Truth
After God, Does Don Cupitt Understand Science? 1
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, July 25, 1999
Monday, 09 February 2004
God, Soul and Spirit
Don Cupitt sets out in his 1997 book, After God, to preserve the values of religion in a world in which religion is looking more and more irrelevant, and even dangerous. His aim is a new religion, or, at any rate, a new form of faith more acceptable to the religious and irreligious alike.
Since his argument is based on language, he begins by seeking to clarify some standard terms used by Christians to form their beliefs. Cupitt tells us distinctions between soul, spirit and gods have been lost, so he explains to us what they are. Soul was originally identifiable with life, and so with blood. The soul drained out of a wounded body with its blood, and retreated naked, like Ishtar, into Sheol or Hades, the underworld, where souls “live” feeling unhappy and uncomfortable without their outer raiment—their body!
For most of us, this understanding of a soul is a supernatural concept, though it is intended as a primitive explanation of what causes the difference between a living and a dead body. A soul living its shadowy life in Sheol is apparently not immortal at all. It is supernaturalized and made immortal like a spirit by drawing closer to God. Otherwise it must eventually fade away and die the second death, it seems. The soul, in the underworld, certainly has no knowledge of God, but in its less than incorporeal existence—it being dead and lacking a body and then being merely a fading shadow of what remains—there is no clear suggestion of retention of personality.
Aristotle, who lived 400 years before the founder of Christianity, doubted that a discarnate soul could have a personality because it was merely an element of the whole cosmic reason, and Plato, who taught Aristotle, thought it was a “Form”, a spiritual blueprint for anything real. Now, if every person had their own blueprint, the whole idea of a Form is blown away. It is meant to be a generalised blueprint, not a customised one. The customisation is the collection of faults introduced into the blueprint when it is copied in the imperfect but real world. Whatever the ideal soul was, in this concept, it could not have been individualised before it was incarnate, and so can have had no personality. Before the Greek philosophers, the Egyptian and Persian theologians multiplied these entities rather than, like the Greeks, seeking a simple ideal world by imagining blueprints for their manufacture, the beginning of reductionism, a grave sin, theologians of both religion and science, think today.
The fact remains, however, that all this is pointless and quite insane speculation. No Christian, any more than a Horus priest or a Magus, bothers for a second about whether such wild conjecture is codswallop or not. So let us cut through it. Soul was what ancient people thought conferred life into something living. It was a metaphor for life itself. That being the case, it is all the more strange that Christians came to think that only human beings could have a soul. It is typical of Christian arrogance. To speculate beyond the simple identity that soul = life is fruitless.
Cupitt distinguishes spirit from soul. The use of the concept of spirit allows monotheism to be full to overflowing with lesser gods called spirits, while pretending there is only one God. A spirit is not a soul but nor is it a god, or rather God, since there is only one. It accounts for all those frightful but sometimes helpful, though nameless, things that inhabit the world unseen by us, and that go under generic terms like angels and demons. All of them are spirits but Cupitt does not now explain what the ancient terms for them—ruach, pneuma and spiritus—meant. He omits it because they all mean “breath”, immediately identifying them with life, just as soul was. The biblical creator breathed life into his lifeless images of clay. The breath of life animated (Latin, “anima” soul) them.
In like manner, simple people identify a gentle vesper on a still day as a passing spirit—a breath of God. Once the idea of a spirit existed as a vestige of God within us all, giving us life, it became the soul, and as soon as the soul could be conceived of as discarnate, then a breath of wind could be a discarnate spirit. What is discarnate can fill the world without being obvious, but they betray their presence by their actions, good and bad, explaining fate and fortune, though nowadays it is usually bad luck they explain because all success is through good management.
Moreover, as soon as the spirit world is imagined and filled with discarnate entities, it soon follows that they must have societies like human societies, and so have a king. Thus, God is invented as the king of the spirit kingdom, and so must be the very spirit image of the earthly king. “As above, so below.” Everything on earth has its equivalent in the spirit world, its “fravashi”, or guardian angel. God is the spirit behind the king, the source of the king’s authority, the king simply being God’s regent on earth. Kings do their duty to God by sitting on a throne and handing out God’s laws and justice. Each tribe or nation had its own national or tribal God, standing behind its king, but each of these was merely a son of the king of the gods. The highest God was naturally the sky or sun god, and these lesser spirits or lesser gods were the high God’s court, paralleling a royal court on earth. The bible, in a passage (Dt 32:8) suitably doctored and therefore ignored by Jews and Christians says clearly that the Jewish God, Yehouah, is just one of the sons of El (not Israel!), so the God of Israel cannot be the High God. Don’t tell anyone!
