GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

192. What's On Our Mind- The Many Faces of God and Self: Discovering the Divine and Personal Identity

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Have you ever wondered how there can be one God and so many different religions? Join Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin as they explore this intriguing question many have pondered.

Scott and Jerry discuss the problem of the diversity of revelations and explore the manifestations of God across different cultures and religions as complementary rather than contradictory. Drawing from Jerry’s enlightening book, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, Scott and Jerry explore the richness of God’s nature, mirroring the diverse ways we understand ourselves.

Scott and Jerry explore the frustrations of being misunderstood and relate these experiences to common misconceptions about God’s nature while embracing the multifaceted essence of God.

Discover how our actions towards others reflect God’s presence in our lives and explore the idea of a more anthropomorphic God who actively engages in our lives. This episode is made for today’s interconnected world!

Follow along with future episodes and get your copy of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher here.

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Scott Langdon 00:17: 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 192.

Scott Langdon 01:14: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, your host, and it's time once again for What's On Our Mind. This week, Jerry and I talk about how we all have different aspects of ourselves, different sides of ourselves, that are seen by different people in our lives. It's exactly the same with God and how God shows up to human beings in a personal way, both through culture and to humans directly. We also discuss the trouble we can sometimes run into when we go looking to find our true self as if it were somehow hidden from us. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you will too. Here's what's on our mind. I hope you enjoy the episode. 

Scott Langdon 02:08: Welcome back, everybody, to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, I'm here with Jerry Martin, and this episode, this edition of What's On Our Mind, is chock full of a lot of really good stuff.

Scott Langdon 02:22: This unit of episodes that we are looking at right here focused on episode number 19. God Explains How All Religions Exist and man, throughout history we have been asking this question, how can there be one God and all of these religions? And if you go to episode 19, right off the bat, the beginning, the very first question is if there is one God, why are there so many religions? But God says that the problem of diversity of revelations, that's what it's been known as the problem of the diversity of revelations. God says that's not really a problem at all. And, Jerry, I found this so interesting when we were making this episode and when I first got these chapters of the book and really kind of dug into them, because this has been a question on my mind ever since I was a little kid in the Lutheran church and wondering how is there Lutheran and Catholic and you are this, and that, it didn't seem to make sense. What God says to you is really fascinating.

Jerry L. Martin 03:32: Yeah, yeah, it's always as I think I say maybe somewhere, that one revelation is a blessing. Many revelations is a problem, because then you wonder, oh well, then I thought my revelation was true. You mean, there's another one, and then another one, and then another one? And God has turned the tables on that. No, you might call it a richness, but it's also a closer approximation to reality, in other words, God, the divine reality, let's call it, because not every face of God is the personal face. There are impersonal aspects to the divine reality. That comes through in God: An Autobiography, and many religions who we think of as theistic acknowledge that aspect, that there's a kind of transpersonal aspect to divinity, and ones we think of as not having a personal aspect actually do have a role for gods or something very much like gods, bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition, for example, and so these are different aspects of the divine. So that's the kind of the theological shocker, but also the good news, because, well, we just have to… I kept saying, “But they say different things. They say different things.” God says to me repeatedly, “Think less either/or and more both/and.” and I know in a little clip I was praising that you did, Scott, you summed it up very nicely, as people know you in different venues. You know you're an amateur boxer, for example. Well, those people see a different aspect of Scott Langdon than someone who sees you in a kind of comedy on stage or you know, than your neighbors and your best friend with whom you do, who knows what, and your musical side, a different Scott Langdon. But they're all you, they're all you and it would be, somebody would have to be pretty limited in their horizons if they couldn't accept. Oh, you mean there's more than one Scott Langdon? Scott Langdon has multiple aspects or is different in this situation than in that situation, and yet it's the same Scott Langdon. Well, we all know in ordinary life that is not a puzzlement at all. That's one of the most basic facts of being a person is you have many aspects and the different venues call out different aspects. In fact, different aspects are needed for different venues. The aspect of Scott you tap on stage has got to be different from the aspect you're tapping when you're just walking with your dog, right, you know where you're not on stage, not performing.

