Bath Philosophy & Debate Group

The “awkward” subject of religion. Like it or not, our Western Culture is partly built on the myths associated with two Asian religions contained in the OT and NT. Most of us are now (probably) a second-generation of non-church-goers, and don’t consider ourselves even to be “cultural Christians” (like Dawkins does). Since Hitchens and Co. mounted their apocalyptic horses, many of us might openly declare to be atheists; certainly, as self-declared philosophers and rationalists, it’s hard to consider any other identity (agnostic perhaps?). Jung claims that it will take a long time before the Christian myths have been exorcised from our culture, language and thoughts. His take on religion was that if people take the myths literally, then they are missing the point; but he also warned against using our critical reason to throw babies out with our dirty bathwater. He agrees with Joseph Campbell that: religions speak the language of symbols; symbols are universal and timeless; and it is symbology that is the language of our unconscious. Whether you agree with those statements or not, it is clear that we humans look for answers and meanings in all kinds of symbols. We seem happy to find lessons of life and human behaviour in Greek Mythology, Medieval Poetry, Modern Fiction and Hollywood Movies, but turn our noses up at The Bible; Jung might say that such cultural avoidance of the Bible is some sort of inevitable enantiodromia. But we are debaters, so we can swim against the tide for a few hours. In his book Answer to Job, Jung psychoanalyses the relationship between Job and God, and we can ask what's the story; is there anything to be learnt; will it throw a different light onto those thin Bible pages; and will we overcome our distaste of Scripture and be more likely to engage it on a different level?

Jung exposes the dilemma that exists in Christianity whereby God/Yahweh is proclaimed as all-loving, yet (in plain sight) the Bible describes him as a liar and cheat, who is ruthlessly violent, vengeful, jealous and unconscious (or uncaring), and easily fooled by Satan (His son and Shadow). Not only that, His manifestation as man (or man-God), which we know as Christ is also ruthlessly threatening – Christ’s hand will be turning the wine-press at the Apocalypse (yes with us sinners inside!), and John (in Revelations) lists all the people(s) whom Christ “hates” with real vengeance! Furthermore, believers in God and Christ, assuming they are familiar with the scriptures, know this, but either push (repress) it to the backs of their minds or try to rationalise the inconsistency. Either way, they live in doubt and fear: doubt is the trump card of Satan, and fear of God seems well-justified.

Jung uses this story to highlight his own belief in the “split consciousness” that we all experience, and he can find plenty in the Bible to support this viewpoint. Here’s a reference to St Paul: ’on one side Paul felt he was the apostle directly called and enlightened by God, and on the other side a sinful man who could not pluck out the “thorn in the flesh” and rid himself of the Satanic angel who plagued him. That is to say, even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.’ This locates God in the unconscious, but doesn’t imprison the unconscious within the brain. We are “of two minds” and we better understand this (to become whole), rather than ignore one (the unconscious) in favour of the other (the ego). From the religious point of view - “on Earth below as in Heaven above”. The pleromatic drama and family squabbles of the gods are mirrored in human behaviour and history: but we can also state from the psychological point of view – “in Heaven above as is in our minds below”: and what our minds contain, we ought not ignore.

Jung’s analysis is about an immoral God becoming conscious of His actions and their consequences, through the eyes of Job – the most moral of men. Job represents the conscious mind and God the unconscious. From this Jung takes his analysis into the need for God to incarnate as man (Christ), in order to experience his own unconsciousness through the eyes of a conscious being. Ultimately, God’s psychology, and His psychological growth (or not) is a reflection of our own! The “crunch” (denied by the official churches) is that Jung concludes – God did not incarnate and then die for our sins, but He did so to repent for His own sin in treating Job so violently! Man needs to save himself from God's wrath, he does this by "evolving" God.