Truth
From the Death of God to Secular Christianity
Abstract
You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. You and everyone else are here for the sake of others.After R Buckminster Fuller
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 16 July 2008
The Prophet
A Christian on a bright morning lighted a lantern and ran to the church calling out unceasingly:
I seek God! I seek God!
Among the Christians standing about, he caused a great deal of amusement. “Why! is he lost?” said one. “Has he strayed away like a child?” said another. Or, “Does he keep himself hidden?” “Is he afraid of us?” “Has he taken a sea-voyage?” “Has he emigrated?” … the Christians cried out laughingly, all in a hubbub.
The prophet jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. He called out:
Where is God gone?” I mean to tell you! We have killed him, … you and I. We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? … even gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, … who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event … and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!
Here the prophet was silent and looked again at his hearers. They also were silent and looked back at him. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, so that it broke in pieces and was extinguished. Finally, he said:
I come too early. I am not yet at the right time. This prodigious event is still on its way, and is travelling, it has not yet reached men’s ears. Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. This deed is as yet further from them than the furthest star, … and yet they have done it!
The prophet made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply:
What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?Nietzsche
The Death of God
Is God dead? Nietzsche thought the Christian God was dead, but few Christians concur. Whatever the condition of God, some thought Christianity was once dying. But Christianity in the USA revived via the fundamentalist evangelicals, and elected Bush, proving beyond doubt that God was indeed dead. Though they talk conventional Christian talk, and fill the place with churches, America is Godless, and it is most Godless where Americans profess the most piety. God is most dead where people worship Him most.
Evangelicals are worshipping a dead God. How can Christians feel the presence of God when He is dead? Did they feel the presence of God when He was alive? They did not stop hating, but instead hated in God’s name. So God Himself cannot have been near them in any supportive or inspiring way. What then was the presence they felt? What else could it be in Christian terms but the Devil? Gnostics said the Devil is the God of this world, an imperfect world. He glories in its imperfections. Giving Christians a false impression he was God, and approved of their false notion of God’s will, was the Trickster’s greatest trick. God’s followers were too easily fooled, so He has gone.
God, the supreme God, died. He has left no trace of Himself. Science confirms it. He has allowed science to prove it, because Christians have betrayed Him. As Judas betrayed Christ, Christian betrayed God. They rejected His injunction to love their enemies, or even each other. They were not content with simple, frugal and humble lives but wanted wealth and fame, pursuing greed and selfishness. Now they are killing the earth, and have killed God. Christians have tied to a throne His putrefying corpse and kneel before it praying for favours, convinced the corpse moves and acts, and is granting them.
“America is truly a semibarbarous nation” theologian, William Hamilton, once wrote. Part of the reason for its barbarism was that it had no history, and, as a consequence Americans looked hopefully to the future instead. The vision of the pioneers led the US to greatness, but it also bred a religious utopianism. It became the grotesque sin and mass delusion that Americans are the Chosen People of God, blessed to evolve into His kingdom. Many seem to think they are already there, but the rest of the world demurs. Yet that wish to look forward can be redeeming.
God is dead because Christians have never obeyed His proclamations. The plain evidence of God, when He appeared as a man in the bible, was that He wanted Christians to be like Him. His teaching was essentially worldly and practical. The other world would come sometime, like a thief in the night, but meanwhile those who wanted to be part of it had to do certain prescribed things. They had to love God, their fellow men as themselves, and give all they had to the poor, thereby being poor themselves, and obliged to live frugally. As the world gets exploited and over populated, you know now that this final message was not to be dismissed, but the first thing Christians did was to dismiss it, and so it has remained—ignored.
God—the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness, pronounced holy.Nietzsche
But the Messiah Lives
Gnostics never accepted the Christian God as being God. They considered the Christians to be worshipping a lesser, even an evil God, the God of this world only—Satan. It is why there was wickedness and corruption in the world. Some Gnostics wrongly concluded it must be all right to be corrupt too, but most believed that Satan was a minor God or wicked angel who had stepped beyond his level of competence, and would be brought to order when the Supreme God of pure spirituality and goodness got enough support from humanity. Satan’s world was hell, and heaven was to come. Good people who paid no homage to the wicked God would get there.