Jerry L. Martin 06:25: So anyway, that's true of God and we can learn about the cultures and how God came to the cultures and the religions and what aspects of the divine God showed through those religions, and an issue all the way back to ancient times, Herodotus discusses it as he writes about all the neighboring kingdoms and the gods they believe in. He thinks they're all calling Zeus by a different name. That's his way of taking that phenomenon in.

Jerry L. Martin 06:57: But in our day, with a shrinking globe, internet, you know, I just find myself, sometimes to my own surprise I'm talking to somebody in Singapore or something you know, interacting with them online, that, and especially in America, a nation of immigrants, the different religions are practiced by our co-workers, by their worship places are all gathered in the same town and blocks within blocks of one another. And this is a question for our age and that's one reason I have often felt God: An Autobiography is a revelation for our times and would have been much less relevant, much harder to grasp, even not to understand what the questions are, wouldn't have quite been present 50 or especially 100 years ago. But here they are now and here we are now.

Scott Langdon 08:02: Now we talk about things and we ask questions like what is our true self? I'm on a quest to find my true self. It's not this self yet, and when I do find my true self, then my life will begin. We're waiting for this true self to be revealed and it’s daunting in this day and age because there are so many facets, so many aspects of ourselves and others being shown to us and being taken in by us. You know, compare this to let's just go 100 years ago that you could be away from the world, so to speak, very easily. You know, maybe if you didn't pick up a newspaper, if you didn't, you know, turn on a radio, you didn't know what was going on for a long time and you could say well, we could do that now, we could just shut down. But we really can't, because this is how we live now, this is how we go to the market, this is how we, you know, pay our bills, this is the way. So it's a way where everything is so immediately available.

Jerry L. Martin 09:12: Yeah, and it is an almost chaotic world because of the different news sources, different entertainment sources, different communications. You get in these loops on Facebook or Instagram, or I sometimes hear from people on LinkedIn and so on. There are so many of these venues where people are there for different purposes. Some segregate themselves off around either an interest or a point of view or something which tends to fragment the culture, and so that's a problem, and so okay, but I think on this question of you know, who am I really? Who is God really? That is a somewhat misconceived question. There's obviously an issue there or people would not be asking it. They're responding to something, and I guess one other way of… The problem is with the- what is my real self? Is you're treating yourself as if there's some hidden self, but, as you pointed out in that nice little clip that I'm praising, no, they're all you. Here you are, here you are. Who is the real self? This is Scott's real self.

Jerry L. Martin 10:32: And the moments where you wonder whoa, I've been pulled this way and that way because I've moved quickly, sometimes almost too quickly. What do you get? Like the bends from submerging too quickly, so you jump from one to another. Whoa, wait a minute. I'm losing track, but I guess an alternative way one might try on, see if this works in one's thinking is it's really more a question about integration. How do these different roles that are all me fit together? How do they weave? You somehow need to have them woven together, even though in many ways they're completely disparate, and you can't just be the same as you move from one role to another, to another. You'd spoil every role you're in if you did that. But you do need some sense of coherence or integration or synthesis or something like that that holds these together.

Jerry L. Martin 11:37: Because in a way I often think about the concept of agency. In a way there's a kind of agency behind them all. It’'s, you know, who's deciding to accept this role in a play? Who's deciding, oh, I'll go boxing tonight. Who's deciding, oh, I'll take my wife out to the movies tonight. We'll go to dinner, I'll bring something home, I'll talk to the neighbor, I'll walk my dog.

Jerry L. Martin 12:01: Who's deciding all those things? Well, there is an agency behind them. And I think we often, maybe people, tend to neglect their own agency sometimes they feel pushed by social circumstance from one thing to another. Maybe people are inviting them to things and they feel they have to say yes to everything they're asked to do. But you need to come back and revisit. Okay, what sense am I making of how all these parts of my life fit together and of the decisions I'm making with regard to whether to accept this, that or the other assignment or group to join or way to spend time? How am I going to make sense of all that for myself?

