God

IX

117 The Old Testament Jahveh is not much like the Christian God and not much like Allah. He is a tyrant. Whatever he wills is just, and he is essentially concerned with promoting his own glory. His law enjoins a rigid adherence to rules.

SS

2 What difference between being a “bad” person and being an exceptionally good one, yet sticking by one’s own beliefs and ideals, no matter what the cost? What was the traditional loyalty to God? What was God? Could it be anything much other than what you believed in? Suppose you feel you are called by God for some mission or other. How could such a feeling manifest itself? There would be an inner compulsion, you would feel compelled to disregard conventional worldly considerations. One might object that a good person would feel called for unselfish ends and a bad one for selfish ones. But that won’t work. What counts as selfish and what as unselfish? Any mission is in a sense a selfish businesses that its fulfilment will presumably be attended with deep satisfaction and unfulfilment, frustration of the mission, with pain. Therefore in pursuing one’s mission one may be presented as concerned only with one’s own satisfaction. I bring God in because that is one way of showing that there is at least one alternative to the philistine humanist equation of good with altruism. What is the contrast, egoistic or altruistic? For there is more there than can be subsumed under the category of false belief.

BD

118 Ideas of God being dead. Think what the absence of God signifies to the mystic. A genuine psychological state. He calls it something, invokes the term God. To him that is atheism. But everyone knows these confused states, and that they may dissipate.

188 Where is God? When you die you collapse into God.

PP

37
See the law of Thelema as a development of Protestantism, especially of Miltonic Protestantism. Thou has no right but to do thy will. Here I stand I can do no other. Osborne’s Luther. We may speak of a man following his conscience, or of a man following his true will. What is “my God”, but my innermost satisfaction? To pursue that can be construed as the supreme virtue even as leading to saintliness, whereas the pursuit of ones ‘own will’ is regarded as the height of evil. Where is the difference? Perhaps that the one who uses the God idiom is expected to be afflicted with inhibition.
The God of the OT was a racial, nationalistic God. What was godly was what served the nation. Few scruples stood in the way of this end. God stood for the collective will, the morality needed to bind a people together.
Protestantism substitutes individual will for collective will.
Ancient and modern Puritanism. The archetypal modern puritan is perhaps the Ayatollah Khomeini. The motives that inspired Cromwellian Puritanism are perhaps not much different from those that inspire this modern one, namely hatred of what is seen as frivolous, decadent distraction. American trash culture demoralising youth.
What Protestantism became was often something crude and repellent, as we see in The Way of All Flesh (Butler). That does not alter the fact that for a while it was something extremely liberating, especially in England.

40& Duty to neighbour, duty to God, duty to self. Duty to self is nonsense, it is mere selfishness. Duty to neighbour should not stand in the way of duty to God. Of course I am an atheist, or rather I describe myself as an atheist. But we must escape from the idea that that all possible morality is contained in the idea of “duty to neighbour” and that the only alternative is some self indulgent atomistic quest for fulfilment. The idea of atomistic hedonism is that pleasure is the good in life and that it is easy enough to forgo one pleasure for the sake of another. The idea behind the conception of duty to God is that you have no choice. That if you disobey the consequences will be disastrous. You have no choice because the consequences of ignoring your destiny or your inner voice are not merely painful but have the ultimate logical effect of making you feel completely in the wrong.

Duty to God might take an entirely unpredictable course. one’s destiny in the world might take any of the manifold possible forms of organic life. At some stage of development one might feel the need to commit crimes for the sake of it.

83 In heresy lies the real life affirmation. It is the affirmation that energy and reason lie outside the simplistic scheme. The Devil is the true hero. He is that which the oppressive scheme cannot tolerate or assimilate. Those within the scheme pour all ignominy fear and hatred onto his head. He will accept all that, like Kierkegaard’s Christian. Daemon est deus inversus Or the Devil is an archangel of the true God as perceived by the demiurge. He is not eternally damned because the metaphysical system damns him is a false one. The Devil is the fountain of life and sex. That is the force the superior mind must follow if he wishes to make contact with the true divine realm.
The first such oppressive shame that has come down to us is that of the ancient Hebrews. Yet without the demiurge could we conceive the true God? God is conceived as liberation from oppression. There are those for whom the demiurge is the true God. To the superior mind it is that God that represents true oppression (though sometimes they strike a bargain with the false God, like Faustus. It is the Jewish God that brings worldly power. The Jewish God rules the world in that he is an orthodoxy. The greatest opponent of any orthodoxy is the Devil

315 Success ethic. To desire one thing, one object of the will, in preference to desiring real satisfaction.
God is a counter, a token.
Hollywood films, very Christian, anti tragic, the saving power of love. That life is really all right because there is love. It is not, though existentialism is adolescent. Christian love, childhood security. In reality there is no assurance that life is good, or that love is security (except for young children).

OO

247 The tortured God may be as divine as the triumphant God. God in Hell. His divinity does not consist in the intensity of the pleasure that he is receiving. The idea of St Peter with his keys is nonsense. God as devil God as maelstrom, an experience so intense that it seems to belong to some someone. The men who invented and refined the concept of the Buddha were s great as the Buddha himself

BA

82 God being dead what do we build on? Our secular public, but there is a huge struggle in front of us. We are surrounded by will that pretends it is not will. Rowan Williams says that if we can’t speak of God our discourse is restricted.

AQ

87 Without God as an all seeing eye, I used to imagine as a child some future humanity unravelling the past through its understanding of strict deterministic laws. What happened might not have happened. What is dead is nothing, yet in view of a strict determinism it is still real because it could in theory be reconstructed. So we imagine the all seeing human eye of the future. Will it be a judging, condemning eye? Or is tout savioir tout pardoner? But the judging is a possible form of experience.

MM

53 God, say, the wholly enlightened one, may take on a bit of ignorance for the sake of the satisfaction it brings, think of the Pistis Sophia, but is liable to lose his way and fall all the way down the scale of being, which is not very nice.
That is looking downwards, after enlightenment has been got, very dangerous recipe for confusion. After total satisfaction must come personal annihilation. One must have no more desire left, after that there is no point in lingering. Mahasamadhi may anticipate Nirvana.