To do it Christ had shown the way. Human beings had to be like him, to live lives of perfection. The Cathars were believers in this Christ, and opponents of the Christian Church. Their fate was genocide at the hands of barons bribed by the Christian Church to kill them all off. Those who escaped were hounded for centuries by the Holy Catholic Inquisition. To this day, there are Christians who defend this torture and genocide as necessary to defend the faith. Such sentiments proved to Cathars that Satan was indeed the God of the Christians. Christ had invited His disciples to love humanity, but their response throughout history was to kill, maim and torture their fellow human beings, even when they were Christians too. Christians ignored God, so God now is dead.
Science has shown God is dead, but Christ lives on. The life and teaching of Christ still remain as examples of how Christians must be to be Christians. Though God is dead, He can be resurrected, Christianity can be resurrected—the messiah lives. Jews have a God but no messiah, now Christians have a messiah but no God, though he is not the messiah of Christians but of Christs! Christians can have a messiah and a God, but only by aiming to be Christs. Then God will be resurrected. And Christians can yet be Christs, just as Jesus intended. Christ taught correct morality, but too few Christians led the life of Christ. And, full of Devilish hubris, assuming God’s role as Judge, they boasted they were saved. Through following Satan, they were sure they were saved!
Faith and the Church
In the concept of the “church”, mankind has pronounced holy precisely what “the bringer of glad tidings” felt to be beneath and behind him.Nietzsche
The church is an immoveable stone rolled before the tomb of Christ. Satan instituted the Church not Christ. Christ did not need a Church. He needed no mediators. His message was simple and clear. Love one another! Be Perfect! Be a Christ! “It is too hard”, they groaned, so they invented the Church and faith. They ignored God. Doing His will was too hard, so Satan invented “Faith Alone”, and Christians snatched it up because it was easy. Doing something, loving others, being humble, was too hard. Faith is doing nothing.
Doing something is all together harder than professing faith. Having faith in Christ is doing nothing. They could continue as they were, merely saying, “I am a Christian. I have faith in Christ. I am saved” They thought they could tell God how good they were, and He would then save them! Satan incarnated as Paul, and negated the message of God when He incarnated. Christians praised God, praised Christ, but ignored what He said. They believed Paul, and boasted of their faith. Christ said, “be humble”, but Paul liked to boast—Christians boast. But they are not saved! They have killed God.
Only the heretics read Christ’s message that they had to be Christs to be saved, so they were murdered and burnt in their thousands as Cathars, Bogomils and witches. Their true message was maimed and mutilated, but it did trigger the Reformation, emerging as a victory for autonomous worship, free of the Catholic Church and its priests. People were liberated to read the bible themselves, and to appeal directly to God. Even given this small measure of autonomy, what did Christians do?—they set up new churches with priests called pastors and ministers, clerical mediators to spy on them, to tell them how to read their bibles and what they should understand by it. The fish escaping Satan’s net were netted again, and made into political fodder for the rich and powerful.
The Church had blinded people to the plain truth, and no one could see it, even when they were given the chance to read Jesus’s life and proclamations for themselves. They called him Jesus because he was telling them how to be saved, but they ignored him and believed Paul, Saul, the Devil incarnate, who taught them a cosmic Christ accessible by faith.
The Idiot God
Christians did not want God. They rejected Him. They chose Satan. The new Israel went the way of Israel. They became Pharisees. Those who had received Christ’s message and tried to be perfect were smoke and ashes. Only a remnant remained, and remained silent out of fear. God had died. He had yielded to the pricks. He withdrew beyond transcendence and left behind a putrefying corpse, the body of Satan with a mask of Christ to be worshipped, its brain eaten by the maggots that fell from it.
Christians did not want a God with a brain. Their’s was an idiot God, a God who did what they wanted. Christians could not love others, do right and be perfect. It was too hard, needed too much effort, too much thought, a brain! “I think” and “I believe”, cogito and credo, are opposites. Christians preferred credo. They didn’t want to think, didn’t want to do anything. So they wanted a God who made it easy, who had no brain Himself, who legislated what they liked and they picked, simple standards that nobrains could understand easily and claim were forever true, static. Yet God had ordained natural laws, and rules of progress, so the simple standards Christians understood fossilized as the world moved by them. By their rejecting their own brains, and selecting a brainless God, God died.
