As much as I believe in God, truly do,
I have never found that arguments for God's existence
are nearly as effective or as important
as arguments for God's necessity.
And that's the point that I want to make here, and we're all making here.
No God -> Chaos.
You don't believe in God?
At least understand what the consequences of that non-belief are.
What's interesting about that, is we keep having these conversations...
And the more that I've been thinking about this in relation to my...you know,
Forays, into the political or cultural world,
this is another consequence of how you align the moral with a strategic.
And in some ways, what you're saying is if you make a moral argument...
People don't even know why they think what they think.
So to come in and say to them,
you need to change your moral outlook, what you're suggesting is and
why I think that's more fruitful is it's a straight strategic approach,
and that's a way to lead people in, and then they can decide how high up
that hierarchy of understanding they want to move.
Well, you can look at this purely
psychologically, which I like to do as much as possible,
because I don't think you should bring God into the issue unless you have to,
in some sense...
You either are aiming for something unified, which means something
at the pinnacle and something that's the highest,
and superordinate and most valuable, or...
You're not, in which case perhaps you're aiming down, or...
You're aiming at a multiplicity of diverse things, which are conflictual.
Those are your options.
And we know that if your perception is fragmented,
and if your navigation is fragmented, which is a chaotic state,
the consequence of that is anxiety and despair, because that's actually what
anxiety and despair mark... Is that...
You're confident and secure.
When you've reduced your plethora
of potential pathways forward to one path.
You know that if you're in a vehicle,
it's like, well, are you going one place or 10?
If you're going 10, you can't go anywhere and you're confused.
You have to be going one place.
And then everything snaps together,
and then your nervous system is literally regulated.
Anxiety is the response to chaos, the a-prior response.
Can I ask Dennis a question, in light of that?
So, Dennis, you said earlier that
the necessity of God is the necessity of belief in God is what's going
to restore us or what's going to keep civilization on the right track...
But is that... Is it enough to have a kind
of psychological just a psychological sort of stability, a belief that God
might exist, or that you should conduct yourself as if God is real,
God exists just as kind of something that provides you with a kind
of psychological unity and stability and order?
Or do you think that a culture needs more than that?
Is a kind of cultural religion,
cultural Judaism, cultural Christianity, enough?
Well, mine is not cultural as nice as cultural is...
(...)
I wrestle with that.
And I've come to the conclusion that I offered earlier.
The number of people who believe in God and that God is meaningless, is enormous.
For most moderns, God is a celestial butler.
"This God, here is my list of what I'd like you to do for me."
"Have a great day."
I am uninterested,
I know this is almost heretical,
for many of my religious friends,
I have asked God in my whole life, twice for something.
Once that my mother not punished me
for breaking the vase in the house, and then once as an adult.
By the way, in both instances, they were answered.
It's a little eerie for me, who doesn't ask him for anything.
But in all seriousness, I am infinitely more interested in what
God wants from me than what I want from God.
And that's the way I portray it to people.
And they're moved by that because they know God is not a celestial butler.
The number of people who prayed for their
dying child and the child died,
everybody knows that that's the case.
So I'm tired of people who say they
believe in God, but it doesn't amount to anything.
Why is God important?
Changes minds.
The founders of America, which I think is the greatest country ever
founded and it may fall over, were at a crisis point.
They knew the importance.
They were not all doctrinaire Christians.
They were all biocultural Christians,
clearly, but they were all very God centered.
When Benjamin Franklin is considered a deist, if deist means Aristotle's
unmoved mover, none of the founders were deists.
They believed in a God who acted in history.
Jefferson, this is almost unknown to Americans.
Jefferson and Franklin designed a great seal of the United States.
You'll find this fascinating. You know what it is?
The Jews leaving Egypt.
It was not tragically.
It was not adopted.
Two of the least orthodox Christians, (s...)
Wanted the biblical depiction to depict America.
The Hebrews left Egypt.
We left Europe.
