| A Review Of Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion" (And Other Matters) |
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| Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji | |
| Wednesday, 21 November 2007 | |
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Every once in a while a scholar of some note writes about the non-existence of God, and his thesis generates controversy. After a while the brouhaha dies down and people continue believing in God. In the nineteenth century, Nietzsche wrote that God is dead. (1) In the early twentieth century, Sigmund Freud wrote about the “Future of an Illusion” (2) but that illusion is still with people today. In 2006 Richard Dawkins, apparently, a propagandist for evolution biology and atheism, wrote “The God Delusion.” Mr. Dawkins’ book is making some waves. No doubt, the hullabaloo he generated would soon die out and folk continue believing in God. Mr. Dawkins was really talking about the God of Judeo-Christian-Islam religions. He did not make an argument that disproved the existence of God per se but a reasonable argument that disproved the Semitic concept of God. Christianity is a sect of Judaism.
The Jews are Semitic. Apparently, a Semitic sect, Christians, took its version
of Judaism to
Mr. Dawkins self consciously set out to make an argument for atheism and alternative life styles. Apparently, he wanted to tell his fellow atheists that it is okay to be atheistic and that atheists can live a complete life without somehow thinking that there is something wrong with them for not accepting “the God hypothesis”. He believes that science is on the side of atheism, that he could use science to prove that God does not exist hence atheists are the rational ones not those who believe in a non existent God. Religionists are the irrational ones and atheists are the rational ones, Mr. Dawkins tells his readers. So, atheists come out of your closets where you have been hiding thinking that something is wrong with you; be proud for you are the honest folk as opposed to the dishonest folk who believe in a non existent Semitic God. Mr. Dawkins is an unabashed propagandist for the course of atheism; therefore, his book is obviously biased, as biased as the religionists he claimed to be refuting with neutral scientific instrument. He is any thing but a neutral scientist presenting arguments for and against an idea; he identified with one set of the religious divide and used shabby science to prove its validity. He is an apologist for a way of living that seems to make sense to him: atheism, homosexuality and other hedonistic life styles. His is the apotheosis of a dying civilization. Mr. Dawkins’ arguments, it appears, cannot make a convinced religionist to change his mind in favor of atheism; instead, he probably makes religionists stronger in their “God delusion”. May be Mr. Dawkins gave hesitant atheists reason to believe in their “delusion that there is no God”. Mr. Dawkins book covered four themes. The first was that belief in God is a delusion. Delusion is that which is not true but is believed and acted on as if it is true. As he sees it, God is not true yet religious folk believe in him, a made up idea, and act as if he is true. Therefore, to believe in God is to be deluded; religious folk are deluded. Mr. Dawkins believes that there is scientific evidence demonstrating that God does not exist. “The God Hypothesis,” as he calls belief in God, he argues, should be subjected to the criteria science employs in verifying and falsifying hypotheses before they are accepted as scientific principles. In his view, scientists should not shy away from trying to falsify the God hypothesis, for it is like any other hypothesis and ought to be subjected to the same tests scientists subject hypotheses and accept only those that can be verified and throw out those that cannot be verified or falsified ala Karl Popper. (3) As Mr. Dawkins sees it, it is time
that scientists stopped treating religion with kid gloves, respecting it as if
it is worthy of respect. Apparently, people respect religion and its God not
because the God hypothesis cannot be easily refuted but because they do not
want to offend the sensibilities of religionists. (This is not to talk of the
fact that if they talked negatively about, say, Islam, that great religion of
peace would declare fatwa on their heads and call on all peaceful Muslims to
murder them. One supposes that because of his fear of been murdered, Mr.
Dawkins did not talk much about Islam but, instead, concentrated his criticism
on Christianity. Apparently, Mr. Dawkins plays it safe; if he was courageous he
should have criticized Islam and risked having Muslim fanatics splattering his
brains on the streets of
Mr. Dawkins is not well read in philosophy and theology and, apparently, is proud of his ignorance. As he sees it, why bother reading the non-scientific speculations called the philosophy of religion? Therefore, he provided only scant reference to scholarship making a case for the existence of God. He did make casual reference to Thomas Aquinas and Anselm’s efforts to prove the existence of God through Greek reasoning. (4) What Mr. Dawkins did do is dwell at some length on the contemporary argument that the universe is so complex that only a conscious intelligent force could have designed it, that it could not have been a product of accident and randomness. This school is called intelligent design or creationism. Is the universe a product of conscious design or not? Mr. Dawkins believes that given enough time that pure accidents could produce what seems to us complex phenomena. Given enough time, evolution and natural selection would produce a monkey and evolve it to a human being and, ultimately, into a William Shakespeare who writes comedies, tragedies and sonnets. We have heard this argument before so it is not really news. Let it just be noted that some physicists, not namby-pamby biologists, such as the discoverers of quantum mechanics, (5) suggest that the observer seem to influence what he observes, meaning that we cannot rule out the operation of conscious intelligence in the universe. Sigmund Freud had attempted to
explain why religion came into being. Given his psychoanalytic frame of
reference, Freud said that people found themselves in an impersonal universe
and sought a sort of father figure to protect them from the inexorable and
implacably hostile forces of the universe. God is our imaginary father, Mr.
Freud told us. When we finally grow up, however, we would accept the reality of
our aloneness in the universe, the fact that there is no God out there helping
us, and stop the nonsense of seeking a false father to tame the forces of
nature for us. There isn’t any father figure out there to protect us, so get
used to it, Freud told folk. A recent tsunami (2005) in
As Dawkins sees it, the accidental workings of the universe produce human beings tendency to seeking God (and the rituals on how to seek that God, religion). Religion is one of those things human beings accidentally evolved. Perhaps, it was at one time adaptive to believe in a God but it certainly is no longer so. How did human beings every where come to believe in God? Mr. Dawkins did not answer this question other than to adduce the incredible argument that it merely evolved as a mechanism for adapting to the exigencies of this world. Mr. Dawkins does not seem to understand that the idea of evolution could be mere rationalization for what we do not understand. Mr. Dawkins attempts to explain the origin of religion is not an argument, not even a sophomoric one, but mere tautology. As for the argument that belief in God makes morality possible (in Brothers Karamazov Dostoyevsky observed that without God all behaviors are permitted and the result is chaos), Mr. Dawkins believes that morality was evolved by animal genes because it is in animals selfish interests for them to be moral. If one respects other folk’s rights and property they are more likely to respect ones rights and property and in so doing one is likely to be let to live by other people hence one survives. Thus, morality is a product of evolution, an argument Mr. Dawkins hinted at in his earlier books, the Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker. Here is a question: if there is no God, no heaven and hell, why doesn’t the stronger animal simply kill the weaker ones, why fuzz over morality and law? Thomas Hobbes said that in nature life is nasty, brutish and short because folk were self centered in their behaviors and harmed each other and to secure their individual security they formed a government to make laws that protect all of them. Okay, but why respect the law if it is just a convenient device for bringing about social security? Why not be cynical towards the law seeing as it is an artificial social construct the consequence of which is only real if one is caught breaking them? Smart folks could figure out ways to get around the law yet many of them do not do so. Perhaps, there is more at play here than mere self interested behavior? Perhaps, utilitarianism, Mill, (6) Bentham (7) is not sufficient explanation of human tendency to morality? Mr. Dawkins did not explain the origin of morality but did manage to sneak in what he really wanted to say, that atheists are moral, if not more moral than religious folk. Mr. Dawkins’ coup de grass is in
elaborating the negative influences of religion. As he sees it, religions
produce fanaticism and religious fanatics do more harm than good. Think about
Arab Muslim terrorists hijacking planes and smashing them into the world trade
center in
No one can deny that religions have
spawned wars and mass killings. However, for what it is worth it should also be
noted that such non-religious ideologies as fascism and socialism have led to killing
people. Adolf Hitler, a fascist killed over fifty million people; Joseph
Stalin, a secular socialist in pursuit of his atheistic goals killed over
thirty-five million persons. Pol Pot nearly wiped out the people of