The Church alienated mankind permanently from God, for the eternal benefit of the demons who claimed to be healing the rift. God was meant to be human life, but, in many of its essentials, it opposed human life. God became a hole, a void, an emptiness, that faith was needed to see, but no one honestly could. But, like the Emperor’s New Clothes, some took the opportunity to claim they could, and the others felt obliged to agree. Yet God was indeed easy to see, and he had explained that he was everywhere. He was human society, and that is why He wanted everyone to love Him by loving each other.
Perfection and Being a Christ
Christ’s message was to every individual. It required a personal decision, personal thought, and commitment, personal acts of love of other people in society. Salvation was resurrection into a perfect world, but this world, an imperfect world made perfect. How could it be? Because perfect people were resurrected. Salvation was of those who were perfect, and when everyone did as Christ told them and showed them, and became Christs themselves—were perfect—then so was the world! “But that is impossible”, the thoughtless Christian protests. “Christ was God.”
Quite so, but God incarnated as a man. He was a man. God did not incarnate as a God. He did not incarnate as half a God and half a man. He was a man! He was born of a woman, his mother. He always said he was a son of man, a humbling expression meaning he was indeed a man, born of a woman, a female man. He did no miracles, because men cannot do miracles. They were given to him by the gospel writers, mainly making some parables into events, and making metaphorical allusions into reality. God incarnated as a man so that He could show how He meant men to be, and to teach them directly, from His own lips as a man what He meant as a God.
No man, in an imperfect world, can be a perfect man. Christians think their idiot God does not understand that! They tell God it is impossible, so that they do not have to try. The incarnated God showed He was less than a perfect man—he was angry, sarcastic, had poor judgement of character, had little sense of humour doing such a serious task, was too single minded to marry, and called out in despair as he died. God incarnated was not a perfect man, and, in wanting human beings to be perfect, was not giving them an impossible task. They were to be Christs, not more perfect even than Christ.
Obviously God wanted people to be as perfect as they could be. God knows you cannot be more perfect! God as Christ tried to be a perfect man, but the nature of humanity meant a perfect man was less than perfect. Christ tried to be perfect, he wanted to be perfect, and that is what is expected of human beings. It was what Cathar Perfects tried to do. Christians burnt them to cinders for trying to do what Christians would not do themselves.
And who were Christians to say it was impossible in any case? Who was to be the judge of that? God is the judge, but Christians wanted to judge, and did to their own satisfaction, but that is not God’s. They said being a Christ is impossible, but why do they think they can second guess God? Satan’s agent, Paul gave them to believe that by some mystical faith in the body of Christ they were saved, with no reference to God, or with God obliged to rubber stamp the power of their faith.
God is almighty. He is not compelled by anything, let alone empty faith. How arrogant can you be to stand before God and tell Him you are saved? God is the judge of your perfection as a Christ. He judged what you have put into it, whether you have seriously tried or just put on a façade. All you have to do is your best at the task He has given you. He knows when you have cynically done less than you could, but he knows that you cannot do better than you can. He has experienced being human!
Perfection cannot come out of imperfection, but the attempt is what is important, what draws people closer to heaven, a perfect place. Once the gap is close enough, God can complete the task. Heaven and earth join together, and the effort to be perfect is rewarded by salvation, and those who have died having met God’s criterion are resurrected into heaven with uncorruptible bodies, and eternal life. Such is the ancient teaching, and the reason why the kingom is to come in earth as it is in heaven. There is no longer a distinction between them. In heaven you who tried to be perfect in life, and never succeeded, but tried your best, will be perfect. But there are no problems, solutions, time or motion needed in a perfect world. You are simply joined together with God. Perfection is to be God!
The Road to Hell
But God is dead. Christian have ignored and rejected Him, while pretending to obey Him in every detail. Nothing should concern them on earth except living good lives of love of God, of other people and being humble and frugal, yet they love Mammon not God, they want to be rich and famous, and will kill each other for such selfish pleasures. God wanted them to make their efforts individually, for once everyone has destroyed the evil within them then evil is destroyed, but they built temples and agreed among themselves they were to respect bishops and pastors instead of ordinary people, even their enemies.
