Richard Lloyd Jones: A listener asked me recently, why is it necessary to speak of God? We have to see this God, or whatever it is, in relation to all that is valid and workable in science, she went on. Well, I agree. Because whatever you call him, God, energy, the great spirit, the world is poor by excluding him. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head the relevance of God in our modern society.
And as I launch into this program, I'm fully aware of the heat this will cause in some circles. One of the distinguishing aspects of our modern society is the almost certain guarantee that if you talk openly about the need to introduce God into human affairs, you're sure to raise howls of protest and derision in many circles. God, it seems, is considered at best old-fashioned and quaint, as if talking about him suggests you're a child who needs the comfort of fairy-tale proverbs about miracles and salvation to help you sleep at night.
And at worst, like you're a dangerous Bible-thumping lunatic spouting biblical scripture in answer to any dilemma and leading any who follow into a mind-controlling cult. I feel this keenly whenever I enter into this subject here on Thinking with Somebody Else's Head. I'm a modern Canadian, after all, a baby-booming wasp raised with the requisite Darwinian scientific education. I remember well how I felt inside when listening to the religious people who came knocking on my door on Saturday morning.
I do believe, though, we have been fed a very distorted story about God. And that we're very out of touch with a meaningful understanding of God and the nature of man and the universe. To the point where we now have knee-jerk reactions that have nothing to do with reason when we face the issue. My colleague Sofie Bergqvist talked in our Thinking with Somebody Else's Head podcast Liberating Ourselves from Our Free Will about this.
When she told a story about an immigrant student in her Swedish high school who innocently stated in biology class that she didn't hold to Darwin's theory and instead believed that God had created the world and all in it. Sophie's classmates were predictably nauseated and cruel in their metting out their justice for this heresy. They simply shunned the girl. No one talked to her.
No one invited her to parties. No one had anything to do with her, beyond laughing derisively whenever she walked past in the hallways and making sure everyone else in the school knew about this untouchable who had emigrated into their superior scientific midst. Well, it's not difficult for me to see the same thing happening in my native Canada. And we are countries, Canada and Sweden, who consider ourselves paragons of tolerance.
But let me tell you, my dear northern, first-world, modern compatriots, that primitive shunning and excommunication would never happen in Brazil. Another of my colleagues, a Brazilian, was conducting a Portuguese class for a group of foreigners trying to learn the language when the subject of belief came up. One of the students started to speak about his belief in God and how he thought it was important for the human being to have contact with his spirituality.
A fellow student from France rose up in protest and started the standard put-down that I don't need to describe. My colleague stepped in immediately and stopped the French woman. Whoa, wait a minute, he said firmly. You're in Brazil now. Here, we don't attack others for their belief or lack of belief. We're not like you in the first world. Here, we respect the person's right to have his beliefs, even if they're different from ours.
Dead silence from the French woman. Message received. When I came to Brazil nine years ago, I remember teaching an English class where one of the students began to speak about his belief, and I said, You mean you can talk about belief and God here freely? And they laughed good-naturedly. Another ignorant foreigner lost in political correctness and censorship. The good news today is, my dear listener, that we can begin again to consider a scientific view of God.
Through the remarkable work of Brazilian psychoanalyst and social scientist, Dr. Norberto Keppe, whose Science of Analytical Trilogy is a reunion of science with philosophy and even theology, imagine that, to give us a vast, deep, and comprehensive view of the human being and the society in which he lives. Keppe's work is a vital contribution to the intellectual treasury of human civilization, and it's my great privilege to be able to talk about that in these programs.
If you'd like to know more beyond this podcast, there are many resources on our Trilogia portal at trilogia.ws. That's T-R-I-L-O-G-I-A dot W-S. And please communicate with me directly so I can keep you posted about any news from our International Society of Analytical Trilogy, rich at richjonesvoice.com. Today, Swedish journalist Helena Melander joins me for a thoroughly modern discussion about the relevance of God in our modern society.
Well, here we are, two people from the first world, in this very delicate topic, talking about God. You know, and it strikes me, when I first came to Brazil, I was like so relieved. I mean, you can talk about your spiritual beliefs here with no problem, but we can't do that very easily in sweden in canada can we. And so you've got to be so careful.
I mean you mentioned god and your your brand is like a religious zealot somewhere who's with glazed eyes and taking the bible literally speaking in tongues something like that. So this is very intriguing and you've been writing a little bit about this with your your blog in sweden. What are your initial thoughts about why we can't speak about this more openly there.