The rest of the spirits are the lackeys of the spirit world. They did the hard work for their masters, the local gods, the sons of God. Among the lesser spirits, one became the foreman or forewoman, thus becoming a specialist god. They were the chief spirit of healing, or of love or war, and so on. The Jewish and later the Christian God was originally a god associated with the winter sun, the sun that brought with it the winter rains, revivifying the earth. Thus, He was a god of life. The Persians set up the Jerusalem temple to this god presented now as a universal god of law and justice. Later, the Jewish Hasmonean family rebelled against the Greeks, who ruled them in replacement for the Persians after Alexander had conquered Persia, and proclaimed this universal god as a national god of the Jews.
As we saw, a national god is the power behind a king, and Yehouah became the god behind the Hasmonean monarchs, and became seen as a powerful potentate typical of eastern potentates. Most of the trappings and aspects He had as the universal god of the Persian empire, he retained when visualized as the god of this tiny nation, and so he has remained propagated once again by Christians in His universal aspect. He had a heaven because he was Ahuramazda, the Persian sky and sun god, but had a hell, a pit of eternally burning sulphur, where all wickedness would be consumed at the End of History, and had seven archangels, innumerable angels and guardian angels, as well as opposing demons and devils, under the leadership of their head, Ahriman in Persia but Satan or the Devil in the Christian update of it. The Jewish god had all of these attributes from the Persian period. None of it is real. All of it has to go!
Spirits fulfil many roles in religious mythology, from metaphors for abstract concepts to the supposed identities of natural objects like trees, rivers and maountains. Christians regard spirits like these as naïve and picturesque, but it is their typical false superiority. They too believe in spirits, but most intelligent Pagans in the centuries leading up to the foundation of Christianity did not. Less clever and less worldly people no doubt did, but educated people knew the whole point of animism was to maintain respect for the environment. The landscape itself was sacred and they wanted to preserve it. The ancient Arab city of Petra is now abandoned, isolated in a desert. Once it was surrounded by forests that were destroyed even in classical times by the locals failing to respect the landscape. The trend to belief in a great abstract God fostered a disregard for the locality, and many places have been ruined by lack of respect, and consequent excessive exploitation of the land since monotheism was forced on to the world.
It is all interesting, if not too enlightening to read lessons about spiritual entities, but it is worrying when people believe it all. Cupitt might not do, but he plainly thinks most of us do. When people say, “Bless you”, in response to a sneeze, they are actually addressing an invisible spirit. He seems to believe that spirits “invade our psychology” and “manipulate us”! He is writing in the present tense, and so must mean these ideas are sincerely held by most of us people today. It illustrates one of the dangers of the Christian fondness for congregating. Because they are always in the company of like-minded people, they get to think eveyone thinks like Christians.
The Illusion of Truth
Cupitt left boarding school in 1952 to enter Cambridge university to read natural science, but switched within weeks to theology and finished up ordained. It was a strange jump to make and was stranger then, after a muderous war fought mainly between Christian people to defeat an inhuman reaction against progress supported above all by Christian churches. The choices he saw were Christianity or humanism, but he rejected humanism because of Hitler and Stalin! Admittedly Cupitt was then a schoolboy, but he has had half a century to think about it, and has still not noticed that Hitler was brought up a devout Catholic by his doting mother, and Stalin went so far in his Christian ambitions that he began seminary training for the priesthood. Nor did the Nazi German state show itself to be anything other than Christian, introducing Catholic assemblies into its schools, though the USSR under Stalin was aiming to be secular. In the end, the secular state played the main role in defeating the monster of German fascism. Though he knew of giants of humanistic thought like Russell, Ayer, Freud and Sartre, the youthful Cupitt preferred the humanism of the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Witch Hunts, along with the apostolic example of the British Tory party, identified as it always was in a popular joke, with the Anglican Church. Is this a man whose perspicacity should impress us?
As a boy still at school when Cupitt left, I had no similar experience to his. The Tory government of 1951 to 1964 dismayed many of the people I knew, even though they were economically improving years after the destruction of the War, which had to be made good. All of the groundwork for this recovery was laid by the short-lived post-War Labour government of 1945 to 1951. In these, the hardest years, the Austerity Years, as they became known, the basis of a humanitarian secular state was constructed and launched. All the hard work was done in those six years that benefitted governments for the next fifty. It is taking a conviction Christian—leader of a Labour party in name only but more right wing than the present Tory party, in fact—to destroy the welfare state built with dedication and sacrifice by those who returned from fighting fascists. Cupitt could not, perhaps be expected to understand such matters, coming from that privileged background of public school and Oxbridge, just like our present messiah. That is what is risible about the Christians and their love of the poor Galilean. If it had been possible for them to meet him in life, they would have had him arrested as a vagrant, or even as a suspected terrorist, coming, as he did, from Palestine with his dark and brooding Semitic features. Christians end up being as hypocritical as it is possible to be, and the man they read about in the gospels would surely have classified the majority of them with the Pharisees.