Mr. Dawkins tells us that religions are intolerant, such as the Catholic Church’s opposition to homosexuality. The Soviet Socialists, if I recall, were opposed to homosexuality, a behavior they deemed evidentiary of decadent bourgeois life style. It never occurs to Mr. Dawkins that homosexuality could be a nihilistic life style engaged in by folk who see no meaning and purpose to existence, a self destructive lifestyle? A man must be disturbed to put his penis into another mans anus and consider such absurd behavior enjoyable. Mr. Dawkins book actually reads like an apology for homosexuality. Perhaps, in due time, when pedophiles tell us that having sex with children is natural, that they are born with such desire hence there is nothing the matter with them, Mr. Dawkins would also come to their defense. In this man’s view there is no such thing as pathology or deviancy. Pedophiles tell us that children
(under twelve) do engage in sex. It is true that some children do explore their
bodies with other children but that is not the same thing as adult sex. They
also tell us that in ancient
The battle cry of the queer nation’s movement is that what is currently considered normal sexuality is abnormal and what is abnormal is normal; therefore, they urge parents to send their children to schools where they are taught that homosexuality is normal and heterosexuality is abnormal. The queer nation, you know, must have children brought up to serve their sexual needs. One is not minimizing some of the
evils of religion. The Christian church perverted its theology to justify
slavery and racism in
Let it, however, also be noted that
the atheists in antebellum Dixieland did not oppose slavery, either. There is
no doubt that Thomas Jefferson was an atheist (that was my impression from
reading his Bible (8)) and yet he not only supported slavery but had tons of
slaves. It should also be noted that European atheists supported Fascism and
did not oppose Hitler’s Eugenics. Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf reference to black
folk is as racist as the worst white racists could do. It should also be noted
that whereas the liberal progressives did not fight to stop slavery that a
segment of Christians did. Yes, the Church initially supported slavery but a
minority in the Church fought to end slavery in
Organized Religion can be dangerous to people’s freedom and civil liberties. One actually agrees with Mr. Dawkins that it amounts to child abuse to socialize children to this or that extant religion. As one sees it, only science is worthy of been taught to children. Be that as it may, one also knows that teaching children atheism is as deleterious as teaching them false religions. Consider: your four year old child asks you where people come from and where they go to when they die? The Semitic religions would tell such a child that people come from God and go to either heaven or hell when they die. The idea of burning in hell, forever and ever can scare the daylight out of a child. By the same token, an atheistic parent could tell such a child that people come from matter, from nothingness, and that when they die they return to nothingness, to finitude and to oblivion. This information could be construed as future annihilation of the self and the child has nightmares from it. That is to say that atheism could cause the child as much psychological problems as the false information pedaled by religions. Neither religions nor atheism know for certain (despite Mr. Dawkins gratuitous comments on agnosticism, what he calls the Neville Chamberlin’s appeasement) where people came from and go to when they die. Therefore, the correct response to the child’s questions is to say: I do not know. And if the child insists on questioning, to provide him with what religions and science say on the subject without making such views seem true, for they are not true, they are just perspectives on unknown reality. Mr. Dawkins’ book and its side kick, Christopher Hitchins’ book, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” (9) is the current talk of the atheist village square. Mr. Dawkins wrote propaganda for what he believes in, atheism and alternative life styles. He did not write a scientific book. It would have been better if he relegated himself to writing on what he is trained to write on, zoology. The God Delusion is not a book of science. Science deals with facts, facts that any one can verify. Mr. Dawkins did not provide evidence that God does not exist that any one could verify. He rehashed the atheists’ angst at religion, this time using science’s language to do so. In a manner of speaking, the book is manipulation of science to make ones point of view seem correct while presenting ones opponents’ points of view as irrational. Mr. Dawkins is clever by half. In as much as Mr. Dawkins employed the term, delusion, let me focus on delusion.
WHAT IS DELUSION? The dictionary defines delusion as belief in something that is not true as true. How do we know what is true or not true? We must first ascertain what is true before we can judge something not true. So, who decides what is true or not? Sociology (See Karl Manheim, 10, Emile Durkheim, (11)) tells us that what is true is a social construct; that the truth is what the majority of members of a group consider true. Over time, what a group considers as true do change, so we really do not know what is true. Sociologically speaking, Delusion is belief in that which other people believe as not true as true, and acting on it. In delusion the individual is not dissuaded by what most people accept as contrary evidence to the validity of a belief. The deluded person believes and acts in accordance with what most people around him believe are false. (Is the consensus of what the majority of the people deem true, always the truth? Sometimes the mad man is the one who knows the truth! R. D. Laing built his whole psychology on this probability. See his Politics of Experience; also see Thomas Tsas, the Myth of Mental illness.) Delusion is different from illusion. In illusion the individual merely takes false information as correct information but changes his mind as soon as he becomes aware of the correct information. For example, from afar a coiled rope may look like a snake and one takes it as a snake, and reacts to it as one would react to an actual snake (take precautions to avoid the snake from biting one). But if one came closer to the rope and verified that it is a rope, not a snake, one responds to it as one would normally respond to a rope, as a harmless thing. In delusion, on the other hand, even if the rope that was hitherto thought to be a snake is shown, by other people, to be a harmless piece of rope the deluded person would continue insisting that it is a snake and therefore could harm him, and takes precautionary measures towards it. People around a deluded person are in disbelief that he could take a harmless stimulus as harmful, that he is defensive towards what to them seems harmless. The doubts of those around him does not persuade the deluded person that he is wrong; in fact, doubting his beliefs often makes him persist in them.
ORIGIN OF THE TERM PARANOIA The term delusion is English for paranoia. Paranoia derives from Greek. (12) Paranoia is Greek for the belief in a self that is not true as true. In paranoia a person believes in an idea of who he is that is not true. The paranoid person denies his real self and posits a different self, usually an ideal, perfect and powerful self, a self that he would like to become, and believes that he is that fictional self. The paranoid person sees himself as a very important, superior, intelligent, wealthy, powerful, handsome self when in actual fact he is none of those admired qualities. In real life a paranoid person may be an ordinary human being, an averagely intelligent human being; a powerless human being, a poor human being, a person of average beauty etc and still believes in the opposites of those realities. The paranoid person, aka the deluded person, believes in a self concept and self image that is not true. Generally, he is an ordinary human being, with the usual foibles associated with human beings, who see himself as perfect. Apparently, he had employed his thinking and mind to construe an ideal alternative self for himself and identifies with that imaginary self construct. Having construed himself as a superior person, the paranoid person acts as if, in fact, he is superior and expects the people around him to collude with him and see him as he wants to be seen. He presents himself as Mr. Big stuff to other people to relate to. He does not want other people to relate to his real self, an ordinary self. Apparently, he is ashamed of his real self, an ordinary self, and wants to become an alternative important self. Naturally, other people do not see the pretending superior self as he wants to be seen; they do not validate his imaginary important self; they see him as like them, ordinary. Perceiving other persons as not confirming his grandiose self concept, the paranoid person feels demeaned by them. He feels angry at people for not seeing him as the godlike person he wants to be seen as. The paranoid person is forever accusing other people of demeaning him, belittling him, humiliating him, degrading him, treating him as insignificant, criticizing him etc. Any behavior on the part of other people that suggests that he is not the exalted personage that he wants to be makes him angry at them and quarrels with them. In his thinking, he asks: how dare other people not affirm that he is a superior self, a god. The paranoid person is in a vicious cycle. How? He is always accusing other people of belittling him when they did not aim to do so. He experiences self fulfilling prophecy. That is, he believes that other people are hostile towards him, when, in fact, they are not. He accuses them of belittling him, and or making life difficult for him. Other people now feel angry at him for accusing them of doing what they did not do. They thereafter respond to him in a hostile manner thereby fulfilling his earlier false perception that people are hostile towards him. He, in effect, created the subsequent hostility of people towards him. If one believes that the universe is a hostile place, behaves defensively towards other people, other people would be hostile towards one hence making the universe seem a hostile place to one. A world that was originally not hostile becomes hostile if one is hostile towards it. The paranoid person expects persecution, stimulates persecution by his unfriendly attitudes and behaviors towards other people, and is persecuted by other persons hence reinforces his sense of persecution. He is caught in perpetual feeling of being persecuted.
