03 Sept., 2000

Finding God in Three Stages

I think that my awareness and concept of God was first of all formed by my Latvian culture and by the fact that my mother was not a church-going practitioner of the Lutheran religion we were registered as belonging to. She thought that each individual must resolve the issues of religion on their own, within their own soul. Faith could not be spoon-fed or force-fed into a child. I am sure that the first time I asked my mother who this God is that I am reading about, I was not reading the Bible but a Latvian daina. Thus, my first awareness of God is based on a cultural factor which I must elaborate on more fully.

My ancestors, the Letts, now known as Latvians, consisted once of several tribes or clans; they are a sub-group of the Baltic people who shared a common origin of language. They were just as "advanced" or "backward" as any other peoples living in the north of Europe. The Latvians are particularly known for their rich poetic culture, which consists of thousands of simple poems, dainas, all of them also associated with a specific melody. These "ditties" were passed on from one generation to the next as songs. To this day Latvians are known for their "song festivals" where this cultural heritage is celebrated.

A significant portion of the folk poems are about God’s intervention in human affairs. The culture and religion of the Latvian tribes – members of the linguistic group known as the Balts – was quite similar to that of the Celtic tribes which had settled in northern Europe after the last Ice Age. The Balts had many lesser gods, each having managerial authority over a certain part of the world of nature. But the over-all authority rested with God. God was understanding, forgiving, and just. He was concerned with the human condition and he was the one who saw to it that good won out over evil. The Latvians’ understanding of God was perfect in the natural sense, which came close to the correct way of understanding our Creator and his handiwork.

At the end of the 12th century and into the 13th, the Teutonic Order of knights, a branch of the Knights Templar who set out to conquer and loot in the name of Christianity, invaded the territories of the Latvians. After many bloody battles and mass atrocities, the technological superiority of the Teutons prevailed. The Balts were not alone in their suffering. During this same period of time the noble knights of the cross were carrying out a program of mass extermination in the south of France in the Languedoc region. The Latvian tribes were beaten into medieval serfdom, which was identical to the slavery of later times. Of course, the Latvians were reduced to slave status for their own good because they were also "made" into good and obedient Christians. The Latvian people referred to the Teutons as the "cross bearers" and the clergymen who accompanied them on their conquests as the "black crows". During the next six centuries the Christian church hierarchy worked hand-in-glove with the descendants of the Teutonic lords to keep the Latvian people in serfdom. A Latvian serf could be, and often was, flogged to near-death for offending either the secular or the heavenly lord.

The centuries of subjugation accomplished the desired results. Today, most Latvians are among the most idiotically docile and blindly trusting Christians one can find. The irony is that they still sing the old poems – the dainas – even as they go to church on Sunday to show obeisance to a God who has brought them nothing but centuries of unmitigated suffering. I suppose that today the people are attracted to Christianity by what I call the "immortality drug."

Of course, what the Teutons did in their time, Christian Europe continued to do to other parts of the world in later centuries. There were the Spaniards in the Americas, the Puritans in North America, and just about every European power in Africa and Asia. Their stated intended purpose was quite similar to that of the Teutonic Knights. They were bringing the savages to Christianity; they were saving the savages’ souls even as they murdered and enslaved their bodies. It was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. In their time, the Victorians called it the "white man’s burden."

It is interesting to speculate how different and much for the better the world would be today if Christianity – this religion based on a symbol of cruel torture, a monstrous hoax of a dead man-god coming back to life, glorification of suffering (good for the slaves), and a promise of nirvana in heaven – had never spread into the civilized world. In this respect, and this respect only, are the musings of the madman Nietzsche worth noting.

One can speculate that if there had been no Christianity and no Pope in Rome, there would not have been any reason for the existence of an organization of knights who would have license to plunder, conquer, and colonize in its name. The same applies to the Spanish conquistadors in Central and South America. Perhaps there never would have been an era of colonial empires. Specifically with regard to the Balts, they might have lost their independence for other reasons, but then again they might not have. In any case, it is very unlikely that other kinds of conquerors, without a religious pretext, would have placed so much emphasis on destroying and eradicating from the people’s memory the perfectly good natural religion that they practiced. This natural religion would also have evolved and lost its animist trappings with advances in men’s general knowledge of the natural world.

