Does GOD Exist?

Everything you act out is predicated on your implicit axioms and the system of implicit
axioms that you hold as primary is your religious belief system - it doesn't matter whether
you’re an atheist or not that's just surface that's just surface noise.

So, it has nothing to do with divinity or dance or it doesn't necessarily have to do with those?
[no it probably necessarily has to do with it too but it doesn't necessarily have anything to do
with your voluntarily articulated statements about whether or not you believe in something
like a transcendent deity]

So, I mean what you act out is much more what you are than what you say about yourself and
what the hell do you know about what you believe anyways? you're complicated, man! - well
seriously people are complicated you know like we're we don't - we're not transparent to
ourselves at all that's why we have that's why we have to go to university and study
psychology it's like you know we're not exactly black boxes but we are the most complicated
things there are right now and we can't even program our VCR clocks so it's like how the hell
can we propose to understand ourselves and you know -
I'm existentially oriented which is to say that I think that what you hold to be true is best
determined another as a consequence of an analysis of your actions rather than as a
consequence of an analysis of what you purport to believe.

Now in order to act you can't act without a hierarchy of value – which I tortured the other
poor questioner about; you can't act without a hierarchy of values because you can't act unless
you think one thing is better than another because why would you act otherwise so that means
that you're embedded within a hierarchy of values whether you know it or not or maybe
multiple fragmentary and competing hierarchies of value which is all the worse for you by
the way because it just makes you very confused.
That hierarchy of values [has an axiomatic structure] it's based on axioms and the
probability that you understand them is very low [because generally people don't understand
their axioms] but that axiomatic system is essentially your religious system and there's no
way out of that as far as I can tell.

And you can say well it isn't predicated on conscious belief in a transcendent deity it's like
okay have it your way but you know most people in this room act out a Judaeo-Christian
ethic and not only do they act it out if they're treated in a manner that's not commensurate
with that ethic they get very, very, very annoyed - so for example if I fail to treat you as if
you're an embodiment of a divine fragment (προσωποποίηση ενος θεικού θράυσματος) let's
say that's characterized by the ability to make free choice and to determine your own destiny
in some sense or if I fail to treat you as if you're a valued contributing member of the polity
as a sovereign individual then you'll find that very offensive and become angry it's like okay
then that's what you believe well if I ask you if you believe any of that well that's a whole
different story you might give me some radical leftist nonsense but that doesn't change from
what you that doesn't take away from the fundamentals of your action!

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HIERARCHY OF VALUES  [based on a set of AXIOMS – it is an Axiomatic System]
 This Implicit System of Axioms that hold as primary is your religious belief system 
Whatever you act out on this world is predicated on this belief system [the Judaeo-Christian
Ethic  that is why if someone fails to treat you as if you're an embodiment of a divine
fragment let's say that's characterized by the ability to make free choice and to determine
your own destiny in some sense or if I fail to treat you as if you're a valued contributing
member of the polity as a sovereign individual then you'll find that very offensive and
become angry!]

Jung’s perception of the GOD idea  the highest ideal that a person holds – either
consciously or unconsciously – that’s their GOD. It functions in precisely that manner.
The Greeks thought we were the play things of GODs because we serve LUST, THIRST,
HUNGER, RAGE! And all of these things transcend us – that’s why they were
conceptualized as being GODs! Rage – the WAR GOD [Άρης]. Why is it a God though?
Well, because it exists forever; it exists in all people; it takes them over and directs their
behaviour – It’s a GOD.
And you can argue about the details – no it’s not a god or whatever. In that case then,
farewell, it is a psychological force that drives your behaviour!
We have to think about what this idea of GOD means! We had that idea forever – it isn’t just
some superstition. You have to be more sophisticated than that… That is what I think is
unfortunate about the new atheists – it’s that they don’t take the damn problem seriously.
They think Christianity = just a bunch of Superstition. Really? Really, though? NO – that is
just not deep enough…

