On God: An Uncommon Conversation (17 page)

         

Are you saying God was not able to accommodate many who were ready for reincarnation?

What is basic in the universe? Certainly the laws concerning the conservation of energy—we know that you cannot do everything at once for everyone. All existence seems to be built on that set of proportions. So to assume that God is in complete command of reincarnation is equal to assuming that He or She never suffers even a passing despair before huge, unforeseen disasters and their concomitant depletions of divine energy. Indeed, why must we assume that God anticipates every event? Or is in command of every energy for every occasion? He or She created our world, but that doesn't mean every oncoming situation was delineated in advance. Hardly so. History, because of the ongoing actions of God and the Devil, is not always open to prediction, not even to them. Before the future of history even divinities take pause. Neither side commands all the contemplations.

         

What happened, then, to those victims of the gas chambers?

I would offer this speculation. I would say most of those who desired reincarnation did receive it, but in unsatisfactory fashion. This would derive from the argument I proposed earlier that the closest we come to Heaven or Hell is to encounter some angelic witty presence who decides how you are going to be reincarnated and where. When God's wit is present, that is as close as you will get to Heaven or Hell, either the knowledge that you will have a better life or a poorer one at the start of your next life. But when the Creator is not functioning at His or Her best but is too beleaguered, too extenuated, too despairing, too exhausted, then the choices made for reincarnation can be deemed gross—there's not enough of God to go around. It is a way of saying the Holocaust deadened God's wit. Too much was happening at once. God, I will repeat once more, is not inexhaustible.

         

I hear what you say, but why is it more difficult for God to assign a new birth to someone who died in the Holocaust than someone who died in the trenches? I don't see the difference.

Okay, let's put it this way—you have been a teacher. You certainly won't dispute the suggestion that you can walk into certain classrooms and see that certain students are ready to learn, whereas others look lethargic. Some are eager to be in class, and others are there because it is compulsory. So I am saying that when you die with great bitterness in your heart, you are harder to reach. How does this not apply to reincarnation? I am now improvising outrageously, but allow me. Let us say that the Monitoring Angel comes by, takes one quick look, and has a sense of how the recently expired soul before him can prove strong here, weak there, and might well deserve to go to this rebirth or that. In normal situations, he can make quick decisions. But if the dead person's soul is in disarray, then it can be analogous to you deciding how to give necessary counsel to a student who has come into your room in fearful drugged-up condition. You don't necessarily know whether they should be assigned to a given class. I think this can carry over to what I'm talking about.

         

Next one. The big picture, the fifth theodicy. God's divine plan is good. What we see as evil is not really evil. Rather, it is part of a divine design that actually is good. Our limitations prevent us from seeing the larger picture. Certainly you'll grant that God envisions more than we do.

Certainly.

         

So things we think are a terrible tragedy turn out a year later to be positive experiences.

Yes, the army: the worst experience of my life, and the most valuable. That's one thing. But to build a theological system on this theodicy may be excessively hopeful. It does not explain evil at all. It does not justify the Holocaust. The first person who can show me how the Holocaust was good for God's purposes will alter my thinking drastically.

         

The great example is Judas. Judas was a traitor, a betrayer, yet he was absolutely necessary to God's plan—

How do you know what God's plan was? You're taking the received wisdom of theologians who have been living with these enigmas for two thousand years and coming up with the answers that serve their respective needs. But what they conclude may have nothing to do with cosmic or earthly reality. In
The Gospel According to the Son,
I concluded that two things happened because of the crucifixion. God lost to the Devil and, worse, he had expected to win. He thought Jesus was going to change humankind profoundly and immediately. He did not foresee the end. God, having so much to oversee all at once, is not necessarily focused on what each one of His particular Creations is capable of. While I'm willing to assume that Jesus was His bold stroke, I would add that in chess when a really bold move is made and the player is not sure how it is going to turn out, you record it with an exclamation point plus a question mark. I would say God's expectation for Jesus was both an exclamation point and a question mark. Then, like many another bold move, it did not turn out as expected. The Devil won—Jesus was tortured. At this point, God in His brilliance came up with an answer to the Devil. He gave us to believe that His son actually died for our sins. What a human chord was struck! But to suggest that this was all planned in advance—crucifixion and resurrection—dubious. God may well have been responding to a crushing defeat with claims of half a victory. That makes more sense to me: God was rewriting the depths of what had happened after the events ensued—which is exactly what humans do all the time. We call it history. It is one of our fundamental activities. I suppose I even offer the assumption that not only is God like us in many ways but, indeed, He or She also has an ego to protect, that is, a necessary reservoir of confidence sufficient to keep striving.

         

The next theodicy argues that evil is not the cause but the consequence of people failing to observe God's will. Universal, reciprocated love would solve most of the problems that lead to the evils in the world.

Well, let me go back to something I said earlier. God is searching for a deeper set of meanings in evil. Conceivably, God may feel that He does not understand evil all that satisfactorily. Evil has aspects that God's understanding may not penetrate. My repetitive notion is that God, like us, seeks to learn. Maybe at the commencement, whatever form it really took, some vast deity, very far removed, said, “All right, new and most youthful deity, this will be your territory. Do what You can with it. If You can.”

         

That's a Gnostic idea.

“And if You fail—well, it's happened to other deities. All the same, You are an artist, the best artist we have available just now for Your assigned part of the cosmos.” Given this scenario, our young God soon discovers that He or She has a great deal to learn about evil—and is soon fascinated with it.

         

Well, you have a view of evil as a powerful, dynamic force.