To return from the material to the immaterial, Cupitt finds the explanation in our belief in spirits in a need to understand what is happening to us and to respond to it. Life must have a meaning, and when we spill the salt, we throw it in the Devil’s face in defiance of him, to scare him off and deter him from causing us more serious grief. It works! We rarely spill the salt twice in a short time! Our rituals work, proving there are spirits by keeping them at bay. It is like tha young man stopped in Oxford Street dressed as Jungle Jim with a wooden rifle he occasionally held to his shoulder, shouting, “Bang”! “What do you think you are doing, sonny boy?” asked the policeman. “I’m scaring off the elephants,” replied the confident young chap. “But there are no elephants in Oxford Street,” retorted the bemused bobby. “Thank God, I’m succeeding, constable,” gasped the relieved youth. Religion is like that. The young man was doubtless training for the clergy.
The explanation is all that is needed. Whether it is true or not does not matter to the Christian. It simply must seem true! Cupitt says it is a good thing for someone to take an action even when it is based on the wrong premise. A man is paranoid that “they” are out to get him. It does not matter what precautions he takes, Cupitt thinks, because they will not be needed if he is wrong, and he might turn out to be right. If they are spirits and the man is hanging up garlic, we can agree with Cupitt, but the precautions might not be so inconsequential. Not long ago, a Christian suffering a paranoid attack like this went into a London church with a Samurai sword and severely injured several fellow worshippers there. Curiously, another Samurai attack resulted in the death of a Liberal Democratic worker, and severe injuries to a representative. Paranoid individuals should be seeking medical help, not taking “precautions” that might be life threatening. Taking “precautions” based on wrong evidence cannot be recommended in general. Even if fanciful explanations will suffice for Christians, it is no adequate reason for preferring them to the truth.
Cupitt comes out with some real surprises! He speaks of “systems of belief in which there is almost no truth”, yet which last almost indefinitely. He does not mean Christianity but gives astrology as his example! Such lack of self-perception is a shock to the skeptic, but is perfectly natural to Christians who just cannot comprehend that they believe a load of hooey. They are utterly uncritical of their own belief. They define “truth” as being precisely what they believe, yet they cannot see how arbitrary they are being. To prove it, they laugh at anyone else’s religiously prescribed “truths”, which are, naturally, equally arbitrary. Anything that can be shown to be true by demonstration is not however true. That is why truth is lies and lies are truth for Christians, and they just will not get it, although their constant hatred of science and rejection of it suggests that they actually suspect they are skating on ice that eventually will break.
The Word
Anyway, spirits were originally breath and God’s word, like anyone’s, is also simply breath—the breath of His mouth, ignoring the “truth” of an incorporeal being having a mouth. Both are creations of God’s metaphorical breath, and so both can be spiritual entities of a similar level. God has a particular word written with a capital letter that is God Himself in the form of His own son, who is nevertheless still Himself, and this Son assumed a human body and was incarnate, thereby performing a trick that other spirits cannot do. Only the Word ever did it! Christians argued and murdered each other, as was their habit, to establish that this incarnated Word really did have a human body, and did not just seem to. At one time, it was an important distinction, though nowadays only pedantic Christians even think about it. For millions, what was once a grave heresy is accepted as the norm, so many befuddled Christians had died for no reason at all.
But the Word was not just an expulsion of breath, a spirit and a human person, all simultaneously, it was also a written down word, or actually rather a lot of them collected into the Holy Bible Part II called the New Testament. This congregation of words is also God’s Word, and, in this written form, is taken by most Christians to be the physical proof that God exists. In fact, for many, it is God. It turns out then that the breath of God became incarnate, or material anyway, in the Holy Book, and Lo! the religion that forbade idolatry—through the pure reason of theology—manufactures an idol, not only acceptable but necessary to most Christians’ belief.
