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Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Illusion of God



Bear with me as I try to get this down before it flits out of my head........

The Holocaust and World War II and the rise of Existentialism went arm in arm, for who indeed could doubt that God was dead? Or at least on extended vacation.
Horrors inflicted with human regularity and human attention, at the hands of fellow human beings whom our mirror neurons had led us to believe were "people" like us - these are the horrors and tortures that destroy the world and God and the entire universe. However we create our plays and scenarios and illusions of God - the projection into endless time and supernaturality that mirror and reflect our loves and hates - and this process breaks down in the face of human-hatred-by-design.

On the other hand, our intense depression, the cruel  witches dunking-stool of unending bipolarity, is a horror perpetrated by ourselves upon ourselves. There is really no illusion of others in depression. We suffer from no paranoia. The unending terror of a heedless universe threatens to suffocate us.... unless we endure until the end of our heroic quest...

...we are dropped down in the middle of some magic city where the hearts of angels beat beneath the pavement and above the skyscrapers. Suddenly we are no longer running away in fright down dark and foreboding alleyways; we slow down to a walk; we compose ourselves - jumpy still as a cat, yet intrepid; we straighten our tie...

... and God comes around the corner and smiles and shakes my hand in greeting.

The illusion of God depends upon human artifice and human acceptance of evil and the "evil narrative" which is the depressive play of The Iceman Cometh forever, when even what we think is our redemption is dispirited and leaves us and our loved ones worse off.

The reality of God only needs our hand reached out to say hello. We know and believe this not as some cumbersome "belief system", but in the marrow of our bones, because we have learned and favored the "good narrative" all the days of our lives...

When the time comes, we shall say, "Hi!"
There will not be any delusion.

--

2 comments:

Ben said...

Very deep thinking here. Very good.

Is the Illusion of God God's supposed absence because we believe God ought to be stepping in and taking an active hand for our cause? Or else if God does not, than he must not exist?

And so the reality is really not this big General with a host of Angels with swords at his back, but instead a presence...like a little bird, or a butterfly...with an innocence about it, and which we can reach out to and say "hello" and feel better within ourselves about it...

And if God were a General...that would taint God in a manner of speaking...

Or something along those lines...

Ben

Montag said...

It was one of those terrible thoughts that goes by at the speed of light, and you struggle to get a grip on it.

I think... I think my point was that the horrors of war led to the notion of the death of God...

But the horrors were man-made.
Therefore, God does not withdraw from the world, thus causing atheism, rather Man creates a reality so ghastly that Man can no longer imagine anything Good in it.

As long as we continue to philosophize - as did the great Sartre - we will never escape the prison, for there is "No Exit".

Atheism requires reflection on horror and suffering. Atheism requires human grievance for human misbehavior. Atheism is a phenomenon of a human crowd...
I deny atheism is a philosophy!