Truth
The Delusion of the Personal God
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Sunday, 06 February 2005
What is a Personal God?
Among the characteristics of God, such as that he is a supreme being as well as the designer and creator of the world, is that He is “personal”. What does it mean? It seems to mean to philosophers that God has a personality rather like most human beings who are not mentally ill or damaged. Because God is personal, in this sense, He can interact with humanity like any other person. Is this what Christians mean by it, though?
Christians seem to think, or at least act, as if God was to each of them their own personal God. He is a personal God like a personal stereo or audio-player, or mobile phone. God is the supreme God of all, but even so takes an individual interest in Tony, Condoleeza and George, not to mention the rest. God has, of course, infinite abilities, so treating every Christians as special among His pets is no problem to Him!
Christians train their lambs to believe all the impossible things necessary for Christian belief before they reach the age of discernment, and, if they have failed still to win them, they fill them with adolescent angst forcing them to lose their personality to the infinite figment, usually by feeding teenage feelings of guilt concomitant with their escaping from dependent immaturity into free adulthood. Despite the rhetoric of Bush, Christians do not want freedom. They want slavery to God, and God is whoever is able to speak for Him, even in Bush-speak. Each Christian likes to be nailed to the Christian cross so that they can never escape. It is then a victory for God, except that God never had anything to do with it. Christians in the end surrender their freedom to be slaves of God, but in practice to those who manufacture the crosses and nail their converts to them.
Christian converts are not allowed to sincerely question the beliefs they are taught about God. They are encouraged not to do so by the suggestion that doing it shows a lack of faith. So, asking questions about Christian beliefs makes them feel guiltier than they are by not asking them and thereby demonstrating their complete trust in God—“their faith!” Except… You should have guessed… Yes, God has nothing to do with it! To be created by God as His special pet in His own image is to be created with a brain, presumably like God’s. Yet our brains are a huge problem for Christian divines. Brains make us do embarrasing things, like questioning faith. So, although God gave us this remarkable organ, in the Christian way of thinking, the divines have to persuade Christians not to use it to question faith. When faith is questioned, a brain is Satanic, not Godly. God created us with a brain to test whether we would be obedient to the shepherds when they told us not to use it. Naturally, they are.
The Delusion of Prayer
Christians have no trouble squaring such behaviour with God to relieve their guilt. Christianity overflows with such contradictions, and Christians dare not say a doubting word about it. No Christian can use their brains in respect of their beliefs. They have to be fools, or, at least act like little children, those young humans who are still gullible and dependent, having not yet learnt how to be critical. Some find themselves questioning God’s aims and methods inadvertantly, adding to their guilt, and seeking then to suppress all equivocal thought. They pray for forgiveness for their faithlessness, and ask for strength to stop thinking!
Not for a second do they think that their prayer implies that God is imperfect not them, for God is omniscient and knew of their prayer in advance but had done nothing about it. God knew what the outcome would be when He made each of us, we are told, so He knew we would end up praying for help. Why then did he not help us from the outset, before the prayer was necessary, thus saving our anguish and self-mortification? A God who has to perform miracles and answer prayers is a God who has made errors, or has deliberately caused suffering. He is either not perfect or not good. By believing in miracles and prayers, Christians are blaspheming an almighty god by thinking that God has to correct the world He created. Yet, they never once think they are worshipping the wrong one of the two supernatural powers that Christianity accepts, Yehouah and Satan, if the Christian view has to be accepted at all. Indeed, they say God does a greater moral good by introducing imperfections into the world that He has later to rectify as miracles in answer to prayers.
That, then is His reason for killing hundreds of thousands of Asians in many towns and villages around the Indian Ocean at Christmas 2004. Look at all the good that came of it! Look at all the good that George Bush is doing by killing myriads of innocent Iraqis. Their reward for dying in innocence is to go straight to heaven, many Christians persuade themselves—just like the Moslem suicide bombers in their own patriarchal faith! The naked truth of the patriarchal religions is precisely the same for each. Send the lambs to the slaughter. It is all right as long as they are willing!
The Ultimate Argument for God
Nowadays, Christians like to use the ultimate argument for God—that they actually experience Him personally—the argument from experience. These people say they have met God or even that they meet Him regularly for chats about their progress. The Christians whose votes put Bush in the White House think they have put God there, and cannot begin to consider they might have put the Devil there, as much of the rest of the world thinks, many of them also Christians. And is it Bush himself that they identify with God, or that God goes where George Dubya goes? George allegedly had a conversion experience, but one of the marks of these events, Christians say, is that it makes them better people. Bush began as an inept rich drunk, but became sober, just as inept and rich, but lying, hypocritical and murderous too. Is that an improvement?
Some of the people who say they have met God have sufficiently good reputations to make it impossible not to believe their stories. The question is not whether they are telling the truth but whether what they say is what they think it is. Professor D E Trueblood (The Logic of Belief, 1942) argues that people have to be religious to have religious experiences:
The religious opinions of the unreligious are no more valuable than are the scientific opinions of the unscientific.