Well
Helena Melander: in sweden we have this thing that if you ask somebody do you believe in god they say well i don't really believe in god but i believe in something you know. And then people prefer to give it like another name like i believe in life i believe in something higher or i believe in some some something divine inside the human being universal
Richard: spirit exactly something
Helena: in the nature.
And i i think it's a little bit funny because somehow all these things that people mention life and divine inside the human being in nature etc somehow this is what we have given the name god. God is a name for that. So i started to think about why can't we use this name god anymore right. You know, why do you have to like find out another name?
And even in Sweden, it happens even that even priests are afraid to use the name God when they speak about God in like some kind of public situation, like on the radio or on TV. And they like almost have to ask for excuse that they are using the word God.
Richard: Almost apologetically.
Helena: Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's kind of, I mean, that's terrible.
Are we ashamed of speaking about God? Are we ashamed of His name in the Western world? And if we are ashamed of God speaking His name, we are in a quite bad situation, I think.
Richard: One of the reasons that you think this is, I mean, because I've certainly noticed this too, you know it's it's like there's this uh this line in the sand you know.
Either you believe in the scientific explanation of the origin of the universe or you believe literally in creationism. And then you're you're not even considered as a scientific person you're like totally old-fashioned
Helena: exactly and superstitious
Richard: and those kind of things. So what's what's going on here how do you see this.
Helena: Yeah there are several like we can say social reasons for this.
First of all really the word God has become associated with the church, this kind of old-fashioned church that we had in the past that was very hard and intolerant and judging. And many times they used God's name in that sense, like saying that God is seeing you, whatever you are doing in your bedroom and, you know, trying to give this bad idea of God being a punishing God, a censoring God.
And I think this name of God still is in people's minds somehow, even though it's quite a long time ago. And in a psychological sense, if we see it in the terms of Norberto Cappi that created integral psychoanalysis, the human being in himself is very censoring, very intolerant. We don't like to see any of our mistakes. And if we do any mistakes, we are like punishing ourselves, accusing ourselves.
We
Richard: punish others, too, who make mistakes.
Helena: Exactly. We are extremely intolerant. You cannot say this, you cannot say that. And so somehow this idea of God as a punishing and like evil God, even you could say, it comes from us. It's a projection. So we are projecting on this word God or what God would be, this intolerant attitude that we ourselves have.
And then we think that by not using the name God or not including Him in our lives, then we will be freer somehow. Then we will not have this bad, punishing God looking at us. But this is something that we have inside of us. It has nothing to do with the real God. Yeah,
Richard: it's a real projection of what we do and what we are.
Because we're the ones who are destroying. We're the ones who are judging.
Helena: Exactly.
Richard: That don't accept anything. In our so-called tolerant first world, we're actually very intolerant.
Helena: Extremely.
Richard: I remember. Sophie, our friend, telling a story of when she was studying in school, and they were studying in biology, the evolutionary story, and one of the students from another country, immigrant, said, but I
Helena: don't believe that.
I believe in the story that we were created. And she was totally boycotted, ridiculed. There was absolutely no tolerance at all. That would never happen in Brazil. Exactly. It's like a
Richard: totally first world conceit, isn't it? Completely.
Helena: Even in the media. I mean, I have worked a lot in the media. You can see that if somebody says something wrong, like a journalist said something wrong, like a wrong idea or a wrong opinion or said something a little bit inappropriate, this person is like being, you know, he's being totally excluded, like he was banned or something.
You know then all the media speaks about this person he said this. So it's like as long as you have a good mask and you hide everything that you feel and think and don't say anything wrong then you are okay. But the moment you express something then wow then they're all all the people are against
Richard: you especially if this mistake that you make is something in the sexual area.
Oh boy i mean you can um president bush lied about the reasons for war and perfectly fine. I was not fine with some people but i mean for the most part there's nothing that happens. But another president sleeps with a young woman in his office and this way
Helena: we have of like labeling people. Even this what you said about using the the word god then if you say god in even in a natural way then immediately people say oh oh she's a religious fanatic.
And then you don't have any chance to say anything more and it being taken seriously. Yeah and so
Richard: let's look a little deeper at this now because you talked a lot about the the sort of the projection, what we do, why we're afraid to use the word god, because we're projecting into him the intolerance, the the intransigence that we have. But there's a deeper reason isn't there of why we don't want to consider this aspect of things and how do you see that.