LL

33 “If God existed it would be necessary to abolish him” (Bakunin)

GG

252 Anarchism and socialism provide myths which offer satisfaction to certain of our impulses. Wish fulfilments, which have little to do with the rational intellect. They work the same as religious movements, the only difference is that we have got out of the habit of speaking of gods. First it was many gods, then it was one God, now it is no God. perhaps it was better to have gods. A fuller emotional relationship to the universe is surely possible if we personalise the forces of nature. It is misleading to interpret all religion in terms of mysticism. Mysticism as such is a specialised interest.

AE

115 Difficulty with atheism. How is one to argue that something is not true? How can you repudiate any foolish position that is confidently held? Argument can go so far as to show the connectedness of all ideas. One is led to assert possibility as a reality. This one could call God if one so chose. But then the ghost of God returns as a curse. Reality, what is that? Does one evoke the name of God to escape the clutches of an imaginary demon? The demon presents itself as immediate reality. To trust in any reality beyond this, it asserts, involves, am arbitrary act of faith in that which is not present. How can possibility have the same kind of existence as present reality? The reality of a point of view in which someone is confident, and which distressingly preoccupies you, as the only viewpoint of which you are immediately aware, and which you fear because you dislike it so much.
Confident rejection involves a trust in something, that is not necessarily felt with any great vividness. It might even seem like a fiction. What kind of reality does possibility possess? But what kind of reality does reality possess? Could we say it comes down to what you think and what you can be made to think?

129 Russell in his History of Western Philosophy says that for Leibniz all monads are conscious. This flatly contradicts what I read elsewhere. Also Russell distinguishes between an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine. I am not sure the distinction holds. Leibniz's “God” is everywhere a highly sophisticated concept. I doubt if even the “exoteric” doctrine was as crudely religious as Russell makes it. And Leibniz does have a way out of determinism. And I doubt that the subject predicate logic is the whole explanation of this system.
But mystery enters with the identity of indiscernibles. It is senseless to complain I might be a different possibility. For if I were you and you me, how could it be discerned? I think I can make sense of the idea. But I am not sure.
The concept of possibility does offer a fullness of explanation, while cause and effect are essentially mysterious.
Think of this possibility. Man is God. But he has descended into matter out of sheer playfulness, and in his playfulness he has made the possible mistake of cutting himself loose. Like the Pistis Sophia, in that moving allegory. He enters in a world of pure possibility, and one of those is hell, the end of all playfulness, the beginning of seriousness.
We are gods who have lost our way in nets of our own devising. Enlightenment is better, more completely satisfying than it is possible for us to think or imagine. It will satisfy more impulses, overcome more reservations, than seems possible.

144 Possibility The subject predicate logic. Not that, I think. The doctrine of possibility removes the problems in the concept of causality. The ground is possibility, this ground we call God. The principle of sufficient reason may in fact not have universal application. But when we try to explain why things are as they are, the most obvious ground of their being is possibility. A possible idea has a form of existence that is apparently transparent. So we say reality has its source in possibility. So possibility is God. Here there is no mystery about the existence of God, or the origin of reality. The mystery is the principle of God's creation. Possibility is possible ideas, what it is possible to be thought. Reality is limitation. My own life history everything about myself, if it is like a story, made up like that, there is no mystery in it. But to make me a substance to which things happen is to reintroduce mystery. To avoid solipsism I must assume there are other people with equal reality, likewise grounded in possibility, or God. So already there is more than one monad, more than one substance.
Leibniz probably was heretical, if not in the way Russell suggests. If we conceive of God as possibility there would seem to remain the prospect of absorption back into God The individual personality would not do this, because that is a limitation. But the ground of this personality is possibility. (Averroism?)
One searches for the language in which to express this. Individual personalities are nothing but these stories. God is in each one as the root and source. There is no unfairness, because we are all equally God at play. By the identity of indiscernibles, if the limitation ceases we revert to possibility, i.e. to God. And God is all possibilities in every monad. So behind the individual personality there is an I that is God (Purusha, Atman) Insofar as I am God my total enjoyment is in nowise limited to this monad, this personality, which preoccupies me here, now.
233&
What actually did belief in God achieve or effect? God was a supernatural authority a person, a father figure in whom one could trust. This giving hope of escape from the distress of one’s immediate situation.
God as possible. Possibility was one of the words scholastics used. With them typically such words had too wide or elastic a meaning. Schopenhauer wrote of “the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words”.
Possibility is impersonal, people want something more personal and immediate. Rejecting the idea of a personal God is clearly an advance into rationalism and enlightenment. But it can leave without hope. As when you are dispirited and feel a great majority against you. They think they are right and that you are doomed to fail, How can you say they are wrong? How can you escape a downward spiral of depression? Why should not the world be as your enemies portray it? Why should you not be doomed to suffering and hell? Why should such a personally horrible proposition not be the configuration of he world, given that pure chance rules? Faith in God is a faith in the goodness of the world. Which is the more rational?

The atheist position is that of radical empiricism, the tradition of Locke-Kant-Schopenhauer. And it is close to the Buddhistic position. Is there a flaw in that position? Is it that it is not sceptical enough, that a further dose of scepticisms can undermine it?

Possibility is something immediately graspable as thought. Possibility is power, various powers throughout the universe. It is a fact as much as any of those revealed by rationalism, that your own beliefs and actions make a difference to your future experience.
Your beliefs can easily make a difference, they can reset the programme How can you make use of this to your benefit without abandoning the insights of rationalism?

240 Proofs of God’s existence were primarily intellectual. The concept was useful, not just the experience, for the concept provided a framework for the interpreting of experience.

268 Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is a good story, a classic. On the obvious view Faustus is a foolish magician who makes a bad bargain, but on other interpretations he is being punished for sin, pride, ambition, malice, the overactive will. In that case his punishment is inflicted by a tyrannical god, the same who cursed Adam for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I want to insist that the pains of hell are not punishment for desire or a bad will, or if they are the punisher is a power crazed demiurge whom it is one’s business to circumvent.
Goethe, Milton, Blake, all in the same tradition, but Goethe was a child of the enlightenment like Mozart and did not escape from the characteristic shallowness or childishness.