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Dostoevsky said straightforwardly if there's no God - so if there's no higher value let's say - if
there's no transcendent value, then you can do whatever you want and that's the question that
he's investigating and you see this is why I have such frustration say with people like Sam
Harris - this sort of radical atheists, because they seem to think that once human beings
abandoned their grounding in the transcendent that the plausible way forward is with a
kind of purist rationality that automatically attributes to other people equivalent value
It's like I just don't understand that they believe that that's the rational pathway - what the hell
is irrational about me getting exactly what I want from every one of you whenever I want it at
every possible second? why is that irrational? and how possibly is that more irrational than us
cooperating so we can both have a good time of it?
I don't understand that. I mean it's as if the psychopathic tendency is irrational - there's
nothing irrational about it it's pure naked self-interest - how is that irrational? I don't
understand that…
Where's the pathway from rationality to an egalitarian virtue? why the hell not every man for
himself and the devil take the hindmost? It's a perfectly coherent philosophy and it's actually
one that you can Institute in the world with a fair bit of material success if you want to do it
so.

I don't understand Dawkins and Harris – the universe they inhabit is so intensely conditioned
by mythological presuppositions that they take for granted the ethic that emerges out of that
as if it's just a given - a rational given in this of course precisely don't Nietzsche observation
as well as Dostoyevsky's - that's Nietzsche's observation  you don't get it - the ethic that
you think is normative is a consequence of its of its root of its nesting inside this
tremendously lengthy history much of which was expressed in mythological formulation
you wipe that out you don't get to keep all the presuppositions and just assume that they're
rationally axiomatic – that they're rational.
To make a rational argument you have to start with an initial proposition. Well the
proposition that underlies Western culture is that there's a transcendent morality. Now you
could say that's a transcendent morality instantiated in the figure of God – that’s fine  You
could even call that a personification of the morality if you if you want to if you if you don't
want to move into a metaphysical space - I'm not arguing for the existence of God!! I'm
arguing that the ethic that drives our culture is predicated on the idea of God and that you
can't just take that idea away and expect the thing to remain intact mid-air without any
foundational support.

Now you don't have to buy that but if you're interested in the idea then you can read
Nietzsche because that's what he was trying to sort out and it wasn't only Nietzsche who
came to that conclusion it was many people have come to that conclusion but I think the two
who've outlined that most spectacularly were Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and each is an
unbelievably influential philosopher you know I don't think there was any one that was more
influential during the entire course of the 20th century. [excepting a very tiny handful of other
people excepting the scientists we won't bother with their with their discussion you could put
Marx in that category you could put Freud in that category partly but after that the list starts
to get a lot thinner…]

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Well so then the question might be – what's at the bottom of the idea of a transcendent value?
And I want to wanted to approach that staying out of the metaphysical domain as much as
possible because you can claim anything you want from a metaphysical perspective and that's
a big problem - and so people will say well, why come up with a hypothesis of God for
example, God could be anything for that matter…
But Solzhenitsyn drew the same conclusions that Dostoevsky did fundamentally - not in
exactly the same way but very close. He believed, as far as I could tell, that unless people
were willing to adhere to some sort of transcendent value that they had no protection against
pathological ideologies and no protection against the murderous impulses that came along
with them - and I found his work in unbelievably I found it incredibly powerful. I don't know
how you can read that book and not draw that kind of conclusion - I think people who
criticize Solzhenitsyn, actually have never read the damn book, because that book is like it's
like going into the ring with Muhammad Ali and being pummelled to death for half an hour
lol - you know you don't recover from it that easily!

