Heaven

12/23/08

Kim and I had dinner last night with Karen Noel and Father Bernardine, the local Catholic priest. Bernardine is a Rwandan refugee and I couldn’t help but ask about how witnessing such atrocity might affect his faith? He is an articulate man, a worldly man and I could find universal themes in his discourse; he is not a parrot; he’s got a mind of his own. I can’t pass him off as a mindless religious sheep, as I might with Karen.

Yet Bernardine would carry on with arguments for God out of necessity, that such and such is so, therefore there must be God. That people got messages and were spoken to by the Virgin etc. He and many others have faith, yes, but that is all really not very convincing.

We talked and the Catholics at the table got into heaven, the afterlife, morals, sin, retribution etc and Kim came up with a great series of comments. First she said, “Father I’m going to be honest with you, I’m not an atheist but I’m damn close to being one” and then she asked why would God play this sort of petty game of retribution with people? Why would God construct this reality only to test people for eternal life? It seems pretty crazy and vindictive to do that. This was a moment. I felt it was a clear question, a great question but it sailed right over their heads. There could be no decent answer to that from any sort of Christian.

The whole house of cards is based on the Christian creation story, of Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, the fall from grace by eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. God got pissed off for being disobeyed, kicked the humans out and punished them for all of eternity with the stain of original sin. We are inextricably marked by it, no escape, no alternative; it is stamped into our nature that we are all sinners.

I guess all religions have to come to grips with the animal aspects of out nature. The Christian creation story is as good as any. Why do we have the capacity to be good but we frequently are not? Why do we mistreat out fellow man as if he were Frankenstein? Are we no better than animals? Does having morality somehow make us better?

Upon reflection I can see that whole scheme of afterlife, morals, heaven, hell, reward and retribution, this is an effort to come to grips with our free will. Sometimes if not many times, the free will of humanity falls prey to lust for power and control, among other “low” animal appetites, failings and shortcomings. Free will seems to lead just as well to exploitation and suffering as to compassion and well being. In the world there appears to be no justice for genocides like in Rwanda, or the Holocaust, what we see is power consolidating power, massive suffering, exploitation, murder and on and on. For billions of poor and slaughtered there is no justice, just the cruel rule of men.

With no temporal justice for sins against humanity, what better way to justice than to postulate a divine retribution and an omniscient god. This god knows all of your evil thoughts and actions, so that in the end there will be justice; no matter how fucked up things ever get, you will be and evil-doers will be measured and judged. And by the threat of eternal condemnation, you are controlled into behaving well; and you also hope that evil-doers will get what they have coming; if you can’t get them, the god will. It seems to be a system not based out of true desire to be good. People act to get their pitiful asses into heaven not out of a true desire to be good but out of fear of eternal condemnation. People do it to please a vengeful and vindictive god. People are led to hope for revenge and not to love peace.

I pointed out to Bernardine that many Jew’s faith in God was shaken or destroyed by the Holocaust. Was his faith similarly shaken in Rwanda? No he said, as God does not intercede, here on earth it is man’s will that guides the action. We have this free will in order to be tested. In effect God has set up an experiment, a school, where either you pass or fail, no B+ or D allowed. Not long ago the Vatican announced that, after all, there was no purgatory, so there is no between, either you are in or out.

And so I thought, if God does not intercede, even at all, for a miracle here or there, then the Devil cannot intercede either. The notion of intercession of any kind is false. Good and evil plays out only in our conscience, only in life as we know it and it is by our fruit through which we will be known. As I think about it, God could not do even one miracle as an intercession, because if he had that power to save a good person, why would he then allow such massive suffering? What the fuck kind of demented experimental school is this? If the Devil could intercede to unleash such evil in the world, why would an omnipotent God not fight back? It is a plainly absurd scenario, a cosmic war in which we are nothing but pawns.  All our capacities are for nothing more than to showw e have faith in a god?

My opinion: what we really have is just a conscious animal trying to come to grips with its capacities for love and hate, peace and war, my tribe and your tribe.

No, there cannot be some transcendent intercession by any divine or evil forces. If there could be, then it would be unconscionable that God would allow such suffering when it was within his power to alleviate it, as so many innocent people die for no good reason. God would be super-arrogant to give a miracle here or there to a kid with cancer yet allow untold millions to be slaughtered or to live a live of exploitation and suffering. What kind of god asks you to kill your own kids to show your faith in him?

But if it is all up to us, why would the Pope and mainline Catholics be against liberation theology? Here you have structural factors, made by men, to exploit the poor and the church is against overthrowing these governments? If it is man’s choice to be good or not, why would the Catholics choose to not act and leave it up to God to say what is right? To not fight oppression and exploitation is to become party to it, that is a sin, structural sin, yet this is precisely the churches’ stance. I guess the church has had its share of being the exploiter and it does not want to mix politics and faith. The church’s dark history with state religion is ample reason to shy away from politics.

How the hell can anyone pretend to know God’s plan? That God prefers to let people suffer it out in the here and now and then judge them by how well they forgave people who mistreated them, is that the plan? That is crazy.

Kim shot an arrow to the heart of the matter. Why in the world would God concoct this bizarre, vindictive morality play? It sure does not make much intuitive sense. This is not a loving, forgiving god. Any parent always forgives their kids, no matter what.

My take: I agree with Frank Zappa, if God made people in his own image and people are dumb, then God must be dumb as well. That we are animals is obvious and it should be no surprise that we behave like them.

Our genes DNA is the same, we are made of the same stuff, have the same sort of bodies and organs, have hair etc, aren’t we a bit arrogant to assume that we are fundamentally different? History shows humanity to be as low and violent as any animal. We’ve got work to do if we suppose we are somehow worthy to be divine material.