274 Deistic ideas of God. Creation of a purely benevolent idea of God. But the utility of it. Mozart. God as totally indulgent parent. What possible justification can anyone have for assuming such a God to exist? What problems does it solve beyond shifting all responsibility off man’s back?. In Goethe, Faust’s spiritual drama is without interest. The meaning of his adventures appears to be arbitrary. Very enlightenment and it presages communism. The great drama of life, human fulfilment in its maximum degree, can be any arbitrary pattern laid down by some arbitrary conception of truth; there is no inner absolute, no necessity about it. What Faust should do with his powers is ascend to heaven, interrogate God and overthrown him, like Monkey in the Chinese story.

AZ

39 Republicans and Democrats failing to concede the importance of sovereignty. Those constantly fighting for an imaginary sovereignty. Like God. Rule by a fiction, supposedly to restrain us. The imaginary sovereignty, the moral order in the universe. The wrongness of it. Why atheism itself can seem so evil when it is only throwing away an imaginary crutch.

86 Democracy is the king. This unamerican thought. As a king expresses his own personality and suppresses those of all rivals. Life and all the activity involved. Imagine how it could be, how it ought to be. But there is an objectionable order of things that hinders this. Like the king to whom one refuses allegiance.
God, too, is an allegory of a king.

120 The whole idea of God. There may have been some rationality in its invention, a personification of sovereignty in an age of universal empire.

Ideas of God and gods. Gods as personifications of all the powers of nature. God as that of sovereignty in the age of universal empire. However it turns into something else, a demand for obeisance on a mysterious premise. And like this God goes the whole of modern morality.

God turning onto a bogeyman a Nobodaddy, a tool of moral blackmail. The priestly people who have learned how to cover their desires with a mantle of moral demand.

FF

27 In the British Museum today powerfully struck by the beauty of Tara. I have recently become aware of the need for some kind of mother goddess in my consciousness. Gods are natural forces and phenomena personified so we may relate to them emotionally. Too much maleness in our personifications means a severe imbalance and loving God smacks suspiciously of homosexuality.

268& Marxist materialism simply another form of Jehovism, Nobodaddy below rather than aloft. Their values are supposed to be determined by matter, and what is mater but the restriction on the freedom of the spirit, in short Jehovah? We do not personalise it, for humanity is now advanced enough to have outgrown belief in gods and spirits…atheism is pointless without freedom from predetermined values, determined values is pretty well what theism means.
The matter that determines Jehovah, the crude prejudices of the mass. Or rather that is the justification that is the stone tablets

AB

196 Understanding Wordsworth. His attitude to childhood. No mere lost innocence. As I remember childhood myself, as a time of fear and looming menace.

When I began in youth's delightful prime
To yield myself to Nature, when that strong
And holy passion overcame me first,
Nor day nor night, evening or morn, was free
From its oppression. But, O Power Supreme!
Without Whose call this world would cease to breathe,
Who from the fountain of Thy grace dost fill
The veins that branch through every frame of life,
Making man what he is, creature divine,

In single or in social eminence,
Above the rest raised infinite ascents
When reason that enables him to be
Is not sequestered—what a change is here!
How different ritual for this after-worship,
What countenance to promote this second love!

The first was service paid to things which lie
Guarded within the bosom of Thy will.
Therefore to serve was high beatitude;
Tumult was therefore gladness, and the fear
Ennobling, venerable; sleep secure,
And waking thoughts more rich than happiest dreams.

This is the sublime, an Old Testament Jehovah service, It could also be pagan, think of panic fear, the terrors inspired by the gods.

He then goes on to speak of the prophets and the satisfaction they could derive even in the midst of fierce denunciation, a aesthetic pleasure in the workings of things however un pleasurable.
See the Platonism in this experience,. And its psychological truth. The use of reason, i.e. of right philosophy, enables mystic and aesthetic experience to be enjoyed without fear, without childlike dependence .
God, lord, Adonai heavenly father, adored as one mysterious who can do harm as well as good. The mystery who is worshipped,
The philosopher, Platonist, cabbalist, wishes to penetrate to the heart of the mystery. Knowledge casts out fear.
Faith in God as father. State of childish dependence. Enjoyment limited by a terrible insecurity. The use of reason, or right philosophy, enables us to overcome the insecurity without in any way diminishing the experience. It is a mystical path, not a mundane one. No mere logic or cold reason

228 Lewes' chapter on Spinoza, (in his History of Philosophy) the first one I have any difficulty in understanding. I cannot understand why he finds Spinoza so compelling and irrefutable, given any possibility of metaphysics at all, nor what he finds so disagreeable and disturbing about the system. Descartes' cogito as a ground of certainty, not a logical ground but an intuitive certainty. Then the proof of God's existence. Spinoza as identification of this, God, the ground of all phenomena, as the whole, the all. A contemplative way of satisfying the mind, its desire for certainty. Programme going back at least as far as Aristotle. Total understanding, Being through its ground. All one can say is that Spinoza's pantheism is one possible consequence of Descartes' God

320 The concept of God as father, this moralistic Jewish conception. What is its significance? Should we perhaps see it as having a primarily negative significance? God perhaps is cliché, the essence and repository of all the pressure on the individual to conform to orthodox judgement.
The cabbala is to be taken as a profound psychological exposition the meaning of the concept of God. To the alienness of the concept may be attributed its significance.

ZZ

126 The origins of Christianity and Islam lie with the Jews, insofar as these latter were different from or opposed to Greece and Rome.
This, the essentially Jewish contribution to world history and culture, their jealous God.
The introduction of the God into world religion and culture was not an advance, unless in most oblique sense.
The basic impulse that set them against Greece and Rome, the impulse that lead to the promotion of their own God.

244 God, demiurge the massive propaganda and suggestion to the effect that I am wrong, that that there is a way of determining the answers to the questions asked other than the ones I perceive to be right.

254 God as possibility. Possibility is everything beyond the immediately given. What ground can there be for such faith? What does the atheist deny? That the universe as a whole is animated by a conscious principle?
A society riddled with putative authorities. From authority good, i.e. value, flows.

YY

24 To say that socialism is the only alternative to God is absurd. God has not existed in England for three hungered years and or more,

199 Consider the proposition that self divinisation is the chief object of life. The object of the various yogas is to achieve this. Divinisation, to which art and poetry assist. Escape beyond the limits of the personality,. Divine personality, satisfied but also active. Something all may desire to become. Archetype. Yoga , being able to capture something of this at will.

