Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle. Tom Harpur

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СКАЧАТЬ Jung wrote. Such flat rejection, he argued, means one is directly doing “violence” to the data that alone hold the key to what is happening around us in our time. It means turning one’s back on part of the only material from which we must work to make sense of our own lives and the lives of those around us.

      The depth and power of this insight really hits home when you look at a contemporary development that has shocked and shaken persons of all religious backgrounds in our time. A militant atheism has emerged as a major opponent of religious belief and faith in every part of the Western world. While books trumpeting atheistic positions have taken over the bestseller lists and their authors preach their positions in the media, the campaign is having an effect and is as deep as it is widespread today in our culture. The numbers of those telling pollsters and census takers that they are themselves either agnostic/atheistic or “of no religion” are a fast-burgeoning statistic in every developed country in the world, even in the still highly religious United States. This reality has been and continues to be well documented by others, so it’s not necessary to go into further detail here.

      But since the growth of atheism and of general unbelief in matters of religion is an empirical fact, the challenging question, of course, is why is it happening? There are many sources for every river, but one usually takes precedence over all the rest. That is true here. The major reason for the growth and spread of a flood of atheism at this hour is that much of the God-talk we hear can’t be believed in by growing numbers of people because it has become utterly unbelievable. Human reason and common sense have their limits, and they have now been strained to the breaking point for millions who once owed loyalty to a denomination or Church or other religious affiliation. The message is loud and clear for spiritual leaders: those who are joining the ranks of non-believers do so because the tenets, creeds and language of religion today too often defy comprehension. They are not accepted and believed because they are for the most part unacceptable and unbelievable. They belong to another time, another place. As Harvey Cox, Dean of Divinity Emeritus at Harvard, argues in his 2009 bestseller The Future of Faith, the age of creedal allegiances is over.

      I want to be very clear here: none of this means that the atheists are right. In actual fact, upon closer examination their position is seen to be based upon non-rational, fallacious presuppositions every bit as fundamentalist in nature as those espoused by extremist religionists. But at the same time, they carry a message: our thinking and language about God must change. Thich Nhat Hahn reminds us eloquently that old concepts of God must die to be replaced by new thinking and understanding. In Living Buddha, Living Christ he writes: “Simple and primitive images may have been the object of our faith in God in the beginning, but as we advance, He becomes present without any image, beyond any satisfactory mental representation. We come to a point where any notion we can have can no longer represent God.”

      As described earlier, ever since I was a very young child, sitting in church for hours, not just on Sundays but at other times as well, I have often thought that there is something wrong with the traditional interpretation of the Biblical narrative. It has been badly skewed by an overemphasis upon sin and misunderstandings of “salvation.” My deepest intuition from earliest days, since then corroborated by years of study and reflection, is that we, each of us, come from divinity and are destined to return to God again. Certainly this is by no means a unique or original experience or idea. The fact that it has always felt so deeply a part of oneself is, I believe, a testimony to its belonging to a very wide base indeed. In fact, it belongs to what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious of humanity. It is really the basic monomyth or underlying story that lies at the core of every one of the major religions today. It is often obscured by rituals and almost buried by dogmas, but it is there all the same. It needs to be rediscovered and reaffirmed for the common good. Here are some Biblical pointers that for me are foundational to such a view.

      The Genesis mythos of the creation of Adam and Eve makes it abundantly clear that we are “made in the image of God”—the Imago Dei. The text says further that God breathed into Adam and “he became a living soul.” The words in Hebrew and Greek for “spirit” are virtually the same, and both words also mean wind or breath. Accordingly, we are made in the likeness of God and it is God’s breath or life force that forms our essence or being. There is a profound and spiritually rich wisdom in that.

      But there is more. Psalm 82:6, in the heart of the Hebrew Bible and thus at the centre of both Jewish and Christian worship, states quite boldly: “Have I not said you are gods and children of the Most High?” Those being addressed are the people of Israel, but also through them the whole of humanity. It is a very significant assertion of who we are.

      When we come to the Gospels, there is a passage in John’s account that one seldom if ever hears mentioned. While arguing with the officials of Judaism over allegations that he was making himself out to be the Son of God—which they said was “blas-phemy”—Jesus is given this response: “Is it not written in your law ‘I said you are gods’?” He goes on to point out that if those to whom the word of God had been given were called gods, then why do they say that he is blaspheming “because I said I am the son of God”? His opponents are unable to answer him. Quite plainly, then, according to the Jesus of the Gospels, we are all “gods” and sons or daughters of God, as he knew himself to be. The blunt truth is that Jesus nowhere makes claims to be God or the son of God in any absolute sense that does not apply equally to everyone who had “ears to hear.” Hence his sharp rebuke to the rich young man in Mark’s account who calls him “good master.” Jesus retorts, “There is none good except God himself.”

      I want to return just for a moment to that wonderful account in the Acts of the Apostles of Paul’s experience while preaching in Athens. He tells the crowd that he is most impressed by all the signs about him of Athenian devotion to various deities. He notes there is an altar to “the Unknown God” and tells them that this is the God he has come to make known to them. This God, he says, made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—“though indeed he is not far from each one of us.” Then comes the crucial passage beginning: “For in Him we live and move and have our being; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘for we too are his offspring’” (italics mine).* The fact that the author/ editors inserted such an admission—that early Christian and Pagan thinking were in agreement on our divine origins, the divine “spark” in every person—is of profound importance. It’s crucial for understanding the core of the message in both camps. And it’s of critical importance now if we are to find a truly universal ground on which all religions can meet and offer a global view of human evolution and destiny.

      Agreement on this is not by any means a step towards having one lowest-common-denominator-type world religion to replace the great religions of the earth. God must love diversity since the whole story of Creation from the beginning has been of an overflowing, abundant, proliferating splendour of differentiation throughout the whole phenomenon of life. Science witnesses to this daily in the new species discovered, often in the most unlikely places, such as in hot springs in the ocean’s floor or in the deepest, darkest caves. The differences will remain. But what an incredibly unifying and pacifying reverberation would spread throughout the whole inhabited planet if every believer of every faith, from Islam to the smallest sect, held that every single one of us, those inside and those outside this or that faith or specific denomination, are truly “God’s offspring” bearing the spirit and image of the one source of all that is. That’s my lifelong vision and my hope.

      One thing I have remained deeply certain of, even back in the days of my discussions and debates with my atheist tutor at Oriel, Richard Robinson: atheists and agnostics too have a deep intuitive awareness of an emptiness within that only God or something they cannot name can fill. Their hunger for transcendence is too often quelled or wholly deterred by bad religion, by thinking and behaviour that give the lie to claims made on behalf of an unbelievable, highly anthropomorphic deity. The noted literary critic Harold Bloom in his 2005 book Jesus and СКАЧАТЬ