So, then Jung branched off of Nietzsche because Nietzsche's idea was that people would have
to create their own values roughly speaking and I think that's where Nietzsche's is at his
weakest because it isn't obvious to me that people can create their own values – [now I don't
want to be a casual critic of Nietzsche because that's always dangerous given that he probably
had an IQ of 260 you know I mean he was away the hell out there in the stratosphere and just
when you think you've understood what he was talking about you can be bloody well sure
that you didn't!] It does seem to me and he was running out of time he died young you know
and he was trying to solve this problem in a rush I would say. What he hypothesized was that
people would have to become Superman / Overmen roughly speaking in order to deal with
the death of God and that idea sort of branched off into Nazi propaganda because that's in
some sense what the Nazis were trying to do with their promotion of the of the perfect Aryan
- you know now it's a misappropriation of Nietzsche in my estimation and it was partly
because his sister who is a perverse creature what would you say doctored his work in such a
way so that it was more easily appropriated by the Nazis - but there is some danger in what
he said too because you know the question is well if you're going to transform yourself into
the into the giver of values what stops you from inflating yourself into something like a
demigod and just pronouncing what the values are going to be? S o, that's a problem you
know you're gonna replace tradition with yourself well there's dangers in that because
there's nothing to keep you humble! That's the most appropriate objection there's nothing to
keep you humble and those things can spiral out of control very rapidly and they did say in
the case of Hitler!

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HITLER:
I mean it's easy to blame what happened in Germany on Hitler but that's a that's a big mistake
because it was a dialogue between Hitler and the German people. Hitler didn't create
himself - it was co-creation he said things people listened and told him back what to say and
then he said them and they listened and they told him back what to say and it looped until he
was the mouthpiece of their darkest desires. Now that's a game he was willing to play but
you can't think about that as it is like Hitler created Nazi Germany. NO - Hitler and the
Germans co-created Nazi Germany - you know when a leader gives articulation to the
imagination of the population, that's what a leader does and you could say that whilst maybe
Hitler filtered what the Germans were telling him through a particular lens because he had no
shortage of resentment and desire for revenge in own heart. You know - it's not like his life
was a spectacular success before he became a political activist.

He was brutalized very badly in World War one and he didn't get to pursue his primary dream
which was to be an art student in Vienna and he had applied three times and got rejected all
three times and so he was bitter about that. He was basically living on the streets after World
War one and of course he wasn't the world's happiest person and I'm sure he carried a fair bit
of resentment in his heart when he was in the trenches in World War one - in one experience
that he had all of his friends were killed by a mortar when he had wandered off to go do
something else. So, it's hard to even imagine what something like that would do to you, but I
can tell you when you're the only survivor out of 20 people that's also going to give you an
enhanced sense of your own specialness because the alternative is just to think about how
goddamn arbitrary the universe really is!

Also, he was high in Conscientiousness – Orderliness  High in Disgust-Sensitivity 

Highly Disgusted by Jews – he wasn’t afraid of them – he was disgusted by them! – and this
can easily be seen in his lectures, when he talks about them.

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There is a principle at the heart of Western Civilization and it's older than Christianity and is
older than Judaism, although Judaism and Christianity developed it to a great degree the Jews
especially with the prophetic tradition and the Christians more with the metaphysical idea of
the word. And so, the idea is – is the idea of the logos and the logos is also the root for logic
and the logos means something like coherent interpersonal communication of the truth and
from an archetypal perspective it's the action of the logos that extracts order from chaos and
that’s really the meaning of the first chapter of Genesis - and it's an old idea it's embedded in
Mid-Eastern mythologies that may be tens to hundreds of thousands year old and the idea is
that what being is a chaotic eviction and the way the human beings interact with each other
and make the inhabitable, habitable is through articulated truth - we make order with
articulated truth and then we inhabit the order. The order is the negotiated social agreement,
that we've all come to so that we can live among each other without tearing each other to
shreds (which is what chimps are doing).
So, we have to negotiate a social order and we do that with the use of articulated speech.
What Christianity did is to take that proposition, which was derived partly from the
Mesopotamians partly from Jews and partly from Egypt, and turn it into a symbolic doctrine.
So, they invented the figure of Christ, which is the ideal man from an archetypal
psychological perspective (image of the ideal – the ideal is the word made flesh and what this
is, is the instantiation of the logos into a body so that it’s acted out in the world –
fundamental proposition of the western culture and we will NOT survive without it…).
We cannot survive without this. That is partly what Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn meant
when they were talking with the Russians – they said: ‘Look, the proper course of Russia
development is to return to Christian Orthodoxy and to develop it forward into the future!’
This is a very difficult thing to do, since the fundamental Christians (most dogmatic
Christians), cannot distinguish between their truth planes and the truth planes of
science! They tend to think, for some reason, that the truths that are embedded in the
mythological structures are of the same type as scientific truths – and they are NOT!!
Scientific Truths are descriptions of what is. Mythological truths (religious truths), on the
other hand, are descriptions of BEING – and guidelines of what ought to be. Now, there’s
two things you need to know about the world – one being what IS (objective world – facts
etc…) and the other one being WHAT YOU SHOULD DO ABOUT IT – and that is the
primary existential issue (How to act in the world?). Well, the religious doctrine is about the
world as a place to act – is not about the world as a place of objects (that is the job of
science). And there is no contradiction between science and religion, except that we don’t
have the philosophical discrimination to distinguish between them! Now Heidegger started to
do that with his analysis of being – but without using the Christian framework. Carl Jung
tried to do that as well (student of Freud and Nietzsche). Nietzsche said ‘God is Dead and we
killed him and we will never find enough water to wash away the blood’ [science killed God]
 He predicted that millions of people will die in the 20th century as a consequence of the
ascendance of communist ideology (at 1880!!) – and Dostoyevsky knew the exact same thing
and predicted it in his book the Devils!