CAUSATION OF PARANOIA As I will presently argue, paranoia
is caused by the nature of the universe. (13) In the world of the here and now,
however, paranoia is generally found in people who feel inadequate and
inferior. David Swanson (14) Alfred Adler (15) contend that some persons feel
that their bodies and real selves are not good enough and could not enable them
adapt to the impersonal exigencies of this world. They feel that their bodies
are inferior Vis a
The paranoid person’s pursuit of power and exaggerate adequacy is compensatory, is a restitution over perceived inadequate self. Having compensated with a desired ideal, powerful self, the paranoid person wants the world to treat him thus; he is happy with those who exalt him and hates those who treat him as an ordinary human being. He is pretty much like the authoritarian personality. (16)
SCHIZOPHRENIA PARANOID TYPE, DELUSIONAL DISORDER AND PARANOID PERSONALITY Paranoia manifests from the severest to the mild. The severest form of paranoia is schizophrenia, paranoid type. Here, in addition to delusional beliefs, is hallucination (usually auditory hallucination, hearing voices that other people do not hear). The schizophrenic may also have other types of hallucinations, such as visual, olfactory, tactile, etc. Generally, the delusions of the schizophrenic are bizarre. For example, he may believe that other people put ideas into his head (thought insertion), that other people read his thoughts (thought broadcasting). The schizophrenic may say that you are planning to kill him and believe it and avoid your presence so that you do not kill him. But you had no intention of killing him yet he is convinced that you want to kill him and behaves defensively towards you. Bad as schizophrenia, paranoid type, is, it is actually less debilitating than other forms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia has many types, including paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, residual etc. In the disorganized type, for example, the person talks in what to other people seem gibberish and meaningless word salad and his sentences do not have logical association; he is the public’s idea of a mad man, perhaps walking down the street, dirty and disheveled and talking to himself and eating from garbage cans. In the catatonic type the individual stays stiff and in one place, unmoving and not responding to his external world, perhaps responding only to internal stimuli (waxy stupor). Psychosis is composed of the presence of hallucinations and delusions. In schizophrenia there is both hallucinations and delusions hence schizophrenia, paranoid type, is a psychosis. In delusional disorder, on the other hand, there is only one arm of psychosis, delusion and not hallucination. The deluded person has fixed and systematized delusions but does not hallucinate. As it were, he is fifty percent psychotic (he is partially psychotic). In delusion disorder, the individual believes what is not true as true and no amount of logical reasoning with him would make him change his mind. Yet such a person may function fairly well in the world of work. For example, Adolf Hitler (17) had a delusional belief that he was superior to other people and that his people were superior to other human beings. There is no evidence supporting that false belief. But he believed it and acted on it. He set out to kill those who, in his opinion, were inferior to him and his Germanic group. He wanted to kill off all Slavic persons for, as he believed, they were sub-human beings; to kill off all Jews, for, to him, they were vermin to be spread with disinfectant and killed off; to kill all black folk for, to him, they were animals to be used as slave labor and when they are no longer useful slaughtered, as folk put to sleep old work horses. Despite all these bizarre beliefs Hitler was still rational in other areas of his intellectual functioning. The deluded person may be a medical doctor, engineer, mathematician, scientist, head of state etc; he does well in the technical aspects of his vocation but generally has conflicted interpersonal relationships. He is forever accusing people of doing what they did not do hence arouse hostility towards him. There are five types of delusional disorder: GRANDIOSE, PERSECUTORY, JEALOUS, EROTOMANIC AND SOMATIC In the grandiose type of delusion disorder, the individual believes that he is very special and that he is in this world to lord it over other people. He may believe that he is here to start a new movement, secular of religious. (18) He expects to be seen as he wants to be: a very important person and feels demeaned and angry if not seen as such. In persecutory type of delusion, the individual believes that other persons or a particular person is out to get him, kill him and defends himself against those person(s); may be he believes that his wife wants to poison him so he stops eating food that she cooked (or go marry another wife that he trusts, for a while, until his habitual suspicions return); he may believe that a business associate wants to sue him and take all his money. In jealous type of delusion, the individual believes that his spouse or girl friend is cheating on him and follows her around trying to catch her in the act. He misinterprets her behaviors, such as taking her talking to any male as evidence of her unfaithfulness, and may beat her (to death). He wants to exercise total power and control over his spouse and does not allow the spouse any kind of liberty. In erotomanic type of delusion, the individual believes that a socially perceived important person is in love with him or her. An ordinary homely woman that has not had a date in years may believe that the most handsome man in her world is in love with her when, in fact, he does not even know that she exists; she may stalk him and or his spouse/girl friend. In rare situations a woman believes that she is married to the most important person in her religious world: Jesus Christ, Mohammed, or other powerful male figures. In somatic type of delusion the individual believes that he has a physical disorder that is not real. Belief in the physical disorder, apparently, makes him or her feel unique, special and powerful. (19) One trait underlies all five types of delusion disorder: the desire for absolute power and superiority. The deluded person feels inadequate and restitutes with pursuit of imaginary power; he feels inferior and compensates with feeling of fictional superiority to all human beings; he wants to be treated as if he is the fantasy important person he wants to be. In paranoid personality the individual is acutely aware of power relationships in society. He is aware of who is powerful and who is powerless. He identifies with the powerful and respects them; he does not respect the weak; in fact, he has contempt for the weak (they are like the weak self he sees in him and is running from). He is sensitive to how he is treated by other persons; if he is not respected by other persons he feels demeaned and reacts with anger; his anger is meant to show the person he believed did not acknowledge his exalted dignity that he is a powerful person. (David Shapiro explored the nature of paranoid neurosis, in some detail. (20)) Make no mistake about it, the paranoid personality would sue you if he believes that you disrespected him (he is litigious); he may even physically attack and kill you if he feels that you violated his dignity. The paranoid person feels totally unimportant and wants to seem important; he is driven by the quest for dignity, respect and power. Now that you have some working understanding of what delusion aka paranoia is, let me ask you a question. Are you paranoid or are you not? Try to be honest. Every human being is paranoid, up to a point. The difference between the clinically paranoid person and the so-called normal person is a question of degrees. All human beings feel powerless, inferior and inadequate and desire compensatory power, superiority and adequacy. All human beings believe that as they are that they are not good enough and seek to become better than they are. The desire to become better than one is the root of paranoia. The pursuit of a perfect and ideal
self is present in mild form in so-called normal persons but exaggerated in
clinically paranoid persons. During stressful times the so-called normal person
exhibits overt paranoid symptoms. When Arab Muslim terrorists attacked
The relevant point is that all people are deluded, paranoid and even schizophrenic in degrees. (Have you ever hallucinated, such as hear voices when there are no persons around you, or seen things that those around you did not seen? Every human being has had, at least, one episode of hallucination. Therefore, stop pointing fingers, stop calling other persons insane for you might also be insane! Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.) In clinical paranoia, the symptoms of paranoia are overt; in normal persons the symptoms of paranoia are masked and hidden in individuals’ unconscious minds. Consider the normal individual who feels fear that is not called for by his external reality, say walk across the street to avoid an on-coming person; he has experienced paranoia without knowing that that is what is going on. He behaved in a paranoid manner because he probably believed that the on-coming person may harm him (perhaps, from an experience in the past where a man who looked like him harmed her). The man coming down the street has no intention of harming you but you believed that he had and defended yourself by separating from him. But, then again, the stranger could harm you; you cannot predict what other persons could do. In paranoia there is always some probability that what is feared could happen. Other persons, for example, may demean you; white racists do demean black folk hence black folk anticipate being demeaned by them and defend against them, may be, by avoiding white folk or been guarded around them; watching for insulting behaviors and in the process being tense. Individuals’ who inherited weak and or sensitive bodies tend to be acutely aware of their weakness; they tend to be acutely aware of the fact that the human environment is impersonal and could overwhelm them. They, therefore, tend to use their thinking to invent self concepts and self images that say that they are powerful and able to meet the challenges of their impersonal environment; they tend to invent ideal selves that enable them, a wish, become able to overcome the exigencies of their world. Paranoia tends to be found in children born with what Alfred Adler called “inferior organs”. (21) As people get older, they tend to feel a loss of physical strength and become feeble and vulnerable to been hurt by their environment. In old age when the human body is weak paranoia tends to increase. If a child falls down he picks himself up and moves on but if an old man falls he might break his fragile bones and have to be hospitalized hence feels that he is very vulnerable. Homes where older people live, such as nursing homes, assisted living homes for the elderly (if you take care of your aging parents you may also witness this phenomenon) are generally filled with paranoid and or depressed persons. Here, you find a former powerful CEO who ran a large corporation now weak and taken care of by strangers. He feels powerless and vulnerable and may believe that other people are out to get him and that he is a very powerful person (he is so powerful that other people change his depend, adult diapers). When individuals immigrate to
different countries they may loose social status. A Filipino who was a high
status medical doctor in his country may become a lowly medical assistant in
THE EXISTENTIAL ROOTS OF PARANOIA So far, we have talked about what psychiatry understands to be paranoia; however, paranoia is more than psychiatric; let us now move on to existential consideration of the origin and nature of paranoia. Before we embark on this discourse let me reiterate that whereas paranoia is heightened in some persons, those who feel weaker than others, that it nevertheless is found in all human beings. There is no human being without some
traits of paranoia; would you dispute this assertion? If you did, may I ask you
why
There is individual and there is
national paranoia;
One, of course, can deny the presence
of paranoia in ones motivation. Paranoid persons are the first to deny that
they are paranoid; they assume that they are sane; they pretend to be powerful;
yet they see enemies under every rock and defend against them.
And after all these efforts to protect themselves they still die and what they are protecting, their bodies rot. They are protecting a body that is future food for worms. Paranoia is insane behavior, for it defends an unimportant thing, the human body and the separated self it houses. Why do all human beings feel weak and vulnerable and respond with quest for power to protect themselves? One possible answer is that human beings inherited weak and vulnerable bodies hence feel weak and compensate with pursuit of power. If you responded thus, you would have merely restated the question without answering it. I will cut through the chase, not beat around the bush, and state the answer why people are paranoid.
