Richard Lloyd Jones: Welcome to Episode 16 of the Modern Relevance of God podcast series on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Our second to last episode in this series. We've been attempting here to make the scientific case for the relevance of a more theological consciousness in our everyday lives. I've been impressed with the idea Dr. Joseph Gogassian elaborated in the preface he wrote to Keppe's glorification, that if we have religions in the world, this must be because of a metaphysical dimension in us.
Worshiping is natural to the soul, he wrote, and not something imposed by institutions. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been so practiced through the millennia, long before we built churches to formalize the ceremonies. This goes deep to the nature of faith, then, and the acknowledgment that anyone acting morally or ethically is doing it out of a belief that it's important, regardless of whether the moral practitioner is a member of any congregation or not.
And what is faith, anyway? Fidelity to the truth, goodness, love, beauty, for one thing. Although our relativism muddies the waters with questions about who defines the truth and who has the final say on beauty, Keppe describes faith as the direct knowledge of the essence. And you have to have a metaphysical view of a correct and initial beautiful reality to grasp that abstraction, not an emergence from the primal mud and alterations over mutations in time.
That latter won't arrive at any satisfactory conclusions for understanding the big religious questions that percolate in all of us, irrespective of dogma or belief. Faith provides the answers that reason cannot achieve by itself. Tennyson wondered about that. Stray son of God, immortal love, whom we that have not seen thy face by faith and faith alone embrace, believing where we cannot prove, that great poet wrote.
Now, I recognize that the show-me-the-money practicalists listening might bristle at that, but I take heart that, anyway, you're still listening, and that indicates another level of acceptance at work than just the gray matter between the ears. I've been there and put together this episode to try to address those tendencies of painting, spirituality, and religion with the same brush. Let's distinguish them in this episode, again with Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco.
Cláudia Bernhardt Pacheco: Society, in the beginning, was totally unified. So why to separate things if everything is one? So, as universals, as we are, we should have an universal interdisciplinary thing because everything is in resonance. Everything affects everything. So, there is nothing which does not affect another component. The universe is in vibration and all vibrations affect each other. It's a whole. It's integral. You cannot split.
You cannot separate. You cannot analyze a phenomena without considering the other elements which are in resonance with this one. It's resonating with the other parts and belonging and absolutely integral. And to understand a phenomena, you have to understand everything that is around and the universal laws.
Richard: So you talked right at the beginning, and maybe we should just go to that for a minute, because that's very different from what we learn in our traditional science.
In the beginning, everything was complete and beautiful. That's not what we're learning right in terms of yeah we come from the the mud and then we become amoeba that join together and then we become
Cláudia: a monkey and then a human being.
Richard: So in the beginning is is perfection. There was there was a
Cláudia: time and this is metaphysically completely different from our scientific view today.
So all the beings in themselves are totally pure beautiful truthful complete integral and evil or sickness is the absence or the distortion the aggression the destruction of what is integral and what is complete. This is what
Richard: we get them when we rejoin true theology with science instead of this reductionist view that we come from little particles. We have a the other idea that we come. How can
Cláudia: you analyze a human being splitting? Like if we don't have an interdisciplinary point of view focus, we will never understand a human being. Because anything or everything is connected, interconnected, in in relation to each other.
This
Richard: changes everything about how we see the world, how we see ourselves. And
Cláudia: you know all the religions understand that. All the religions, not only judaism, not only the bible, but also other perspective, see the human being as a spiritual being, not only physical, but mostly spiritual. So all religions, all philosophies. But you have to consider that something is religion and churches and institutions.
And another thing is spirituality, because spirituality is something innate in humans. Every human being is spiritual, no matter where he's born. And this has already been verified by many anthropologists, psychologists, theologists, philosophers, that there is this tendency or this inner ethical aspect in human being, which is the search for a higher purpose, the purpose of life, and that there is some higher being controlling or feeding or giving life to other creatures.
They may even be a sort of penteistic, seeing a huge force in the universe and not a being. But they know, and all of us know, that we are not the creators of ourselves. And this is what is the difficult part of our situation. We are not the creators of ourselves. Here we are, we have been born someday, and our grandparents and grand-grand-grandparents, One day they were born, and they were not born out of their own option or choice or will.
So there is a higher force controlling everything. And this notion is so strong that if we deny this, we go to a mental hospital.
Richard: You're seeing this as one of the sources of mental disease.
Cláudia: Yes, absolutely right. Dr. Keppe saw theomania or the mania of being godlike, being our own creation or the creator of our own life and our own truth and being like above God sometimes.
You may even be a believer and be a religious person and be very, very theomaniac. Like above anyone, above everything, above the truth and being the owner of the truth and the arrogance is the biggest characteristic of Lucifer. He knows there is God, but he doesn't accept it. So this is arrogance. The spiritual need of humanity is present in all peoples, in all colors, all races, all times.
So this is beautiful because Keppe arrived to a point where religions could be unified under the same understanding of God. God is one. So God should be the one of everybody. And not split into this or that religion. And what Keppe arrived is really a universal viewing God and understanding God.
Richard: And the difference that Dr. Keppe would make and you might make between spirituality and religion is what?
Because when we start to talk about this science with theology, people start thinking that we're religious fanatics. And so we need
Cláudia: to take that out of the equation now. Spirituality is
Richard: not religion, but religion has spirituality. Yeah,
Cláudia: spirituality is this natural tendency and one of the strongest essential components of human being. And religion seems to include some specific beliefs and dogma that people follow, linked to their culture, to their social historical evolution and experience.
So many people form a church and they go to that church to perform religious rituals.
Richard: Those religious rituals.
Cláudia: Those specific rituals that belong to an institution. So it contains much more particulars in that. So when we speak about spirit, we understand more universal ideas and feelings. And when we talk about religion, we speak about more particulars. So at that time, in that time in history, that person, that prophet or that person specific wrote that book.
So you go for that book. So there are more particulars. Particulars. And theomania comes here to make things more difficult, because then each religion says or claims, I'm the owner of the truth. So the truth is in my religion, not in your religion. So this creates enormous friction. It's even worse than fighting about politics. Particulars, and theomania is very much applied to particulars, because we can only fight around particulars, not around universals, because universals are universals.
So what do you understand? About a universe is the same thing that I understand. Like, for instance, peace is good. Peace is necessary. Peace is a good thing. And people, theomaniac people, start fighting. No, war sometimes is necessary. In order to have peace, you must make war. So this is all about theomania. All about theomania. We know that peace is necessary. Only demons and crazy people Live out of the necessity of having a war and destruction and killing people and suffering and all of this impede the development of civilization.
Richard: It's a wonderful antidote to the idea that war brings development, isn't it? It seems that the warmongers and perpetrators of crime amongst us are really out of reality in the sense of reality that Dr. Pacheco was laying out in that class. You know, I've been watching the Israeli TV series Fauda on Netflix recently and struck by the greeting that guerrilla warriors call out to each other upon meeting.
May peace be with you. Ironic in a series that presents the problems between Israel and Palestine as unsolvable, relentless, a cycle of violence without end. Without this uniting in the universality of spirituality and spiritual beliefs, we really are doomed to fight endlessly about the particulars. Well, we'll try to bring all this together into a new vision for spirituality in the next century, in our next and last episode.
