Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and god knows there is no justice in the world. --Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments not convinced that there is a god, and following my own logic, all I can really say is that if these proofs alone are the only source of my knowledge of god, I am tending towards an atheist position. However, because I say that these arguments don’t hold water is not to say that god does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal--my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgement of Evil as moving them closer to believing in god. I am going to call this exploration “stories that we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” They claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness as well as their coherence also depends on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment we can set this aside, and simply say that we have experience of evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent god, this presents a problem, but is it also an opportunity to prove the existence of god?

The relationship between evil and the existence of god is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity, The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency back to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic host. The existence of Evil should convince us that god exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all powerful Jehovah. In the myth I learned, before he fell Satan was called Lucifer, or light-bearer, a name which indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appear much in the Hebrew Bible with the major exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels as well as Revelations, it was Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) who put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the god-in-the-sky myth is that god creates an existential problem by allowing evil--a la Job--why do the bad prosper while good people suffer. For the pious this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: god only wants to make us better, and this requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also on some very real level entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it--a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. Not a minor flirtation with some new age religion. However, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably I need to look no farther for the reason why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in god is acknowledgement that god exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. She says this myth contains the roots of the long horrendous history of antisemitism. Pagles says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I am going to use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of god’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion::Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extend this odd belief to Lucifer extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself, ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I am calling “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you, and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she further compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and delivered an unredeemable rag? That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

Angelina, according to the Psalmist (8.5), is fashioned after the image of god, “a little less than the angels” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined that you, Angelina and the dry cleaner were standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Certainly the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Perhaps Judge Judy, even though not Solomon, she is Jewish and has a no nonsense tone, could set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt really violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of personal investment in that little black dress, but I am going to use it to examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We also know from experience that the verbal tongue lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum 5,000 dollar fine and you are able to collect it, is not really sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that given similar circumstances almost everyone except the super rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings and that’s really just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help increase the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I really think. There really are bad people. The only justice in the human realm has been devised by us humans to order ourselves and create some space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we might even entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world that humans inhabit. There is no god. He/She/It disappeared with that little black dress.

Driving in India as Spriritual Practice

Let’s begin our journey by taking a spin around an Indian traffic circle. For rigid westerners the driving here is totally insane; thinking that the roadside altar dedicated to Mother Teresa of Calcutta actually points to an Indian Catholic church is as misdirected as believing that the road crew in charge of installing shrines had a master plan. 

I wondered if following the blue dot on Google maps could help me trace the route that the Apostle Thomas took to India. After an interesting side trip into Nestorian Christianity, and questions about the exact nature of Jesus as both divine and human, I decided to return to the original focus of my exploration. 

Continuing my madcap trip around the Indian traffic circle, I wound up in Chennai where completed an informal pilgrimage to the three basilicas dedicated to one of the Apostles of Jesus. I visited the Basilica of Apostle Thomas, and felt that it pointed to something larger than just maintaining the prevailing view of what Christianity.

I’m going to try to construct a meditation about Thomas. Let me try to rip away some of the garbage I think surrounds Thomas, and point to why I think we might pay attention to him as we meander through India, or the world.

I will posit that we don’t know much about Thomas is because he was not a church guy. I think he actually might have been the smart ass geeky kid, maybe even an obnoxious asshole.  I found this brief article about the “Gospel of Thomas” by Elaine Pagels and a talk she delivered at Stanford 17 years ago, My friend Bonnie Johnson would have loved Pagels’ work, and you might appreciate how Thomas sides with the slaves who are unwillingly forced to disrupt things trying to get a high caste lady’s sedan chair to the front of the crowd. 

After Jesus was crucified, the Apostle James and a few others stayed in Jerusalem, preached about the risen Jesus and kept kosher. Paul went off trying to translate his take on radical conversion into Greek, adopting the first non-Jewish cultural idiom. Peter traveled to Rome where he, according to legend, set the course for the Teaching of Jesus to dominate the western world. 

But Thomas apparently went in the exact opposite direction; he struck out for India, alone or with maybe a few followers. The churches, the communities he established were not as cohesive as the ones established in the Greek and Roman worlds. Maybe my speculation that the Indians were just just not going to submit to conforming beliefs way back then, like right now, is basically correct, and any communities he established disappeared or were absorbed by local cults. India in the first years of the common era was religiously similar to what I experience today, mystics and wandering sadhus.

The most famous story about Thomas, and he is only mentioned a few times in the official record, is that he did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead because he hadn’t seen him, that he would not believe until he actually placed his hands into the wounds of the torture that had killed Jesus. So Jesus appeared and held out his hands with the wounds still open. Thomas says, My Lord and my God, I believe. Then Jesus says:  "Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed.” Pagles says that this is the formal, or dominant church getting a recalcitrant believer to cast aside his or her doubts and enter into the fold. But something else might have been going on.

What if our Thomas was really just a stubborn guy who not only demanded a different kind of evidence when it came to belief, but insisted on an interpretation of the message of Jesus that included everyone, not just the proper ladies but also her slaves, the outcasts, even the homeless? And since the older Apostles who were in charge couldn't forbid him coming to the Lord’s table, they just sent him to India, and told stories about him, barring him from the proper European landholdings.

You don’t have to join me in India to upset the picnic table. That is not a rhetorical question.

The ride around India (or anywhere) is much better with a companion; I remember Ashish Gupta driving for the first time in India, in Goa where the traffic rules are slightly more recognizable for the likes of us. It is the main headquarters of the Jesuits in India and has been since about 1543 plus or minus so there is a bit more ingrained European sense of order in some things. But Ash still almost got us killed. My last longish trip here was twice to Amritsar where I got my Covid Vaccination. 12 hours round trip to a private hospital that would give foreigners a jab. It really did save my life, and I was scared to death on the highway across Punjab where drivers think nothing of driving against traffic on a two lane divided highway if it gets them closer to home. 

So I don't have any real question. It is more of a floating inquiry--how we open to the Spirit for more than just pinpointing a destination. My observation is that it's almost as if to thwart our good intentions, sometimes the movement of the Spirit is like barreling up the freeway in the wrong direction, or maybe to be accurate, facing that guy who needs to get back to his cows who's barreling towards us, and we know we really shouldn't trust his driving. 

And if you can't join me in India, (not a declaration or assessment but a kind of wild daydream--you, me and Rinku driving across the high Himalayan plains in Kashmir!), we still travel as spiritual companions and check out Saint Thomas. What a blessing.

Of course after all that travel--a post card!