Scott Langdon 13:31: God says something really interesting and shocking, almost especially to you who you're a philosopher, logician, and God says listen, get more anthropomorphic. God is saying when you think about Me, think about and try to put more human characteristics to Me, that way you can know, you can think about what kind of person I must be in order to relate to humans. And I thought about that. I thought, yeah, that's strange, it's as you say, it's opposite of what the big thinkers tell us to think. And yet, if God is a person, then what are you going to look to, what are you going to use to describe a person? Anthropomorphic adjectives. And when I think about characters that I play and most of the time they're human, and if they're not, then they're anthropomorphized animals or whatever it might be, but it's still like what is the human characteristic that I can get into to do this character, to perform what this character performs? So when God says get more anthropomorphic and imagine what it must be like to be Me, and then He goes on to talk about what do people want? And you say you know, we want to be loved. Yes, yes. And He says I want to be understood and taken in. Yes, God says that's what I want. I want people to listen to Me and I want them to take Me in, and I want to be understood.

Scott Langdon 15:29: It is so difficult to be misunderstood and boy howdy, that struck me super hard. That is probably my deepest social anxiety. Hang up of all time is that I'm not being understood, and it has sometimes morphed itself into some narcissism where, if you disagree with me, I'm just thinking well, you just didn't understand. I didn't make myself clear enough. Like whoa Scott, hang on, that's no, no, no. But that desire to be understood, to be- did I make my point? Do you understand what I mean? We say that all the time. We yearn for that, we long for it, and when someone connects with us yeah, I understand what you mean. Oh man, that's it! Right? And so if that's what God is like, I can imagine that. 

Jerry L. Martin 16:25: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's so fundamental. We have many desires, but fundamental is the desire to be a person in the eyes of another person. The personal is interpersonal, I'm told in prayer and God: An Autobiography. The personal is interpersonal, meaning you can't really actualize, you know, flourish, manifest as a person unless someone notices you're a person and recognizes you as a person. And fundamental to that is to kind of understand what you're up to.

Jerry L. Martin 17:03: I had the experience in my years in Washington. It's a big power city and people would understand what I was, my behavior sometimes in terms of oh, Jerry is trying to maneuver for this kind of power, and they often had what I thought was so superficial, an idea of power like having more people in his work unit at any age. Who cares? But they would interpret my behavior that way and I would find that frustrating. No, I'm trying to make an argument for something I think would be good to do, not just good for Jerry or power or something, but good in terms of the mission of the agency, serving the public in terms of bringing the humanities to light. And that's very frustrating to have someone fundamentally misunderstand you, and of course you look at God in these terms.

Jerry L. Martin 17:57: What's the history of religion when an awful lot of the history of religion is of people trying to understand God as a kind of magic worker, as that rescue helicopter? Oh God, do something for me. And if you don't do this one thing I want, then you're no good and I'm going to both hate you and stop believing in you. And so that's just one of the misunderstandings, the other that comes out in this context of the diversity of revelations if someone understands you, Scott, only in terms of your amateur boxing, that's a pretty limited understanding of Scott. It's real Scott, but it's a very limited understanding. If they think that's all there is to Scott, or if anything else you do, like walking your dog or being in a role, they interpret that as a version of Scott the boxer. You know they kind of radiate that one little idea over everything.

Jerry L. Martin 18:59: Well, think how much God has that problem that people see God only through their religion. If they become kind of open-minded and knowledgeable, take a world religions course or read a world religions book, they think, oh, here are very interesting things, and so forth. But if they're kind of rock-ribbed in one thing that my way or the highway then they're going to distort all of those. They can't understand any other face of God. They understand only one and they reject the others as either false or they reinterpret them in light of their own set of beliefs. Of course the atheist does that too, and so forth. This isn't unique to religious people, but it's a human tendency. But that's one of the things that to take in a more comprehensive reality, we have to be more open than that and take in the many aspects of the divine self.

Scott Langdon 19:58: To get really literal. In some of the religions and I'll just take Christianity for an example, because it's my upbringing in the language that I have. Jesus says things like when you do good things for the least of these, you're doing them for me. And growing up I took that to mean that if I were doing it for giving food to a hungry person or poor hungry person, that that person was sort of standing in for Jesus. Almost like an understudy, like Jesus isn't here right now, but if you do this for Jesus, you can do it for me. You know that's, he'll be my substitute.