THE EXISTENTIAL NOTHINGNESS OF THE EGO AND BODY All human beings feel like they are not special. All human beings feel like they are worthless and valueless; all human beings feel that their lives on earth are meaningless and purposeless. (23) As existential writers observed (24), to be a human being is to feel that one is nothing special, is worthless and valueless and to feel that one lives a meaningless and purposeless existence. This feeling of the nothingness of being on earth is overt in self conscious persons (who tend to exhibit clinical paranoid symptoms) and hidden in normal persons unconscious (in every day living, normal persons tend not to exhibit paranoid symptoms, but when push comes to shove they are as paranoid as the schizophrenic, paranoid type; on September 11, 2001, I saw so-called normal Americans behaving like schizophrenics, paranoid types; these people were looking all over the place expecting attack, scanning their environment, anticipating attack, being guarded and defensive and not trusting other persons, especially those that looked different). (25) We are born, grow and must die. When we die our bodies rot and smell to high heaven. We devote enormous energy serving our bodies; we work to earn money to buy food, clothes, houses etc for our bodies. Then our bodies die and rot. Dead bodies smell like feces. Dead bodies are shit. If you see a dead and rotting body you would close your nose and flee from it, for it is like seeing a mound of feces, with worms crawling all over the decaying body. In scientific terms, the human body is composed of the various elements (carbon, calcium, sodium, oxygen, nitrogen etc), which are composed of particles (electrons, protons, neutrons) which are composed of sub-particles (such as quarks). The human body is matter/energy, and in that sense not different from the bodies of animals, trees, rocks etc. (26) The human body and its epiphenomenal self, the human personality, is nothing special. The awareness of our existential nothingness is conscious in the so-called paranoid person’s mind and unconscious in the so-called normal person’s mind. As it were, normal persons repressed their lives existential nothingness into their ego unconscious. That way they do not have to be overwhelmed by the constant awareness of the nothingness of their being. Thus, they are left with time and energy to go about pursuing nothingness, working without been paralyzed by the fact that they are doing nothing. A normal medical doctor works to heal human bodies, and he is not aware that the body he is healing is nothing. A paranoid medical doctor is aware that the very bodies he works on are literally nothing. I know that the above statements are depressing. As William Meissner pointed out, paranoia is an effort to escape from the awareness of our depressing nature, but it is about time that we paused and dealt with that reality, as it is, without running from it. (See Robert Waite, Hitler: The Psychopathic God. (27)) Here are our existential facts. If you choose you can pump bullets into my head and blow my brains out and I die, and I can do the same to you. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used to line folk up by a ditch and put one bullet into each head and he falls into the ditch and when the ditch is full of dead human bodies they covered it with sand to prevent the diseases that dead bodies spread. Hitler and his goon squad killed over fifty million persons. If people were important they wound not have been so easily killed; certainly their supposed protective God did not prevent them from being killed. (See Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. (28)) As I sit in my home office, in front
of my computer, typing (November 17, 2007) the TV in the background, in the
living room, is stating that a cyclone in
Simply stated, to nature we are not important; nature does not treat us as if we are more important than animals and trees. Whatever we consider to be our importance is made up by us and is false. Make belief importance is not real importance! Paranoia is existential in origin; it emanates from the awareness of life’s nothingness, valuelessness, worthlessness, meaninglessness, and purposelessness, and efforts to hide those ugly realities. Paranoid persons are acutely aware that they are nothing special but want to become something special; their personal struggles (Mein Kampf) is to be something special in the face of their unspecialness. White (paranoid) racists, like all human beings, are aware of their existential nothingness and want to seem like they are something; they seek to become something important by putting black persons, those who seem materially underdeveloped, down. In considering Africans inferior, inferior feeling white racists, such as James Watson, manage to make themselves seem superior. They are superior, indeed. They are superior food for worms; as food for worms they are humongous nothing despite their pretended importance! (See Existentialist philosophy. Also see African religions. (29)) Normal persons do what paranoid persons do but their knowledge of their existential nothingness and struggles for importance is repressed into their unconscious minds and they are not conscious of what they are doing. Pause and think about what you are doing. You struggle to earn money with which to buy food to feed your body; you buy medications to make your body healthy; you buy clothes (and while at it fancy ones) to protect your body from the elements; you build and live in a house to protect your body from inclement weather. You do whatever it takes to live in body. Alas in, give or take, one hundred and twenty years, you die and your body rot; your much valued body (which you are secretly ashamed of) become food for worms. Worms, in turn, are food for bacteria and fungi. Life in body is vanity, vanity upon vanity, the writer of Ecclesiastes (in the Christian Bible) correctly observed. To live on earth, in body, people must value their bodies; they must take pride in their bodies. To be a human being is to value that which is literally nothing, the human body. No wonder people are narcissistic and deluded; they take pride in nothingness, in shit. The awareness that our bodies is like feces, is nothing special, is humiliating to our ego pride. It makes us feel that we are nothing important. We do not like to accept that we are unimportant. We compensate with pursuit of fictional worth, aka paranoia. To be human is to pursue paranoid goals, false goals that make nothingness seem like it is something important, that make the unimportant seem important. (An African saying states that no matter how much soap one employs in washing ones anus that it would still smell of feces. This means that no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that our life is beautiful and matters that our lives is nothing, and does not matter to nature. Ego idealism, which is what paranoia is, does not eradicate the fact that our egos, our lives are nothing.) How come human beings feel like they are nothing?
SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY Now pay attention and learn. For too long the West dominated all the talking about religion and God. The air waves were filled with noise made by Westerners. It is now time we, non-westerners, are listened to. Listen to us and change your conception of what life is all about. Another way of putting it is to say that it is time we stopped listening to Semitic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam and listened to the voice for pure reason. In the past, God was discussed from Semitic religious categories, categories driven by fear instead of bold reason. It is now time we discussed God without fear of displeasing him, for he is us. We must now discuss God in non Semitic, religious categories, but in the categories of what I call spiritual psychology. We are the makers of our ideas of God. It is us that constructed our ideas of God. Let us stop fooling ourselves and accept that it is us who invented God in our self images and not the other way around. If we constructed God we can deconstruct our constructions of him and reconstruct him in light of pure reason. My mission in life is to deconstruct Semitic constructions of God and reconstruct him in light of pure reason. (30) I was raised a Catholic Christian (African). At age fourteen I concluded that the Christian God belongs in a psychiatric institution, what with his pathological narcissism, his rage and anger when he was not admired, worshipped and told what an important person he is. Offend the Semitic God and he casts you into eternal hell fire. For having natural curiosity to look at her burning city, when God allegedly told her not to do so, Lot’s wife was turned into a sac of salt. For eating an apple fruit that God allegedly told them not to eat, Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden and made to suffer by their angry God. To my teenage mind, such a God seemed monstrous. I concluded that the Christian idea of God cannot possibly be true and said my good bye to Christianity. Nevertheless, I took the trouble to
study the bible, and Christian theologians, from the Church’s early fathers,
such as Origen,
I looked at other religions: Gnosticism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam and philosophies of religion, such as Henri Bergson’s writings (31), and appreciated their valiant efforts to explain God but in the end concluded that all extant religions are irrational and that we must attempt to explain phenomena through pure reason. I accepted the scientific method. That method, so far, is able to explain matter but has not explained the thinker in us. There is something in people; what Henry Bergson called “elan vital”, a force that thinks through us. That force eludes our rational understanding. Presently, I will explore the nature of the thinker in us. But before we get to that subject, let me focus on paranoia a bit more; I do so because understanding of paranoia helps us understand the human condition.
PARANOIA, DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY Only a handful of persons are psychotic (about two percent, one percent schizophrenic, one percent bipolar affectively disordered); the majority of those who seek psychotherapy are suffering from the various anxiety disorders, depression and some sort of personality issues. Anxiety (32) is fancy word for fear. When fear has an immediate cause most people consider it normal but if the immediate cause is not ascertainable they call it anxiety. Consider a person who is sitting in the comfort of his home and is overwhelmed by fear. His heart races and pounds as if it wants to fall out of its chest cavity, his lungs work hard as he breathes in and out rapidly, his muscles feel tort because his heart had carried oxygen and released sugar to them, preparing them to work hard, to fight or flee from whatever is making him fearful except that he does not know what it is. Normally folk feel fear when their lives are threatened and their bodies mobilize and make them run or stay and fight. But if no one is currently trying to harm one and one feels all the symptoms of fear what is going on? Such individuals may have any of the anxiety disorders: panic disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia or paranoia. Paranoid persons feel intense fear (33) and feel an urge to run. They are generally afraid of other people and to reduce their fears avoid them. Perhaps, they feel that other people are out to kill them. Perhaps, they have grandiose self concepts and fear that other people would see through their fictional superior selves and reject them, and to avoid such anticipated rejection avoid people; in social avoidance they fancy that they retain their cherished grandiose self concepts. Paranoid persons also experience depression. In fact, paranoia is a mask over depression. (34) The paranoid person knows his self to be inadequate and does not like that negative self concept. He sees himself as not good enough and rejects that self assessment. He assesses life in general as not good enough and feels depressed by that negative perception of the human reality. In depression the individual feels that life is not worth living and may lose interest in the activities of daily living, such as food, work, personal grooming, sports, socializing, and sex and simply keeps to himself contemplating death. In clinical depression the person may not even have the energy to get out of bed and feels fatigued, preoccupied with suicidal thoughts. The paranoid person feels most of the symptoms of major depression but does not give in to them. Instead, he uses his mind to reject them and tell himself that he can do whatever it takes to survive. Paranoid self concept is an overlay over depressed self concept. The paranoid person is a depressed person who denied his underlying depression and masked it with paranoids grandiosity.(The white racist projects his negative self concept to black folk; he now sees them as he sees himself but denies: as not good.) In psychotherapy the paranoid person must let go of his ego defenses and experience his underlying depressed view of himself and life in general. As in grief and loss therapy (35) the individual must go through his reaction to the tough realities of existence, such as, death sickness, loss; he must go through the stages of shock, anger, rage, asking why me and finally accept the reality of his powerlessness to change the loss. The realistic individual accepts his powerlessness to change certain realities, such as death, divorce, separation from loved ones, loss of job etc. When the individual accepts his powerlessness to alter reality he becomes calmer and more mature. The paranoid person must also give up his paranoid defense, defenses that he hitherto used to make him seem powerful and mask his underlying depression and now see himself as powerless, hence depressed. In reality we are powerless and when that is accepted (depression and anxiety worked through) the individual is ready to grow up and deal with reality, as it is, not as he wants it to become. Changing the paranoid person’s cognitions, from grandiose self concept to realistic self concept is healing his paranoia. This is not to say that paranoid persons do not have biological correlations to their paranoia. As noted elsewhere, they tend to have weak bodies and bodies that are quick to respond with fear (nervous system that quickly picks up those environmental stimuli that causes fear in human beings). They are quicker to fear response. Anti anxiety medications may be useful. But these are generally addictive. Therefore talk psychotherapy is the best approach to paranoia.