All opinion, in this view, must only be about some sort of belief or experience before it can be expressed. It follows that the sanity opinions of the insane are valueless, as one might expect, but so too are the insanity opinions of the sane! No scientist has any valid basis for any non-scientific opinion, and religious people have no basis for giving their opinions on secular matters. This is a view that no Christian can hold to. The main pupose of Christians, it seems to non-Christians, is to tell non-Christians what they should be doing to be proper members of the human race. God says so!
Hallucinating God
Some religious people do concede, however, that not all religious experience can be relied on. They accept that some of it is delusionary. To wake up at night to find Condoleezza Rice or Padre Pio standing by your bed would leave most of us considering the possibility that we were dreaming still, or hallucinating. Neither Padre Pio nor Condoleezza Rice have reputations as cat burglars, and few of us are likely to be on their personal visiting lists, especially in the case of Padre Pio who is dead, and, if Condoleezza Rice was addressing the United Nations that very night, we should have more reason to doubt our senses.
If, even so, we felt sure we were seeing the US Secretary of State or the stigmatic monk, then we could apply further tests such as trying to touch them, asking a pertinent question or making a loud noise to startle them. We could also call in other people, our husband or wife, the lodger or the neighbour to confirm our vision. All of these tests could be used to test whether an experience is real or not.
Do mystics report such tests of their experience of meeting God? Reports of mystical experiences are sometimes by people with impeccable credentials, but then so too are some reports of alien abductions, and the latter are more common these days. Some impeccably honest people cannot be disuaded that stage magicians are merely performing clever tricks. Those who have invested a lot into a particular belief are often the hardest to persuade they are mistaken in it. They suspend their critical abilities in favour of their beliefs, though they would not make an exactly equivalent judgement on experiences attributable to beliefs they do not support. Their judgements are not fair and balanced.
The God of Serial Killers
Serial killers often seem to be instructed by God, and Christians cannot honestly object that God is not like that. The God of the Israelites seemed to delight in much worse crimes. But once it is accepted that some religious experiences of God are not real because they are delusions, then infallible criteria of what a genuine religious experience is are needed to distinguish the real from the false cases. There are none. Bluntly, holy people cannot be distinguished from insane ones. We cannot distinguish between a man who eats little and glimpses heaven, and a man who drinks much and is surrounded by serpents and pink elephants as Lord Russell put it, according to Paul Edwards.
Christians like to think that some, at least of the mystical experiences that so impress them are genuine, but even if this is so, no one knows which ones they are. Perhaps, the God of the human race is evil, and it is serial killers who truly have the mystical experience. It ties in better with human experience of earthquakes and tsunamis too. More likely still is that all mystical experience is either delusion or rare but perfectly natural. The best that can be said for meeting God is that it is a glimpse of some aspect of reality not normally visible. God then has no part in it at all. It might be a temporary schizophrenia or a brief recognition of the unity of Nature—a momentary breakdown of our individuality explaining both.
In any event, the imagined proof of God cannot be had from mystical experiences as they are any more than it can be had from miracles. God is not commonly positively identified, say by a choir of angels, though musical hallucinations might be a part of it, and nor has He ever left a calling card. The hypothesis preferred here is that it is a dissolving of the boundaries of personality that have evolved in allowing individuals of the species to look to their own interests rather than the interests of Nature as a whole. Without any such distinctions, one animal form would have no sense of itself relative to the whole of life. Without a sense of self no animal would have anything to be selfish about. Selfishness is the reason for defending one’s young, resisting predation, fighting for food and fighting for mates—self-preservation. Yet it hides the kinuity of all life. That is the illusion of God!
Transforming Lives
The best evidence for Christians of the genuineness of religious experience is that it transforms lives. Morose depressives become joyous. Drug addicts and alcoholics become drug counsellors and Presidents of the US. The cruel become tender, the proud humble and the weak strong. Or so it is said. It is curiously rare for the rich Christian convert to follow his god and give all he has to the poor, thereby becoming poor himself, even though the poor were supposed to be blessed. Rich Christians follow the sentiments of Christ by doing their best to keep the poor poor, and therefore remaining blessed, and often they just kill them with highly explosive bombs dropped from a great height with pinpoint accuracy, thereby putting them out of their misery with a pass to heaven for dying an innocent death with no complaint. Sometimes, they sell them arms and ideologies so that they can kill themselves with no taint on a rich Christian soul. Few Christians object to any of this. It is not part of God’s design but the work of the Devil.
Moreover, when people converted by religious experience are found to be remarkably good or kind, we do not often know what they were like before their conversion. If S Francis was good to animals as a Christian, do we know that he was awful to them beforehand, or was he kind to animals anyway, and his kindness helped lead him to convert. People do not have to believe in the Christian’s God or any god to be good, though Christians like to pretend otherwise, despite the evidence of Christian history. Neither is everyone who is not a Christian wicked, nor is every Christian, nor even most Christians, unusually good.
While instances of horrible people, like Saul of Tarsus, becoming good Christian through a conversion event are often cited by Christians, they rarely cite the many examples of Christian leaders committing the grossest of horrors in the name of Christianity, like pope Innocent III. Alongside them are the tyrants and murderers who commit atrocities because God commanded them to. Christians are always highly selective in their evidence, simply omitting all the counter examples of the effects of Christianity on people to keep its image spotless. We have no unequivocal reasons to think that more Christians have been guided by supernatural voices in their heads to do good than to do ill.