This is particularly you've been able to see this through Norberto Keppe's psychological therapeutic work. How
Helena: do you see this now how much deeper can we go here. Yeah i think there is a fundamental point that human being doesn't want to touch you know. And this is what uh dr Keppe has discovered and he named it universal envy. And universal envy is also very close and very related to theomania.
So what is theomania. Theomania is when you want to be a god you want to be above everything and everyone else you want to be above your own reality. And of course you don't want to accept that somebody's higher than you that somebody's on a higher level than you. Uh and of course if you would say that there is a god then of course this god is on a much much higher level than
Richard: you by definition
Helena: exactly there's no
Richard: way out
Helena: of that one.
No and uh and the human being doesn't like that idea that's that there would be a being that knows everything that is complete beauty that is complete truth. But let
Richard: me just pause for a second here because people don't think about that they're not thinking about well i've got this i really don't want to believe in god because i don't want to believe there's somebody bigger than me.
It's not a conscious thing
Helena: like no no absolutely not.
Richard: So how what's the sort of way we can understand that better how do we get into this thing of envy and theomania they're fundamental points.
Helena: Yeah well since i'm a teacher also here at millennium in san paulo you can see that when a student has this kind of more higher level of theomania he doesn't want to listen to the teacher.
So the teacher is explaining something something important something interesting and he thinks that the teacher isn't right that he doesn't know starts to like argue with the teacher. He doesn't have enough humility to accept that maybe he doesn't know everything and maybe the teacher actually knows more and in some certain points he has to be the one to listen. And of course this student in that case really somehow deep inside even though it is unconscious, even he thinks that he knows everything and that he can know everything and everybody that has another point of view is wrong.
Richard: Unless it agrees with his.
Helena: Exactly. So this kind of theomania happens a lot among people also in relationships. And imagine then if there is a much bigger being than us that would be God and that, I mean, we come from him, that would be too humiliating, you know?
Richard: Better to think we come from bacteria than that. Yeah. And we come from the muck, from nothing.
This is a much more appealing attitude to a theomanic individual.
Helena: Exactly, because then he's like on the peak of evolution. Like he is, you know, especially the scientists, they feel that they have almost reached the secret of life by, like, dividing the atom and, you know.
Richard: Spinning all these particles around, particle accelerator. Exactly,
Helena: changing the genetic code of the animals,
Richard: of the human being.
Keppe put it in one of his new books. I'm not sure which one, but I like it very much. He said that original sin, and we're going to use that word because we're talking about God now. We could call this, like, human pathology in scientific terms. But original sin, he said, was the consequence of man's desire to be useless and also to make useless everything that exists.
Thus, man rejects this paradise for which he was created, polluting the air, seas, and earth, destroying the forests, rivers, and animals, trying however he can to eliminate any trace of divine creation. Now, that is a really, really powerful statement. And I remember when I was talking to one of our dear friends, Dr. Cláudia Pacheco, about this. She said, can you see the competition, Richard?
Can you see that man competes with God, that we want to sort of be bigger than God in some way?
Helena: Very interesting, because it's like everything that we have today that is natural, we think is not good enough. So everything in your body you have to change. So it's not okay to have normal, natural breasts. You have to have silicone breasts. Your teeth, many people, they take out the teeth and they put other teeth instead, like these kind of artificial teeth.
Richard: People don't want their sex sometimes.
Helena: Yeah, exactly. And when you are going to have a baby, maybe you will even try to find the perfect genetic code for this baby.
Richard: Designer babies.
Helena: Exactly. And the food, I mean, the natural plants and vegetables are not good enough. You have to change them with also genetic modification. So it's so clear that it's another way.
I mean, also, human beings don't perceive this, but it's another way to say, God, what you did was not good enough. We will do this better. And here, I think it's very clear this aspect of envy. And this is maybe even more difficult to understand, but that there is a kind of envy in the human being towards God. Like you don't want to admit that he's so big and so good and so beautiful so then you start to think bad things about him or even deny him.
And
Richard: then we hide behind the idea that we come from nothing. So this is like the idea, the scientific idea all the evidence, all the research all the books that are written to explore the idea that we come from nothing to hide this really malicious
Helena: attitude. Yes, it's like the human being wants to have like a kind of triumph over God. And his biggest triumph is to say, like Nietzsche said, God is dead.