TREATMENT FOR DELUSIONAL DISORDERS If delusional disorder is belief in
what is not true as true, the treatment would seem simple and straight forward.
Persuade the person to accept what is true and give up what’s false. But here
is a question: what is the truth? Who exactly are human beings? Are they only
their bodies? If all that people are is their bodies then they are nothing! Put
a bullet into a man’s head and he turns to a bag of rotten meat and that is all
there is to his body. Hitler (36) talked shop about been the most important man
on earth, the fuehrer prince, and then Russian solders came knocking at his
Berlin bunker, and to avoid been captured and exhibited in a Moscow zoo as the
animal he is, he swallowed a capsule of cyanide and also put a bullet into his
head and died. His body was taken outside, to the flower beds, and burned,
reduced to ashes and manure to feed the rose plants around the bunker. So the
most powerful man in
Operating from science’s perspective that man is pure animal and that his thinking is strictly biological hence mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, neuroscience treats the mentally ill with medications. Neuroscience teaches that schizophrenia, which includes paranoid type, can be treated with medications. It currently gives schizophrenics the various neuroleptics, such as Zyprexa, Risperdal etc. These medications, apparently, reduce the level of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, in the brain and in so doing reduce hallucinations in psychotics. But the medications do not heal psychosis. (37) Whereas neuroleptics seem to reduce hallucinations they do not seem to affect delusions. Delusion disorder does not respond to medications, at least not yet. However, if these people are given anxiolytics it tends to reduce their exaggerated fears, their anxiety. If somatically calm human beings tend to be less deluded. Whatever calms people tends to make them less fearful and less paranoid, whereas whatever excites people tends to make them fearful and paranoid. Caffeine, Nicotine, cocaine, amphetamine and other stimulants of the nervous system tend to engender paranoia in some persons. Persons on cocaine high have been known to believe that the police are after them and in an effort to run away jump out of windows to their death. Some observers argue that stimulants increase the level of dopamine in the brain hence lead to psychotic symptoms. (38) I find the writings of Albert Ellis (39) and Aaron Beck (40), Cognitive behavior therapy, useful; they can be used in cognitive restructuring, in helping the paranoid individual to reconceptualize his self concept and henceforth see himself as who he is, an ordinary human being with imperfections and live with that reality rather than try to be godlike. Ultimately, what heals paranoia is good old realism. Look at yourself in the mirror. What do you se? You see a bipedal animal. You are not that different from dogs, cats, mosquitoes etc. Perhaps, your brain is a bit more complex than some animals’ brains but in the final analysis you are an animal. Nature certainly does not treat you any different from the way it treats animals. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis plagues, bacteria, virus, fungi etc kill human beings as they kill animals. Man is just a variety of animals. Give up all quests to make yourself seem more important than animals. Hitler and other white racists fancy themselves superior to black folks but what are they but shit waiting to be carted to the dumping ground for shit (cemetery)? An individual must be scrupulously objective in assessing his value and worth. In body we are worthless and valueless. In fact, if you melt down your body, the minerals in it are worth less than a dollar. Now, having said these seeming depressing things are we just our bodies? I do not think so. How do you find out if you are worth more than your body? I recommend that you practice meditation. (41) In meditation convince yourself that you are not your self concept and self image and that you are not your body and personality. Tell yourself that all the thinking that you are doing is done through your brain hence is animal in nature. Nothing that the human brain can produce is true. All concepts are relative and not true. Now that you are convinced that you do not know what the truth is, and is not capable of knowing the truth, try to be quiet. If you are not your self concept so who are you? If you do not know what any thing is or means so what are they or mean? Just empty your mind of all concepts and leave it sat that. You are not your self concept or self image or personality or body. Nothing that you know is the truth. If so what are you? Keep quiet. If you empty your mind of all received concepts and stop coloring reality with the concepts of reality that you learned in the past you become still and quiet. You experience physical calmness. Peace of body and mind is pleasurable. If you continue with meditation Buddhists claim that you might experience what they call nirvana (what Hindus call Samadhi and Zen calls Satori). They say that your ego disappears and you return to the awareness of undifferentiated spirit self. That undifferentiated self is said to be ineffable and cannot be explained by human language. Language was evolved to communicate with separated selves and does not apply to the unified world of spirit. If the individual can see himself as one with all people, as the same and equal with all people and give up his quest for specialness he tends to be freed from delusional disorder. (In other writings I attempted to explicate the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism. For the purposes of this paper, briefly, Hinduism believes that there is one force in the universe, Brahman. Brahman is one yet infinite in numbers. Each of his part is called Atman. Brahman and Atman are one self, literally. Shankara tried to explain how one self is also other selves. At some point Brahman/Atman cast a magical spell, Maya, on himself and dreamed that he is not one but many. His dream is our world. In our world each of us, Atman sees himself as separated from other people. Hinduism teaches people to recognize that they are all one self, Brahman. Those who have the understanding that they are one with all selves have broken through the illusion of separation, moksha; they are now enlightened to their true self, Brahman. They are illuminated to the reality of our shared one self and one mind. Buddha is a person who understood that he and all existence share one self and one mind. He understood that the separated ego self and its body is an illusion. Buddha set up a school to teach people to know their unified self. In desiring separated self people suffer but in relaxing into unified spirit people know peace and joy. (42))
DISCUSSION Have I seen a person healed by the methodology that I have just explicated? Instead of asking me for answers why don’t you find out for yourself if there are answers, why not give up your grandiose self concept, and see what happens. No one can heal other people for no one can give up other peoples self concepts for them. As George Kelly (43) observed, the Individual, in childhood, utilizing his biological inheritance and social experience constructed his self concept; nobody else constructed it for him. Only the individual can deconstruct his self concept and reconstruct it on a more rational footing. I cannot heal you and you cannot heal me, only you can heal you, with all of us providing you with information. An American clinical psychologist, Helen Schucman pretty much wrote, what I am writing here, in Christological language. She employed such Christian terms as Holy Spirit, atonement, salvation, etc and gave them a different meaning, a meaning that is in accord with the thrust of this paper. (44) One of the great illusions of Western psychiatry is that one human being can heal another human being. Thus psychiatrists set out to heal the mentally ill. Psychiatry does not heal the mentally ill. So far no schizophrenic, deluded person or bipolar affectively disordered person has been healed by psychiatric medications or so called talk psychotherapy. New age faith healers chime in and claim ability to heal folk through prayer and other such nonsense. In their view, if you prayed to God you would bribe him and get him to heal the sick. A God that does not heal folk before they pray to him cannot heal them after they pray to him. No human being can heal another human being. Only the individual can heal himself. It is the individual that constructed his self concept. Only him can understand his self concept and decide that it is not what he wants and deconstruct it, and reconstruct another one. All self concepts are unhealthy although some are relatively healthier. All self concepts areseparated self concepts. As long as a human being feels separated from God, his real self, and pretends to be a separated self housed in body he is sick. The only healing for a human being is for him to relinquish his separated self and return to the awareness of unified self. Unified self is mental health. But unified self can only be attained in spirit, not on earth, so no one on earth can ever be totally mentally healthy. However, a person can reconstruct his earthly separated self, his personality and become somewhat mentally healthy, but not entirely healthy. One can change ones self concept, from a self of hate to a self of love. If one uses ones separated self to love all people and sees ones self as the same, equal and one with all people one is relatively healthy. But in as much as one is still in body, in form one is still living in the illusion of separation hence not completely healthy. Let me reiterate that only the individual can heal himself. I certainly do not go out of my way to heal another person, nor do I expect another human being to heal me. Healing consists of accepting our earthly reality of nothingness and our spiritual reality of somethingness. In spirit we have grandeur but in body we have nothing (but delusions). Once the individual accepts this reality and seeks out something he likes doing, studies it, and works at it to make life a bit easier for all people he is doing fine. One should study science and or technology and use that information to improve the human condition, to make the dream pleasant without deluding ones self that the dream is anything more than a dream. This approach to living is existential psychology or spiritual psychology. Life on earth is worthless but we must make the most of it without illusions that it is going to be heaven. We live and die but while living we might as well live the best we know how. This philosophy is in line with stoicism and Epicureanism. It is heroic philosophy; it accepts reality as it is and, like Sisyphus, rolls stones up hills knowing that they would always roll down. One never gives up and becomes depressed and defeated. Life on earth is nothing but we can enjoy that nothingness. One does not cry over spilled milk; one cleans it; one makes the most of a bad situation. Such is life, cest la vie. People are not going to become angels; they would always be imperfect. One accepts and deals with people as they are, imperfect. One should not expect people to be ideal and perfect. It is only in non-physical form, in spirit, that people can be perfect. On earth people inherited different bodies and have different personalities and different levels of intelligence; some are smart and others average and some dumb. There is nothing we can do to change this reality. In spirit people are the same but on earth they are different. One must accept this reality without idealistic hopes that it can be changed. In so far that attaining mental health is concerned it is the mentally ill person, which are all human beings that must heal himself (with the help of all of us). Each mental disorder is a specific pattern of separating from the whole, unified spirit. The individual must return to unified spirit. You cannot return for him, only he can do so. The schizophrenic, deluded person, manic person, depressed person etc must give up that specific manner of separating from the whole and return to unified state. In unified state he is healed. But, as noted, unified state is not possible on earth, not for a sustained time; union can only be attained in meditation; one returns from meditative, unified state to our separated state and that means that the individual must have some mental disorder. On earth, only partial mental health is possible. The loving and forgiving person is partially mentally healthy and that is all that can be attained on earth; total mental health is attained only in unified spirit, heaven.