Yes, at the least I see evil as looking to destroy the part of the universe that we know—our world.

         

Emerson said there really is no evil, just the absence of good, but that there are degrees of good.

Too easy. It enables us to go to sleep at night without pang or fear. But on the nights when one can't sleep, sometimes you can feel there's evil in the room, evil in your heart, evil in people around you—not all the time, but (rarely—thank God!) on those occasions when one's felt such a presence, you certainly cannot say that it is not really evil, merely a lesser degree of good. Maybe Emerson never felt an incubus on his chest. He was, after all, such a fine spirit.

         

Another argument: Evil is the consequence of God permitting humans to have free will. Human cruelty is the price of freedom. God gave us this freedom, and He cannot interfere. Without the possibility to choose to do good or evil, humanity would be robots.

That's the best, single, strongest argument. But theologians wriggle out of it. They put God back in control by the end of the philosophical day.

         

Well, yes, at the end of time, God does take over again. This is a testing time.

Here is exactly where existentialism needs to rear up. Yes, God had to give us free will in order to find out about us. He could learn so much more about us provided we were given free will. But, of necessity, the door had to be left open to the Devil. This was a move done, perhaps—on a cosmic level—in fear and trembling. Yes, great fear because the final answer had to be left open. It was not free will unless the Devil had something like an equal opportunity to influence humans.

I would add that by now it is a tripartite war. If it is only a contest between God and the Devil, and we are no more than the field on which it all takes place—some species of Astroturf—then we still do not have free will. We have to be equal as players to God and the Devil. That has to open a new kind of fear for us. It could all go down to disaster. The usual supposition, however, is that God will finally be victorious, and, yes, we, His soldiers, will all go to Heaven, a view held for centuries—no longer, however, I would say. Now it is as if any one of these three forces can triumph. Many will now even conceive of a universe without God and the Devil. I don't pretend to know how to speculate on this. Let's say it is not inconceivable that man may become more powerful in relation to God and the Devil. If They have exhausted each other, we may even arrive at a point where it does become man and woman's world, our humans' world.

         

What would make that come about?

Technology. It's obvious—well, obvious to me—that every effort is being made in these years to replicate a human being and, once done, forge armies of them. It might take two centuries, but it does seem to be what we humans are hell-bent on doing. At that point, free will will have grown so large and so livid that it will be looking to replace God. I naturally see that as absolutely disastrous. If I have been ready to question God's judgment on many a matter, I am wholly reluctant to put faith in our judgment. We are far from equipped to deal with the cosmos.

         

Here is the last theodicy. The eighth. God is a righteous judge. And so people get what they deserve. If someone suffers, it is because they have committed a sin that merits such suffering.

What if a divine balance has been disrupted? We had a different relation to existence ten thousand years ago. You had to hunt an animal down if you wished to eat meat. Now the beasts are brought to stockyards. Flesh for consumption is slaughtered in disagreeable fashion. Sows are kept in cribs so small they do not have room to move once they are fattened. The world of nature once lived on the basis that nearly everything contributed to the feeding chain. Add reincarnation, and the cycles of life and death were taken care of. This was the original conception. Today, as one example, contemporary agribusiness has skewed it. So, in like fashion, can we speak of the earlier human notion that excessive evil was compensated for? The idea that if you were killed before your time, reincarnation could make adjustments may no longer be operative. Yet it still remains the only explanation I know for why many young soldiers are, when tested, ready to die in battle. I think they have a sense—comparable in some degree to the terrorists who are blowing themselves up—that they are going somewhere special. Right or wrong, this is their belief. It is a deep belief—indeed, so profound that one cannot necessarily ignore the possibility that it is real. But repeat this theodicy, would you?

         

God is righteous. People get what they deserve.

God does the best He or She can do. That doesn't mean people get what they deserve. If they did, the universe would be equal to a clock.

         

Would you agree that it was inevitable once God gave us free will and intelligence that technology would follow?

No. I am working against the tide on this one, but it could be that at a certain point God hoped and expected all of us would become psychic. Great entertainers would be so intense in their art that men and women all over the world could experience the performance. Of course, it did not happen. We looked instead for technological means of communicating. And that blunted the possibility of such fine senses. It helps to account in part for the near-mute, somewhat odd and wistful sense we acquire when we watch a world event on television.

         

I would say that if you put people in a physical world, they are going to invent the wheel. And once they do, technology follows from that.

No, sir. No, sir. Electronics has nothing to do with the wheel.

         

So when we went from a mechanical universe to an electronic universe—

A leap not anticipated. Or such is my supposition.

Now, most people who believe in reincarnation do expect that sooner or later they will reach enlightenment or some equitable resting place and look back upon the problems and sufferings of earthly life as no more than way stations on the journey. But I can't agree. I think reincarnation makes no sense if the end is foretold. I can't emphasize this enough. None of my arguments makes sense if the end is known. I think it is precisely because the end is unknown that human terror sits at the root of every theology, as it has for millennia. It is so difficult for humans to accept the likelihood that this world is as open and undecipherable, as chaotic, as wayward, as playful, as perverse, as unexpected as, in secret, we fear it is. I think this is what has driven any number of theologians to the notion that it has all been foretold, that the end has been granted to us. Such conclusions are not only philosophically untethered, even outrageous, but have gotten us into all sorts of trouble because a foreordained end narrows our lives, shrinks our thinking, and tends to bring out the worst in us. We become addicted to quick judgment concerning others, even as we cling to a partial optimism in which we only half believe.