For the professional wordsmith, words swarm around like flies, or like the ubiquitous but unseen spirits of these religions, and that is because words are the same as spirits. They are “at the interface of subjectivity, and the public world”. They can haunt you, and trouble you, and become an “inner demon”, according to an amateur theologian called Carl G Jung. Such monsters are defeated and put in their place by naming them, and that can easily be done by anyone with a deep wallet, and a lot of time to recline on a couch idly chattering to Dr Jung or one of his acolytes. When the psychiatric shaman names the demon, the patient is cured. This latter-day exorcism is called psychoanalysis, and it proves that ultimately spirits are nothing but words. And that is Cupitt’s theory. And it is his!
Culture
Breathlessly, if not unspiritually, we arrive in an instant at the meaning of culture. Culture now is a broad concept for habits and preferences passed from generation to generation, such as language and taste, giving a distinctive feeling and appearance to different nations. It reached this meaning from an earlier one which pertained to the distinctive service of each people’s gods. Culture meant religion. Even before that, it meant tilling and preparing the ground to grow food. This was the original meaning from which came words like “to cultivate” and “agriculture”. Cultivation was doing what was necessary to live, and became metaphorically doing what is necessary for us and our gods to live the way we are accustomed to.
So, hunter-gatherers worshipped the spirits of the many animals and places that fed them, and so too did the early agriculturalists, adding a recognition of the importance of the seasonal cycle, but so soon as cities began to form, some of the spirits opted for city life, and to accept the ministrations of a lot of human beings glad to be their slaves. Gods are urbanised spirits, lap-dog spirits mollycoddled by willing townies happy to build them luxurious kennels. Hark, the holy bark!
Human beings… built the city, constructed the temple, carved the image of the god, established the cult—and then promptly declared that… it was the god himself who had chosen the site of the city, handed down the design for the temple, instituted the sacrificial system, and appointed the priesthood.Don Cupitt, After God
Human societies constantly go to considerable lengths to maintain this pretence. They concealed the truth by attributing it all to God’s revelation. Yet all the god is is an image like Donald Duck. As Cupitt says, each image of Donald Duck is not an image of some real Donald Duck somewhere in the world. Each picture of the character is the character. The love of Donald Duck is nothing other than the love of the images called Donald Duck. The same is true of the gods.
There is no standard model of a god. Each divine image had its own reality. The image of the god was a symbol of the assistance and mutual assurance that the citizens of the city state provided each other. To maintain the actuality of it, they had to contribute, and the contributions helped to keep the god’s attendants, and his servant and regent, the king, and his army. The god loved his people, and protected them through his king and soldiers, but expected them to love and serve him in return, for which purpose his other army of personal attendants called priests had to be fed.
The god provided other useful services for the people too. They regulated their lives in an era before chronology by calling them to prayer at fixed intervals, and regulated the agricultural year by having festivals that reminded people when it was the right time to do what was needed in the fields to keep them alive. The seasons of the year were kept by the priesthood and they announced when god would send his rain to fertilise the fields and so when it was the right time to plough and to sow, the right time to gather, the right time to introduce a ewe to a ram or a bull to a cow. It is easy to see how gods became associated with life—the actual wherewithal of living—and from that, through complete urbanisation, when many townies were divorced from agricultural practice, the metaphorical other life that the priesthood then then had to promise. Though gods began serving a purpose in agricultural societies, they ended up as Donald Duck—quack gods, conning people into believing their nostrums of immortality.
Belief in a god is not proof that he exists. However useful these ancient religions were for early agriculture, Christians will laugh at any suggestion that these gods were real. Indeed, some cultures had no gods, or considered they were too remote to bother human life. The patriarchal religions, however, grew from the sort of god described above universalised. Now, though these gods play a central role in the lives of the millions of those who believe in them, there is no proof that these gods differ in any way from their smaller precursors—there is still no proof they exist. Belief is the first and essential item of faith, and, the skeptic will say, the biggest trick of all. Cupitt wants to show that belief in the existence of the Christian God should be abandoned. God does not exist and never did, except as a concept in the minds of His believers. That this is so should be acknowledged. God can still be believed, because nothing has changed except that God is properly understood. The concept of God is, Cupitt argues, still useful. As the psychological strut that skeptics have always said He was, perhaps, but He is nonetheless imaginary. He is Harvey!
Cupitt elaborates further, drawing on Thorkild Jacobsen’s description of the evolution of Mesopotamian religion (The Treasures of Darkness, 1976). Jacobsen found that the original god of Uruk in the fourth millennium BC was Dumuzi (Tammuz), called the shepherd god, suggesting its primitiveness—a god that had become a seasonal god from being a god of primitive herders, the people who are only one step removed from the original hunter-gatherers. The ritual was of “wooing and wedding, death and lamentation” standing for the fertilisation of the earth, plant growth and its eventual death. Nothing was personal about this god, though people were overjoyed at his wedding and grieved at his death. These though were communal occasions, not personal ones.