And then he feels like now I have the power, now I'm the best. This ridiculous God doesn't even exist. But that statement is pathetic in itself because really if God didn't exist, how could he die? And, you know, I
Richard: think one of the things that really speaks to this, it's an uncomfortable subject for many people to listen to, I think. But if you think about it, and Keppe talked about this in his book, Glorification, which is his book directly about the man's experience with God, where he said that in his first 25 years of working as a psychoanalyst, he applied himself solely to scientific principles.
But then he began to perceive, as he was working with clients year after year, day after day, hour after hour in his office, that people had this desire to know who they were, where they came from. And so Keppe, through his science, determined that the human being has a strong desire for religiousness. And I don't mean religion. This desire to know where we come from, who we are, what we're part of.
This is a human desire. This is not something fanatic. And
Helena: we can never find peace if we don't somehow find that answer or at least look for that answer. Because if not, if we try to forget that question, that deep existential question, why are we here? Where did we come from?
Richard: What's it all about?
Helena: Yeah, is God there, you know? Then, what is life?
I mean, then it's totally meaningless, somehow. Then people have this deep existential crisis that we see a lot in Sweden, for example, a lot of suicide. Talk
Richard: about that, because this is a
Helena: deep problem in that country, I know. Exactly. I mean, because Sweden, we could say, have reached a kind of perfect social society in terms of welfare and security. It's
Richard: very beautiful and
Helena: organized.
But I see that especially young people, when they come out in society, start living their lives, you know, they are completely lost because nobody tells them what is right, what is wrong, what you can believe in. And it's even interesting because there have been some studies now saying that, like, because we have many immigrants in Sweden, that, for example, this Muslim young people that live in Sweden, they have a much better psychological health than the Swedish.
So why? Because the Muslims, they have something to follow, you know, they have a religion that unites them and that they can, you know, connect to every day. They
Richard: found the same thing with the Mexicans in North America, because they have this strong Catholic underpinning upbringing.
Helena: So if you don't have any kind of even religious education, you can even speak of, where are you going to go?
It's like you don't have any ground to stand on. You don't have any deeper ethical values. And this, I think, is interesting, too, because in Sweden, we have a strong movement of a group that is called the humanists. I don't know why they are called humanists, but they say that they don't believe in God. They believe in the human being and they believe in ethical values and that we can have all these values without God.
But somehow, if we try to have that right and wrong, fair and unfair, good and bad without God, it's like we do not have a reference point. I mean, so where do these values come from? What is that? Then it's really like, okay, but then you can really question these values somehow. I mean, who said that they are right in that case?
So we can't deny that all of the values, the universal values, the goodness, the truth, has its origin in God. That's the center of reality, the center of existence and of our essence.
Richard: You know, one of the things I see happening, I feel a similar experience in Canada when I go back to visit. There's all this material abundance. Um it's noteworthy uh everybody has everything i mean of course there are divisions but it's not like a country like brazil or ethiopia i mean equally it's it's pretty much the same for everybody.
But there people have a different sense of desperation because with all of this material stuff there's still a feeling of emptiness. And so then the people go well now what I've got the house and the summer house and the great vacations, but there's something missing. And so if we're stopped
Helena: from exploring this deeper part, we get sick. This is the desire inside the human being to know more.
And we're stopped from doing that by these kinds of discussions we see in our developed world. You
Richard: can't talk about this, you know.
Helena: It's like a thirst that, you know, if you don't get any spiritual orientation or anything, it's like you're dying of thirst inside and life becomes extremely dry somehow. So I can see sometimes when I speak about these topics in Sweden, when I go there to give lectures or even on our blog that we have in Sweden about integral psychoanalysis, I can see that these kind of issues, people get really, you know, they want to know more.
It's like they are really thirsting for this kind of spiritual water, we can say, of talking about deeper, deeper questions, of having some kind of answer. And I think we have to try to meet that need somehow, because really we are having a very good situation physically, materially, but if we are not well spiritually, then what are we here for?
Richard: And actually we're destroying our material wealth.
Exactly.
Helena: The material world is being destroyed by this envy, this theomania you talked about. Exactly. You
Richard: know, I showed in my class the other night this movie about Nelson Mandela. Invictus and um i don't know what people who are listening think about this movie but there's a couple of scenes in it at the very beginning well right throughout the whole movie but i showed the first 20 or 30 minutes of it.
There's a couple of scenes in there where he's sort of demonstrating some universal values including tolerance forgiveness. He says at one point he says to one of his black guards who doesn't want doesn't like the fact that mandela has mandated some white guards from the old order to help protect him this black guy doesn't like that at all. And he says you know uh forgiveness starts here mandela said you know if if um if you have forgiveness you liberate yourself you liberate yourself from fear.