So they knew the importance of God,
and a lot of believers don't.
Another aspect of the American Revolution,
you probably know that at the defeat
of York town, the Hessian and British troops ordered to play the ballad,
the world turned upside down.
Which was a 17th century ballad,
and came out of the English Revolution,
which came out of the Torah.
And the simple idea was it became various
crazy things with the diggers and the levelers and so on.
God had created order.
Humans had created disorder.
So God, to create order again,
turn the world the right way up and turn it upside down.
And you have in Act 17.
These men who've turned the world upside down have come here and so on.
And the original idea of revolution was actually biblical.
Although today it's almost totally taken over by the left,
reordering the world and putting it the right way up or again,
you jews say repair, repairing the Earth...
Yes, repair repairing the world under the rule of God.
So we could say that, you could ask
the question not so much what do you have with God,
you could reverse it, in the Nietzschean sense,
you could say, what do you have without God?
And then what you definitely have is you have no centralizing axis,
you have no highest spirit in the highest place.
And so psychologically, that means chaos and confusion
and internal conflict, and then you have no common spirit that unites you.
And so then you have conflict.
And so I would say that acting as if is the crucial issue.
And I was going over that this morning
in a class I was doing on the Sermon on the Mount.
And Christ says, in the Sermon on the Mount, the ordering of his ethical
injunction is something like: "do and then teach."
But it's in that order. But it's not do only.
And it's not teach only, it's do and then teach.
And so you could say you have this internal mimicry of the Father,
the Holy Spirit, let's say, the revolutionary spirit
in the proper sense, and then you can communicate descriptions of that spirit.
And that's the religious enterprise.
And we confuse that, I would say,
in some sense, with descriptions of external reality.
They're not the same thing.
The religious enterprise is
the description of the animating spirit and the proper animating spirit.
And that's why even in the Exodus story, God is presented as the spirit that calls
the hero to lead his people out of slavery.
It's not a description of the world. It isn't that...
The idea that there's wisdom in the world, isn't there.
But that's not the superordinate idea.
And so I think you need both.
You have to have the acting as if.
That's the primary thing, because otherwise you're a hypocrite.
The most famous philosopher of the "as if" is Emmanuel Kant of the 18th century.
I mean, just the great kind of father of the Enlightenment.
And he's often thought to be somebody who does away with God.
He's a kind of precursor to Nietzsche in lots of ways.
There was a poet called Heine who said
that Kant was much more devastating than Robespierre, because whereas Robespierre
just decapitated a king, Kant decapitated God.
But I think he had this idea that we can't
know that God exists, we can't have theoretical knowledge
that God exists, but we must so conduct ourselves in the ethical life as if God exists.
Because as free beings, that's the primacy of pure practical reason.
So we know it's reality as free agents.
So you could say in a way that Kant is not actually claiming that...
I mean, I think Heine is completely wrong about this, but...
God is just a regulative as if, as of.
But rather he is criticizing a notion that, sort of Aristotelian Platonic notion,
that we can know God by contemplating some abstract object.
And he's saying, no, we have contact with numeronal reality.
We have contact with the divine as free agent.
So when we obey the categorical imperative, which he thinks is
intrinsically linked to the idea of God, that's the kind of knowledge.
We saw that echoed with Moses.
I mean, Moses walks by the burning bush,
but as we all noted, he does turn to notice.
And so I would say we do have access
to experience of God if we pay enough attention and we pay enough attention
to the things that in some sense transcend our current parochial conceptualization.
I think you're quite countin in, and I think your approach, Jordan,
in the sense that you attend to the structures of subjectivity
and the structures that are uncovered by psychoanalysis and psychology.
But you're also, I think, more this is a development I think I've
not really heard you talk like this until quite recently,
this notion of transcendence, not kind of divine transcendence,
but somehow that the world beyond the world as it's given, morality as well,
pierces through that kind of your kind of psychological wrapping.
I think that that's a development in your thought.