HATING GOD IN SECRET

HATING GOD IN SECRET
Míceál Ledwith.

There is an individual in the highest position of authority and respect today who planned the killing of countless thousands of innocent children, including the tearing apart of forty of them by bears, who advocated genocide and the selling of people into slavery, was implicated in the rape of virgins and wives, counseled pederasty, and who - among many other atrocities - advocated wife beating, the mutilation of corpses and human sacrifice.¹

If someone were to be accused of even one of these crimes today he or she would be regarded as a criminal of the highest order.

To this very day this kind of description stands as part of the official picture of the God of the three great western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

This is not an attack on those religions, and certainly not an attack on God; it is actually an attack on those who would demean God. I am simply pointing out that these and many other descriptions are officially and unashamedly espoused, even today, by the great western religions as part of the inspired written word of God, contained, for example, in what Christians call the Old Testament. One may very well ask what such pictures have to do with the vastly different type of God that Jesus preached?

¹ In the short space of an article such as this there is not sufficient room to formally quote even some
references, but here is a short list which you can look up for yourself:
The Book of Deuteronomy, chapters, 2, 3, 7, and 13.
The Book of Joshua, chapters, 5, 6, 8, 10.
The First Book of Samuel, chapters 15 and 18.
The Book of Joel, chapter 3.
The Book of Judges, chapters 18 and 19.
The Book of Numbers, chapter 31.

Traditionally biblical scholars have been ready to concede that the Old Testament God was a jealous God, and have tried to put the best possible face on things, but when confronted by these rather dubious accomplishments to which I have just referred, they realize they are on difficult ground indeed and know that trying to put a better face on this list of atrocities would border on the absurd.

Quantum physics is now 107 years old. Over the last half century it has spawned a wave of information, which has swept the world, about creating the kind of realty we wish to experience. In that light it's obvious that we have to ask whether the foundational beliefs we accept serve to empower us or make us dependent and fearful. It's very obvious what these Old Testament images do in the context of the quantum world.

People still hold on doggedly to those beliefs about God, even though many are becoming aware of the negative impact they must have on our spiritual evolution. The addiction, dependency and fear generated by such ideas of God must be due to something that is extraordinarily deep in the human psyche. It cannot be entirely due to the fact that most people don't want to take responsibility for creating their own reality but prefer to imagine being taken care of by the Great Parent in the sky who will replace the role their human parents had when they were children.

If what Jesus used to refer to as "the Kingdom of Heaven" really is inside us, then there is nothing outside of us that could ever afford greater care and protection than the abilities we all have within us. Unfortunately they have become dormant and stunted through lack of use, and its seems their resuscitation demands going against the tide of what is now customarily retailed as spirituality. The intensity of this drive to hold on to external, human-style and fearful Supreme Beings, of whatever kind, and at whatever cost, I had to describe in one of my previous articles in this series as nothing less than "a lust for Gods."

These images have also contributed to many people abandoning belief in a Supreme Being altogether, because they do not realize these are just second-hand images of a second-hand God that have very little to do with the real thing. As a result the baby is thrown out with the bath water and the reality of the divine within has become lost. A new enslavement simply replaces the old, with no evolution of thought.

If we accept that the official picture of God as retailed in the major western religions includes such atrocities as I've listed that must surely give us some pause, unless, as many do, we deliberately shut out consideration of such things from our minds because we fear what the outcome might be if we contemplated them.

If this is so, and we believe that God does have such atrocities in his resume, and if we further believe that such a being has commanded us to love and serve him under threat of being burned for all eternity if we don't, then we really have a major anguish going on buried deep in our subconscious minds. The rantings so many preachers indulge in about inculcating "a God-fearing" mentality as the solution for all the problems of the day, owes much to this inner turmoil.

The bottom line is that we know in our heart of hearts from these descriptions that the type of being whom we have been commanded to love is in fact hateful. Since he holds all the chips, the best we can do is try to make the best of it, and set about the impossible task of unconditionally loving a profoundly hateful being. The fear of the Lord is not the beginning of wisdom, it is the beginning of spiritual disaster.

It is in direct contrast to the goal of this life's journey, which is probably best described as a mastery. Trying to love a fearful God inculcates a disempowerment, not a mastery, as it generates a spiritual schizophrenia in which two aspects of the self are at war with each other.

Whatever mastery means it must start with having complete ability and skill in something. There is no place for struggle or difficulty or heroic effort, or for trying to control. Such manipulation is instinctive in us but it is the very antithesis of mastery. If we are threatened or intimidated by something the last thing we want to do is judge it negatively or try to get rid of it, for such an effort only keeps it more firmly in place. There is a great skill involved in opposing what we wish to remove from our experience lest we only generate more of the same in the process because of our lack of skill in dealing with the realities of the quantum world. Mastery is as far as could be imagined from passivity, but it is definitely a state of serenity. In the light of this knowledge the very last thing we want to have in our orbit as we set out on a real spiritual journey of achievement is secretly hating an omnipotent and vengeful God.

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