Scott Langdon 00:00: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 182.
Scott Langdon 01:08: Welcome to episode 182 of God: An Autobiography, the Podcast, I’m your host Scott Langdon and this week on the podcast Jerry Martin and I share What's On Our Mind. At first, the idea that loving someone can turn into a very significant form of idolatry might not make sense, how can you go wrong with loving someone? In this week’s episode, Jerry and I dive a little more deeply into what it means to have God really love us and what the implications are for human loving relationships, as well as our individual relationships with God. If you'd like to share your story of your relationship with God, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us an email at questions@godanautobiography.com. Here, now, is What’s On Our Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon 02:02: Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, I'm with Jerry Martin again, as usual, and this week we're going to talk about a couple of episodes that we've just gone through. And, Jerry, I want to start with this unit'sFrom God To Jerry To You. It's episode 178. Does God Really Love Us? And you ask the question right away and you even address it. You say, listen, this is a question that might sound strange away and you even address it. You say, listen, this is a question that might sound strange, it might take you back a little bit. But look, does God really really really love us? We hear that in all kinds of religious traditions God loves us, God is love, even is talked about. But does God really love us? And we know that there have been a lot of philosophers, even theologians, who have said you know, God isn't capable of that kind of thing or whatever it might be. But you addressed a lot of this in that episode and I was fascinated by it. Does God really love us?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:58: Well, it's kind of shocking in one way, because you read some of these high theologians, like the great Saint Anselm, who's the one who formulated the idea that theology is faith-seeking understanding, which is like the perfect definition of theology, faith-seeking understanding.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:16: And yet when you read him, he has trouble with the concept that God loves us. And the reason he has trouble is that God is too perfect to love us. God is eternal, unchanging being of some sort, and love is, for one thing, it's an emotion, and they thought a perfect being wouldn't have emotions. That's just, you know, your body reacting to events or something, the way fear is or hunger is, and God doesn't have feelings, and so God can't actually love us. He concludes, but thankfully he says God brings it about, that it feels to us like love, and I comment in that episode if I learned about Abigail, she doesn't actually love me, but she arranges it with magic pills or something so it feels to me like love I would be profoundly disappointed. But so that– Hence the question: does God really, really, really love us? And my answer is yes, and part of that answer is well, God is a person, you know, who loves. Well it needs to be a person.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:35: My computer doesn't love me. We have a microphone here that doesn't love me. My desk doesn't love me. I may love them, you know, my favorite chair or whatever, but my chair does not love me. It's an unrequited love. So it takes a person.
Scott Langdon 04:57: It takes a person to have it go both ways, if you will. The relationship is both ways. So you can have someone intending love towards someone else and someone receiving that and feeling good about it and wanting to reciprocate. So you give back and it becomes this two person thing. So obviously it's a relationship. So if God is in some kind of relationship with us, then God must be capable of love. You have to at least start with the idea of two, which for me you know how I have difficulty with duality, so that notion anyway, if God is a person and I can accept that and I can say, okay, well, let's go with this notion that God is a person, then God must be capable of loving, because that's what persons do.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:54: Yeah, that's almost, you might say, a definition. Or if you were to unpack the definition of what a person is. A person is in part, I'm told this from God to Jerry, the personal is essentially interpersonal. To respond to other persons is what a person is, you might say. And what are the basic responses, person to person? The most fundamental, you might say, is love. Otherwise we're just bobbling around in the water adjacent to one another. But it's love that creates the ties, that's the basis of family, society, community, shared commitments and goals and so on. Underneath all of that is this deep caring for each other which, at its ultimate form, is love. The ultimate form is love.
Scott Langdon 06:48: We think about how we might love our pets and how our pets might love us, or how animals might love other animals. We anthropomorphize animals all the time in our storytelling and everything else. But it does seem that you can't love, I can't love my dog Watson in the same way that I would love another person, another human. There is communication there of some sort between my dog and me where I might you know he is hungry and so stares at me until I figure out that he wants me to feed him or go out or whatever. And you know, I tell him things and pet him, and so it feels like we have this relationship and we do, but it's not a personal relationship because there's not this intention, meaning at a different level. I don't know if I'm articulating this right or how I mean, but it's a different level.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:49: There is something very special, certainly, about love between people and communication between people. I don't have a view about animals. The people who study animals a lot would tend to anthropomorphize them more, you know, not because they see them as like little people running around, but because they think they have their own intellectual, emotional lives and intelligent modes of communication that are quite rich. But again, I've read people saying that, but I don't have a personal feel for it. I've never owned a pet, as you have. Laura Buck, who works on our team for this podcast, I think it was the first dog she's ever owned and I forget its name, but she says it's a very wise dog, she takes it to be an old soul and she says I have learned so much from this dog.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:50: Well, I don't. Again, I haven't had this experience. I haven't had your experience, Scott. I know when you have got something to think about, you and Watson go for a walk and you probably talk out loud to Watson whether Watson gives you feedback. Abigail is going today to ride a horse and the place she goes, she finds out what's on her mind and the horse gives her a response, and horses have the advantage, compared to people, of being very truthful. So the main thing they notice is if you're talking baloney, you know if you're making a bunch of stuff up. So anyway, I just don't know about the level of animals, but I do report those facts, you might say.
