Scott Langdon: 0:17: 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 189. Welcome to God: An Autobiography the Podcast. This is episode 189, and I'm Jerry Martin.
Scott Langdon 01:22: This week we turn our focus to episode 19. God Explains How All Religions Exist. It's in this episode that God explains to Jerry that what has been traditionally known as the problem of the diversity of revelations is not actually a problem at all. In fact, God tells Jerry to get more anthropomorphic and imagine what kind of person God must be for his interactions with human beings. God explains that He grew as a self in response to the interiority of others and wanted to communicate more fully.
Scott Langdon 01:53: Next week's episode is a return to the Life Wisdom Project series, and Jerry welcomes back as his special guest, our good friend Mikhail Sergeev, to talk about this new revelation, about revelations. So this week we bring you episode 19. God Explains How All Religions Exist. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dramatic Adaptation: God Explains How All Religions Exist
Jerry Martin - voiced by Jerry Martin
The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice
Jerry Martin 02:16: If there is one God, why are there so many religions? Philosophers call this the problem of the diversity of revelations, but I was told
Voice of God 02:38: There's no reason to think the diversity of revelations is a problem, any more than for a therapist to say different things to different clients whose needs and situations differ.
Jerry Martin: 02:52: That analogy didn't take me very far. The therapist, like a doctor, is giving advice depending on the needs of the client. But God is giving different people contradictory stories about Himself, also about how they should live.
Jerry Martin: 03:09: “Lord, why not just give everyone the whole truth?”
The Voice of God 03:13: Your question has presuppositions that I've given different, incompatible stories to different cultures. This is only apparently true If you think them through. They are different pieces of the same puzzle.
Jerry Martin 03:30: Perhaps each religion is like a single eyewitness report of some strange event such as an alien landing. The reports might be wildly different from one another. The challenge would be to sort them out and put them into a single coherent account.
The Voice of God 03:47: Not exactly. It's not to blend the religions into a single synthesis of theology, it's to put them into one story.
Jerry Martin 03:57: I didn't see how to put the pieces into any kind of story. I'm not getting anywhere, Lord.
The Voice of God 04:04: Get more anthropomorphic. Look at what kind of person I must be from my interactions with human beings.
Jerry Martin 04:14: Get more anthropomorphic? What a thing to be told. It is just the opposite of what the big thinkers tell us to do.
The Voice of God 04:30: The story begins with creation, the evolution up to life, animals, early human beings, then to the very ancient communications that require language and memory. As I have explained, I grew as a self in response to the interiority of others and I wanted to communicate more fully and at a higher level. This communication is somewhat possible with early human beings who recognized my presence in nature and in life and also heard, if somewhat dimly and inchoately, my other promptings, such as conscience, the sense of right and wrong, fine sensibility, appreciation of nature and beauty, love amongst creatures and mystical union.
Jerry Martin 05:26: The next phase is what I wonder about. It looks to me as if you communicated some sense of moral order and hierarchy, reverence for life and death, a sense of the meaning of life. I am feeling that this is your voice, not mine, Lord.
The Voice of God 05:46: Yes, it is. They were understanding me well enough to understand that life has a meaning, a beginning and an end and the sense of a meaningful movement from one to the other, summarized, judged, reckoned at the end. Death and the hope of immortality, which isn't merely the fear of death but the understanding that there is a vertical dimension to life and that its meaning does not stop with death, that there is a larger story the individual is part of and his and her spiritual development, in fact, is not limited to just one life.
Jerry Martin 06:24: Please go on, lord.
Voice of God 06:26: My presence in a person, when felt, results in awe, conscience, appreciation of beauty, humbling before the cosmic order, and so forth. Don't think of My relations to people as tapping out telegraph messages that already have a precise meaning. I understand My nature better as I articulate it, or, better way to put it, as humans hear it, process it and articulate it.
Jerry Martin 07:05: Is this the key, then? Not so much God's trying to communicate something specific, as people themselves responding to some aspect of the presence of God.
The Voice of God 07:22: I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures and the like.
Jerry Martin: But only individuals receive communications.
The Voice of God: Just listen for the moment. I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways. Do not assume the only interaction I have is the same I have with you. With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions, cultures, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms.
Jerry Martin 08:00: Why is culture so important?
The Voice of God 08:02: There are many ways of actualizing the human story. Culture enables lives of different types of significance and meaning.
Jerry Martin 08:11: But why in terms of Your story?
The Voice of God 08:14: I come to people in all their particularity, not to mankind as such. The Chinese is one way of being, the primitive is one way of being. I come to each in its own terms. Each enables me to show a different side of myself.Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the 7th century Chinese, to Americans today, to you?
Jerry Martin 08:40: So any single conception of God will only grasp one of Your aspects.
The Voice of God 08:45: Yes, you see the problem. My nature is quite variegated. People see one aspect and not another.
Jerry Martin 08:57: I wondered how many aspects there were to God. I had never read the Bible cover to cover before. When I got to the end of the Old Testament, I told Abigail, “This is not a success story.” Over and over, the people of Israel lapse into faithlessness. When I prayed, I was told:
The Voice of God 09:39: Indeed, in a sense, no story of human interaction with God is a success story. However, that is only half the picture. There is also enormous success, both individually and at a cultural level.
Jerry Martin 09:56: Wouldn't it help if I had some sense of the overall direction of the story?
The Voice of God 10:02: It's too soon to really go into this. Let me just say this, it is not simply progressive, it is paradigmatic, iconic. Do not look for one thing one religious phase, for example to build on a previous stage. Look for iconic moments in which something unique is realized. These are breakthrough moments. Not everything meaningful has a developmental pattern, not even a meaningful story or history. Imagine a tale in which first the hero acquires courage, then wisdom, then compassion.