The next stage is that described above of the god as the supernatural king and protector of the city, accepting his people in supplication before his temple seat for a fee. Here is the god of the protection racket. Save us! Lord Al-Capone! By the end of the second millennium the vicissitudes of fate were leading people to question the protection supplied. Small city states were being replaced by empires, and, protected by a god or not, they could not cope with such powerful enemies. Not only that, but the empires had not yet properly caught on to the idea of making conquered cities into provinces, thereby rendering obsolete the need to conquer them afresh every few years, whenever they needed a cash injection.
Individuality and Monotheism
Another problem was that people had begun to notice their own fortune. They lived under the protection of the city god, but some people in the city did much better out of it than others. Worse! The ones who did well were often impious, whereas the ones who suffered were humble and devout. People were catching on that the gods were less than fair at the level of the individual. Part, at least, of the response to this, paradoxical as it might seem, could have been monotheism. The great nations that were emerging had elevated the god of their capital city into a national god, a king of the kings of gods, just about the time when personal consciousness was finding expression, and local gods were looking ineffective. Whether individuals took to a national god, or an important god of some particular attribute, like Nebo, they began to choose, and religion was evolving into a monotheistic and personal devotion.
Cupitt surmises that God only became a fully individualised god when the worshipper felt confident enough to call Him to account. God, who earlier had often been so wrathful and vengeful that no one dared question Him in case he threw a wobbly and zapped the whole city, or withdrew his protection so that it got zapped by the Assyrians, was suddenly found not to mind being questioned. He actually liked a good argument, and loved you for being so frank. Thus, the personal loving God, seen resplendent in Christianity, was born as a realization that God would not harm you when you asked Him hard questions. Of course, people muct have done this before, but never in public. Religions require public agreement, whatever people do or think in private. Not that God went any further in helping you, but a god who did not want to harm you was at least half kind.
Yet another paradox of Christianity, however, is that the right to question God that made Him your own God was quickly abandoned by the organized churches, and questioning God became blasphemous, and so it remains—in public. It was still considered bad form or even blasphemy to question God in front of others, openly, but believers felt they could gently quiz Him in private, thus getting the best of all worlds. But the public Christian God had reverted to type, and Christians loved Him all the more, proving that they like their gods fearful. Undeterred, Cupitt thinks what people have remains their own concept of God, and it is a concept that arose alongside the human realisation of individual personality. Thus, the personal God that Christians generally proselytize is an imaginary concept that came along with their personal consciousness. It is an aspect of one’s own personality and nothing wider. It is not a universal God actually manipulating Nature as a puppet master, and it is a mistake to project into the real world one’s own idea of God. Cupitt thinks that sort of thing is disintegrating, and is unnecessary anyway when religion is personal.
Christianity, a peculiar amalgam of Jewish religion, Greek philosophy and Roman imperialism, dominated religious thinking in Europe for the best part of 2000 years, by promulgating God as exclusive to Christians, but merely requiring faith by everyone to become universal, or Catholic. This God was explained in truth as the God of the universe who loved everyone, even though He refused to save those who would not swear to believe in Him. Those who did not, it turns out that this God did not love at all, and tipped them by the myriad into a sea of burning sulphur in Hell where they were to burn in excruciating pain for all eternity for their temerity. It would not be at all sensible to question this God, if He were real, but fortunately it is not true, or rather it is only Christian truth, that such a God actually is real. In the darkness and superstition the Church created in forcing this God on to Europe, people were inclined to believe and pay their dues called tithes, amounting to ten per cent of all income, irrespective of ability to pay. The Victorians had become so proud of a version of this religion that they called it, not jokingly, “ethical monotheism”. By then, though, people had started to dissent afresh, over 3000 years after Cupitt said they had first realised they could, and about 1500 years after the Church had insisted they could not.
People like Nietzsche and Freud declared God a human literary construct fashioned after the human image, and not the reverse. God was imaginary. He was a human male, writ large, alternatively petulant and bullying, demanding and dismissive, cruel and, latterly, supposedly kind. The outcome of the clash between the real and the imaginary God is inclining, in the twenty first century, towards the victory of the imaginary God. Cupitt now admits that the notion of a universal ethical God really existing was coming to an end in the 1950s just when he chose to switch from science to religion. It seems that God called him, even if he only imagined it. The false objectification of myths has now been recognized, even by some Christians, and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) has traced how it happened.