214 the unjustified assumption of spiritual authority has always seemed to me the essence of the Judeao-Christian god.

225 Cuppitt. I read an article he wrote in the Listener. He talks of moving into a post platonic world, where we are no longer to experience ourselves as exiles, serving time on earth. He dates the origins of this ‘platonist’ other world to the pessimistic style of religion that grew up after 700 bc, the origin of other worldly religions, an age, he says, that is coming to an end.
This is pure Nietzsche, and also very Crowleyan. He proclaims an end to the formula of the dying god,
It is my belief that Platonism does not fall so easily that so called ‘modern rationalism’ or ‘relativism’, subjectivism’ or whatever we call it, breaks down on strict analysis and that the platonic world of ideas is essentially logical formulae to coordinate experience,

329& Message of the scene in the Ministry of Love (1984). One of the most terrifying passages in all literature. Reality beyond. What existence? What type of existence if not experienced, if merely faintly conceived? How can one accept a truth which does not strongly present itself, which merely exists as a hope of escape? This unpleasant immediacy insists that it is all of truth. How can you deny that without appearing to show faith in some kind of God? “Do you believe in God Winston?” This claim for all of truth, can we say it is actually, demonstrably false? That it contains and implies falsehoods? That the hope of another reality is not a mere faith but a sound expectation, not a logical or metaphysical but a factual question.. the attempt to fix reality in the bully’s unpleasantness is the attempt to introduce an authority, a God. Believe in another reality and you should be able to reach out and take it.

XX

6 Tendency to define God in terms of what is possible, i.e. conceivable. There can be no objection to this as a definition. But then the decidedly metaphysical idea that what is possible, in this sense, necessarily exists in an actual sense. That the world is perfect because it contains everything possible, i.e. conceivable. Necessarily exists, (i.e. not now but somewhere in eternity). It seems that there is here a metaphysical explanation of 'the whole' and this is in terms of the perfection of God. The philosophy of Leibniz is closer to this than some have thought. Spinoza only accepts one possible world, and that perfect.

338 All my life I shall be thankful (to God?) that I have had these experiences before getting too old.

VV

109 Possibility as God. Instead of a picture of the substratum as dead, inert matter. “Could I become a different limitation” does not make sense. The more you become, the more you understand, the less limited you are.
To realise, to understand, possibility. We do know there is possibility we do not as yet understand. As to what kind of existence possibility possesses. It is a permanent substratum. One could choose to say it exists, just as anything exists that is not immediately present to consciousness.

157 God as possibility, What is possible is necessary. God as explanation of the universe. The power of God. The possibility of a thing and its necessity. The possibility of a thing is a logical matter. It springs from sheer abundance. God, the foundation of a thing, its possibility. It’s imaginative concept. But further than that, its necessity But what it is possible is necessary and vice versa. I am a limitation. God is simply limitless possibility. Actual existence is merely a form of limit, actually a form of non existence. The fact that a thing exists springs from the fact that it is conceivable.

AP

243 Going to the autumn wood in some mood or other. Say one of mild melancholy. One does not feel as fulfilled as one might. The effect the wool has. Its sheer variety says something about nature. Like the life force. It seems to say something about the possible moods, states of mind one might be in, to put oneself in perspective. This comes out in terms of the variety of nature’s production, of which one is oneself a part. All one is just a phase of nature, with all its manifold production. So one can come to the wood for advice. And so it can seem that the wood is a benevolent force, like a conscious force. One might want to call it God. Not just a god because it blots out all other gods for the moment. Yet it is so unlike the God of the Jews and Christians, that God of pomp and gorgeous raiment, that middle eastern Potentate of jewels, architecture and precious stuff. This is an English God, but one that predates the English race, a God of this land and its history.
The wood is very particular, closely tied to place and a long expanse of history,
Though in other places there are other woods, this is an immediacy of presence about this particular wood, god manifested here.

Nudism gives me the same feeling. It links me to nature, it is more than simply sexual, it has a mystical quality. So easy to personify the force , to see it as God.

AD

259 Gospel Christianity, if moralistic, accusatory, shirty. Esoteric Christianity deals with
historical forms and energies. The apparent emotional content of some form or appearance may be quite opposite from what it is at first sight. Thus the origin of Christianity among the Jews, this repellent fact of history which orthodox Christianity cannot escape, would be faced full square by esoteric Christianity as one of the mysteries. God is desired significance. Mere decorative forms with significance may be unsatisfactory because of that lack. Significance the capacity of discovered forms to answer to desires.

372 Feminism, by setting up women as a group against men.. Insisting on a set of rights which protect women against the influence of men. It is to make it impossible for woman to have the receptivity of a goddess, her highest destiny. To call her a goddess is not to put her on an unrealistic pedestal. She is s goddess when I am a god. We are to achieve this divinity together. This when we can fuse mentally to become the male and female counterparts of the same mind, the same point of view.

UU

80 Eilade- The Epic of Gilgamesh has been seen as a dramatized illustration of the human condition, defined by the inevitability of death. Yet this first masterpiece of universal literature can also be understood as illustrating the belief that certain beings are capable, even without help from the gods, of obtaining immortality on the condition that they successfully pass through a series of initiatory ordeals. Seen from this point of view, the story of Gilgamesh would prove to be the dramatized account of a failed initiation.
Egypt, the Old Kingdom. If it was originally only the king who had divinity and immortality, what of the priest who invented the doctrine?
The garden of Eden, like Gilgamesh, a failed initiation. Ugarit, Baal-Peor, the extension of the concept of the dying god to cover “certain negative aspects of life”

Certain authors claim to have seen in this myth a reflection of the annual death and reappearance of vegetation. But in Syria and Palestine summer does not bring the “death£ of vegetable life; on the contrary it is the season of fruits. It is not a torrid heat that frightens the farmer but a prolonged drought. So it seems plausible that Mot’s victory refers to the cycle of seven years, of with there are echoes in the Old Testament. (Genesis 41:2 Samuel 24;12 ff).

