Finding
God in Three Stages
by George J. Irbe
I think that my awareness and concept of God was
first of all formed by my Latvian culture and by
the fact that my mother was not a church-going
practitioner of the Lutheran religion we were
registered as belonging to. She thought that each
individual must resolve the issues of religion on
their own, within their own soul. Faith could not
be spoon-fed or force-fed into a child. I am sure
that the first time I asked my mother who this God
is that I am reading about, I was not reading the
Bible but a Latvian daina. Thus, my first
awareness of God is based on a cultural factor
which I must elaborate on more fully.
My ancestors, the Letts, now known as Latvians,
consisted once of several tribes or clans; they are
a sub-group of the Baltic people who shared a
common origin of language. They were just as
"advanced" or "backward" as any other peoples
living in the north of Europe. The Latvians are
particularly known for their rich poetic culture,
which consists of thousands of simple poems,
dainas, all of them also associated with a
specific melody. These "ditties" were passed on
from one generation to the next as songs. To this
day Latvians are known for their "song festivals"
where this cultural heritage is celebrated.
A significant portion of the folk poems are
about God's intervention in human affairs. The
culture and religion of the Latvian tribes --
members of the linguistic group known as the Balts
-- was quite similar to that of the Celtic tribes
which had settled in northern Europe after the last
Ice Age. The Balts had many lesser gods, each
having managerial authority over a certain part of
the world of nature. But the over-all authority
rested with God. God was understanding, forgiving,
and just. He was concerned with the human condition
and he was the one who saw to it that good won out
over evil. The Latvians' understanding of God was
perfect in the natural sense, which came close to
the correct way of understanding our Creator and
his handiwork.
At the end of the 12th century and into the
13th, the Teutonic Order of knights, a branch of
the Knights Templar who set out to conquer and loot
in the name of Christianity, invaded the
territories of the Latvians. After many bloody
battles and mass atrocities, the technological
superiority of the Teutons prevailed. The Balts
were not alone in their suffering. During this same
period of time the noble knights of the cross were
carrying out a program of mass extermination in the
south of France in the Languedoc region. The
Latvian tribes were beaten into medieval serfdom,
which was identical to the slavery of later times.
Of course, the Latvians were reduced to slave
status for their own good because they were also
"made" into good and obedient Christians. The
Latvian people referred to the Teutons as the
"cross bearers" and the clergymen who accompanied
them on their conquests as the "black crows".
During the next six centuries the Christian church
hierarchy worked hand-in-glove with the descendants
of the Teutonic lords to keep the Latvian people in
serfdom. A Latvian serf could be, and often was,
flogged to near-death for offending either the
secular or the heavenly lord.
The centuries of subjugation accomplished the
desired results. Today, most Latvians are among the
most idiotically docile and blindly trusting
Christians one can find. The irony is that they
still sing the old poems -- the dainas --
even as they go to church on Sunday to show
obeisance to a God who has brought them nothing but
centuries of unmitigated suffering. I suppose that
today the people are attracted to Christianity by
what I call the "immortality drug."
Of course, what the Teutons did in their time,
Christian Europe continued to do to other parts of
the world in later centuries. There were the
Spaniards in the Americas, the Puritans in North
America, and just about every European power in
Africa and Asia. Their stated intended purpose was
quite similar to that of the Teutonic Knights. They
were bringing the savages to Christianity; they
were saving the savages' souls even as they
murdered and enslaved their bodies. It was a dirty
job, but someone had to do it. In their time, the
Victorians called it the "white man's burden."
It is interesting to speculate how different and
much for the better the world would be today if
Christianity -- this religion based on a symbol of
cruel torture, a monstrous hoax of a dead man-god
coming back to life, glorification of suffering
(good for the slaves), and a promise of nirvana in
heaven -- had never spread into the civilized
world. In this respect, and this respect only, are
the musings of the madman Nietzsche worth
noting.
One can speculate that if there had been no
Christianity and no Pope in Rome, there would not
have been any reason for the existence of an
organization of knights who would have license to
plunder, conquer, and colonize in its name. The
same applies to the Spanish conquistadors in
Central and South America. Perhaps there never
would have been an era of colonial empires.
Specifically with regard to the Balts, they might
have lost their independence for other reasons, but
then again they might not have. In any case, it is
very unlikely that other kinds of conquerors,
without a religious pretext, would have placed so
much emphasis on destroying and eradicating from
the people's memory the perfectly good natural
religion that they practiced. This natural religion
would also have evolved and lost its animist
trappings with advances in men's general knowledge
of the natural world.
With the relaxation of serfdom in eastern
Europe, in the later half of the 19th century, the
Latvians experienced a cultural revival. This
revival blossomed and continued until WWII. As part
of the cultural re-awakening, Latvian children were
taught to read and sing the old dainas. Many
of the dainas told of the intervention of
God in human affairs, always to correct wrongs done
to good people by bad people. God was a very kind
and good individual who had unlimited power and
could accomplish anything one can imagine. One
prayed for God's assistance to overcome tragedy and
misfortune. However, there were also lesser gods
with specific responsibilities in the natural word,
which an agricultural people like the Latvians had
to appeal to as dictated by circumstances.
