Skip to main content

How God is a Drug Sold by the Devil

How is it that people like David Koresch, or Jim Jones, or saints and popes, and even Mother Theresa, can all hook people into believing what they are selling? Easy: they hook people on the drug of their own desires. But any desire to fulfill one's desires - including and perhaps especially the desire to fulfill a desire "that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy" - is simply an outright rejection of a willingness to "die to self."

ISIS, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, fill their ranks with willing "believers" and even terrorists the same way, with war, misery, and abject poverty only helping to increase that desire by robbing people of the most basic of life's necessities, including any hope for a better future (at least here on earth). 

But from the Catholic Church to the cults of Charlie Manson and David Koresch, people's addiction to always wanting "more" is not only the drug that hooks consumers to the need for ever more fashionable consumption, but fills the pews of churches around the world every Sunday with "believers" seeking "the desire that nothing in this world can possibly satisfy," as C.S. Lewis once described God and heaven. 

That "desire" for more not only cost Adam & Eve the garden of Eden, but it also cost Lucifer his position at the head of God's army of angels. In fact, it even lead the Sanhedrin to crucify Christ, since Jesus was certainly not as much of a "messiah" as the Sanhedrin clearly "desired."  Indeed, the Catholic Church condemns envy as one of the seven deadly sins, even as our "desire" to live forever in Heaven with a God amounts to the fulfillment of the culmination of every envy a person could ever have.

In contrast to using and encouraging our "desire" for ever more, the way Christianity does so shamelessly when it defends its "God" with the "argument from desire," Eastern philosophies take the opposite approach. Rather than promising people that their deepest desires will all be fulfilled by God in heaven, which only encourages the covetous nature that serves as the engine of consumer Capitalism, the philosophies from the east like Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, preach that paradise can only be reached by learning to let go of all of our desires.   

Our desires, after all, are the soul of selfishness, even if that desire is for God, or heaven, or certainly for eternal life. And perhaps one of our most selfish desires is that our identity exist eternally, even if that identity must do so in another body, or with no body at all. Yet all such desires are simply a refusal to accept the obliteration of our existence, our identity, and perhaps most of all, our ego.  It is a desire, in other words, to be like God, just as much as it is a refusal to stop being purely human.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...
  The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” James Baldwin   

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of  our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angles and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil.  We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years.  Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...