A MYTH OF CREATION In their original state human beings were (and still are) part of unified spirit. As unified spirit (if you prefer traditional religious categories, God), they had grandeur and worth. Outside unified spirit human beings have no worth; they struggle to have worth, worth based on separated selves, not unified self; worth based on separated self is delusional. While still in the state of union, somehow human beings seem separated from unified spirit and manifest as separated selves housed in bodies. The moment a human being is born in body, on earth, in the world of space, time and matter he feels like he is nothing. On earth human beings feel like they are not important; in their original home in unified spirit they were important. No one can feel unimportant unless he had felt prior sense of importance. (45) Since on earth human beings feel unimportant they must have lived in a state that is the converse of their earth experience, a state of total importance, worth and value, meaning and purpose. In unified spirit people had worth, in separated state people have no worth. But in their separated state people seek worth. People cannot obtain worth in separated state. The only way they can regain worth is for them to return to their original unified spirit state. It is only in unified state, which must be spirit, for matter separates, that man has worth; in separated ego state man has no worth. In meditation, if the individual succeeds in letting go of his sense of individuation, his having a separated existence, he momentarily merges with undifferentiated unified spirit state and feels worthwhile, valued, important, meaningful, purposeful, eternal, immortal and all knowing. In the beginning (there was no beginning, to employ the term beginning is metaphoric; there was no time that God and his children did not exist), in the beginning was God, aka unified spirit. God is a self replicating machine. God replicates himself into other Gods. God is perpetually replicating himself. Each replicate of God is exactly like God. The difference between God and his replicates is that he replicated them and they did not replicate him, otherwise there is no difference between them. God and his replicates, in Christian language, God and his sons, are the same, equal and one. (I employ Christian terms whenever doing so makes my point more lucid); God created his son and his son did not create him, though his son is as old as he is, which is forever, for there was no time that there was no God and no sons of God. If there was a time when there was God and no son of God then God was not God, for God is a father and fatherhood is conferred by the presence of a son. God has existed forever and his sons have existed forever with him. God has infinite sons. God’s infinite sons are like him; they, too, replicate into their own sons. They replicate with the replicating (creative) power of God in them. The son of God does everything with the power of God in him but by himself he cannot do anything. In the world of spirit, aka heaven, there is God and his infinite sons. God and his infinite sons are not in material forms, they are spirit. Spirit has no physical dimensions and can be everywhere and in everything. As spirit God is in his children and they are in him. God is in his sons and they are in him and in each other. Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere; where one son of God ends and another begin is nowhere. There is no space and time between God and his sons. God and his sons are one (they share one spirit self and one spirit mind); they are joined and continuous; that line of continuousness began nowhere and ends no where. What I described above is the state of unified spirit, aka God and his children in their natural state, heaven. This was their state and is still their state. Their joined state is changeless, timeless, permanent and eternal. In that state there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object, all are one. Christian mysticism, as illustrated in Meister Eckhart’s writing, Hinduism, Buddhism, Plotinus’ Gnosticism, and Schucman’s A Course in Miracles reached similar conclusion. (46) I reached this conclusion through my own thinking and eventually read what other persons said and they seem to agree with my conclusion. However, I am not making my views contingent on religions or persons; I do not accept the authority of another person. Something is true because it is self evidently true, not because some religious authority, such s Jesus Christ, said so. If what I said here makes sense to you, it is your truth; if not, throw it away; do not accept any idea because some alleged authority figure or God’s so-called spokes person, messenger of God etc said so. We must extend to religion the same criteria we employ in science, that is, accept only what makes sense to us. In their eternal, unified state the idea of the opposite of union entered. Each son of God wished that he were separated from his father and from his brothers. He cannot separate from God and from his brothers, for union is eternal and has no opposite. The wish for separation was really a wish to create ones self, to not be created by God. It is impossible for the son to create himself, for the father is the creator of the son. The son cannot create the father or himself; a son has a father and cannot be his own father though he can father his own children. The wish for separation persisted and finally the children of God, who is one Son of God, cast a spell on their selves and forget their unified state, and seem to have gone to sleep and in their sleep their wishes are gratified for them. In their sleep they dream that they are separated from their father and from each other. To be separated there must be space, time and matter. Thus, the children of God, working in tandem, invented space, time and matter, in that order, but almost simultaneously. (Consider the Big Bang hypothesis (47) as the scientific version of the story of creation that I am presenting in metaphoric terms. As the Big bang hypothesis has it, all things were originally in a unified state hence must have been the same, equal and one. Somehow, that state of singularity exploded and in nanoseconds invented space, time and sub-particles. In time sub-particles merged to form particles and the later merged to form atoms and the later differentiated into the 104 and counting elements we have on Chemistry’s periodic tables. The elements formed the galaxies, stars and planets and finally biological life forms.) The children of God, as it were, went to sleep and in their sleep dreamed a world that is the opposite of their father’s unified world. Their father’s world is unified, eternal, changeless and permanent; they invented a separated world of space, time and matter, a changeful, impermanent and transitory world. In their new abode they are born in matter, body, live for a few decades in bodies and seem to die (death is the opposite of immortality). In their new world they have the satisfaction of been the ones who invented that world. They are now the author of their world and their selves. The self concept is the self that we invented to replace our non conceptual real self; our true self is the thinking self, the concept maker, not the concept itself. Their self concepts and their self images, their personalities, their separated selves, their egos are the new selves they invented for themselves. As it were, they have destroyed the unified self created by God and replaced it with their own self, separated selves housed in bodies (bodies, space and time give them a sense of boundaries; give them a sense of where each of them ends and another begins). They are now individually powerful, more powerful than their father, they believe. (Mr. Dawkins hopes that as a scientist, the all knowing person, he is more powerful than God, he is on an ego trip.) Separation is impossible; no force in the universe can destroy the unified world created by God. At any rate, if union is destroyed both father and son dies. Nothing can exist unless they are unified. Even the material world is unified though it seems separated. God’s world of union is still the only real world. The world of separation is a mere dream world, an illusion and does not exist in fact. Literally, the world of separateness, our apparent world, does not exist; it is a dream in our minds. While we are still in unified spirit, heaven, we seem to have dozed off and in our dream see the world we now seem to live in. A dream is not reality; a dream is an illusion that seems real but is not real. When the dreamer wakes up from his sleep he recognized that the dream world that he thought was real was not real. How does the dreamer wake up? He wakes up by recognizing that the dream world is not real. When the sleeping-dreaming son of God comes to know that his world is a dream and that it is not real he wakes up and continues in the wakeful state of unified state, a state he had not left, not even for a second. (See writings on solipsism, idealism and materialism. The debate as to whether the world is in our minds or outside our minds has not really been resolved. (48))
THE HOLY SPIRIT, THE CORRECTION PRINCIPLE God knows that his sons are sleeping and dreaming that they are separated from him and from each other. He knows that dreams are not real, so he is not disturbed by his sons dream. Nevertheless, he wants his children to have happy dreams. To enable his children have a happy dream, God created another aspect of himself, the Holy Spirit, and as him entered his sons dreaming minds, our temporal universe, and tells us that we could see our world in a different way, in a way that makes it lovely. Whereas the world is still a dream, is an illusion and not real yet it can be seen with the eyes of love. Whatever is seen with love becomes beautiful, even if it is beautiful illusion, beautiful nothingness. (The human body, for example, is nothing but if seen with the eyes of love becomes a beautiful nothing. If you love people even though in their ego- body state they are nothing they seem beautiful to you.) The Holy Spirit teaches God’s separated children that they are forever unified with God and each other and are equal, same and one and should love each other. In whatever they do on earth, dreamland, if they do it with love that activity becomes lovely, and the world becomes a lovely dream. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to show the children of God in dreamland a different perspective to their dream. Dream but dream with love. The Holy Spirit does not destroy the world invented by the children of God; that is not his mission; his mission is to reinterpret the world so that it becomes a lovely world. As it is, the world is an ugly place and God wants to make it a lovely place. In the world we attack each other; in fact, the world came into being via our mutual attack; we attacked each other to push each other away, to form space and time between us. The world came into being via attack and is maintained by our continuous attacks on each other. A world of attack is a painful world. The Holy Spirit teaches the children of God to stop attacking each other, to love each other and in so doing experience their world as peaceful and happy place. They then dream happily and when they are tired of dreaming, living as separated selves, they forgive the world, overlook what is done in it, and overcome the world and wake up in unified spirit state; they come back home and the journey to no where, for every where is in God, is over; a journey without a distance ends where it began, in the mind of God (we are ideas in the mind of God; ideas do not leave their source, we remain as ideas in the mind of God). (49) In Unified Spirit, heaven, Love unifies the infinite children of God into one son of God. On earth, love is the recognition that all the children of God are unified and are one. All of us are the same, equal and one (in spirit) though in matter we seem different and separated from each other. If a child of God recognizes his oneness with all other persons and loves them he feels peaceful and happy. Love makes our dream a peaceful and happy dream.