This God of the ancient Latvians is the one that
I happened to meet and understand first. It was
very reassuring to know that he is there for you
when you pray for his help. The Teutonic
"cross-bearers" and their "black crows" had used
extreme measures to wipe the memory of this God
from the peoples' minds. Sacred oak groves were cut
down and burned, sacred altars shattered with
mauls, observers of the ancient rites flogged, or
burned, or hung. But the dainas survived,
sung in secrecy, if need be. The God of the
dainas survived through six hundred years of
persecution by the "cross-bearers," the "black
crows," and their descendants.
I must say that my encounter of the God of the
dainas was by no means the norm for children
of my age. I do not remember learning how to read,
I only remember that I was reading at the age of
five. Other children were not such keen readers as
I was, and I would guess that very few paid much
attention to the God of the dainas.
In Latvia, as in most other states of eastern
Europe at the time, Christianity was the official
state religion. In some states, including Latvia,
the Christian churches received state support, and
the clergy were paid a salary by the state. Daily
religious instruction in elementary school was
mandatory. So it was that I encountered a second
and different kind of God in the first grade. I
must say that I and most of the other kids learned
and memorized things about this God because we were
made to do so. I cannot say how the other children
regarded this God. For me he was a foreign God from
a city called Jerusalem in a far-off land. This God
had a son &endash; Jesus &endash; by a woman called
Mary. Jesus was nailed to a cross by some no good
Jews. Jesus died, but three days later he came back
to life and, zoom!, he went straight up into
heaven. But I could never believe the parts about
this Jesus being conceived by God, and coming back
to life after being dead for three days. Even less
could I believe that, on the one hand, all the dead
people who believed this story about Jesus would
rise out of their graves on something called
pastardiena -- i.e. Judgment Day, but on the
other hand, the bad people went to hell and the
good people went to heaven as soon as they died. My
imagination tried to cope with this picture to no
avail. All this just could not be true. We were
also often reminded by the teachers and the
Lutheran ministers that Jesus loved us and that we
were to love Jesus and all people in return. This
everybody-loving-everybody was an equally dubious
proposition to me. I could feel love for my family
members and perhaps a very close friend, but it was
obvious that one could not love everybody.
In any case, I was, like most kids, a relatively
respectful and obedient student of the Christian
religion. One memorized and repeated back to the
teachers what they wanted to hear. As I matured and
reached a more adult understanding of how things
are, the idea of immaculate conception and bodily
resurrection became really ridiculous to
contemplate. And yet, one drifted along in the
accepted social mores of one's society. Why rock
the boat? Thus, in later years, I took the
confirmation course and regurgitated back the
memorized words and phrases, as required by the
liturgy of the Lutheran church service. We were
married in a Lutheran church. I admit that I, like
most people, did not attempt a serious examination
of my beliefs during the very active working years
of my life. I became partially estranged from the
Latvian culture, as well. The God of the
dainas receded into the dim memories of the
past. However, looking back now on the active
working years, between 25 and 55 in my case, I
recognize a definite connection between the
dainas God and the God who started to grow
ever so imperceptibly larger in my consciousness.
My relationship with the Christian God continued to
be inconsequential and perfunctory. One went to
church on special occasions in order to satisfy
social protocol. From what I have observed, there
are many other people who similarly only "go
through the motions" with Christianity.
As I mentioned before, my mother never tried to
drum religion into me. However, she did instill in
me, from an early age on, a respect for all living
things and appreciation of God's wonderful
creation. She instilled in me the virtues of a
civilized human being. We never discussed which God
it was whose handiwork she taught me to admire. He
was simply God, but I see now that he was more like
the God of the dainas than the God of
Abraham. The dainas God cares for everybody
and everything. Abraham and his descendants claim
to have a one-to-one direct relationship with their
God. Mother's loving attitude toward nature was
also shared by my step-father John. Both considered
working out of doors with the natural world
superior to other occupations. Thus, when I was
trying to decide what I should study at university,
they both recommended that I should choose either
Forestry or Geology. I decided on Engineering
Geology in order to take full advantage of my first
class honors in mathematics, physics and chemistry
on the Grade 13 final exams.
My mother was not without her share of mythical
beliefs, or superstitions. I must confess to having
one of them myself, and of being afraid to discard
it. My magic token consists of a few pages of
writing on onion-skin paper, which my mother gave
to me in my youth and which I have carried in my
wallet without fail since some time in the
mid-1950s, when I started to work up in the north
in the summers. The writing consists of a stream of
words and symbols, undecipherable to me (and I
suspect they were also to my mother who had copied
them from someone else's copy) which are a mixture
of Christian and only God knows what other sources.
Carrying these words with you is supposed to
protect you from harm. They were given to people
heading into danger, such as war. Mother was
insuring me from harm while I trekked through the
wilds of Canada. Of course, admitting that I cannot
remove these words from my wallet goes against the
grain of my professed rationality, but there it is.