But the interest of the myth goes beyond its possible connection with the rhythm of vegetation. In fact these touching and sometimes spectacular events reveal to us a specific mode of diving existence, particularly a mode of being that includes defeat and “death”. Disappearance by burial (Baal) of by dismemberment (Mot) followed by more or less periodical reappearances. This type of existence, at once intermittent and circular, recalls the modality of the gods who govern the cycle of vegetation. However this is a new religious creation, which aims at integrating certain negative aspects of life into a unified system of antagonistic rhythms.

The unpleasant little desert demon, abetted by various malcontents throughout the ages, Yahweh, has succeeded in establishing a religious monopoly over a large portion of the globe. The intolerant structures founded in his name have survived in the secular religion of communism. What do you know of Ugarit, of Baal-Peor of Gilgamesh, of voodoo? Christian conceptions are still forced down our throats. Pagan ideas with their immense power to fertilise society on many different levels are treated as evil, depraved, superstitious or primitive.

AF

19 Irritable impulse to believe what we believe we understand. Why we are not total sceptics, paralysed? Think of all kinds of false beliefs, about all kinds of things. The way they minister to happiness. The fact that God is dead. God is an idea which divides the world in two. The whole world of experience is divided up in accordance with such belief. There is a place for all your hopes and aspirations. But how can any such belief be presumed? In looking at the culture of the past, or even of another person we sort it in our own minds, interpret it not such as to think his thoughts. Necessity to escape from and overcome the ordinary. With a belief like their, the ordinary, what is perceived as the ordinary cannot satisfy. Beliefs, ideas held. Think of the beliefs that may seem to make the ordinary acceptable.

244 Interesting programme by Thomas Romer about the origins of Genesis and Exodus. The six days of creation, the six generations of gods in Babylonian mythology. The Egyptian bondage and exodus, totally unhistorical, Moses himself as an Egyptian word meaning origin. The story a myth to describe the origin of a God.
Romer describes the God as a good thing, I regard it as a hateful thing. The new culture, a time of megalomaniac power fantasies. Actually there was a powerful current of anti-Christianity. Hatred for dogmatic Christianity

264 The totalitarian idea that the judgement of the majority should rule over the individual. Like the idea that the judgement of fashion, or of the established religion, or of the excluded, or the included, should rule.
The God, Yahweh, coming out of the land of Egypt. Eastern art, turning back into religion. Where I want to see art take us is back to the land of Egypt, back to a multitude of gods.
My ambition is not mere personal vanity, it is a vital necessity. I feel I have to resist depressing and demoralising ideas. Ideas I cannot and do not accept, but which exert a constant pressure to yield to yield to the judgements to which they give rise.

310 God, possibility. Everything is true. A photograph records an image of a time and place. The image is there, vivid, remembered. But how much reality do we give the past? Everywhere where cameras were not, but theoretically might have been, there too was an image strikingly vivid, we can extrapolate it, its permanence is somehow necessary. So whenever you were naked you may imagine yourself to have been photographed, endlessly. Think of this.

AH

128 Summit of human ambition, to become God one might say. Then as God to create, to make a world for his enjoyment. For God to have such a desire may seem to be a mark of imperfection,. But perhaps that is the mystery that shields ultimate perfection or the ultimately desirable. In history man creates. Creation comes through destruction and thorough error.

166 The sense of power, that is the reward of communism. The spiritual feeling. All other values having been destroyed a new God is created. This God may be thought of as the state, or the party, or it may be more abstract than that. For those of lesser understanding the God that may take on a human incarnation as, for example, Lenin the Merciful He would be a kind of bodhisattva. All this value is essentially the intoxication of power.

264 Art is divine, the great artist is as close as possible to god. the height of human felicity is in imitation of the divine activity through creative originality In some ways the renaissance magus was superior to the later scientists.

AK

205 People point out the dangers and drawbacks of freedom. But freedom is God, it is the supreme value around which the rest of society should be organised.

315 God is a plethora of possibility.

AL

165 The fragment of reality which to you is care, is just a tiny section of what those beings you care about are. They exist, but everything else exists too, including all possibilities. That is what God is. What is the time in which other people exist? All I care about is that time in which I exist. Every individual is only a fragment of God. Death as white not black Whether life is worth living. You do a few things before you die. Monstrous futility.

251 As God incarnate I have incarnated so far. Had I gone to Oxford, things would have been easy. As Incarnate God I have chose to make things difficult for myself.

AN

5 Different types of God. To the true Neo-Platonist even God is a vulgar expression. He conceives a state so totally unexpected and completely beyond normal comprehension . Hegel on the other hand wants a specific God, a political God. To the Neo-Platonist Hegel’s concepts of enlightenment is the archetype of ignorance and darkness. Different viewpoints of the individual and the conformist. Like framing different gods, different conceptions of enlightenment, illumination. To each the other appears benighted.

36 Hegel, emphasis he places on Lull, Bruno, Boehme. Can one have a thought that has not occurred to him? The vastness of his learning suggests he is acquainted with every spiritual state. Are there perhaps states of schizoid solipsistic horror that have philosophical significance and which he does not understand? A state of negativity and rejection that is more than even his mystical consciousness can cope with. Something that really is right outside the framework of the Christian God and yet contains the seed of a great hope.
The traces of God that remain in his system. Modern atheism that never rises to a full religious height. The horror is the perception of contradiction. Also the desire to destroy his system out of pure hatred. A non-Christian mysticism, a heretical, a Gnostic mysticism. Destroying all belief by a will to destroy. Annihilate the Christian God.

47 The mediaeval conception of God, a great possibility which swallows up all reality.

337 As an exercise, imagine putting a modern scientific outlook in verse, like the Essay on Man. “to justify God’s ways to Man”. No way one could do this or even want to. That kind of God, as personification of nature, is irrelevant now. Nor is there really any romance in sub atomic physics. Yet the God concept could still have a place. Deism no longer has any meaning, God can be a moral pressure to believe, or a liberation from such pressure As for ethical exhortation that is neither meaningful nor required,. It sounds like Kant.

341 Need for a conceptual framework that permits the emotions we want to have. The trouble with scientific materialism is that its dogmatic insistence that there is no God, in its own way quite limiting the range of thought, quite precisely. Atheism that pre-empts questions that are to be asked.