With the relaxation of serfdom in eastern Europe, in the later half of the 19^th century, the Latvians experienced a cultural revival. This revival blossomed and continued until WWII. As part of the cultural re-awakening, Latvian children were taught to read and sing the old dainas. Many of the dainas told of the intervention of God in human affairs, always to correct wrongs done to good people by bad people. God was a very kind and good individual who had unlimited power and could accomplish anything one can imagine. One prayed for God’s assistance to overcome tragedy and misfortune. However, there were also lesser gods with specific responsibilities in the natural word, which an agricultural people like the Latvians had to appeal to as dictated by circumstances.

This God of the ancient Latvians is the one that I happened to meet and understand first. It was very reassuring to know that he is there for you when you pray for his help. The Teutonic "cross-bearers" and their "black crows" had used extreme measures to wipe the memory of this God from the peoples’ minds. Sacred oak groves were cut down and burned, sacred altars shattered with mauls, observers of the ancient rites flogged, or burned, or hung. But the dainas survived, sung in secrecy, if need be. The God of the dainas survived through six hundred years of persecution by the "cross-bearers," the "black crows," and their descendants.

I must say that my encounter of the God of the dainas was by no means the norm for children of my age. I do not remember learning how to read, I only remember that I was reading at the age of five. Other children were not such keen readers as I was, and I would guess that very few paid much attention to the God of the dainas.

In Latvia, as in most other states of eastern Europe at the time, Christianity was the official state religion. In some states, including Latvia, the Christian churches received state support, and the clergy were paid a salary by the state. Daily religious instruction in elementary school was mandatory. So it was that I encountered a second and different kind of God in the first grade. I must say that I and most of the other kids learned and memorized things about this God because we were made to do so. I cannot say how the other children regarded this God. For me he was a foreign God from a city called Jerusalem in a far-off land. This God had a son – Jesus – by a woman called Mary. Jesus was nailed to a cross by some no good Jews. Jesus died, but three days later he came back to life and, zoom!, he went straight up into heaven. But I could never believe the parts about this Jesus being conceived by God, and coming back to life after being dead for three days. Even less could I believe that, on the one hand, all the dead people who believed this story about Jesus would rise out of their graves on something called pastardiena – i.e. Judgment Day, but on the other hand, the bad people went to hell and the good people went to heaven as soon as they died. My imagination tried to cope with this picture to no avail. All this just could not be true. We were also often reminded by the teachers and the Lutheran ministers that Jesus loved us and that we were to love Jesus and all people in return. This everybody-loving-everybody was an equally dubious proposition to me. I could feel love for my family members and perhaps a very close friend, but it was obvious that one could not love everybody.

In any case, I was, like most kids, a relatively respectful and obedient student of the Christian religion. One memorized and repeated back to the teachers what they wanted to hear. As I matured and reached a more adult understanding of how things are, the idea of immaculate conception and bodily resurrection became really ridiculous to contemplate. And yet, one drifted along in the accepted social mores of one’s society. Why rock the boat? Thus, in later years, I took the confirmation course and regurgitated back the memorized words and phrases, as required by the liturgy of the Lutheran church service. We were married in a Lutheran church. I admit that I, like most people, did not attempt a serious examination of my beliefs during the very active working years of my life. I became partially estranged from the Latvian culture, as well. The God of the dainas receded into the dim memories of the past. However, looking back now on the active working years, between 25 and 55 in my case, I recognize a definite connection between the dainas God and the God who started to grow ever so imperceptibly larger in my consciousness. My relationship with the Christian God continued to be inconsequential and perfunctory. One went to church on special occasions in order to satisfy social protocol. From what I have observed, there are many other people who similarly only "go through the motions" with Christianity.

