I’d like to talk about belief, belief meaning and ultimately mental health. One of my clients the other day mentioned to me that a friend of hers said essentially that there’s no purpose to believing in God.
You had to look to the scientific, to the evidence-based reality. That’s all it was about. And obviously, you can’t find God lying around the street, so to speak, so there is no God.
And she was troubled by this, and she asked me this question. Do I believe in God? And also, it stumbled me somewhat.
You know, it made me pause for a moment and reflect, because the quick answer is, of course, yes, I do. For sure, no question at all. But why would be the corollary?
Why do you believe in God when God essentially is not evidence-based? Well, I guess you would start off by saying, of course, God is evidence-based.
All you have to do is look at a child, perhaps a newborn baby, or you go for a walk in nature, and immediately you pulled into the belief that there is something supernatural in that sense.
And you have Thomas Aquinas, the five proofs for the existence of God. Of course, that also is evidence-based, one would believe. But I think the more important factor of it all is how faith makes me feel.
I don’t know about you, but I do know about me. It brings me a sense of calm and a sense of hope. And I think in the end, you stumble into Pascal a bit, because Pascal’s wager states that, why not believe in God?
Like, why not? And if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. But if you’re right, away it goes.
But I think the big mistake that’s made here is actually a compromise between a belief in God and atheism, nihilism, if you will. There is no value to life, there’s no value to anything really in that sense.
And I think ultimately, the compromise is with a man called Meister Eckhart.
He died at the beginning in the early 14th century, and he in a sense, even though he was a Catholic theologian, his states or his claims about God and about Jesus are radical in that sense. He makes statements like Jesus is inside of all of us.
So he doesn’t really focus on the historical Jesus. He focuses more on the esoteric Jesus in that sense. So Jesus is in all of us, and in that sense, we are all sons of God.
I think one of his quotes is, Jesus is perhaps born divinely, and we find our way through prayer, things along this nature. It’s an interesting approach, for sure, even if you’re not a Christian at all.
Our society, since Nietzsche’s great pronouncement that God is dead in the 19th century, has had a lot of difficulty, because the average human being, not people that are necessarily highly religious or things along this nature, but the average human
being needs belief in something, be it may a belief in a family, or a belief in a career or a job, a belief in a society, belief in goodness, intrinsic goodness. And I think if you strip those things away, and you start to say that it’s all possible,
you can have moral relativism, you can decide what is right and wrong, and if you cross the line, socially you will be punished, but there is no universal good. I think this causes a lot of complications for people. It just does.
So if you think to yourself, why would belief be necessary? Why? Well, I think if we start off, like I just said, belief most assuredly anchors you.
It gives you some, if you will, existential meaning. Why am I here? What’s my mission?
What happens when I leave here? It strengthens as well, I think, your sense of social belonging, like we are intrinsically good. Why?
Well, because we’re all God’s children. We’re all made in the image of God, and biblically speaking, God is good, of course, right? It promotes a sense of moral realism, that there is some standard, there are universal truths of goodness.
And I think this is also very, very important. In a sense, it also restrains your ego. So Meister Eckhart, curiously, he says that after death, there essentially is no ego, which is certainly against, I think, mainstream Christianity.
Your ego doesn’t transcend, but your soul does. Your droplets of being will go into that cosmic lake. So this is what he says, in a sense.
And I think belief also assists us through suffering. I was reading an article the other day by a doctor, and religion or faith gives a lot of people soulless when absolutely terrifying things have happened, really.
And on the other side, if you think to yourself about real evil, which of course does exist in the world, real evil is not the natural state of humanity. That would be the claim, which is what I also believe.
Evil is here because of perhaps forces in the universe. That could be. But more importantly, it exists because it is actually non-good or non-love, or as you would describe it, it certainly builds your moral architecture as a being, doesn’t it?
And ultimately, belief gives you some form of legacy, right? That you matter, like my three questions I alluded to before, that you are not just one of eight billion or a little bit more now empty beings, you actually have value.
There is a mission to all of this. And I think on a much larger scale, in a sense, if you think of the idea of action and inaction, well, the action of inaction is in reality an action. Nothing changes when you have inaction.
It only changes when you have action. Something different will happen. So if you go on a moral quest or a spiritual quest, this will take you somewhere.
There are far too many people in history, and they certainly outweigh the atheists by factors of tens of thousands of people that have taken the spiritual or esoteric or mystical route from all denominations and all religions, and they have come to
really states of enlightenment, whatever that means, and they’ve come to states of goodness. This is not the case, I would think, for the average atheist. Because all you have to do is read Fathers and Sons, right? Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
He is supposedly the first author to coin that term, nihilist. And he essentially shares the story of his son. His son has gone away to university, and he comes home with a friend, and the friend is a nihilist, as such.
And he converts his son to nihilism, and the struggles that go on. And in the end, the nihilist dies. And the son who had been converted to nihilism renounces it, gets married, has a family and lives out a happy life.
So I think it’s something to reflect on, isn’t it? Because ultimately, in the modern age, there are a lot of people that are mentally ill because of nihilism, because of the age of comparison from the internet. They have nothing to believe in.
And I think some people really don’t want to think. They just need to believe. So for the society overall, I would disagree with the new atheists because I don’t think this kind of truth, if it is truth, benefits the society at all.
It harms the society. And Nietzsche pointed this out in his Great Claims of God Being Dead, didn’t he? The society hasn’t benefited from lack of belief, lack of religiosity.
So you think to yourself, why do I believe in God, Gaia, or the universe? You think about that, because I think ultimately, it’ll bring a great deal of peace to your life, as it has to mine.
And you know what they say, you know what they say, critical thinking is necessary, especially if you’re going to find your spiritual path in life and critical thinking is great, truly great. You take care. God bless.
Bye bye.