They were told directly by God that they served God by serving their fellow men, they loved Him by loving other human beings, but they parade ceremoniously into churches to flaunt a false love of God while plotting to exploit and kill Him. They were not to tell others how to remove the motes from their eyes while they themselves had planks in theirs, and God was the judge of their success in removing their planks, not themselves. They were not to judge. God Judged!
Christ did not tell them to institute any theocracy. The universe is God’s, the power is God’s. He will institute a theocracy of His own when mankind does as God wants. Theocracy will happen when people are acting like Christs. It can never happen while they act like devils and worship the putrefying body of Satan they have appointed as God.
They choose to take an easy road to heaven, but the easy road is to hell, and God told them so. They believed Paul, so they do what Satan wants, they kill and torture in God’s name. That is not God’s will, and the name is a guise for Satan, it is not God. It should be clear to any human being that wilfully causing pain to others is not love. Pain is to warn people of injuries, it is to save them something worse, and to use it deliberately for torture is the sure way to hell. It is using God’s kindness for evil. There can be no salvation for torturers. Anyone who does it, or condones it, is wicked. It is the opposite of being a Christ, it is being a demon of hell.
Christians permit torture. God cannot endure it, so He is dead, and they killed Him. They want eternal life for themselves, and no life for anyone who does not worship the putrefying corpse they worship. God is dead, and now they have the problem of resurrecting Him, if salvation is what they really want.
The answer ought still to be clear. To turn to Christ!—the Christ they can read about in the gospels, without any professional bloodsucker standing over them. Christ told them what to do, and he showed them how to do it. They must turn from faith to love. They must have no excuse that love needs faith. Faith needs love. There can be no proper faith in God unless you do what he told you—love others, even your enemy! Don’t make any excuse about not needing works. Love is works. Christ said he came to fulfil the law, and the works spoken of biblically means works of the law. The law is fulfilled when everyone is a Christ, when everyone is full of love for others. Then the law, the works of the law, are fulfilled. Works and law then are unnecessary, love having superseded them. So there is no antithesis between works and faith, when works means love.
The Least of You
There can be no waiting for God to return before they do it. Love is works, it is activity, it is deeds. It is not like faith. Faith is intrinsically passive. It is empty unless, as James, “the brother of the Lord” said, it is is filled by lovingkindness to others. Faith in God is shown by love of God, and He said that means love of people. Not just your relatives and best friends, nor just fellow Christians in the same church, but, even the least of them—even your enemies.
As you did it to one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it to me.
These are God’s own words, spoken from His own lips. He says clearly that any good or ill that you do to others, you do to God. So, love others, serve them, even the least of them—especially the least of them—and you serve God. Harm them and God knows, for you are doing it to Him. Love cannot be hidden, what good is love that no one knows about? Love has to be public, visible. Love cannot be abstract, it must be open, demonstrated by kindness and compassion. It is the only way to love God.
You cannot serve God like serving an idol, dressing it and feeding it. You cannot imagine God is a megalomaniac, constantly demanding praise and worship, sacraments, ceremony and ritual. These distract people from what is important. It is obvious, because true, that Christians were tricked into believing that all of these distractions meant something to God. God wants to be loved. He has told you how to do it—by imagining that everyone else in the world is God. So, love them. So why have Christians not done it? If you want to be saved treat even your enemies as if they were God. That is being perfect. That is being a Christ. The Cathar influence on Luther shows in his wholly correct imperative to Protestants:
Become a Christ to your neighbour.
If faith helps you to do it, then faith can be salvific, but faith alone does not save and never did, according to God. If it did, then Christ need not have appeared at all. Good men have had faith since Abraham, if not before, so why did God have to appear to demonstrate the value of faith? Christ’s distinctive message was to fulfil the law of Moses, God’s commandments meant for people to use as a measure of righteousness. Christ brought a much easier measure of righteousness for people to understand. Love. When people love one another, society is better for everyone, and God’s will is fulfilled.