As I mentioned before, my mother never tried to drum religion into me. However, she did instill in me, from an early age on, a respect for all living things and appreciation of God’s wonderful creation. She instilled in me the virtues of a civilized human being. We never discussed which God it was whose handiwork she taught me to admire. He was simply God, but I see now that he was more like the God of the dainas than the God of Abraham. The dainas God cares for everybody and everything. Abraham and his descendants claim to have a one-to-one direct relationship with their God. Mother’s loving attitude toward nature was also shared by my step-father John. Both considered working out of doors with the natural world superior to other occupations. Thus, when I was trying to decide what I should study at university, they both recommended that I should choose either Forestry or Geology. I decided on Engineering Geology in order to take full advantage of my first class honors in mathematics, physics and chemistry on the Grade 13 final exams.

My mother was not without her share of mythical beliefs, or superstitions. I must confess to having one of them myself, and of being afraid to discard it. My magic token consists of a few pages of writing on onion-skin paper, which my mother gave to me in my youth and which I have carried in my wallet without fail since some time in the mid-1950s, when I started to work up in the north in the summers. The writing consists of a stream of words and symbols, undecipherable to me (and I suspect they were also to my mother who had copied them from someone else’s copy) which are a mixture of Christian and only God knows what other sources. Carrying these words with you is supposed to protect you from harm. They were given to people heading into danger, such as war. Mother was insuring me from harm while I trekked through the wilds of Canada. Of course, admitting that I cannot remove these words from my wallet goes against the grain of my professed rationality, but there it is. I suspect there is a little superstition in almost every one of us.

The maturing of my understanding of God

Since I was a child, I have detested murdering or torturing living things. I use the word "murdering" because I want to differentiate between the needless destruction of living things and the "killing" we humans must do, like all other animals have to do, for our own sustenance. Killing is to be done quickly and with minimum of suffering to the sentient being whose life we are ending in order that we can sustain our own.

I was truly fortunate that while working as a geologist in northern Ontario I had a chance to buy a small cottage on a spring-fed lake which is situated on the watershed divide between Lake Superior and James Bay. Until the mid-1990s, this lake was accessible only by rail or by float-plane. Without exaggeration, it then was (now man has ruined it in the name of jobs and progress) the best brook trout lake in all of Canada. I had 30 years to enjoy this paradise in the heart of the north; just about every animal and bird species of the north was there to observe up close, to admire, and to thank God for creating it all. There I enjoyed lots of the Aristotelian kind of leisure.

During the eight years I worked in the bush, first as a student and later as an exploration geologist, and the 30 years of summer vacations in my cottage in that little bit of nearly pristine paradise in northern Ontario, I became more and more aware of the interconnectedness of all of God’s creation and of the general harmony and balance of things in that creation. There was only one anomaly – a jarring and destructive one – in the otherwise smoothly-functioning system. That anomaly, of course, is man.

Granted that there is violence and cruelty in nature, it is not, as a rule, gratuitous, nor excessive. All aggression in the plant and animal kingdom is basically in the interests of survival of the individual and of the species. There are certain rules (or laws, as I prefer to call them) at work, which we can discern through observation. Generally, these laws work through some agent, condition, or circumstance in the natural world in order to restore balance to the system, if the system is disturbed by an anomalous condition, such as may be produced by the over-population of a species or over-predation of one species on another. I began to see that these laws act in a similar way to what we call the "laws of physics" – laws that we have discerned and understood, e.g. Newton’s laws and Einstein’s laws, and so on.

I began to think that, if I believed in a God who created everything in the universe (which I did believe), then it follows that God had also instituted these laws. It follows next that God has instituted these laws so that his creation could function according to them. I could see that man was the one unruly element in this system, and I asked, Why? Actions by man appeared to be the only ones that were not counter-balanced or reversed by acts of nature; in other words, man appeared to be exempt from the laws that govern the rest of creation. The other peculiarity about man as a species is the aggression, viciousness and unlimited lust for killing that he is capable of directing toward his own kind. That, to my knowledge, is not found in any other species on Earth.

I was fully aware of the irreversibility of many of man’s actions. (I mean irreversibility in a common-sensical way which excludes the possibility of a global disaster, either man-made or natural, that would totally eradicate the presence of man or set him back to a primitive, much diminished level of existence). Man is the only creature on Earth who can destroy another species of animal or plant by simply dispossessing that species of its habitat, or permanently altering that habitat to suit his own wishes and thus making that habitat unlivable for the other species. I have had occasions to personally observe this process of habitat dispossession or alteration at work.

