GOD AND REALITY

Of course, God created everything, or so goes the story but about its nature he remains opaque. He didn’t tell us much about how the universe works, and the bits he did tell, well, he got a lot wrong. We humans have a passion to understand reality and at least as far as we can understand it comes in two sorts, which we can call real and not so real. The former is somewhat easy; whatever can hurt you or make your body feel good is the first sort. If we call it physical reality, we understand that such things exist and we better pay attention or it will do us in. Believing you can fly is not a justification for jumping out of the hundredth floor of a tall building. Here, a bit of a caveat will help. This is not about an ephemeral sort of reality that comes down to a matter of opinion. It is not a matter of opinion that banging your thumb with a hammer will hurt like hell. Science is not a matter of opinion; we invented it because understanding reality requires considerable patience and observational rigor. Experimentation is nothing more a matter of observing reality, often with devices such as microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders, etc. and developing a way of understanding what we observe.

Living, staying alive and enjoying it requires the ability to figure out which reality is which avoiding the harmful and establishing the enjoyable. That’s the hedonic formula and it becomes tricky when it comes to giving up an available pleasure for a future gain. It is tricky to understand that while pleasure is good, not all pleasure is good for you. And, sorting those out is complicated by how our bodies manipulate us into doing that which is not so good for us. The last thing the alcoholic remembers is, “Oh, just one drink won’t hurt me,” in the face of all contrary evidence.

Sigmund Freud, the preeminent psychiatrist and inventor of psychoanalysis told us that it we have a mental construct, the ego, which works like the devil to keeps us alive by guiding us between the Scylla of desire and the Carybdis of restraint. But, he realized that more was necessary, hence he formulated the super-ego, the mental mechanism which provides templates for the good me and the bad me. Simple observation tells us that the ego is insufficient because it lacks standards of behavior. If a goal can be achieved by stealing, the ego only needs to determine if the deed can safely be done. You want money, be careful about leaving clues and avoid observation and you can have what you want. Society cannot thrive without internal rules of conduct; the function of morality, generally another invention of the human animal

serves that purpose.

Freud called the mental construct, which monitors desirable and undesirable behavior the super ego, one part of which is desirable goals for behavior, the other self-punishment when the standards are violated. We learn good me and bad me from our family, i.e. parents, sibs and relatives and we learn from them how to find a proper role in society. 

Freud hoped the super ego would do the trick but it became obvious that it does not, and considering our human nature, it could not. We are perfectly willing to put up with guilt, always self-induced, or failure to reach an internalized goal in order to satisfy our passions. (These are sometimes called “base” motives, but they are only ourselves seeking some gratification.) And, good old rationalization is always

available to establish plausibility for our wildest excesses.

What to do? Civilization seemed a train-wreck in the making, but a solution fell into hand. Humans found a much-admired leader who told us how to act properly and who punished us when we deviated from his laws. Like our parents, he wanted to embed his laws in our brains so that we would not need him in the future but he forgot our humanity. Adam and Eve ate the apple and the whole moral edifice toppled. Yes, God was both enraged and disappointed and kicked us into the real world of pain and suffering. God is our ultimate super ego given supernatural powers and depending on your version of that phantasied being, can raise cruelty to incredible levels. Just read the bible and you’ll see what I mean. The Ten Commandments express what God demands of us; breaking any one of them leads (presumably) to ugly consequences.

The holocaust occurred because found flaws in the European Jews worship of him. Hey, Hitler was God’s right hand man.

The problem with God as our solution is that the idea distracts from the problem: How can we act in ways which foster our well-being and which help us avoid disaster? Those are our real problems, but the more we turn to our super super ego the less we will accomplish. Try learning to change your behavior when you suffer from wracking guilt; guilt is an attempt both to gain forgiveness for past misdeeds and to keep us from repeating the crime. Forgiveness simply perpetuates the behavior; it is far better to figure out the source of the bad behavior so it can be changed. And, for sure, it is ugly to examine the truth about ourselves, but accepting it means accepting yourself . . . and you know what to work on. Super egos almost always cause us trouble and having to struggle with a supernatural super ego is quite a task. Of course, you can always say, “It ain’t my fault, the devil made me do it.” Hell, you can always find a sucker to fall for that line.