God’s will then is that people should live together harmoniously, not that they should fight over God’s name, or whether they should pray five times a day or eat fish on Fridays. All of the minutiae of this faith and that are devilish distractions from the simple principle of love. Perfection is acting perfectly towards each other. Only people who do it satisfactorily in life, as God judges, can ever be saved, and all anyone can do is to try their best to be a Christ, and put their faith in God’s merciful judgement.
A Secular Christianity
Kierkegaard said faith was subjectivity. The Christian God is perceived only subjectively. Science is perceived objectively. Science has to be objective. It is systematic objectivity. It has to find what is true for all. It is communal observation, social observation. Subjectivity is solitary observation. Subjectivity is the antithesis of objectivity. It is solitary and selfish, in contrast to objectivity, which is social and sharing. So, science cannot see God, yet science is the social endeavour, and God is the solitary and so antisocial endeavour.
God banishes science, and science banishes God. Faith, being subjective, needs the negation of the objective to succeed. So, perpetually it negates the objective. Reality is what is agreed upon by several different observers. It is objective. Faith and God are subjective and therefore not part of reality. They negate reality.
The myth of Christ expresses dictums for social living, which being social, are objective. One was to love each other and another was to love God, and a third was that loving God was loving each other. These principles of Christ abolished the gap between God and man. They are objective principles. They are social principles. From them God is seen to be a metaphor for the whole of humanity, the whole of human society.
Faith is subjective, showing that faith is not part of these principles, or even compatible with them. It is solitary and selfish. Only by defining faith as the act of adopting and practising these principles can faith be rendered social and objective. Anyone who adopts and practises them can say they have faith and call themselves Christian without accepting a supernatural God. Practising these principles to the best you are able means you are being a Christ, and so you are a proper Christian, and the principles and practices of Christ then are faith. The principles must be practised.
Once God had incarnated Himself to tell humanity how to behave in the social world that helped lift them above the brutes, He must have thought His task was over. He could leave humanity to progress towards deity themselves. He meant to depart with a sense of achievement. Yet no sooner had Christ been crucified than a human agent of Satan—Satan in disguise—arrived to garble the message, and make it into its opposite. God wanted to show mankind how to succeed without Him, but the God of Paul was substituted, and no one noticed. Some followers of Christ tried to object, but were pushed aside. God became Satan and he instituted the Church.
Prophets
Occasionally prophetic people see a little of the truth, but humanity, under the rule of the Devil, always kills its prophets.
Dietrich Bönhoffer saw that God never meant people to have to pray to appeal to Him to solve their problems. God had given us a brain for that, and our biggest problem, as social animals, was ourselves, and God gave us the solution to that—to love one another. Bönhoffer’s idea of secular Christianity and religionless Christianity were to stop focusing on ritual, and start doing what Christ wanted us to, like helping the poor. Bönhoffer argued that the church was no longer needed to carry out Christ’s wishes because everyone is capable of carrying out God’s will without any greater help than his own will and power.
There is no point in asking God to do what he has equipped us to do ourselves. Love of others, universally adopted, banishes loneliness, despair, fear, selfishness, greed, it inspires forgiveness, compassion, generosity and charity. It banishes too the avaricious clergyman, a confidence trickster who pretends he has the way to God, or will bribe Him given the money! And Christians trust him! Do they think God is present in the garish church adverts these men display, or in the exploitative TV shows they produce to make fortunes out of naïvely false expectations and the despair they help to create.
God is found more easily than that. He has told you Himself that He is standing next to you in the subway and at the football match, sitting next to you in the theatre and the cinema, working with you. He is even the terrorist trying to blow you up, and the robber jumping on you from the alley. God is Everyman. If you love a wayward child, you will try to find out what is causing their problem and help them. They have a problem with society and therefore society has their problem. You try to solve their problem, not add to it. That is the sense in which He meant people are children (Mark 10:14). God has told you to do it, and how, and doing it, you no longer need invite Him to break His own laws to help you in particular. God is not partisan. If you do not love Him, love everybody, you are assisting the Devil. God has told you. Now go away and do it. You no longer need Him.