When Christians splutter indignantly that God could not have motivated men into wickedness, they are doing no more than continuing their self-selection by labelling Christian outcomes as necessarily good. Yet, even if mystical experience led only to goodness in people, it is no proof of God. Altruistic sacrifice of one’s life used once to be thought of as noble, but the Moslem suicide bombers who martyr their own lives are considered evil by Christians. Where then does this martyrdom point? Towards God or towards Satan?
Moslems are considered deluded or tricked to give away the lives the way they do. Giving away your life is only a noble self-sacrifice when it is done by a Christian. And who is to say that hallucinations, illusions or delusions cannot lead people into such acts. Those with the delusion that they are guided by the spirit of someone famous, or even who believe they are someone famous might be cruel or kind. If they think they are Vlad the Impaler, they might be nasty, but if they think they are S Francis of Assisi, they might be kind, or at least kind to cats.
Few people today think it likely that someone has been reincarnated, even saints. The scientific evidence is all against it because DNA, the blueprint of people, is too complicated to be replicated on a second occasion. Not only that, but life’s experiences which condition the material produced from the DNA plan is just as impossible to replicate. Even if, as religious people think, some sort of personality, called a soul was dropped into the material shell of a human animal, it would not be operating in the same conditions it had in the original Vlad or S Francis and could not therefore produce the same output. All human shells would have to be identical for the personality of the hypothetical soul to be replicated from one to another. DNA shows they are not. They are different.
It follows that people are deluded to think they are someone else, and their concomitant behaviour, good or bad, must then be formed by a delusion. A religious experience, albeit a delusion, can confer benefits or otherwise to those who experience it. Simply counting the good and not the bad instances is simply dishonesty. Even good outcomes of religious conversion do not prove the experience is what religious people claim it is, or that God exists, and men and women of high moral and intellectual integrity are not immune from deceptive psychological experiences. If we accept that such people would not lie, we are only accepting that their description of their experience is reliable, not the interpretation they put on it. They can be just as deluded as anyone else, perhaps even more subtly so.
Care, in particular, has to be taken of evidence from ancient, or even not so ancient, times, when people were less sure of the difference between dreams and reality. Then, people would awaken with a start from a nightmare convinced they had just been struggling with a demon. With no intention deliberately to decive, they would describe their dream as reality. Many saints fought with demons, and Luther could smell the sulphurous whiff of the Devil constantly about him trying to tempt him. He suffered from flatulence!
Superfluous Explanations
If religious experiences are due to certain ungratified needs in people who have been raised in a religious environment, and if those unfulfilled needs are widespread, then we would expect religious experiences to occur quite frequently, even on the assumption they are delusions.P Edwards, Introduction to Philosophy, 1965
Those brought up in a common tradition would be expected to have similar but not identical visions or experiences, while, as the tradition varies differences should occur, according to the changes in the teaching of the tradition. Christians see saints, devils and the Virgin Mary, but other religions have mystics who never see these. It is bright light and a sense of oneness with Nature that most generally characterize God’s presence—the kinunity of life. It is what would be expected from an experience that is uncommon in its strongly developed form but not exceptionally rare, especially in lesser forms, but is wrongly interpreted through false teaching as a religious event. There is nothing but excuses to explain why God’s revelations are never clear and consistent, but a natural event explains them nnaturally. Believer think God is almighty, omnipotent, but He seems to be albungling and inept if not impotent at putting across His supposed messages, even to the willing.
Edwards tells us that Professor C D Broad, the twentieth century philosopher thought mystics are slightly cracked to be able to sense the world that is normally beyond the senses. That seems likely, but we then have to wonder how cracked people can get and remain reliable. If they can remain reliable enough we are still left with the original problem—is the vision of the supersensible world a vision of God or a vision of Nature normally blocked to us so that we can be individuals? Always there is a simpler, more likely and more normal explanation of supposed religious experiences than God. Edwards concluded that if we have a perfectly good explanation of a certain phenomenon in terms of natural causes, it becomes superfluous to explain it in terms of something supernatural. Illnesses were thought to have been been caused by demons before they were thought of as God’s punishment for sin. Now, natural explanations have replaced both, and have shown us ways of stopping God’s punishment.
Many Christians will pray for guidance before a decision, and having taken it, are convinced that God has personally advised them. All such advice should be perfect, coming from God, the perfect planner, but Christians can always find excuses for why they are not, after the event. The Victorian Tory Prime Minister, William Gladstone, according to Paul Edwards, had his guidance from God, and doubtless President Bush is the same, and the advice is always Tory advice. God is obviously a Tory, and liberals and socialists are just additional mistakes He made in His Creation!
When rulers think God is telling them, or advising them, what to do, it ought to be obvious that the rest of us must pray that they are balanced and measured in their judgements. Better still, the rest of us should make sure such men never get into positions of power. Their conviction that God guides them all too often turns into an insane belief they can do nothing wrong.