Scott Langdon 09:39: Well, isn't it safe to assume that if God is everything, then we can imagine that our animals do love us and that we do love them? There's no question that Watson and I have a very specific and definitive kind of relationship. If things go the way they normally, go Watson will likely pass before I do and I will grieve him and you know all of that very real, emotion, the real grief all of that happens in the world and so there's certainly a relationship there.
Scott Langdon 09:30: The idea of God being able to really love us and in fact, does really love us and is with us all of the time, leads into what we had next as an episode, which was replaying episode 17, and that's where God tells you what really happened with Adam and Eve.
Scott Langdon 09:50: The episodes are titled I Learn What Really Happened With Adam And Eve. And God gives you this vision of, or this understanding, or communicates to you the story of Adam and Eve that's different than the one we find in the traditional way of seeing it, in the Old Testament, for example, but in it, God, it first of all says there wasn't really a garden and it's not two people the way you know, it's that's– let's leave the factual kind of thing away. But as we get into what humans and proto-humans and they first started to connect with God, God is surprised at first and you're shocked about that. You say the development of humans is surprising, and He says, yeah, in a way, it kind of was. I'm creating, I'm creating, and here's this creation that is now responding to me in a way that all of the other creation has not responded. What is that thing that makes it different that now, oh, you’re responding. This is responding different than everything else. What do you think that was?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:42: Well, that's described and I don't know how it fits with the various animal stories, what I was alluding to, but, those steps are actually told. Part of it has to do with language coming about.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:12: An animal gets capacity not just to make some marks or whatever, but the marks actually mean something. And once things mean something, meaning comes into the world. And with meaning, well then you have a sense of time, not just what do I want now, which is how you would think of Watson as wanting, being hungry and coming and nudging you to provide some food but we can make plans that are 10, 20, about our grandchildren even. We can think longitudinally and have purposes, and with purposes come norms and ideals and values you know, and the ability to say well, this didn't work out because I made this mistake. So you can appreciate values achieved, you can note values not achieved, or even you know this neighbor, seems, is a bad person. You know, stealing my chickens or something is a bad person.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:06: So that's the change. Now suddenly and I think God puts it almost in this again, kind of literalistic language, man can look at me, eyeball to eyeball. Something's going on in man's mind/head, looking at Me or thinking about Me or communicating with Me. And of course I communicated with God by praying. It was a prayer of thanks, it was a one-way communication at first and then God responded that's in the very first or second episode, and so that's what it is to be a person you can respond you might say fully to God and to another person.
Scott Langdon 14:25: So in this new way, humans are responding to God in a way that none of the other creation has done and those steps that it took to get there over time. And so here we are, developed, and then God talks to you about Adam and Eve, specifically that story. We kind of focus in on the human, male and female, and what was going on. And God, you know, talks about making adam and how the other creatures they just weren't right. Well when Eve was made, Adam sees her as right for her. Yeah, this is right, this is a good mate. And now we have a third. We have Adam, Eve and God, and the way God talks about the fall, if you will, is not so much that Adam and Eve sinned and broke the rules, but they were going with their human desires and what it means to be human and left God out. That still seems a bit vague, like this idea of if God is us, then how could God be a third? But we can see that when Adam now is focusing on his mate, that we can feel how that might seem to them to hide from God or leave God out. What was God's point of view on that?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:03: Well, I think that you know there's a key distinction. I don't know if it's quite made explicit in God: An Autobiography, but just thinking about it, there seems to be a difference between, it is alluded to, a difference between what I call the ubiquitous presence of God. God is everywhere and in fact is everything and the differential presence of the divine, where God says at certain moments I'm with people more, and that might be at a moment of death or birth or transition like marriage, or tragedy or worship. It could be celebrating a religious ritual or singing religious music. Ajit and his missive to us talks about dance, for example. So these can be ways of experiencing the divine in a different mode than just the ubiquitous presence. You know that God is everywhere. One time Scott said, you said, a guy who wrote us couldn't find God anywhere and it was like an empty closet. You said maybe God was in the empty closet and you said maybe God was in the empty closet. God was the empty closet. So there's that ubiquitous sense. Okay, that's great. God is everywhere. But that's not quite the same as this differential presence.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:30: And God, at one point, tells me something like you are a kind of embodiment of Me, a particularization, something, language of that sort of Me, of God. The God you encounter is, in fact, a particularization of Me. And I never tried to overthink these things. Okay, how am I going to conceptually map this? In spite of my being a philosopher and having a tendency to think that way, I just thought well, let's just take it in, you know, and then go with it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:07: And God told me at one point don't try to figure everything out. In fact, don't think, as I tended to, why that can't be true. Try to think how it can be true, you know. Try to get your mind to the point where you say, oh, oh, yeah, now I see it. If you think of it this way, or if I can get my mind to that point, or accept a kind of metaphor. Sometimes it's the images you're using. You've got to break through to understand something. Okay, so it's a little puzzling. The God who is everything is also highly differentiated into particulars, and there's you and me, and there's the frog in the pond and nature abounding in all these wonderful, marvelous particularities of every single plant and flower and creeping moss. Whatever you want to talk about, it's just abounding in rich forms of reality, life and things that aren't alive or things that are semi-alive, like coral reefs and stuff. It's just abounding in realities At the same time the behind it all is God or Brahman, or whatever you want to call the ubiquitous divine.