AR

61 I had been reading Byron, particularly his Hebrew Melodies. This led to an interesting train of thought. This emotion of exile. “by the waters of Babylon”, the fall of the Temple. Understanding this as just poetry. Powerful poetic emotions this love of native land and lament for its loss. And focussing all this on Thou, this creation of a people., the focus for all poetic emotion. This strange alternative to the classical civilisation into which so much has been poured.
So try to enjoy, relax and experience. But then one runs into barriers. This thought form is not to be treated so lightly. This is a terrible, jealous, dangerous God. This is how he has been created, and we cannot tailor him to suit ourselves.
A thought form not to be trifled with, demanding grotesque sacrifices of his followers, not the least of which is ritual circumcision.
Precisely this forbidden aspect This exclusivity, brings the need for redemption, for Christ.
-

187 To be anti Judaic is to be anti-God and vice versa, this is something formidable to take on. See the need for something like the Russian Christ to counteract it. Forgiveness of sin. Like Christian God that is the opposite of the Jewish God.
The great idea the Jews contributed to the world is only this Jealous God, which reflects the interests of the Jewish people. In reality this God is precisely in the Scriptures, in the Bible. It is the expression of a people, the creation of a people essentially in reaction against an outside world. Like against Hellas.

268 This God, given to the ancient world, in no respect does it seem superior to the gods of Greece. Its so called sublimity is like that of Young’s Night Thoughts. Idea that this God is great and sublime, a con trick, a God of his chosen people. A God of a different race Who expresses its power. Its claim to embody a nobler and higher ideal which atheism does not succeed in doing away with this Impulse. The Jewish God is just one expression of this alien racial culture, the mystery, the great deception

AX

49 Ideas of God, truth and science. Where there is a supreme God, his interests are taken as defining truth. Truth may be conceived as the interests of his people. Therefore Catholics and Jews may see no contradiction in what strikes us dishonest special pleading. Truth is simply perceived as what God is perceived to want. This gives quite an interesting and committed view of history. To get out of it means a different view of truth which involves a different view of God. The standards of objective scholarship are obviously a rejection of that God. The question is much to do with science and the ground of science. There are standards of truth that derive from science.
Then think how the movement in art and the movement in since may be essentially the same thing.. How do gods, individual desires, turn into God? And would it be acceptable to turn away from Truth to a multiplicity of truths? No, because that means equal rights for that to which we do not wish to accord them

AW

175 Struck by the obscenity of weddings. The idea of a filthy God, a God that participates in obscenity and indecency.

AC

275 Of course one should replace Christianity with some form of theosophy. Not the kind of wet tolerance nowadays tight in primary schools, but a free, exploratory attitude to the mystical treasure on offer.
The hierophant, the magician, the manifestation of symbols.
Do I believe in Dionysius’s ‘God’, his transcendent super essence? Perhaps I am prepared to do so as I am not with Augustine’s repellent emotional conception, his lover and beloved, products of a decadent sensuality theory. Dionysius is hardly worth denying. What could denial achieve?

AT

122 Suppose one were obtaining fame at last, and even wealth. Defying the odds, defying chance. Might one feel favoured of God?. More likely the Devil. One might feel one had made a pact.

181 The land, landscape, the community, the historical community the contemporary community
the deep emotional love and attachment to the landscape, and identification with ancestors. The rich emotional sexual enjoyment. One with an historical creative power. Paganism you might call it, though it is even more than that.
Against this feeling, the deep romantic feeling that in poetry and literature is the counter idea of the contemporary community.
Edward Thomas. The first world war. The feeling that made it possible to die for one’s country.
The patriotism of the Serbs. Making it possible to massacre.
The patriotism, mystical, sensual, of the Russians.

God. Mystical ideas. Neo-Platonism. Access to emotion. The land, the dead, will, the past. Versus the modern community. Diachronic versus synchronic. The synchronic community is a definite idea, a zeitgeist, a detestable clarity. It is like an interrogation room with unbearably bright lights, It is the rightness of something that ordinary people grasp, it is the pride and presumption of the woman, of the teenage girl.
Call the other thing God perhaps. Not paganism. Given the language of God it is an interpretation of God. A God of sexual unity.

305 Cuppitt’s book, After God, the Future of Religion, his most accessible entrée into postmodernism. Strange idea of the Bible. That its God is not an absolute despot at all, but a personality that responds to dialogue. He admires the Bible and blames the Greeks.
The strange idea that we are now all shallow and that it doesn’t matter. The assertion that esoterism always descends into meaningless nonsense.
The postmodern world has an art that is just shallow.

AS

86 America as God. View on Yahweh as a description of the nature of political power and sovereignty. The sovereign power does what he likes and he may be arbitrary and capricious. If one accepts his sovereignty one accepts his childish whims. Look at the God of the Jews as essentially something post platonic. World empires. The split between Israel and Judah as expressing that between the Seleucids and the Ptolemies.

113 Suppose man is the serpent. The serpent himself the equal of God. God was supposed to have created him, so how did he know so much?
Yahweh is a discovery of something. Originally he was not the mere uncomfortable thing he has become by now, the huge great lie that does not correspond to experience. He was imperial sovereignty.
What was the irruption of this nonsense into the Greek world?

118 La Mettrie. I would say he comes close to Gilbert Ryle. Avoiding Descartes, he goes back to the ancients, and to the true mystery of life as found in oriental religion A mystery that does not require God.

133 God, see the concern as arising in a post platonic world. Both preoccupied with the evils of democracy and the need to establish some form of new order. Both doing this through a form of tyrannous assertion.
One with which a lot of people identified. But which was an evil, containing its own reaction. Gnosticism and Protestantism.

140 Relativism, God of resentment. Slave morality, the identification of some perceived rational self interest, which yet conflicts with the perceived interest of some other group, with bad conscience. Such moral habits can easily survive the death of God.. God is only a personification of the impulse.

257 the Jewish God. The formation of a value to oppose something hated. Like an idea of good and evil. A whole framework of morality based partly on fear of dangerous thoughts. against this, an ideal of intellectual freedom that springs from an original rebellious desire, and that repudiates the original value as something untrue.

AU

25& Demons as agents of God’s judgement. When God comes to express the rest of society, a projection of female experience and desire. When the idea of God is a wholly negative and depressing thought.

Milton’s theology. The God of the Jews and Christians as expressions of someone’s will. Hostile to nature in this sense. Anti-sexual, or changing sex with morality.