William Blake
William Blake was another prophetic figure. He is said by many to have been a mystic, seeking God, but, though Blake was a Christian, he had no regard for Churches. He saw that Christ had been hidden by Vada’s Veil, the obfuscation and confusion of the Church with its worthless sacraments and ceremonies. Mysticism is tolerated in Christianity because many Catholic Saints were mystics, but barely, because it is basically Gnostic, being founded on the Gnostic dualist idea that man is a battleground between the spirit and the flesh.
Spiritually, man is a part of God, a spark or misplaced atom aspiring to find its way to rejoin the supreme Good, God. The pleasures of the flesh tempt him to remain tied to the earth, the domain of a wicked God, Satan. The mystic disregards the body and even wants to discard it as a hindrance to the rise to the spiritual level, and union with God in the Godhead. So, earthly life becomes nothing to the mystic. He lives an extreme asceticism, enduring self inflicted suffering, the pain of which is a catharsis. He mortifies the body until symptoms of starvation and neglect begin to appear as an ecstatic state. In torturing his body, he goes through hell, hoping to rise then to heaven, and thinks the ecstasy, the symptoms of bodily breakdown from neglect, are its first glimpses.
Blake had little regard for the Christian God but he was a heretic, a Cathar or a Gnostic, in essence. Cathars sought God but considered it was a personal quest, and no business of anyone else. Naturally, they gave each other support and guidance, but they had no notion of magical sacraments, sacred prescriptions, or concern about what other people were doing to reach God, or not. Blake was similar, but he recognized the quest for God was for Man. Man was God.
Jesus is the only God… and so am I and so are you.
Blake held that “less than All cannot satisfy Man”, and “the Desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite, and himself Infinite”. Blake did not regard God in a supernatural way. The quest for God was finding the Gnosis of it—the secret knowledge of it. The secret was that God was Man.
Thou art a Man, God is no more,
Thine own humanity learn to adore.
Blake opposed Christian hypocrisy that substituted church attendance for the proper objective of lifting Man towards God, and the orthodox mystical self denial in the material world as a way of getting to heaven. He opposed sanctimonious Christian apologies for tolerating injustice, suffering and evil, man’s exploitation of man, and Christians’ excusing it in prejudice:
And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.
Until Nietzsche towards a century later, no one criticized traditional Christian ethics so frankly. Blake was like Nietzsche too in hating the hypocritical morality of Christianity. Sexuality is not a matter of morality—what is immoral is not caring for any children that result—yet for Christians, by an historical accident, it is uppermost in morals. Sexual restraint distorts man’s real nature, for life is holy. The main heresy for Christians is any human’s right to live a natural and enlightened life so long as they are not burdening others:
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions, or have no Passions, but because they have cultivated their Understandings.
Nietzche spoke of a “power” (perhaps today what would be called charisma, originally a Christian term) that made men into overmen (Übermenschen, Christs), what put them on the way to being gods, “energy” gave them eternal delight for Blake. Jesus is venerated because he heralded man’s joy, not because of any imaginary redemption—because he was a rebel against false Law, not because he was divine. In Blake, joy is what redeems:
We are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.
To love in the way that lifts us towards God is to carry a burden, but once you learn to do it, it becomes a delight. The war between good and evil, for Blake, is a metaphorical struggle in man to resolve the opposites in life. Man never fell, to need redeeming, as the Christian myth maintains, so there is no need for a religion to do it, no original sin to be redeemed. The sense of original sin, that makes human nature sinful, is an invention of the Devil, the Creator God, Urizen. Blake saw Satan saying plainly “thou art worshipped by the Names divine, Jesus and Jehovah”!
Satan rules this world, “the Empire of nothing”. Spectrous Chaos told mankind, “That human form you call divine is but a worm”, meaning to us, a snake, Satan, then He calls God, “the Great Selfhood, Satan”. Blake saw the God of the Christians to be Satan, the God of this world, not God. Satan is Self. God is Others. Satan is the solitary, the unsocial, the atavistic man. God is the communal, social, progressing man. For Blake, at the apocalypse, God appeared as hell which Jesus had to pass through before eternity began. Hell is this world. Blake devoted Jerusalem to “Jesus only”, for Jesus was Christ and Christ was “Universal Humanity”.
