DECEMBER 9, THURSDAY

GOD IS DOG

DOG IS GOD or a Bill Mosher take on what it is to be human.

The question that keeps striking me and which I am a little nervous to mention, is the almost blasphemous similarity, to me, of QAnon conspiracy theories and the Bible (or the Bhagavad Gita or the Koran). Both the QAnon conspiracy theory of threatening pedophiles and the Christian story of Jesus seem to me to be equally unverifiable from an objective, scientific perspective.

Each of them stirs up tremendous emotional intensity in their believers. Each of them demands the full attention of believers so that when she opens up to them she feels intensely alive. Both of them feel very, very real. Pedophilia, even unproven pedophilia, arouses intense fear, loathing and fury. Jesus arouses intense feelings of being loved and approved of. It is the feelings that are so real, not the verifiability of actual events that provokes those feelings.

I connect God with Dog because if we observe a dog carefully we will begin to sense that what impels him or her or it along, what impels any animal along, what impels me along as another animal, is some inner unconscious emotional response, the more intense the response the more I am impelled to act. If I can understand this drive I may have a clue into why we worship as we do and why God, or the gods, have been so significant to humans since we became human and became consciously aware of these inner drives. I believe we became aware of the unconscious inner drives propelling us from birth to death not by understanding them in a Freudian or Jungian scientific, or pseudo scientific way, not an explanation of anything, but by feeling them projected into the world around us in a way that we intensely respond to. We feel these drives intensely but can‘t be aware of them directly until they are projected into the world around us, until they begin to turn electric the ordinary world around us.

I‘ll give some examples. We feel an intense erotic attraction at times to the other sex. We know this is central to the evolution of life and the continuation of the species. It is an overwhelming urge that we don‘t need to understand or be aware of. We (dog or human) just have to do it at least enough to propogate our species. But this intense erotic response is not confined, in my view, to sex. We have an intense erotic feeling response to sunsets, to symphonies, to knitted sweaters, to flowers of every kind, to the movement of water and on and on and on. All of these response feel good. This wider erotic response electrifies the ordinary world and fills us with a delight that impels us through life as we sing and dance and wonder at the beauty around us. Sex becomes almost a byproduct.

We are aware of this intense response not directly, we know it through the delight that certain things around us evoke in us. When we say a thing is beautiful, we are really saying that something in us responds in an intense erotic feeling way to some object or person. The intensity of response is within us, not within the person we respond to. We are touched by a painting, but it is not the object in the painted everyday world that shimmers, it is the response of the painter to the object that is so intense and which touches us. It is a way for the painter to arouse an intense response to a child or a flower in us through projecting this intense response on a child or flower. In his painting of the object we see his intense response and this is what touches us. The feeling is within the artist, but is projected onto the object that she is painting in a metaphor that combines actuality and intense feeling. Or at least that is how I see it.

It seems to me that something like this must happen with our response to God or the gods. There is some kind of projection of what could or should be, mythical stories that almost sound like dreams, that help us to make our passage through the world with some stories seeming much more real than others because they connect with something deep inside us. The ordinary world becomes divine with sacred power because of our response to it. We live in a profane, ordinary world, but sometimes are struck by the divine, not because of something out there but because of something within us that is suddenly excited. The gods feel more real than our actual everyday experience. They are not figments of our imagination, they are a real embodiment of the unconscious inner visceral self that is most real to us.

But when we let the sacred power of myth as embodied in unrealistic projections be confused with the measureable, objectively factual world that we move within, we cause confusion. It is pointless to try and prove that rampant pedophilia or rising from the dead really happen, or that they don‘t happen. That doesn‘t make them more real. What makes them real is how intensely we are provoked to an intense response by these stories. They are real because they feel intensely real, not because they actually measurably exist.

So that is why I‘ve been wondering lately about the connection between conspiracy theories about unprovable events such as the QAnon conspiracy theories and people‘s response to an unproveable or objectively knowable connection to God who is so real to them. Both of these are based on strong emotion, both are not factual, both stir up very strong emotions within us and for that reason make us feel very alive. They are very similar.

One distinction is that many conspiracy theories are based on fear of some force that it out to destroy us in some way. Christianity assigns that projected fear to Satan and intensifies it by emphasizing the fear of going to hell. We as humans must have a great need to project our unconscious and hidden fears out into the everyday world. Conspiracy theories of all kinds must serve this function, as well as myths and stories which deal with monsters and demons and violence of all kinds. So the significance of myths and conspiracy theories may be that they are a way of dealing with our inner fears and inner sense of what makes us most alive. The intensity of myths and stories can make us feel more alive and impel us through life, but so, maybe, can conspiracy theories. But the difference is that conspiracies often project as an enemy that doesn‘t exist in actuality and can make us do terrible things to the people we project these conspiracy theories on. And religions that preach love and fairness and acceptance can have the opposite effect of letting us accept other people and feel empathy for them.

Both of these are non rational, non objective, strongly emotional responses. Whether they are valid or not probably depends upon a person‘s emotional response rather than rational response.

But it could be that either one makes us feel more alive and as human beings we need constantly to be stirred up and that the QAnon conspiracy theories are a very satisfying way for some people of being stirred up.

So there is no point in trying to tell people that they are projecting pedophilia or that the election wasn‘t stolen. They are getting too much of a kick out of their fury at pedophiles or of storming the capitol in order to reverse the election to listen, just as other people are having a great time going to church and being in the presence of God.

I told you that I was embarrassed and maybe my musings might be a little controversial but you kept on reading anyway so I won‘t apologize any more.

But I leave myself with a problem. There doesn‘t seem to be a way out of this tension. If unconscious drives are what are most real then there is no way to change people‘s minds. The only hope for me is that as the world changes rapidly that our tribal ways of thinking will also slowly shift. This has happened in the past. As long as we maintain one person one vote with our votes counting more or less equally, which they don‘t always do now, the change will gradually happen and be reflected in our voting patterns and very gradually we will shift in an almost unconscious way and avert tension and find a way to get along with each other. Confrontation won‘t do this, argument won‘t do it, it will just slowly happen.