My career took a turn when I left geology and ended up working as a physical scientist/climatologist for the Hydrometeorological Division, Atmospheric Environment Service, Department of Environment of Canada. I spent 26 very interesting years doing work I fell in love with. My job required that I stay current with the latest developments in environmental research including the damaging effects on the environment by the activities of man world-wide. I had routine access to the latest scientific literature in this area and attended many international and national scientific conferences dealing with environmental problems.

Gradually there grew in me yet a third understanding of God, this one arrived at independently, largely on my own. I realized that man is certainly situated in a relationship with God that is different from the relationship that all other living beings here on Earth are subject to. The information and knowledge that I could access at my place of employment showed clearly that there was no difference between the most primitive peasants of the so-called "third world" and the most modern industrialized societies of the West when it came to callous and uncaring attitudes toward the natural environment. For example, there is as much irreversible damage done to the natural environment by the deforestation and slash-and-burn "farming" by the peasant of the third world as there is by the industrialized society which finds it necessary to cover ever-increasing portions of the earth’s surface with asphalt and concrete. I found that I must habituate my mind so that when I thought of "man" or "mankind" or "men" I really did think of all of mankind – every race, culture and creed. All men, from the least to the most developed societies, have always had this common trait of wanting to wage war – war on their own kind, on the natural world, and on the laws that God has instituted for the natural world.

I reasoned that simply drawing this conclusion about mankind could not be the end of it. It did not seem at all reasonable that God would create the cosmos and the laws for its maintenance but exclude mankind from the jurisdiction of these laws. There had to be more to it, and – as I have reasoned it out – there is. I started to develop my understanding of the place and status of mankind in God’s creation after going into retirement. My essays God, His Laws and Mankind and How It All Comes Together: God, Life, Soul contain the conclusions, conjectures and answers I have arrived at regarding mankind’s relationship with God. Those essays discuss God’s special dispensation of intelligence and free will to the souls of human beings, and the expectations he has, in turn, of us – expectations which still hold us subject to his laws, including an extraordinary set of laws designed specially for us. These special laws accompany the gifts of intelligence and free will which he has bestowed on our souls.

During the last five years or so of my search for answers to what God wishes of me and of other men, I have often asked myself, How logical are my conclusions and conjectures, and – going beyond conjectures – how substantial is my faith in God? I can be absolutely certain (and this I certainty share with all rational human beings) of the existence of the physical laws which we observe at work in the material world. Then, if I believe like most people believe, including most scientists, in a Creator God, of necessity God is also the author of the laws I speak of. The last stage in this process took more time and effort, because at first I could not find a solution for the most important aspect of it. As I noted above, there is no way one can imagine that God would exempt mankind from the laws he has instituted for all of his creation. But man is an exceptional creature with an exceptional soul; his soul is conscious of itself and can exercise free will. Therefore, God must have instituted additional laws applicable to man, different from those that govern the rest of creation which has no self-consciousness, a limited intelligence, and little free will, if any. It was clear that these special laws have to do with the morality and ethics of man. The problem I was left with was where to look for such moral and ethical laws, which one could say were as natural (and therefore instituted by God) as the natural physical laws that everyone recognizes as such.

My life’s experiences, observations of mankind’s behavior during my lifetime, plus the historical record of mankind’s behavior back through the ages, convinced me beyond any doubt that, with few exceptions, mankind in general has a very poor and erroneous understanding of God and an even poorer, or non-existent, understanding of God’s expectations of mankind. The three monotheistic religions which still dominate mankind’s thinking and attitudes give the wrong answers. Just because they claim as "truths" the tales of hallucinatory experiences millennia ago, does not make them so. But by insisting on these "truths" (of so-called Divine revelation, no less) they have been the primary instruments of mankind’s abysmal performance in every respect, because they have imposed their own primitive superstitions and fantasies on man’s intellect, thus stifling development of a true understanding of God and his expectations from us. In one word, the three main religions, with a common root going back to Abraham, have been disastrous for mankind.