Jerry Martin 10:39: I take it that the hero is not moving up a scale of virtues. The opposite order, compassion, then wisdom, then courage would be just as good.
The Voice of God 10:49: The desire for a direction is a product of human attachment to will. People want the satisfaction of getting somewhere. Step back from willfulness and you will see it differently.
Jerry Martin 11:03: But, Lord, I thought Your story didn't move randomly from one moment to another, but to higher levels of development. Is that wrong?
The Voice of God 11:12: No, not at all. I have evolved, developed like a child born into a new life. The learning for human beings is also a learning for God, but much learning has the pattern I have described, rather than a one stage leading to the next quality. As you develop my story, this will become clearer.
Jerry Martin 11:50: One day I learned more about God's story when I asked simply, “Where should I begin today, Lord?
The Voice of God 11:58: Start at the beginning.
Jerry Martin 12:00: I felt drawn into God once again at the creation. “Lord, we seem to be at the point where the world has been unfurled and life begins.
The Voice of God 12:15: Yes, and that goes on as we have discussed. Don't you feel my loneliness, my searching, questing for something alive, yearning for interaction?
Jerry Martin 12:29: Yes, I do. Oh, Lord.
The Voice of God 12:33: Ask yourself what I am looking for.
Jerry Martin 12:38: Love.
The Voice of God 12:39: Yes, but what is love?
Jerry Martin: 12:42: Interaction, communication, understanding.
The Voice of God 12:46: Yes, I long to be recognized, to be understood and then to be taken in.
Jerry Martin 12:52: I wondered why a great being like God would need to be loved by mere mortals. Why does that matter to you, Lord? You've got it all just being God.
The Voice of God 13:03: That's silly. This is what I am. I am like a function looking for a variable. I am only half the equation.
Jerry Martin 13:13: I looked for a humbler analogy, like cement looking for bricks to hold together.
The Voice of God 13:20: Okay.
Jerry Martin 13:21: Is that connection only what you need, or is it also what the world needs?
The Voice of God: 13:27: Both. Obviously. In your analogy, the world is like the bricks that need to be held together.
Jerry Martin 13:37: But, Lord, I sense that Your yearning is not just an incompleteness, like needing a pair of gloves, it feels like a craving.
The Voice of God 13:43: Yes, it is a deep internal dynamic that drives me forward to do the things I do. I unfurl the world and call forth life and send signals to people.
Jerry Martin 14:00: Sometimes words came so fast I could barely keep up, and some of my notes are little more than scrawls. Also, I sometimes rushed because of an underlying fear I was somehow just making all this up. I was trying to write it down faster than I could possibly have thought it up myself. God picked up on that.
The Voice of God 14:25: Don't be so frantic. You're writing this down, fearfully rushing, and hope you're not just making this up and that something will come up that looks insightful or profound. Relax and let Me tell you what I have to say, My story.
Jerry Martin 14:44: Yes, Lord. But look it just, it all sounds quite un-God-like, un-divine to me.
The Voice of God 14:52: Where do you get your idea of what's divine? What makes you think you know what it is like to be God? You wouldn't presume to tell a bat what that is like, just listen and feel.
Jerry Martin 15:07: The feeling that comes to me is Your desire to call into being a corresponding being. It seems a lot like the dialectic of self and other in Hegel. Subjectivity desires to objectify itself, as it does in artifacts, and to subjectify the surrounding world, as it does in interpretation, and even higher, to encounter another subjectivity.
The Voice of God 15:30: Yes, Hegel is very insightful on this score, but I am not working out a dialectic, I am not a sublation of a sublation.
Jerry Martin 15:39: That is Hegel's jargon for stages of the dialectical process.
The Voice of God: I am a person searching for…
Jerry Martin: That's what I wonder, Lord, I can't quite imagine what you are searching for. Just interaction, that seems too limited and, in a sense, too easy.
The Voice of God 16:00: You're right to be puzzled. Perhaps speaking of loneliness is misleading. Why does a human being look for love? It's not just for company. That's companionship, not love. You want to pour yourself, your concern, your destiny into another person and you want them to respond in kind, to understand and sympathize with and care about you and to share your life story so that “I” becomes “we”. And the result is not just good feelings or good times, it is ontological, it is virtually molecular. The constitution of the universe is altered by My love and My being loved. You can't just say God so loved the world. Love is a two-way street. Anything unilateral is merely an effort at love, not its fulfillment, not its achievement.
Jerry Martin 16:56: How does this relate to your story Lord?
The Voice of God 16:59: You could tell My story, one version of it at least, through the history of love. What has love meant and been over time? From Abraham's love for his wife and his son and his God, through the Ramayana and the compassionate Buddha and Jesus, and Plato's philosophy as eros toward wisdom, to Christian chivalry and Buber's I Thou, these are stages that reflect my development and my interaction with human beings and their developing response.
Jerry Martin 17:30: Aren't these stages progressive, then. Don't they move upward?
The Voice of God 17:35: That's not a helpful question. Let Me go on. The telos of the world is both eminent and transcendent. It is eminent in the sense that the seeds of love are planted in the world itself, in the human heart, in people's animal nature. That is the driving force of sexuality, which has an analog even on the molecular level. It is transcendent in that there is an outward pull toward the ideal, toward love of the highest kind. So there is the telos of the thing's nature or person's nature, pushing him or her forward, and the telos as an ideal and an object of love pulling him or her forward.
Jerry Martin 18:27: Lord, where do we go from here?
The Voice of God 18:33: Let's go to China.
Scott Langdon 18:59: 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 Jerry Martin. I'll see you next time.
