Posted by
Republiservative on Wednesday, December 01, 2010 10:35:29 PM
In considering the differences between theanthropic religions (e.g., those involving human sacrifices, human control via magic, human final arbitration or co-opting of cosmic attributions), mere masculine sacramentality involving a hero ascending to or visiting Heaven, and the Judeo-Christian faiths, there seems ongoing insufficiency in the psychology/behaviorist arguments against God as He is defined through Scriptures.
Before Richard Dawkins and “The God Delusion”, the psychiatric paradigm Carl Gustav Jung, in “Modern Man In Search Of A Soul”, “Introduction To The Religious And Psychological Problems Of Alchemy”(Psychology And Alchemy, Collected Works 12), and otherwise, certainly contested Freud’s claim that God is a mere projection of man’s own psyche, but backhanded God anyway through saying: man is genetically tailored with a superego searching for parental and social archetypes and bonds for life with any real or false such original exposures; and, that the religious archetype is still the “self”, except like all human archetypes is no man-made tropism but something that evolved in humans as a genetic edge favoring survival of the fittest.
However, this overlooks the salient point that it is not good for one’s mere survival to believe in a God leading one to respect all people’s dignity, and to care for the sick and disabled.
The likes of Goebbels, Zhdanov, and their modern counterparts have an interest in Jung’s religious archetypes theory, despite its warts. Jung held that if the archetype didn’t manifest itself in some worship of God, then it would manifest upon another objective even if no survival edge(s) actually resulted.
Propagandists historically seek eradication of the ability or even courage to make religious expressions, so that people turn to devoting all their energies to nationalism, racism, feminism, political candidates, campaigning for or against issues, fighting hunger or disease, and so on…again, with results or a real plan never needing to materialize, and often with government steering all subject matters for their own interests.
Judaism and Christianity affirm a transcendental causal agent for our universe, affirm the dignity of ALL persons, and espouse that ALL non-debilitated persons have a choice in choosing situational goods or evils but through choices they alone “elect” to spend eternity in the presence or absence of dignity.
This could be how God can give free will up to the second one meets Him, yet “know” where one will wind up based on their manifest heart. As to Hell, well, what sort of lodgings could anyone expect from someone who has never, ever had the slightest feeling of dignity or love towards anyone, and now spends literal eternity lording over souls who thought Satan never existed?
There is no “hate” speech just because one may say God reveals those who choose one way will have to eventually stick with it longer than they thought, or reveals that an absence of dignity and seeking of God’s Spirit leads to earthly emptiness and failure as a stand-alone matter of fact.