I still & shall to Eternity Embrace Christianity and Adore him who is the Express image of God.
Contrary to Christ’s messages, the Church has made the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, into permanently antagonistic enemies. If the least of human beings is God, there can be no such division. The Christian thinks they have a Christian cloak donned or doffed according to the occasion. That is satanic. You cannot be kind to people in church, and outside of it expel people from their land to build a golf course, or a used car lot, herd cattle for hamburgers or chop down forests for hardwood. You cannot invite God to bless America, then order the bombing of innocents, or even not innocents, in God’s view uttered by His own lips. God is not an American. He is Everyman. Two faced behaviour towards people is contrary to God’s will. Yet Christians who do precisely this expect to be saved.
Who is responsible, but Paul? Christianity, Buber says, is dominated by Paulinism without love, for even Paul, to effect to be teaching what Christ taught, had to speak of Christian love while pressing the primacy of faith. Even Paul can be redeemed when love is put first instead of faith.
How to be Christ
Christ died for humanity’s sake. How can the Christian do that? Christ died for the love of humanity. He sacrificed himself for others, and he was their example, their role model. They had to love like him, even their enemies, and the love had to be public, had to be open, like a man openly and publicly nailed to a cross. Blake knew that every act of true kindness, not mere tokenism, was a personal sacrifice. You did not have to do it, but, like Christ, you chose to. Each little sacrifice was a little death. Christ’s death on the cross did not have to be emulated literally by his disciples actually dying, but they had to give their lives nevertheless, dying little deaths, making small sacrifices in every act of lovingkindness undertaken. God knows loving others is not easy, especially loving your enemies, and requires genuine determination to do. It was a sacrifice, like Christ’s but smaller. And that is how the Christians should die for humanity, like Christ. But they would not do it.
If true Christians had to be Christs, how then can they be resurrected? When being a Christ is the way Everyman is, then humanity is reborn into the new society that arises when the old satanic one dies and rots away.
We behold as one, as one man all the universal family, and that one man we call Jesus Christ.William Blake
The universal family is the kingdom of God.
The Christian has to reject the mumbo distractions of serving the Devil, of the Church. God does not require service, He is not an idol. The stone sealing the tomb of Christ, that is the Church, has to be rolled aside. The seal must be broken to allow Christ’s word to be heard again, his practical proclamations for living like God. The Church had sealed them up, and instead resurrected the ancient mysticism of primitive religion. Instead of driving Satan from human society, the Church set Him up as a false God, and worshipped him, not the true God. It encouraged Christians to do nothing but have faith and wait forever for the parousia of Christ, when they were supposed to be cultivating it within themselves, growing within themselves the true love of others that God desired.
The parousia can never come by waiting. It can never come because evil men decide it is time it should and set off holocausts of hatred. It depends on mutual activity, mutual love strengthening society because society is what saves us all from isolation and barbarity. When you all love each other, society is the kingdom of god, but there is no magical way to it. It requires effort, sacrifice, a multiplicty of tiny personal deaths, a willingness to lose a little more Self for others. You must do what Christ, God, taught you to do.
Instead Christians celebrate holy communion, separating themselves from others to worship an idol, and think it is enough—worse, what God wants! The Eschaton comes when people are Christs, not by sitting smugly secure in a worthless faith. Real faith recognises continuous acts of love towards others as the little deaths you each suffer, like Christ, for humanity to be resurrected from atavistic selfishness.
Hoping or praying for a return to Eden is doing nothing. It is wishful thinking. Eden is a paradise lost, but Christ showed the way to restore it, to resurrect it, to make human existence divine, through universal love of others. To reject it as impossible is to serve the Devil. It is not easy, but it is easier than being crucified, for our sacrifices are small, and often are immediately rewarding. The lost paradise is valueless to us. Remembering it is idle. The task in hand has to be addressed, not golden pasts. The task is to be perfect, as perfect as possible in an imperfect world. That will satisfy a gracious God. The task is to make little sacrifices for others a habit, to make it an instinct. That is what being a Christ is. That is being perfect.