ON EARTH TO LOVE IS TO FORGIVE In unified spirit, heaven, love is the glue that joins all children of God to each other and to God. On earth where the children of God seem separated and do bad things to each other love has a different meaning. On earth, to love is to forgive other people the wrongs they did to one. In their sense of separated states and having different interests’ people do harm each other. A loving person must forgive other people’s wrongs to him. The Holy Spirit teaches the sleeping, dreaming children of God to forgive each other their apparent wrongs, which is to love each other. The gospel of the Holy Spirit is forgiveness. Forgiveness overlooks the world and what is done in it; forgiveness recognizes that the world is a dream and that what is done in it is dream activity and, as such, has not been done. To forgive is to overlook the world and its activities. To forgive is to overcome the world and its separated egos and the harms egos do to each other. Jesus listened to the gospel of forgiveness taught by the Holy Spirit and forgave those who destroyed that which earth people value, their bodies, his body. Jesus forgave the world that destroyed his body and in so doing overcame it and resurrected to the awareness of his oneness with all his brothers and father. Through forgiveness, Jesus awakened from the dream of separation and returned to the awareness of unified state. (50) The prodigal son (that is, Jesus Christ, and eventually all of us) returned home and his father rejoiced. However, his father sent him back to the world to go work with the Holy Spirit (God) to enable other people resurrect from their sleep-dream. Thus Jesus and the Holy Spirit now work together to awaken the sleeping sons of God. (Jesus is now in spirit, not body, and as spirit works with the Holy Spirit/God in each of us.) Every once in a while a son of God awakens from the sleep of self forgetfulness; he, too, joins the awakened ones, the Jesus’ and Buddha’ and become a teacher of ways to awaken God’s still sleeping children from their sleep. Each awakened son of God teaches the message on how to awaken in his way but the content is always the same. The message is that sleep-dream isn’t our real nature; the message is that our real home is unified spirit. The message is that in our unified spirit state we are always unified hence innocent, guiltless and sinless (whereas in our separated state we seem to do harmful things to each other hence guilty; we are innocent in eternity and guilty in time). We must forgive each other so as to awaken from the sleep that separation is possible. As many sons of God awaken and join the teachers of resurrection from sleep (death), as many children of God listen to the Holy Spirit and awaken and join the teachers of resurrection (who are teachers of God, teachers of union, teachers of love and teachers of forgiveness), the world becomes a happy, peaceful place. Metaphorically, the world is brought to the gate of heaven but is not in heaven for people are still in bodies, in forms, to be in heaven people must be formless spirit. Each of us must awaken and join the teachers of oneness and teach union until all of us awaken from the dream of separation and return to the awareness of unified spirit. When all awaken to the reality of union the dream of separation would be over; the world would end. This will take millions of years to accomplish.
REINCARNATION, CAUSE AND EFFECT In the dream, our world, people’s bodies last for a certain number of years and seem to die, but their spirits merely return to other bodies and continue dreaming until they awaken from the dream. People have many dreams, many reincarnations in the world of dreams. They always come back and start from where they left off in past dreams, in past lives.
THERE IS NO KARMA, PUNISHMENT OR HELL Hinduism teaches reincarnation and karma. (51) There is no such thing as karma or punishment for peoples past misdeeds. People are not punished for what they did in past lives. But people do take the consequences of their actions. If they did mostly evil things in their past dreams, lives, they manifest in lives where they learn that such actions are not right. They are not been punished by any one; they merely enter other dreams where those they harmed in some dreams now harm them or forgive them. They take the effects of their actions. Slave masters become slaves; leaders become the led; people alternate roles. In spirit itself God does not punish his children for God is his children and to punish his children is to punish himself, which he does not do.
RELIGION IN DIFFERENT TERMINOLOGIES The discourse on religion that those of us who were socialized Christian engaged in was done in Semitic categories. Folk now presume that to talk about God is to do so as Jews, Christians and Muslims do. The Semitic influenced discourse on God does not make sense to me. Richard Dawkins talks about his understanding of the Semitic God and wants his reader to reject that God. I have already rejected the Semitic God. Dawkins criticisms of the Semitic God were not a criticism of the real God. The Semitic conception of God is wrong and one doesn’t waste ones time on it What Mr. Dawkins proved in his book is that the Semitic construction of God is wrong; he did not prove that God does not exist. Additionally, Mr. Dawkins believes that he has made powerful argument for atheism. In his mind atheism is right and theism, as he understands it, is wrong. Well, both his atheism and Semitic theism are wrong. He is barking after the wrong tree. Apparently, Mr. Dawkins does not know that some religions do not have God, at least not in the same way that the Semitic religions do. Buddhism and other forms of knowing dispense with the idea of God. (52) Atheism is wrong if it believes that God does not exist. Not only does God exist, God is the only thing that exists. Nothing else exists apart from God. But make sure that you understand what God is. By God I am talking about unified spirit not the Semitic God of separated selves.
GOD DID NOT CREATE OUR WORLD WE DID Unified Spirit aka God did not create our temporal world. (53) Only a mad person could have created our world. Ours is a world where we are born, live to suffer and then die. What sort of person would create this insanity? Only a sadistic person could create this world. This world was invented by an insane mind. God’s children became insane from jealously (an aspect of delusion disorder) and invented this world. This world was invented in madness and is a mad world and lasts for as long as the children of God are mad. When the children of God are healed of their insanity the world they invented would end. The children of God are healed of their inanity when they recognize their eternal union with one another, in spirit, and while in the world of seeming separated selves love one another. For as along as they wish to be in this world they ought to correct their behaviors and make them loving. When they want to awaken from the dream of separation they must forgive each others wrongs. If you still wish to be in the dream, on earth, if another person wrongs you, teach him what correct behavior is; correct behavior is loving behavior. If a person committed a grievous crime he may need to be in jail and while in jail is rehabilitated, that is, taught appropriate , that is, loving, behavior. On earth it is impossible to practice total forgiveness. If you practiced total forgiveness you would forgive murderers (in which case they would run around and keep on killing people). If you want to awaken from the dream you forgive people totally, including murderers, rapists, pedophiles, homosexuals etc. In practicing blanket forgiveness you may physically die, as Jesus died, for those you forgive may still kill you. However, in physical death you awaken in unified spirit and return to the world as a teacher of God. (When you return to the world you do not return in bodily form but as spirit, spirit in peoples minds; you become parts of their higher self, the Holy Spirit, the God in us, the God in the temporal universe. God the father, the transcendent God, is in heaven, not in the world, God the Son is us, the sleeping son of God, God the Holy Spirit, the immanent God, is the part of God trying to awaken his sleeping sons.) But for as long as you want to be in this world you cannot totally forgive wrong doers; you can only correct their untoward behaviors and make them socially serving. God did not create our temporal universe; the children of God, us, did. Since the children of God are God, what they did God did; therefore, you can say that a sleeping aspect of God, the Son of God, us, created this world. God is always awake. The children of God created this world and are in charge of this world. God as God, unified spirit, is not the creator of this world and is not in this world. Dawkins was cursing God for creating a world that he did not create; we created this world. Dawkins should direct his anger at us, not at God. There is God but he is not the extant conception of him by religionists: Christians, Muslims (Buddhists and Hindus came very close to the correct conception of God). We no longer need religions conception of God; we now need a rational, and, eventually a scientific understanding of God. The scientifically verified God is still far in the future. In the meantime, I can state without equivocation that God exists. From the much that I understand, God is unified spirit (universal intelligence). That one intelligence manifests in the infinite us, in all creation, not in our present forms, but in our real nature, spirit. One God is the infinite us. Somehow we chose to seem separated from God, and since he is our real self, from our real self. We invented false, separated selves and seem to be those false selves. In our false selves we feel impotent, powerless and like we are nothing. Since in our true self, unified self, we felt important we cannot accept feeling impotent, so we strive to seem important in our new separated ego self. In the egos world we posit ideal selves and seek to become them. The pursuit of false ideal selves that make us seem important is the nature of delusional disorder. All human beings have aspects of delusional disorder. There is an aspect of belief in God that is delusional but this is not the real God. The real God is our real self, unified self. The real God is the intelligence that operates in us, the thinker in us, the self doing the asking of questions and proffering answers. CONCLUSION In October of 2006, I read Richard
Dawkins “The God Delusion”. The arguments made in that book seemed to me like
the type of arguments I made when I was a teenager struggling to understand
what seemed to me an irrational Christian religion foisted on me. I had dealt
with that religion and dismissed it as not tenable to pure reason and moved on.