And he said that's why it's such a powerful weapon. I never thought about universal values as being like a weapon. I don't mean it in a military sense, but it's like a because it speaks to something deep inside and everybody goes yes of course we need to be like that. We feel that, you can feel the goosebumps when you hear him say that.
And some of the students were very impressed by that because here's a guy 27 years in prison talking about forgiveness. And so why does that have such power because that's something directly from this source you're talking about.
Helena: And these leaders, these fantastic leaders, Mandela, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, they were so connected to God, to that source, and I never heard them being afraid of mentioning the name of God.
No. You don't find a leader, a big leader that can, you know, really make people have this hope that you're speaking about or this sensation of goodness, of truth, if you have this kind
Richard: of trying to compromise and not saying God's name and trying to be, you know, politically correct in the sense of using, like, softening words and, like, not saying what it really is.
Jesus said, as he was dying, forgive them. I mean, you can't think of anything more generous than that. Yeah. And it seems to me, Helena, as we're talking here at the end, that we're having a really modern conversation. We're having like a 21st century conversation, that to consider God in the context of science is finally cool. It's like a good thing, a welcome thing for the world.
Helena: Absolutely, because I feel that we really try to have a kind of secular, non-religious, non-spiritual society. We have really tried in Sweden, but now we have come to a point where we just can't make it anymore. You know, so people are coming back to the churches, not the really traditional old fashioned churches, but like where you can have a more open service and where everybody can speak and you have music.
And people also speak very much about the experience of feeling that they are closer to God in nature. So, I mean, the spirituality is coming back. This is something you can take away from people. And we can see this even in Russia, the communists, the old communist states, you know, when the communist was, you know, broken or when it was taken away, the spirituality is coming back.
There are new churches. And of course, what is very clear in Dr. Keppe's work is that we don't need a church. We don't need a, you know, established religion in order to have contact with God. I mean, really, God is inside us. I think the church can help sometimes for us to remember that and make that connection. Are
Richard: you prepared to talk just a little bit, Helena, about the trilogical view of God, like the difference between like being and just energy or is that something that we could just at the end talk about a little bit?
Helena: Yes, exactly. I think it might be a little bit dangerous to have a too loose idea of God. Like it's just some kind of mystical energy in the air or some kind of spirit that is everywhere in all the trees and all the animals. Because then it's again like you're trying to escape from the fact that God is God. And God is a being.
As far as I understand Dr. Keppe's work, he is a being. Of course, you can call this being the absolute love, the
Richard: absolute truth, the absolute beauty.
Helena: And the view of Keppe, especially in this book that you mentioned, Glorification, It's an extremely beautiful view of a God that is complete compassion, a God that only wants us to be happy, you know. Why should ever God want us to suffer or to be sick or anything?
I mean, that is, we are creating our psychopathology and our physical sickness and all this craziness that we see in the world or all the wars and hunger. But God, of course, God wants us to come to Him, to be in the same happiness that He is. And I would really like to recommend this book because if you have this kind of problem with the God concept, you are listening.
I'm sure that you will find peace in finding this concept of God, this explanation of God. The
Richard: scientific explanation
Helena: of God,
Richard: which is extraordinary.
Helena: Yes, exactly. Because I can really understand. I can't say that I'm a very religious person, you know. I didn't have a religious upbringing or anything, but sometimes you can feel really uncomfortable when very religious people speak in that kind of, you know, it's like they speak in a very religious way, but it's like there is no feeling in it somehow.
Um but as you said this this uh book is a scientific and uh very objective and clear description of what god is. Let me just
Richard: read a little paragraph from this great book. Glorification, which I love too. Man spends his whole life searching for that which he has drawn away from and is not able to forget. God, even though we do not clearly perceive it, all of our actions, our feelings, and our thoughts are directed in an attitude of intense desire towards the Supreme Being, simply because we, in every fiber of our bodies, have been created for the glory of the beauty, the truth, and the goodness, which are not only in the Creator, but are also in the whole of each of us.
Whether we wish it or not, our destiny is glorification, and it can only occur at the sight of the one who possesses it forever. Marvelous isn't it. Yeah.
Helena: What more can you say.
Richard: Nothing more to say is right. Keppe's view of god is beautiful, refreshing, and absolutely modern. Love to hear your thoughts rich at rich jones voice.com. This is Thinking with Somebody Else's Head.
I'm Richard Lloyd Jones. Good to have you listening.