Once it is done, the wicked God of the world will die. The good God, as Christ, will be resurrected from death in Everyman, for God is Everyman, and human society will be the kingdom of God. Every moment of peace, joy and delight you ever experienced will come together, every moment of gratitude for care and compassion, for relief that assistance is at hand, will be realized. It will not be perfect, but only as perfect as possible. Even then you shall have ascended to heaven, and man and God will sit on the same throne!
Further Reading
- More on religious origins
- More, and even more on morality
- More on Nietzsche and secular christianity
Comment
From Sam
Mike, I have the following comments on: From the Death of God to Secular Christianity. Dear oh dear. That was painful! Far from being communicative or relevant the writings of these philosophers and social protestants against the status quo of their time seem dated and even infantile. The whole of their arguments or sermons are a complete tort for they accept as the premise the thing they are purporting to deny. As a social history lesson in cultural conformity and metaphor, even archetypical thinking, they are perhaps worth study, but Blake, who is single handedly responsible for so much of modern social secularity, who brings into the secular field the divine nature of everydayness, can be criticized for his lack of open defiance of the religious establishment. However why be a martyr if god is dead?
The bastard children of the powers that be have to rise up in distress and cry out about the hypocritical nature of their parents in absentia. But what is it they are seeking? Social justification for their conceptions of reality and reality’s god, a just society that expresses the ideals they glimpsed through the dirty windows of the house of their cultures as gleaming and bright? Modern day rethinking of these ideas are more direct, with a “fuck that!” here and there for emphasis. There is no doubt that genteel niceties and parlour house society does not need to be appeased or won over to discuss these ideas and concerns. Steven Hawking and Richard Dawkins have at least in the west been able to lay out explicitly and clearly an alternative description of reality so called which does not have to be convoluted and pay homage to disrespected deities or values. And indeed not only an alternative description but some movement towards a reworking of underlying values and paradigms and metaphors. I suppose the human metaphor Dawkins uses in his title, The Selfish Gene, owes some recognition to the efforts and explanations of philosophers who have gone before abstracting the human behaviours out of the religious conceptions of sin and placing them in a no less unsupported concept called morality from which later good people could draw a less specifically religious language to describe human like behaviours.
But my point is this: religious concepts are like any other concept matrix, they describe what the culture wants to describe to itself in ways the culture wants to imbibe it. So the scientific concept matrix does exactly the same job and can be used in exactly the same way. Thus every religion can in fact be re-described in scientific language or concepts. The struggle that is underway is between those who want to retain the old ways and those who want to use and invent new ways of describing reality to ourselves. Of course the big persuader is what magic can you do with your way?
In old days faith magic through hypnogogic influence was supreme, today we are impressed by technological magic like computers etc, but these are not at odds with each other as we see. Only people are at odds with each other over power and authority. God is dead is such a meaningless statement, but these guys obviously wanted to equate the values and principles they subscribed to as being alive in the world if they were carried out by humanity. And these alive values they want to be called god in my opinion. As such the social values were more important than an invisible god if they were evident in a society. The values without a personified being but rather a collective holding those values in evidence is what secularisation is about. A secular society gives the headstrong headroom while allowing the simply not interested to continue unpeturbed in their daily life. Those who want to fantasise about gods and demons etc can and those who want to fantasisie about resident forces etc can, and those who want to make their own way can also do so without imposition by power crazed groups.
This brings me nicely to the excluded middle style of logic so often used by either side in a debate. It is instructive to read a little history about logic for it is not what some purport it to be but it is an excellent tool designed to win arguments by whatever means. And so to the excluded middle argument against evolution. Which came first the chicken or the egg? Empirically it is quite clear that both evolved together! As for our morality so called, it would be better to recognise that it is based on symbiosis and antibiosis rather than the dictums of great teachers. It is and always has been biological in origin.
I tried to put this in the blog section at the bottom of the box, mike but it rejected it a spam. How the hell are you? Well I hope.
Sam, thanks for your recent spate of comments, and it is nice to hear from you from time to time. I am not sure why you were spammed, but the criteria are pretty strict because of spambotting. It could have been just that it was too long. The blogback is for short statements really. Anyway, I’ll add it to the page as a comment. Best wishes, Mike