Initially, in my ignorance, I was left with what appeared to be a hopeless situation. It seemed that there was no place I could turn to for support for my beliefs. Then, while investigating what literature there was on morals, I soon encountered Mortimer Adler and through Adler – Aristole. Here was the "missing link" in my conjecture of a natural code of morals and ethics that encompasses God’s special laws for mankind. Very aptly, Adler calls his normative prescriptions of oughts and ought-nots "the ethics of common sense." This common-sense ethics was the bulwark I needed to support my conjecture of God’s special laws for human beings, in order that they should understand his expectations from them and in order that they could meet those expectations. I believe firmly this to be the case. Only in this way can the role of mankind be logically integrated within the rest of God’s creation; and only when men recognize and accept their proper role will they cease being at war with the rest of creation, and thus with God himself.

I conclude with some comments on the immortality of the soul. As I say in God, Life, Soul, I subscribe to the hypothesis offered jointly by Karl Popper and John Eccles (in The Self and Its Brain). Based on many observations of the brain’s activities, they conclude that the Self (or soul) is the immaterial self-conscious essence of the individual which uses the brain for all intellectual and other deliberately-willed activities. The next step is to conjecture on the survivability of the immaterial soul beyond physical death of the brain. I believe in the survival of the soul, under certain conditions which I describe in God, Life, Soul. This is, of course, a matter of pure faith, based only on the reasoning that God preserves souls which have attained a certain level of conscience and understanding of his laws. In believing this, I subscribe in part to John Eccles reasoning that, surely, it makes no sense for God to create from oblivion (exnihilate) a soul and allow it to experience a short period of exquisite self-consciousness, only to consign it again to oblivion (annihilate it). I believe that many souls are not annihilated at death. This belief is supported only by what to me is a common-sensical inference that God would not exnihilate something only to annihilate it again, if that something – for example, the human soul – has proven to be a worthy addition to his creation. But, no human being can, while his soul is anchored within the corporeal body and has at its disposal only the physical brain whose capacities are circumscribed by the material universe of which the brain is itself a part, claim to have actual evidence of the where and the what of the afterlife. Since time immemorial, there have been people who have claimed to have such evidence. These people were (are) either hallucinating simpletons with wild imaginations or clever bunko-artists and flimflammers who feed on the gullibility of the simple-minded.

I think that I have arrived at a worthwhile and tenable set of beliefs, the foundation of which consists partially of deductions and conjectures with at least some factual and rational support. I do not think these beliefs can be called a "religion." Making a religion out of my beliefs is the last thing I would want. The question arises: can these beliefs be adopted and sustained universally by all mankind. I think they could be universally adopted and sustained, but I do not see it happening in the foreseeable future. In other words, unforeseeable events in the affairs of mankind would have to take place before the universal adoption of these beliefs could be realized.

Can and will these beliefs be pooh-poohed as idle ramblings by an uninformed mind? They certainly will be so characterized by the august establishment of theological philosophy or philosophical theology, or whatever they call themselves, because my beliefs do not conform to the definition of faith, truth, belief, and religion as laid down by their not-to-be-questioned reason and logic. And my set of beliefs rest on precious little, if any, of that necessary element (according to the reigning gurus of philosophical theology ) of "supernatural knowledge" – whatever the heck that is! I am convinced that the phrase is an oxymoron. If someone relates a tale about what he has seen, heard, or felt while dreaming or hallucinating, his account does by no means constitute knowledge; even when the tale has been handed down through millennia.

My belief in God is now settled and it is simplicity itself. I do not need visions and divine revelations to know him. I do not have to grovel in worship of my God, nor pray to him for special favors and deliverance. I know what he expects of me and every other human being. God wants me to be his willing servant and collaborator in managing his creation according to his laws here on Earth, and (in the not-distant future) elsewhere in his universe. I am to make a good life for myself in the Aristotelian/Adlerian meaning of the term, and show my own goodness and respect toward all living things and toward all God’s creation. My soul must earn the reward of continued existence after my biological death by meeting God’s expectations. It is all so simple. I cannot understand why men have always misinterpreted (and still misinterpret) these common-sense expectations that God has of them. The only logical answer is that men have deliberately chosen to ignore them.