Religious Supernaturalism..:

November 2008

In a vacuum, I would not have any respect for the study of religious tenets.  They comprise a pseudo-science like astrology, and we do ourselves no honor by being expert in them.  One page of meta-technology or "personhood theory" is worth more than thousands of volumes of religious studies, I say.

All the same, there are reasons to spend some time sorting out what religion says.  First, nominal faithfulness to religion is the supreme consideration to most people.  Even if history displays a collective materialist ambition, traditional religions continue to supply people's ultimate loyalties.  People live through imagination.  The material world is only a prop that the imagination conjures with.

It may seem ridiculous to bring up the second secret of Fatima here, but it is a remarkable case in the relation between the Church and political power.  The second secret of Fatima commanded the Pope to publicly consecrate Russia to the Sacred Heart to atone for the evil of Communism.  The Popes never did so—evidently because the Soviet regime gave them to understand that they must not.  Not only would such a Papal declaration literally have been an act of war.  It might have been more devastating to the Marxist regimes than a contingent of tanks. 

Again:  my readers may not like it, but people live and die for the imagined world.  At the end of his life, Castoriadis began to talk about "the imaginary."  Maybe he and I see the same thing in this connection.

Beyond the consequences of credulity, there is another motivation for this study.  We affirm that the word 'spirituality' is correlative to something palpable.  The problem is to gain consent for a redefinition of the word.  It is, then, well to sort out what the word covers in present usage.

The spiritual notions most people harbor stem from religious teachings about an ethereal world and about sanctity and sin.  Having said that, we must mention in passing that the ethereal and the morally branded are interwoven in religion to the point of fusion.  A person is born in the dungeon of the material, and life is a search to escape from earth to heaven:  to escape from sin to sanctity.  In other words, almost all people who have ever lived are already drowned in this agenda, which is a pipedream, psychologically unrealistic and self-flagellating.

Having made this axial observation, let us proceed to the isotropic perspective.  Religion embodies an entire "science" concerning a morally branded ethereal plane in which humans have extensions called souls—a "science" which science excludes.  Because humans live primarily through ideology, it is not vain to sift through religion and to extract the "spiritual science" implicit in it.  Two things must be clear.  First, it is an exercise in philology, or if you want to be pretentious, in cultural anthropological philology.  (Can there be a cultural anthropology of a group with a written language?) 

We add up what is said with no attempt to hide the implausible, and no attempt to arrive at a uniform doctrine that can be dogma.  In other words, we analyze not anything real, but the hell that is ideology.

In fact, there could be a study here à la Levi-Strauss, since the tenets, and their constellations, repeat with variations across cultures.  (While at the same time, they are disputed within a given tradition.)

Most people, affiliated with this or that religion, have signed up for beliefs they know little about.  Suppose, for example, we asked people to draw a map of reality that shows the relation of the spiritual to the mundane.  Many people, I assume, would draw a pyramid.  The broad base would be the material world; above the base would be human souls living outside bodies; above them would be angels; at the apex would be God. 

But that is mere neo-Platonism.  It is not what the religions teach. 

The religions teach a map like a lozenge.  The extension downward from the visible world is just as important as the extension upward.  Below the midline are demons, and at the nadir is the Devil.  The Devil, in fact, commands an army of evil spirits, and opposes God indefinitely, without suffering any reprisals to speak of.  (In Judaism, God wields evil as a lash.  Broadly speaking, the Devil does not make war on God.   In Christianity, the Devil makes war on God.  The account of the final defeat of the Devil at the End of Days is ill-conceived, and appears in a book which was only narrowly voted into the New Testament.)

If you don't see reality's map as a lozenge, then you don't even know what the normative doctrine is.  It is not respectable among the religious laity to hunger for "factual" knowledge of demons and the Devil.  And yet:  the religious make extensive assertions in this regard—and insist on them.  There is an extraordinary collective psychological mechanism at work here.  Ideology has a sub-section that is mandatory.  One who denies it is expelled as a heretic.  But one who wishes to delve into this sub-section is ostracized as unsavory.  For that matter, one is supposed to own a copy of the Bible.—But to know what the Bible says would be condemned as "picking out the bad places" and as "bigotry."

One does not have to be a Freudian to realize that there are mandatory beliefs and texts which it is considered indecent to dwell on.  It is a mind-boggling collective mechanism—but human life could not go on for a day without it.

Having said all this, let us pursue our analytical philology with a series of questions.  The motivation of some of these questions is clearer if one knows the "Abrahamic" literatures.  But we do not want to interrupt by citing cases from scriptures.  Thus, we will indicate comments by ¶ numbers and postpone all of them to a subsequent post.

The divine

We descend from a philosopher's God to anthropomorphic gods.

Is God everything?  [Is pantheism true?]

Why is God branded as good?

If God is everything, is everything good?

Did God create the universe? 

If yes, does that not imply that God has intentions, and that God acts on an other?

If the universe has to have an explanation because it is a something and every something has to have an explanation, does God have to have an explanation?

If God created the universe, does that prove that God is not everything?  (Would it not be nonsense to say that "everything" creates itself?  Again, intention and the other.)

Was the creation of the universe also the creation of time?

Is God infinite?

Does God display a qualitative infinity?

Does the existence of God prove that time is infinite?

Did God create and discard the universe repeatedly?

Can God make 2 + 2 equal 5?

What cosmology is correlative to God?  How many stars are there?  How many planets?  How many planets with intelligent life?

Is God conscious?—does God have a self?

Is God a person?  That is, is God counterposed to a resistant object, an object of God's perception and valuing and action?  Is God prideful, does God plan, does God will, does God value objects, does God act?