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We have no cornerstone in our culture – we oscillate from the radical right (hyper-order) to
the radical left (hyper-chaos); we’ve got nothing to keep us central… And what keeps people
central, whether they know it or not, is the Logos – they just don’t understand what it means.
The thing about the philosophy that is instantiated in Jungian Psychotherapy – it requires
personal responsibility above all else… [and people will choose the nihilistic option over
responsibility (meaning – infinite responsibility for every choice) any day].
What do you mean by GOD?
Part of the conception of God that underlies the Western ethos is the notion that, whatever
GOD is, it is expressed as the truthful speech that rectifies pathological hierarchies. But that
is not all it does. It also confronts the chaos of being itself and generates habitable order––
that’s the metaphysical proposition, and is best conceptualized as at least one element of
GOD.
So, I would think about it as a transcendent reality that is only observable across the longest
of iterated time frames to your point of being.
Here’s some propositions, which are complicated and need to be unpacked:
1. God is how imaginatively and collectively represent the existence and action of
consciousness across time, as the most real aspects of existence manifest themselves
across the longest of time frames, but are not necessarily apprehensible as objects in
the here and now.
[So, what that means is that you have conceptions of reality built into your biological
and metaphysical structure that are a consequence of processes of evolution that
occurred over unbelievably vast expanses of time and that structured your perception
of reality in ways that wouldn’t be structured if you only lived for the amount of time
that you are going to live AND that’s also part of the problem of deriving values from
facts, because you are evanescent and you cannot derive values from the facts that
portray themselves to you in your lifespan]
2. God is that which eternally dies and is reborn in the pursuit of higher being and truth.
[this is a fundamental element of hero mythology]
3. God is the highest value in the hierarchy of values.
4. God is what calls and what responds in the eternal call to adventure.
5. God is the voice of conscience.
6. God is the source of judgement and mercy and guilt.
7. God is the future to which we make sacrifices & something akin to the transcendental
repository of reputation.
8. God is that which selects among men in the eternal hierarchy of men.
[This is a nice one, specially tailored for evolutionary biologists!]
[So, you know men arrange themselves in hierarchies and then men rise in the
hierarchy AND there exist principles that are important that determine their
probability of rise & those principles are NOT tyrannical power. Rather, they are
something like the ability to articulate truth (in the service of higher-order goods) and
to be competent; and to be able to make appropriate moral judgements; AND if a man

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is able to do all that, then he will be voted by other men to rise at the top of hierarchy
and that will radically increase his reproductive fitness. The operation of this process
across long expanses of time looks to me like it’s codified in the notion of GOD as the
father.
So, this process (the rising of men on the top of dominance hierarchies) operates
across tremendous expanses of time and plays a role in the selection of survival itself,
which makes it a fundamental reality.]