we from It, the same cannot be said of the Aeons (or angels, demons, spirits, whatever). Ancient scriptures are full of the insight that these Intermediaries take great interest in us. Genesis records the interest of the Angels in fornication with human women, for example; myths and legends record the activities of Incubi and Succubi. And I attest, as a Magickian, that I have invoked and known the attention of one such Intermediary and even recorded the nature of that attention in one of the articles I linked to.
Does God care? No, not remotely. Do the Intermediaries? Oh yes. And they care intimately. As yet, I don't even pretend to understand why. But its in this intimate interest that there lies the origin of every temptation, every revelation. And they are all true, every one of them. And they are all lies, every one of them.
It's not the status of some particular Revelation as fact that's important. What makes any Revelation important is the degree to which it can attract support, faith. It's the degree of faith commanded by any particular Revelation that determines the degree to which the Intermediaries pay attention to its worshippers. It's to that degree that miracles can be counted on to occur. Miracles are simply the outward expression of the life-force of faith commanded by any given religion. No faith, no miracles.
Which is why Catholicism and Islam, not Protestantism and Islam, are the two great ideological enemies of this Century. The Protestants are dead on their feet, as demonstrated by the schism wracked Anglican Communion.
God doesn't care, in my understanding of reality. But Others do. Since it's my understanding of my experience that these Others exist and interact with us, I must adjuge to God both the existence of these creatures and the possibility of interacting with them. If I can now, then others have in the past. There is no temptation on my part to think myself unique or specially privileged.
I know things others have known before me, and known in better degree and with greater command.
Because I don't believe that Jesus was or ever could have been the Christ, doesn't mean that I don't believe that Jesus worked miracles. I call myself a Ritual Magickian. So I believe in the reality of Magick and the power of the Magickian. If you were to ask me now who I thought Jesus was I'd have to say he was a wise man, a man who observed and understood the human condition with great charity, a man disciplined and committed enough to hold by what he believed without yielding to consequence, and a man capable of making his Will manifest in physical reality. Because that's what a Magickian actually does - makes his Will manifest.
The Jesus of the Gospel narratives is to me a man who spoke what he Willed. His particular appeal to me has always been that what he Willed was spoken into the world of spirituality and motives, a Magick of the interior world, a world transcending the flesh that I have always been suspicious of - with cause. I've written elsewhere of how deeply alienated I was from my own flesh.
I've written at length of Jesus because Jesus is the cental tenet, the cardinal element, of Locomama's faith in God, and it was her faith that prompted me to write in the first place.
Does God care? No. But Jesus might. If you love him enough. And don't think a lot. On the other hand, if you want something enough, enough so that your wanting becomes a will; and if your reason is willing to contemplate apparently irrational means by which to achieve what you want and Will; then those who fill the space between God and the creation just might answer you.
What needs to be remembered, always, is that the Magickian is not powerless to respond to that answer. God does not care but I do, and for their own reasons so do the Intermediaries. It is in that nexus of desire that the forces which shape the life of the world (as opposed to the Power that decreed the processes which govern the life of the world) come to be.
What you do with that 'coming to be' in your own life is something only each individual can decide for him or herself. What's certain is in addressing how you come to terms with that 'coming to be' you have to confront the question 'does God care?' I took up that challenge and my answer to it is "No. God doesn't care. God doesn't care enough to laugh, and there is no reason why It should."
The question itself is a valid existential enquiry that can serve many purposes, as well as being an immediate challenge to faith. How you respond, be you a Christian or not, depends entirely on who you are. And who you are depends entirely on what you want, and what you have the courage to Will."