Is God unique, or a unique person?

Does God have a sex?

Does God know the entirety of the future at all times?

Is God omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent?  If so, is God responsible for everything?  [Interjection:  the attempts by the theologians to make God all-powerful but not all-responsible are excuses of the most sleazy sort.]

Does God have an interest in people beyond a clinical interest?  That is, does God love and hate people?

If God loves people, how is that psychologically possible?  One cannot properly love a being who is infinitely inferior to oneself.

Does God require people to be dazzled by him?  Is God psychologically insufficient?  Is God emotionally dependent and insecure?

Is the word 'good' merely the name of the egoic impulses of God, or is there some external norm relative to which God can be proved to be good? 

Would an autonomous criterion of good have to have an explanation?

Does God issue orders regarding human relations?  

Does God steer small, individual lives to some purpose whether or not they see that purpose?

Does God converse with individual humans through the ether?

What does an oath on God mean?

Is it meaningful for God to give assurances by swearing on himself, saying, "By God, what I tell you is true," or, "By God, I will do so-and-so"?  ¶ 

Is "the deific" a plane of being inhabited by more than one person or being?  ¶

If there are gods, do they intrigue against one another and injure one another?

Here it becomes unavoidable to speak of the Devil  (Satan, al-Shaitan).  Religions need the Devil to implement transcendent retribution for evil.  So it is that our exposition will get ahead of itself regarding unholy things.

The Devil

Is there a Lord of Evil who can oppose God indefinitely without suffering any reprisals to speak of?

If the answer is yes, then why doesn't the Devil figure into the answer to whether there is more than one deity? 

Does the Devil have a sex?

Does the Devil have to have an origin?

What is his origin?

What is the extent of the Devil's powers?  Is he omniscient?  Does he know the future?

If good is God's egoic impulses—tautologically—then the only reason the Devil is bad is that he opposes or taunts God.  Without a norm of good independent of God, the Devil is bad only by stipulation.  So:  Is the Devil bad only by stipulation?  ¶ 

Does the Devil have non-human subordinates?

Does the Devil have human followers?

Does the Devil have his own unearthly realm, Hell?

How is Hell populated?

Is Hell's reason for being so that demons can punish humans for disobeying "the God"?

Must we conclude that the Devil has no unearthly realm to reward his human followers or to punish his human opponents? 

Does Hell exist for God's benefit and not the Devil's?

Humans as gods

Can a human be God?

Can God be killed by humans?

If there is a human who was God and was killed by humans, why didn't he visit Heaven as a human before he was killed?  (Anticipates a later question.)

Can God be cast down to Hell at death?  [This question refers to an obscure dispensation of the New Testament unknown to most Christians.]

Does God have a human body-part of special sanctity?

Spiritual composition of the person

How many ontologically incomparable constituents make up a person? 

What are the definitions of "heart," soul, spirit?

Is the soul an entity, the entire intangible person?

Does the individual have an overmind which is normally inaccessible and which is coextensive with God?

is the soul inserted in a gestating human?

How many souls does one person have?

Do souls differ fundamentally by race (lineage)?

Are some lineages divinely cursed?  ¶ 

Does demonic possession count as having a second soul?

Can one person know another person's thoughts?

Can a person know the future with certainty (apart from reasoning from cause to effect)?

Are humans volitionally autonomous (and thus responsible), or are humans puppets?

Can humans defeat God's purpose for them?

What is death relative to the ontologically incomparable constituents of a person?

Can a human have a disembodied life under any circumstances?

Is there a career after death?

Are careers after death sharply different for the righteous and the unrighteous?  [That would mean that the career of the spirit is overwhelmed by moral considerations—which is what religions say.]

Do souls have lives in new bodies after death?

Do souls have lives in replacement bodies as the same person?

Do souls have lives in unlike bodies as new persons?

Can life after death only be in a glorified body on a new earth?

Is there a life after death for the unrighteous in a place of punishment?

Holy non-human persons

What are the sentient beings other than humans who are below God?

Are there god-animals?

Are there god-humans? ¶ 

What are angels?

Do angels die?

What is the demography of the angel population?

Do angels have sexes?

Are angels sexual?

Do angels have family relationships?

Do we know names of angels, are angels famous?

Are there innate differences in rank among angels? ¶

Do angels exist in harmony or disharmony?

Can an angel fight God?

Are angels corporeally abused?  ¶

Can angels retain their high station after misbehavior and punishment?  (No felony convictions for angels?)

Do angels assume roles as guardians of humans?

Is it the job of angels to punish humans at God's behest?

The unearthly location

Is God's immaterial kingdom (Heaven) vertically above the earth's surface?

How is Heaven populated?

What are the appointments in Heaven? 

Do Heaven's dwellers eat?

How do Heaven's dwellers occupy themselves?

Is there harmony between angels and the humans who arrive in Heaven?

Can a human tour Heaven and return to earth, all without dying?    ¶

Unholy non-human persons

What are demons? 

Are all demons angels in rebellion who were expelled from heaven?

Can a demon incarnate in a living human, contending with the human for control of one body?

Does a demon have a sex?

Do demons have family relationships?

Do we know names of demons, are demons famous?

How are Hell's dwellers occupied?

Is there harmony between demons and humans who arrive in Hell?

Again:  Is Hell's reason for being so that demons can punish humans for sin?

Is it not so that both angels and demons are appointed to punish humans?  And is it not so that angels in good standing can do wrong and be corporeally chastised?  If so, how different are angels and demons, really?  They differ principally in where they live.

The unholy location

Is the Devil's kingdom located below the earth's surface?

What are the appointments in Hell?