19. God Explains How All Religions Exist | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher [Part 19]

"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." 

Welcome to 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.

Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

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Transcript

Season Two - Episode Nineteen

 GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST
 
JLM -       Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon
 Jerry -     Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
 GOD -    The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice


JLM

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...

GOD

There is 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.

JLM

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, and also about how they should live.

JERRY

Lord, why not just give everyone the whole truth?

GOD

Your question has presuppositions--that I have 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. Names shift but that is superficial.

JERRY

Perhaps each religion is like a single eye-witness 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.

GOD

Not exactly. It's not to blend the religions into a single synthesis or theology. It's to put them into one story.

JLM

I didn't see how to put the pieces into any kind of story.

JERRY

I'm not getting anywhere, Lord.

GOD

Get more "anthropomorphic." Look at what kind of Person I must be from My interaction with man.

JLM

Get more anthropomorphic? What a thing to be told! It is just the opposite of what the Big Thinkers tell us to do.

GOD

The story begins with creation, the evolution up to life, animals, early man. 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, interact, more fully and at a higher level. This communication is somewhat possible with early man, who recognized My presence in nature, 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

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.

GOD

Yes, it is. They were understanding Me well enough to understand that life has 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

Please go on, Lord.

GOD

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, a better way to put it, as humans hear it, process it, and articulate it.

JLM

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.

GOD

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

JERRY

But only individuals receive communications.

GOD

Just listen for the moment. I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways. Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction 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

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?

GOD

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking, "What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?" but start with Me and ask, "What am I doing with that culture, individual, art form, or whatever. What is it to Me?" Pray and I will tell you.

JERRY

Why is culture so important?

GOD

That's like saying, why language? If I am going to communicate with people, they need a language. For the same reason, they need a culture.

JERRY

They need a culture, but why such a variety of cultures?

GOD

There are many ways of realizing (actualizing) the human story. Culture enables lives of different (types of) significance (meaning).

JERRY

But why, in terms of Your story?

GOD

I need to 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 seventh-century Chinese? to Americans today? to you? 

JERRY

So any single conception of God will grasp only one of Your aspects?

GOD

Yes, you see the problem. My nature is quite variegated. People see one aspect and not another.

JLM

I wondered how many aspects there were to God.

(Music)

JLM

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:

GOD

Indeed, in a sense, no story of man's interaction with God is a success story. However, that is only half the picture. There is also enormous success, both individually and at a larger cultural level.

JERRY

Wouldn't it help if I had some sense of the overall direction of the story?

GOD

It is too soon to really go into this. Let Me just say this. It is not progressive (simply); it is paradigmatic, iconic. Do not look for one thing (one religious phase, for example) to build on (or) advance on a previous stage. Look for iconic moments in which something unique is realized. These are breakthrough moments. Think of it like an author's oeuvre: a sonnet here, a tragedy there, a comedy, a play that achieves one set of insights, another achieving another. 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.

JLM

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.

GOD

To some extent, the desire for a direction is a product of human attachment to will. People want the satisfaction of getting somewhere. Step back from will (willfulness) and you will see it differently, and (that it is) like first learning music and then studying French.

JLM

Okay, it is good to learn, say, French after studying music, but that does not mean that French is superior to music.

JERRY

But, Lord, I thought Your story didn't move randomly from one moment to another but to higher levels of development. Is that wrong?

GOD

No, not at all. I have evolved, developed, like a child born into a new life. The learning for man is also a learning for God. But much learning has the pattern I have described rather than a precisely developmental one-stage-leading-to-the-next quality. As you develop My story, this will become clearer.

(Music)

JLM

One day I learned more about God's story when I asked simply, "Where should I begin today, Lord?"

GOD

Start at the beginning.

JLM

I felt drawn into God, once again at the Creation.

JERRY

Lord, we seem to be at the point where the world has been unfurled and life begins.

GOD

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

Yes, I do, Lord.

GOD

Ask yourself what I am looking for.

JERRY

Love?

GOD

Well, yes, but what is love?

JERRY

Interaction, communication, understanding?

GOD

Yes! I long to be recognized, to be understood, and then to be taken in.

JLM

I wondered why a great being like God would need to be loved by mere mortals.

JERRY

Why does that matter to You, Lord? You've got it all, just being God.

GOD

That is silly. This is what I am. I am like a function looking for a variable. I am only half the equation.

JLM

I looked for a humbler analogy.

JERRY

Like cement looking for bricks to hold together?

GOD

Okay.

JERRY

Is that connection only what You need, or is it also what the world needs?

GOD

Both, obviously. In your analogy, the world is like the bricks that need to be held together.

JERRY

But, Lord, I sense that Your yearning is not just an incompleteness, like needing a pair of gloves. It feels like a craving.

GOD

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.

JLM

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.

GOD

Don't be so frantic. You are writing this down fearfully, rushing in hope that you are 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

Yes, Lord. But, You see, it all sounds quite ungodlike, undivine to me.

GOD

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

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 subjectivize the surrounding world, as it does in interpretation, and, even higher, to encounter another subjectivity.

GOD

Yes, Hegel is very insightful on this score, not so much from his understanding of God, which is limited, but from his understanding of the human dynamic and of the dialectical nature of thinking. But I am not working out a dialectic. I am not a sublation of a sublation.

JLM

That is Hegel's jargon for stages of the dialectical process.

GOD

I am a Person, searching for . . .

JERRY

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.

GOD

You are right to be puzzled. It is not just looking for company. Perhaps speaking of loneliness is misleading. Why does a human being look for love? It is not just for company. That is 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 recognize 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. You know that, because you have experienced it. Imagine how puny your love is--not to belittle it, but just for comparison--compared to Mine. What is barely ontological or molecular in your case is fully so in Mine. 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. 

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

Aren't these stages progressive then? Don't they move upward?

GOD

That is not a helpful question. Let Me go on. The telos of the world is both immanent and transcendent. It is immanent in the sense that the seeds of love are planted in the world itself, in the human heart, in people's animal nature itself. That is the driving force of sexuality, which has an analogue 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 in 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.

Remember that love is what fully actualizes a thing. A person comes into full personhood only in a loving relationship, in loving and being loved. That is true of the whole world, and of Me as well. If you go back over our prayers and your readings with this in mind, what do you see? You see My drawing the physical world toward life, and drawing life upward to greater possibilities of love; to creating man and drawing him people into loving relationships with his their fellow creatures, with nature, and with Me; to developing people into social relationships that are richer and on more stable grounds. Consider the invention of the hearth, of a home, of passing on such things as property, traditions, and values from one generation to the next, of coming to care about great-grandchildren one will never see.

JERRY

Lord, where do we go from here?

GOD

Let's go to China.

(Music)

(The End)Season Two - Episode Eighteen

 GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST
 
JLM -       Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon 
 Jerry -     Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
 GOD -    The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice