So...then the question came to me: ”Do I believe in God?”
And... I don't like that question.
And people have complained at me a lot,
and I'm sure they have their reasons because they don't like my answers.
And I have two answers.
They've kind of become stock, which is not a good thing...
But they're the best approximate...
I can't figure out why I don't like the question exactly.
I had three, sort of burgeoning hypotheses.
One was: ”It's none of your damn business”.
That's the first one.
So it's like a privacy issue.
It seemed to me to be a question that was too private to be answered, properly.
You could consider that a cop out.
Maybe it is. And then another one was,
”Well, what do you mean by believe?” Like, do you mean the words?
Do you mean to say the words: ”I believe in God?”
Does that indicate that you believe in God?
I don't know what you mean by believe, exactly.
And that's got me in trouble, too, because people think that attempting
to clarify the meaning of words is an attempt to escape from the question
when it's actually an attempt to specify the question.
I mean, is what you believe, what you say or what you act out.
Now, I would say, to some degree, it's both.
But if push comes to shove, as far as I'm concerned,
what you believe is what you act out, not what you say.
And if you're an integrated person,
then what you act out and what you say are the same thing.
And then you're a person whose word can be trusted, right?
Because what you say and what you do are isomorphic.
They're the same thing.
But belief is instantiated in action.
So I have also suggested that ”I act as if I believe in God”
or to the best of my ability.
And people aren't very happy with that either.
And then the third is that
”I'm afraid that he might exist”,
which I think is the most comical of the three answers,
and perhaps the most accurate one.
But then I was thinking about this today
when I was thinking about what I might talk to you guys about, and I thought,
Well, let's go into this a little bit more.
Let's say you say you do believe in God.
Say, I believe in God.
It's like, okay, well, that's hypothetically pretty impressive,
I would say, it's like you believe that there's a divine power that oversees
everything that is fundamentally ethical, that's watching everything you do.
And you believe that, and so...
What effect does that have on your behavior if you believe it?
Are you all-in on your beliefs?
Are you sacrificing everything to this
transcendent entity that you proclaim belief in?
Have you cleansed yourself of all your sin, let's say?
Are you making all the sacrifices that you need to make?
Like, have you taken the moat out of your eye?
Or are you in the same situation,
let's say, that the Catholic Church seems to be in right now.
Just out of curiosity...
It's a good time to bring that up, since the Pope seems to be concerned
with what's been happening with the Catholic Church.
Given the endless pedophilic scandals, let's say, which seemed rather serious
in my estimation, and might have been something that was cleaned up, perhaps
or a thousand years ago,
and it's being taken seriously, perhaps now, and perhaps not, because it's
not so easy to determine exactly what it would mean to take that seriously.
And you might say, well, are all the people who are committing
these highness actions and then covering them up, if you ask them, well,
do you believe in God? What are they going to say?
You'd think the answer would be yes,
given that they're like priests, and yet? What's the evidence?
Well, the evidence isn't exactly so clear
that the mere statement, let's say, or the mere acting out of the ritual, let's say...
And I'm not trying to denigrate
the statement or the ritual, but I'm pointing out that that's no
indication of your right to say that you believe...because...
And I think this is why it's bothered me to answer this question.
It's like, what right do I have to say that, to make that claim?
I believe in God? Well, what's the claim?
Is that the claim that I'm a good person somehow?
Because you think that if you believed in God, actually, like, seriously,
that you'd be a good person, like, right now, because...
For obvious reasons, I would think.
And so if that hasn't happened in some sort of miraculous sense,
so that you're the best person
you could possibly imagine being,
on an ongoing basis,
and then terrified of deviating from that path in a serious manner,
then, I don't see why you have the right to say that you believe in God.
One of the things Nietzsche said about Christianity.
He was a great critic of Christianity,
although also a great friend, in a very peculiar way, in that...sometimes your
best friend is the one who points out your weakest properties, let's say.
He said as far as he was concerned,
there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross,
and that's perhaps an extreme statement, but one worth giving some consideration to.
It's like, well, then you look at what are you called upon?
Let's say, if you're going to proclaim yourself as a believer,
I thought about this a lot as I've gone through the Old Testament.
I did a bunch of lectures last year.
So what are you called upon?
Well, you're called upon initially to act out the spark of divinity that's within
you by confronting potential with the logos, that's within you,
which means to take the opportunities that are in front of you,
the potential future, and to transform it into the present
in the best possible way, using truth, and courage, and careful articulation
as your guide.
So that's the first thing you're called on to do.
That's a major deal there.
That's a tough one.
And then the second is to make the proper sacrifices.
That's the Cain and Abel story.
It's like, you want something you genuinely want it.
You want to set the world straight.
Then you let go of what's necessary,
and you let go of what isn't necessary, no matter what it is, no matter what it is.
And then you pursue what's necessary.
And then maybe you sacrifice your children to God.
That was the story.
That's one of the next stories that comes up, of course.
And you think, well, that's pretty damn barbaric.
And the way the story is laid out, of course it is.
But...
That isn't exactly what it means.
It means that what you try to do when you raise children is that you try to do
everything you can to impress upon them by imitation and by instruction
and by love and by encouragement that they are crucial beings in the world
whose ethical decisions play an important role in shaping the structure of reality
itself, and that they have the moral responsibility to do that.
And you get your arc in order, that's your family.
Let's say so that when the storms come,
you can stay above water for the 40 days of flooding.
And you're capable of leading your people
through the desert, when the desert makes itself manifest,
and you can escape from tyranny properly because you're wise enough to see it.
And you take the full burden of being
on yourself, all the suffering that's part and parcel of that.
You accept that voluntarily, let's say.
And you do everything you can to confront the malevolence,
that's part of you and that's part of the state, and it's part of the world.
And you make a garden around you.
That's the paradise, a walled garden.
It's a well watered place.
So the forces of nature and society exist together in harmony,
and you place your family in that so that they can live properly.
And you treat your enemy as if he's yourself and the same with your brother.
And maybe then you have the right to say...
That you believe in God.
Otherwise...
Maybe you should think twice about it.
There's a line in the New Testament that Christ himself says... Two of them.
I should read them, too, because they're very relevant to this.
I guess I could paraphrase them.
A rich man comes up to Christ
and says, Good leader, Good Lord.
And he asked him a question about how it is that he should be a good person.
And Christ says, don't call me good.
There's no one that's good but God.
And that's worth thinking about.
The one person that, in principle
in our ancient stories, had the right to make some direct
connection between himself and the divine, was unwilling to do it when challenged.
And so, it might be reasonable to assume that each of us could be much more
cautious about making that sort of statement bluntly when we're asked.
And then, the other line is
not all those who say, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Got that about right.
Which means something approximating just because you make a claim
to moral virtue, let's say, your belief in God, which I can't see
how you can make a higher claim to moral virtue than that.
Agnostic, atheistic, I don't really care...The purpose...
The point is something like this.
Imagine something of ultimate transcendent value.
I don't care whether you believe in it or not, but imagine that something like
that exists, and then you swear allegiance to it.
Which is to say, I believe in this.
There's a heavy moral burden that comes along with that.
Just to allow yourself to utter the words without feeling that you should be
immediately struck down appropriately by lightning.