Reading Mr. Dawkins book brought back to my mind my adolescent struggles with what
I called Semitic religions. Reading the book made me realize that there are
adults who are still wrestling with issues I wrestled with long ago. Mr.
Dawkins, a professor at
I thought about writing a review of
the book, which, if I did, would have been devastating but decided against it.
However, three days ago, somehow the book came back into my memory and forced
me to think about it. I decided that instead reviewing it in a critical manner
that since the book dealt with delusion that I ought to present an alternative
view of God that is not delusional. (Some would say that the very idea of
thinking ones self able to provide a different idea of God is delusional; that
one is delusional for trying to provide an alternative view of God. Deluded
persons often embark on new religions or ideologies; they begin movements that
give them the opportunity to be the definer of reality, and while at it control
their followers. Paranoid Prophets satisfy their need for grandeur and power.
Think of Jim Jones of
Mr. Dawkins, apparently, considers himself an atheist. I sympathize with him. Any one who accepts the Christian God ought to have his head examined for mental disorder. However, just because the Christian God seems rubbish does not mean that there is no God. God is very real. However, God is not the God of extant religions. God is the unified spirit self that manifests in all of us, and does what we do. We are parts of God. If you like the analogy of sleep-dream, God is dreaming through his children; which are the same thing as saying that the children of God are dreaming through their father, for the father and sons share one self. I do not know how to explain the reality of God, but I tried. I hope that the reader is stimulated enough to go explore a non-Semitic idea of God. The real God is not an “other” person that we worship; he is our true self. We love him to love our true self, and since he is all of us to love him is to love all people. In love and forgiveness we know peace and happiness. However, on earth total forgiveness is not possible. On earth, a separated place, total love, union, is not possible, so total peace and joy is not possible. We can only forgive sometimes hence know partial peace. Total peace and happiness lie in total love, union, which is only possible in unified spirit, not our separated world. We can make our world somewhat loving hence experience what an Iranian mystic, Bahaullah, (54) called the lesser peace. The greater peace is only possible in formless unified spirit self, aka heaven. Human beings are those creatures that think they are nothing but wish that they were something important. They make up all sorts of make belief stories to the effect that they are important, and in the process become mentally sick. The human body and its ego is nothing; this fact must be accepted. To be mentally healthy people must relinquish their false beliefs of who they think that they are; they must accept their ego-body nothingness. Interestingly, when they accept their nothingness they find that nothing is everything, that they are everything. Human beings tell themselves a whole lot of lies. Consider: they tell fabulous stories about how gorgeous sex is. In actual fact sexual intercourse is filthy and disgusting. Why not accept this fact and still engage in sex for they must engage in sex to procreate and temporary unite with other people? Why not call a spade a spade? Sex is nothing but nothingness that must be engaged in without shame or guilt. Like food, sex is a physical activity, activity human beings must engage in to exist as bodies. People must eat to live; people must have sex to procreate. Thus sex like food is neither good nor bad, but is just a human activity. Those who seek to know their truth transcend all bodily activities, not by rejecting them but by seeing beyond them to the unified spirit that is everywhere and nowhere in particular. Spirit is formless and is everywhere. Everywhere means that nothing else exists but spirit. The world of forms (galaxies, stars, planets, mountains, rocks, plants, animals, human bodies) does not exist in spirit; they exist in the world of dreams. In the real world of spirit there are no forms, no you and I, just one spirit that is everywhere. In that unified spirit self we are at home; in separation we are in an alien land, and feel conflicted and unhappy; we can only feel peaceful and happy in our real self and real home, unified spirit. Ozodi Thomas Osuji November 20, 2007 I can be reached at (206) 529-4745 or ozodiosuji@gmail.com
FOOTNOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche. In one of his best-known and most contentious works, The Anti-Christ, Curse on Christianity (Der Antichrist. Fluch auf das Christentum, September 1888), Nietzsche launches into a hyperbolic attack on Christianity. 2. Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion) is a book written by Sigmund Freud in 1927. 3. Karl Popper. Conjectures and Refutations; The Logic of Scientific
Discovery.
4. See both Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (the Politics). 5. Many scientists are associated with Quantum Mechanics, such as Neils
Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Emile Schrodinger.
6. John Stuart Mill. Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, 1844. 7. Jeremy Bentham. The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). 8. Thomas Jefferson. The Jefferson Bible, or The Life
and Morals of Jesus of
9. Christopher Hitchins. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA/Warner Books. 2007. 10. Karl Manheim. Structures of Thinking.
11. Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, On the Normality of Crime (1895). 12. William Meissner, The Paranoid Process. New York: Jason Aronson, 1978. 13. R. A. Alpher, H. Bethe,
G.
Gamow (1948). "The Origin of
Chemical Elements". Physical
Review 73: 803. ^
R. A. Alpher and R. Herman (1948). "Evolution of the Universe". Nature 162: 774. 14. David W. Swanson et al. The Paranoid.
15. Alfred Adler, The Neurotic Constitution.
16. Theordor .W. Adorno et al. The Authoritarian Personality.
17. Adolf Hitler. Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), Adolph Hitler (originally 1925-1926), Reissue edition (September 15, 1998), Publisher: Mariner Books, Language: English, paperback, 720 pages. 18. The American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,
19. David Shapiro, Neurotic Styles.
20. David Shapiro. Autonomy and the Rigid Character.
21. Alfred Adler, Collected works. Adler, A. (1956). The Individual
Psychology of Alfred Adler. H. L. Ansbacher and R. R. Ansbacher (Eds.).
22. John Locke. Second Tract of Government. (1662). 23. Jean Paul Sartre. Being and Nothingness. (1946). 24. Albert Camus. The Stranger. (1942). 25. Gordon Allport. The Nature of Prejudice.
26. See, Pinel, J. P. J. (2004). Biopsychology. Allyn and Bacon. ISBN 0-20542-651-4 Olton DS, Becker JT and Handelmann GE (1979) Hippocampus, space, and memory. Brain and Behavioral Science 2: 313–365. S. Marc Breedlove, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and Neil V.
Watson (2007). Biological Psychology: An Introduction to Behavioral and
Cognitive Neuroscience. Sinauer Associates. ISBN
978-0878937059 27. Robert Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler.
28. Alan Bullock. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, ISBN 0060920203
29. John Mbiti. Akamba Stories.
African Religions and Philosophy. African Writers Series. Heinemann [1969] (1990). ISBN 0-435-89591-5 Concepts of God in
New Testament Eschatology in
an African Background.
Love and Marriage in
Introduction to African Religion. African Writers Series. Heinemann [1975] (1991). ISBN 0-435-94002-3 The Prayers of African
Religion .
Bible and Theology in African
Christianity.
African Proverbs.
30. Comparative Religion by Eric J. Sharpe (Paperback - 11 Aug 1994) ... Major World Religions by Lloyd V.J. Ridgeon and J. Houston (Paperback - 13 Mar 2003) 31. Henri Bergson. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics,
pages 160 to 161.
32. Isaac Marks. Fears, Phobias and Rituals: Panic, Anxiety, and Their Disorders. (1978) Living with Fear: Understanding and Coping with Anxiety (1978) Cure and Care of Neuroses (1988).The Practice of Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy (foreword) (1991). 33. William Meissner. Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process.
34. William Meissner Ibid 35. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Death and Dying. Grief and Loss Process. On Death & Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969. 36. Albert Speer. Inside The Third Reich.
37. James W. Kalat. Biological Psychology.
38. Ibid
39. Albert Ellis. Reason and Emotion In Psychotherapy. NY: Lyle Stuart, 1962. 40. Aaron Beck. Why Distinguish Between Cognitive Therapy and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy - The Beck Institute N |