Looking out of the kitchen widow at the branches of the great tree in the distance. Personifying nature as a God or goddess. One that defies the moralising judging God of the Jews and Christians, that condition making God that demands slaves and subjects. The God that is not on the side of your desire but who in the complexity of his twigs and branches would entangle you with guilt.
Because he expresses some one person’s particular will.
The other which would disentangle you. Restraint of the natural desire of the young child.

131 Difference between Schopenhauer and Burke. Burke. The discontent to which aesthetic experience is an answer is medicalised. “The sublime” need to escape lethargy and torpor. Disorder in the humours. Loss or absence of power. The physical material medical explanation. Fact that the sublime with its cruelty and sadism is a way of overcoming this loss of power. The mediocrity of indifference which becomes actively unhealthy and unpleasant. This so called normality this normal thing to contemplate.

Idea of sublimity in the idea of God This is only an idea, it is not nature. An imaginative idea someone has thought up we may judge it by its cleverness As if the sublimity of the idea give it charismatic authority. A certain confusion of thought I think. If the idea existed it might be sublime But it is not poetry. The Bible is not Milton.

285& Brian Davies- An Introduction the the Philosophy of Religion. Arguments for God Quite favourable to many of them as if the argument is hardly settled. Even Paley. Philosophy of religion. Sort of irrelevance. The arguments for God’s existence mostly seem like sophistries. How rarely I would normally feel like employing the language of the Bible. The language of praise. Sometimes, though, I would want to employ it in a seemingly strange context as to praise the nakedness of woman. That is the sort of language that comes most naturally to my mind. Not all that much else I really feel like praising these days.
Brian Davies and his strange mentality. These arguments for God’s existence seem to form part of some classic canon, but to miss out what is really important. Both the origin of religious belief and its real justification if any. Naïve and disingenuous,.
The peculiar scholastic world of his book. The se philosophers arguments for God are like mere games that could hardly engage belief. Philosophers as scholastics, trying to settle the concepts with which we should order our experience. A pure power game. The philosophers’ God here is also an expression of will to power. Philosophy on this level can seem like legal argument.
Creation of rational form to underpin agreed conventions.
Also there is the suggestion of the very strange Oxford world remote from ordinary life where presuppositions are explored for a form of life which doesn’t really exist anymore. Beliefs which are culturally relative in a most obvious way.

BE

3

Jonathan Sacks The Dignity of Difference. Flaws in his thesis. He exaggerates how stable and secure life was in the past compared with today. I am all for his affirmation of difference though

and he has come up with a version of God that is not Ialdabaoth.

158

Schopenhauer’s attack on Jewish optimism. The fundamental antithesis, counterpoint. seeing Christianity, insofar as it is not Jewish, as Indian, somehow via Plotinus.
This extra dimension, this God which may look fair but it is not. Which expresses all the needs and concerns of this deeply alien people. An abstraction, a beam in the eye.

A

88 God was what was understood as that which was outside sectional interests.

130 Seeing order and meaning in nature, like seeing God through nature. One may also see God through architecture, if God is understood as meaning, but some art is infused with raw will to meaning which I refuse to accept, because there should be something better in its place.

151 Jesus as symbol. Uniqueness. Limitless possibility. Philosophy projecting itself as religion.

B

35 Bakunin and the Hegelian origins of the mystique of destruction.
I am sure that by “God” many mystics had meant something very similar to what I mean by the principle of infinite possibility. Something which is above all contradictions and yet contains them within itself.. the same is the philosophical absolute. To preserve God is thus to preserve the possibility of balance.
Basis of Burke. With rationalistic reformism you never know where it will end. Any rationalistic revolutionary theory is always one sided. The only way to escape from the hideous confusion that will result if we ever open the gates to the power of thought to rule our lives is to cleave to tradition. The first objection is that the thought we should cleave to tradition I is itself a thought. And there is in Burke something of the tired. Simply by saying what he does Burke is entering the arena and can only be judged, like his opponents, by the highest standards of rationality.

C

82 Zurvan, the supreme god of zurvanite Zoroastrianism. Fate Infinite time. Ascribe the origin of everything to chance, pure possibility, there being no reason why things should not be in any particular way rather than in any other, there is no problem as to why they are as they are.
So let us consider this in the light of the vast infinite. In the infinite Space and time does every possibility find expression? If not why not? But perhaps we can say that his is irrelevant. It merely takes the problem one stage further back. Question as to the operation of the laws of chance. So chance is offered as an ultimate explanation of everything. But is this chance any different from the old God? If chance works as an adequate explanation then it has the status of a supreme God. Theism and atheism are divided over the question of whether such an explanation is possible. Atheism is comitted to an infinite regress- no explanation is possible- if not why not, until it has be satisfactory explained. Is it a satisfactory explanation of the universe to know that no explanation is possible- . It never can be. Atheism cannot accept Chance, it can only accept eternal bewilderment.. i.e. there is a possible question which cannot be answered. Etc etc

AA

31 Myself, my personality, my atheism. My atheism is my own personal tradition. As a child what it meant was the assurance that there really is no more than my world of experience, that there is no conscious authority over the universe. Belief in God is a low superstition. Father God- Father Christmas. I admit it may provide a bridge, or building block for more subtle conceptions. Childhood piety. Such religious conceptions as I have are Gnostic, anti Judaic, anti Jehovian. With the abolition of God an end to superstitious fears. God- restrictions on personal freedom, childlike dependence, security.

115 God creating the universe, this necessarily better than a demiurge creating it, so long as there is a higher principle above? What is important is a comprehensive kabbalah of concepts, there does need to be a concept which corresponds to total freedom, a realm above any particular truth.

174 Mysticism makes no difference to philosophy. It leaves the world as it is, and the true mystic will respect the activities of philosophy in it own field.
Underlying all is self, which is what we call God. Phenomenal self is an obscuring of God. The uncovering of self brings happiness, for all tensions are loosened. God is that which experiences, when tension is relaxed upon it it moves to a state of bliss. Permeating all phenomena the will to happiness. But your happiness is not my happiness. God as a totality comprises all pain and suffering. These in the realms, where he is obscured. God is not a piece of understanding
Such certainties belling to another field, a different game.