Scott Langdon 19:48: In episode 180, we had Abigail, your wife, Abigail Rosenthal Martin, on and it was a wonderful discussion and you talked about episode 17, and I thought it was great to have her on board for this particular episode of Adam and Eve. And the reason there were many reasons, but one of the reasons I think was great is that the whole reason that you had this encounter with God in the first place is because of your love for Abigail and you have this prayer to thank God and can I be of service? I mean, it's what love inspires us to do, to do things, to be of service. So having her on made all the sense in the world to talk about how God wants to be present in Adam and Eve's relationship and how they think they're hiding. They think they're, you know, but what is it that really going on there? And Abigail talks about and you ask her, her love for happy endings, happy endings in movies and everything else, and why that's sort of necessary to want to pursue.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:05: Yeah, of necessary to want to pursue. Yeah, I think her sense of that is when she deeply holds that life is a story, a nonfiction story. It's a drama, it's an unfolding and it's just the nature of a story- what animates the story? Desires! And here I'm speaking on behalf of kind of Abigail's understanding of things. I've encouraged her to write more about this because she has a very unique insight in this area that I just listen to you might say and try to resonate to in terms of my own understanding and experience. But what drives the story is desire, and she has the deep view that people need to be very much true to their desires and that's why I know you mentioned this in one discussion, I think, of this episode she said we have to honor the grief. Is that right? Is that the expression? Something like that you go through a bad time and she says don't deny it, that's not truthful. Your desires are being disfrustrated, maybe spoiled, maybe obliterated. Maybe the person you love most in the universe just passed away. Maybe they passed away not painlessly but in a tragic way. Don't deny it, live through it. She says, and I'd never heard her before say honor it, and I don't know how she would explain that, but I guess when I think about it I think well, you know, the suffering in life is not meaningless. This is, you know, how do you learn? How do you become a deeper, more mature person?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:46: I mean, I know someone who has been on some of our programs who just went through the most tragic thing I could imagine. Midlife. He fell in love for the first time, but a happy bachelor, and then whoa, falls in love. Well, that's good too, that's even better. And they buy a house and so forth, and within like 18 months she suddenly dies with no preexisting condition, no warnings, no, nothing. Well, I just thought I don't know how you survive such an event. But he is surviving.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:26: And the last time I saw him I thought, ah, he'd always seemed like the eternal boy. You know, kind of had a youthful energy even into middle age. Well, he has more gravitas now. There's a new depth, a new maturity. That isn't necessarily better than the eternal youth, but what would be?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:51: Nevertheless. It is a kind of development and it's a new, richer, deeper, more mature, more profound person they often feel, when you're talking about some public figure, that the suffering they went through gave them a depth they wouldn't have ever once had. They now understand the suffering of others, and that's an important human trait. You know, if you've had a blessed life, you may not even quite understand the suffering of others. Oh, their suffering. You know.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:22: That's how it happened to the young Buddha when he first asked to– He grew up a rich prince, but asking the guy can you take me out around so I can see what's going on? Well, he sees people sick and decrepit and dying, their funeral. And whoa, he had no idea because he led this totally sheltered life. And of course, this is how, step one in his becoming the Buddha was seeing the depths and range and diversity of human suffering and thinking, whoa, what can we do about that, what is the solution to this problem? And that led him to contemplation and enlightenment.
Scott Langdon 25:20: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.