How DO We Get to God, If At All?

Define God. There is the problem. If you COULD define God, then the definition could be translated to language, and the language could e translated to algorithms, and the algorithms would be programmable in any standard computer, or “Turing Machine”.

The discrepancy, however, is unavoidable. “I” am “disconnected” from what exists because there is an unbridgeable gap between “me” and “everything else”. It is axiomatic that “I exist” or “I am”, and it is also axiomatic that “existence exists”, but even as part of all that exists, “I” am separate from “you” and all other “yous” on the planet.

Hoffer, in the opening page of The True Believer, quotes Pascal, in Pensees:

“Man would fain be great and sees that he is little; would fain be happy and sees that he is miserable; would fain be perfect and sees that he is full of imperfections; would fain be the object of the love and esteem of men, and sees that his faults merit only their aversion and contempt. The embarrassment wherein he finds himself produces in him the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults”.

What we desire is generally not equal to what we are. We are “deficient” in our perception. There exists a discrepancy between our desire and the current state of things. If we look at this in terms of the usual concept of religion and “sin”, we have just created a perpetual condition of disequilibrium between our desire and what we are, and there can be no reconciliation. We may have just found the source of the need for religion.

Just below the quote from Pascal, Hoffer adds a simple statement from Genesis 11:3:

“And slime had they for mortar”.

If humans organize and congregate, they tend to seek elimination of all “discrepancy”. They will seek patterns of behavior that both define things in common for themselves, and separate them from that which is “other”. Several terms may fit this desire:
1.Religion
2.Anthropomorphism
3. Narcissism
4. Altruism

The base of all the above terms may actually come from a more recent phrase of Richard Dawkins:

The genetic replicative algorithm.

As Hoffer has pointed out, it is not the “content” of the various holy causes and movements, but a certain “uniformity” that permeates all of them no matter the content, whether Christianity, Communism, Fascism, or nationalism.

If there was a near fanatical desire to organize and “spread the word” of unification, McLuhan points out that it was the alphabet, which allowed “tribal’ man to escape the limited confines of tribe and become part of a universally extended humanity based on the standardization of print technology, and which allowed “civilized man” to perceive space itself as uniform and continuous as needed for geometry and calculus.

The development of geometry, as the result of the linear and continuous power of the alphabet, allowed humans to define “universal” relations within space that were derived from axiomatic foundations, via Euclid. The linear, continuous, uniform, homogenized space created by the alphabet allowed Western man to organize rapidly while ignoring the near infinite differences that may have existed between man and man.

For the first time since the first man said ‘I am”, the alphabet, geometry, and uniform continuous space allowed Western man to bridge the gap between ‘self” and “other”. All of humankind could be perceived as existing within the uniform continous space called existence, and could increasingly interchange ourselves within that near measurable existence. We could not only add ourselves, one at a time in “massive agglomerate of power”, but each person could retain enough of “self” to select and control the exchange of differences, and to become interchageable in our lifestyles.

This, in fact, was a strategy extremely compatible with the working of the genetic replicative algorithm.

As Leonard Shlain points out in The Alphabet Versus The Goddess, both Christianity and Islam took on a fanatical power of conversion when both religions were printed in a book, one called the Bible, and the other called the Koran. The uniformity and standardization of both Bible and Koran, aided by the Gutenberg press, became fully consistent with the expansive replicative power of the genetic replicative algorithm. Both books were based on the uniformity, interchangeability, and standardization of replication useful for the genes. Both books allowed humans to organize in such a way as to reduce the differences between them, giving greater control of the genes to replicate within a “fixed’ environment. Both books allowed the main religions to develop “franchises” which were nothing more than a metastasizing themselves into other cultures for reduction to a singular uniformity.

Western man had become “cancerous” in the sense stated by Slater , quoted in an earlier essay. If “conversion” brought a sense of peace and “atunement” with everything, it was because each person, once separated by an inconsolable loneliness, was now a part of a “greater reality”, a satisfying reality that embraced all humanity and made them one.

Nothing could have been more useful to the genetic replicative algorithm. To seek oneness, atunement, atonement, and unity just “feels right”, and it “feels right” because it satisfies the deepest needs of our urge to reproduce.

If the alphabet brought geometry to ancient Greece and created universal, axiomatic representations of spatial truth, the Koran, with its emphasis on the same linear, standardized repeatability, launched a new mathematical renaissance in the form of math and algebra, along with Arabic numerals. The strict, linear, interchangeable controlled, and digital representation s of time and space were useful for the rapid expanse of the human genetic replicative algorithm.

Everything literally became subject to conversion: conversion of men to one true religion, conversion of more and more energy into organized systems, conversion of energy itself into useful functions for civilized man, and even conversion of ourselves into mechanical representations in the form of Artificial Intelligence. Everything, including our very physical forms, could be converted to quantum mathematical representations.

However, this representation of the ratio of the senses always brought greater awareness of that which was different. Socially, this typographic extension of humankind had its drawbacks, and they were not pretty. Hoffer wrote of the contradictions that occur as we seek peace and harmony through unification:

“…when we renounce the self and become part of a compact whole, we not only renounce personal advantage but are also rid of personal responsibility. There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and vain stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual in dependence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom–freedom to hate bully, lie, torture, murder, and betray without shame and remorse.”

When we “renounce the self” in service to a cult or mass movement, we serve the interest of the genetic replicative algorithm, because or lives become subject to the corporate whole of the uniform system. If OUR lives are worth little as individuals, the lives of other groups will be worse little as individuals. From this springs the capacity for all out, collective warfare. From this perceived discrepancy between “self” and what is ‘desired”, there comes the need to “convert’ to coerce, to proselytize, and if necessary, to kill that which is not and never can be “self”.

Hoffer continues:

“When we see the bloodshed, terror,and destruction born of such generous enthusiasms as the love of God, love of Christ, love of a nation, compassion for the oppressed and so on, we usually blame this shameful perversion on a cynical, power-hungry leadership. Actually, it is the unification set in motion by these enthusiasms, rather than the manipulations of a scheming leadership, that transmutes noble impulses into a reality of hatred and violence. The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The torture chamber is a corporate institution”.

genes, wrote Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, cooperate in ” cartels” to build bodies.

“What really happens is that the other genes of the gene pool constitute a major part of the environment in which each gene is selected versus its alleles. because each is selected to be successful in the presence of the others–which are also being selected in a similar way, cartels of cooperating genes emerge.”

Within these cartels emerge cooperating systems that tend to resist change from other systems. Humans, as extnsions of that cooperative system, will form cultural niches that allow them to protect themselves from reproductive difficulties. From that emerges mating rituals, rites of passage, and many ceremonial practices to maintain sexual “integrity”.

The search for a “Universal Ethic” resulting from this expansion and homogenization merely expands our war-making power to national levels, and drives us to acts of intolerance in a society that sets tolerance as its ideal. The more we seek harmony, the more discrepancies we discover, and the more discrepancies we discover, the more we seek to eliminate differences, which will mathematically become an infinite process.

The simple fact is, you can’t get “there’ from “here”, because the very nature of information is to demonstrate differences between the desired and the present state. “God” is NOT part of our organizational capabilities.