D

62 The God of the Old Testament is the enemy of rationality, God is Mahoney, the repulsive guru. God is the supermen apotheosis of a human type leader, Submission to God is like the masochistic pleasure taken in submission of an oriental potentate. Sublime!. It is easy to see through. Judaism arose out of Egyptianism. Submissive before a despotic ruler, one obtained his protection, and perhaps his patronising smile One feels proud to be a good boy, powerful in the strength of a force much stronger than oneself, an apparently stronger than one’s enemies. Sublime! Once we understand the emotion and can trace its human roots and parallels, perhaps we can exorcise the peculiar hold it has over us.

71 Advantages for freedom of thought of the Puritan idea of freedom of conscience. Whatever God is, he will only be that which reigns supreme after all metaphysical questions have been rationally answered. So the questioning faculty of the human spirit is left unimpaired, and is allowed to speculate freely, indeed he must do so, because he cannot lean on an external organisation to assure him of his salvation, to give solace in the midst of confusion. So man is really left free to speculate about the true mysteries of existence, which must apparently be faced before God comes into the picture at all, or rather they determine the way in which God comes into the picture when he does. Thus the seventeenth century in England was an age of great radicalism on mind as was the warring states period in China, and the fourth and fifth centuries BC in Greece.

F

145 The dilemma of Prometheus, to transform himself into a god in his own isolation. It might be said that he knows all gods to be mutable But we should best think of him as knowing nothing to start with, and creating everything out of his own courage. Circumstances in which I might be able to accept gods. Best if I could conceive him as the mere form of objective security, like a Platonic idea. So there would be no dogmas, only a language to learn. But some people would want to reject the language.
For those who abhor Atheism, is it only the world “God” to which they extend their loyalty? Is it that the expression “there is no God” is a taboo expression? Plato does not want to enchain people, but he does want to make them all speak the same language, use the same symbols. My philosopher kings do not want to wait until the final initiation before they know the truth.
And Plato places so much stress on the value of the life of contemplation. Admittedly contemplation can give itself a value, rather like the love of God, but is not the only real point of it that it provides a power base? That it enables meaning and fulfilment to be derived form aspects of life that are not purely contemplative?

G

191
God might be conceived as the faith that there is a resolution of forces, which as a universal object of worship even this idea stands contrary to the demands of freedom yet use of the principle may frequently help to resolve forces, by setting up a motive powerful enough to overcome defeat and despair. The notion the at there is not always a resolution of forces is not atheism, it is more like the Devil,

GOD IS DEAD

BA

107& Religious myth and theory as enabling thoughts.
To say God is dead is not just atheism, nor is it regret for the loss of consoling myth. It is the recognition of the uselessness of a powerful symbol, a form of language.
There is much value in Coleridge’s book Biograhia Literalia We cold say it was from a time when God was not yet dead. He writes of atheists having existed in France and we might feel ashamed of our lack of English virility if we had none.
He admit 18th century infidelity. God was not a clear thought but a lot came with it. there was a lot of clear thinking enabled
God as part of a language in which thoughts may be experienced. His existence or non existence is not even particularly interesting. Modern theism or atheism is something of no great moment. It was not atheism that caused distress, at least among intelligent people.

AO

205 What I call my idea, that I want to set up beside the fatal woman, is the nude goddess.

GODDESS

AL

181 Isis the goddess. Let Mary inviolate be torn upon wheels. Isis was a full blooded woman, she handled pricks and put them into her fanny, A real mother goddess who cares for her men in all their troubles, their death and desolation, and exerts herself to resurrect them

179 Tlazolteotl ancient Mexican goddess of dirt and carnal sin. Brian Sewell says we can have no understanding of these ancient religions. I do not think that is true. I think we can have an immediate relation to the paganism, It is a paganism of civilisation, different from African barbarism to which I am not at the moment so sympathetic, Christianity is miserable and depressed, It sparing from a time in history which was obsessed with celibacy. In each pagan god or goddess there is an imaginative ecstatic focussing on an aspect of life.

AN

279 Religion, salvation, the nude goddess.. she saw that she was naked and she was not ashamed. And there was nothing in her ridiculous but she was glamorous. Her nakedness was the finest raiment there could be.

GODS

YY

199 A god is a personality very fully expressed. It expresses aspects of life which are universal. Participating in the life of the gods the individual may live out all motives. Why cling particularly to one element of my personality when it is only one aspect of a universal state?

215 The shallow goddess fashion, who rules in America. See how now much of the values of the so called sixties are dismissed as if they are now outmoded by fashion. They were not the product of fashion but were values and ideas struggling for their own sake (in the name of goodness and truth)which fortunately managed to achieve a measure of fashionability.

221 The sage, the Taoist immortal, he understands something of the conditions of happiness. Unlike the Christian saint, he seeks longevity, not because he believes that this is the only life there is, a brief shaft of light in an infinite dark abyss, but simply because he wants to live and enjoy. A god is an image of fulfilment that is somehow beyond reason.
The Taoist perception of the vanity of worldly ambition (such as the aspiration to become a government minister) is not renunciation or weakness, but a clear perception of priorities. One could become a government minister, but that would be a mere bauble, and a dangerous one at that.

AJ

218 The vision of the nude goddess. Not to be defined simply as Aphrodite, she is both more general and more particular than that. Worship is actually the right, the most appropriate attitude.

370 Idea of God, the supreme value. Development of heresy.
Private Eye reviewer attack on Eddings, a sword and sorcery writer, for promoting “perverted religion.. Perverted religion actually sounds something quite interesting. Orthodox religion I find really hateful.

AY

54 Justice and goodness of God, from the perspective of the damned. Consisting of affirming Hell.

BC

36 Ariadne represents humanity as lovable. Dionysus, overflowing love, amor fati.

158 Asking you, as a statesman, what you would like to see. Beyond patriotism is fundamental myth, the energies of the gods. These include all desires, and are a way of speaking about them. The statesman, the artist tyrant. Sex as individual desire, Or as the creative energy of a people.

AK

3 Restoration of paganism. Creation of gods by the need for redemption. A god is something in which one finds deep satisfaction of that which needs to be satisfied. , A cure, a focus of concentration such as is sufficient to justify life, and to remain, as an image of satisfaction, firmly fixed in the memory.

AN

116 Idea that Mahakala is derived from Greek coins of Poseidon with his trident.

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