Scott Langdon 20:52: But I feel like, in light of what God talks about, about being a person, God says to you look at what kind of person I must be from my interactions with human beings. Now, if God is again, if God comes to us, that kind of language, God comes to different people, God comes to different cultures. In my mind, growing up and until recently, and I still have a little difficulty with the both/and of this, but I'm starting to settle down into it, but that notion means that God is somewhere else, absent from here, and came to us. God was out there, came here, but we've already and God has already said that's not entirely true, because I am the essential nature of everything. I'm the essential nature of everything. So if everything is God, this language of God coming from somewhere else has been difficult, and we've talked about this a lot before.

Scott Langdon 22:03: But what if we took God as a person and how do I look at the aspects of a person without looking at the person? So if I can't quote unquote see God physically, I can certainly look at the poor person who I'm feeding, but it's not a substitute for God. The essential nature of that poor person who needs food is God. So God is showing up to me in that way. God came to me as this poor person that I am now feeding, or whatever the story might be.

Scott Langdon 22:47: So if I'm waiting for God to come to me physically, you know kind of thing, I don't have to wait. Your neighbor is…are you doing things for your neighbor? Then you're doing things for me. But it doesn't even have to be that, not even that it is look at yourself, take care of yourself. If God is the essential nature of everything, God is the essential nature of you as well, and so you are a starting point, a place of focus for God. So I just find it really interesting when God says get more anthropomorphic, that God is really like dig into what human beings do, how they struggle, how they think. Look at yourself, think about what you think is important and wonder about and struggle with. God is doing that. God is doing those things right, along with us.

Jerry L. Martin 23:51: Yeah, yeah, you know one of the first things I was told in the book, because I ask in irritation, if you want us to know You, because I'd just been told human recognition is the essence, or something like this is the essence of My being. What? And then so I ask in an irritated way, “Well then, why are You so hidden?” You know, if you want to be recognized, why are you so hidden? And God's response is, “I'm not hidden. You see me all the time.” And I sort of do that. This is very early in the book and all this is new to me.

Jerry L. Martin 24:26: And I remember I was at a cafe and I looked around trying to see the divine and if I really relaxed I could, oh, take in things a little more, you might say in their just presence, rather than as forks and knives, things to be used, you know, for our purposes. That was about the closest I could come, and I thought of Martin Buber saying thou to nature, which doesn't really mean saying hi, how are you to nature, but it means recognizing some independent integrity and presence there, and that was about as close as I could come. But God's presence is more vibrant than that and it's more the—I don't know if God uses the term essence, essential reality, but it's the primal reality everywhere and yet has this completely personal aspect. Often those seem so different. How can the, you might say, the universal surround, the God that is here and there and everywhere in the air, we talked at one point about somebody looks in the closet, you know, kind of doesn't find God. Well, God's in the air, in the closet, in the darkness, in the closet. There's nowhere God is not. And yet God also has an intensely personal aspect, has desires, things God earnestly wants, and a lot of those are things God earnestly wants us to do. God even has…

Jerry L. Martin 26:12: I don't know if regrets is the concept used exactly, but God seemed to be some kind of suffering that I sensed at one point for God's own incompleteness. Because God is evolving in interaction with us and had to learn things. And the whole story of the Garden of Eden is interpreted in those terms, the whole evolution of the stars and the planets and the Big Bang is interpreted. God kind of finding whoa, where am I, what's my role? And then people come along and that role becomes oh, and the Chinese experience me as a kind of cosmic harmony. And God says and I discovered that is a side of my nature and this happens to all of us.

Jerry L. Martin 26:58: I mean, for a lot of young kids they learn that they're funny because they find it in class in high school. Other kids laugh at their antics, others don't do anything that anybody laughs at, so they have comic talent. And so these sides of ourselves come out in these situations and especially in interaction. It's often you feel, when you make a close friend, part of that close friendship is often well, this person is seeing me in a way I never quite saw myself before and is understanding me in a way, nobody's quite understood and often, until they understand you, you can't quite understand yourself. Oh, yeah, yeah, they say things back to you oh, you know you're this kind of person, and they say, oh, really, yeah, I think you're right. I never noticed that. So a good friend who understands you is very helpful just for your own self-manifestation, your own self-understanding.

Scott Langdon 28:13: 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.