I suspect there is a little superstition in almost
every one of us.
The maturing of my understanding of
God.
Since I was a child, I have detested murdering
or torturing living things. I use the word
"murdering" because I want to differentiate between
the needless destruction of living things and the
"killing" we humans must do, like all other animals
have to do, for our own sustenance. Killing is to
be done quickly and with minimum of suffering to
the sentient being whose life we are ending in
order that we can sustain our own.
I was truly fortunate that while working as a
geologist in northern Ontario I had a chance to buy
a small cottage on a spring-fed lake which is
situated on the watershed divide between Lake
Superior and James Bay. Until the mid-1990s, this
lake was accessible only by rail or by float-plane.
Without exaggeration, it then was (now man has
ruined it in the name of jobs and progress) the
best brook trout lake in all of Canada. I had 30
years to enjoy this paradise in the heart of the
north; just about every animal and bird species of
the north was there to observe up close, to admire,
and to thank God for creating it all. There I
enjoyed lots of the Aristotelian kind of
leisure.
During the eight years I worked in the bush,
first as a student and later as an exploration
geologist, and the 30 years of summer vacations in
my cottage in that little bit of nearly pristine
paradise in northern Ontario, I became more and
more aware of the interconnectedness of all of
God's creation and of the general harmony and
balance of things in that creation. There was only
one anomaly -- a jarring and destructive one -- in
the otherwise smoothly-functioning system. That
anomaly, of course, is man.
Granted that there is violence and cruelty in
nature, it is not, as a rule, gratuitous, nor
excessive. All aggression in the plant and animal
kingdom is basically in the interests of survival
of the individual and of the species. There are
certain rules (or laws, as I prefer to call them)
at work, which we can discern through observation.
Generally, these laws work through some agent,
condition, or circumstance in the natural world in
order to restore balance to the system, if the
system is disturbed by an anomalous condition, such
as may be produced by the over-population of a
species or over-predation of one species on
another. I began to see that these laws act in a
similar way to what we call the "laws of physics"
-- laws that we have discerned and understood, e.g.
Newton's laws and Einstein's laws, and so on.
I began to think that, if I believed in a God
who created everything in the universe (which I did
believe), then it follows that God had also
instituted these laws. It follows next that God has
instituted these laws so that his creation could
function according to them. I could see that man
was the one unruly element in this system, and I
asked, Why? Actions by man appeared to be the only
ones that were not counter-balanced or reversed by
acts of nature; in other words, man appeared to be
exempt from the laws that govern the rest of
creation. The other peculiarity about man as a
species is the aggression, viciousness and
unlimited lust for killing that he is capable of
directing toward his own kind. That, to my
knowledge, is not found in any other species on
Earth.
I was fully aware of the irreversibility of many
of man's actions. (I mean irreversibility in a
common-sensical way which excludes the possibility
of a global disaster, either man-made or natural,
that would totally eradicate the presence of man or
set him back to a primitive, much diminished level
of existence). Man is the only creature on Earth
who can destroy another species of animal or plant
by simply dispossessing that species of its
habitat, or permanently altering that habitat to
suit his own wishes and thus making that habitat
unlivable for the other species. I have had
occasions to personally observe this process of
habitat dispossession or alteration at work.
My career took a turn when I left geology and
ended up working as a physical
scientist/climatologist for the Hydrometeorological
Division, Atmospheric Environment Service,
Department of Environment of Canada. I spent 26
very interesting years doing work I fell in love
with. My job required that I stay current with the
latest developments in environmental research
including the damaging effects on the environment
by the activities of man world-wide. I had routine
access to the latest scientific literature in this
area and attended many international and national
scientific conferences dealing with environmental
problems.
Gradually there grew in me yet a third
understanding of God, this one arrived at
independently, largely on my own. I realized that
man is certainly situated in a relationship with
God that is different from the relationship that
all other living beings here on Earth are subject
to. The information and knowledge that I could
access at my place of employment showed clearly
that there was no difference between the most
primitive peasants of the so-called "third world"
and the most modern industrialized societies of the
West when it came to callous and uncaring attitudes
toward the natural environment. For example, there
is as much irreversible damage done to the natural
environment by the deforestation and slash-and-burn
"farming" by the peasant of the third world as
there is by the industrialized society which finds
it necessary to cover ever-increasing portions of
the earth's surface with asphalt and concrete. I
found that I must habituate my mind so that when I
thought of "man" or "mankind" or "men" I really did
think of all of mankind -- every race, culture and
creed. All men, from the least to the most
developed societies, have always had this common
trait of wanting to wage war -- war on their own
kind, on the natural world, and on the laws that
God has instituted for the natural world.
I reasoned that simply drawing this conclusion
about mankind could not be the end of it. It did
not seem at all reasonable that God would create
the cosmos and the laws for its maintenance but
exclude mankind from the jurisdiction of these
laws. There had to be more to it, and -- as I have
reasoned it out -- there is. I started to develop
my understanding of the place and status of mankind
in God's creation after going into retirement. My
essays God, His Laws and Mankind and How
It All Comes Together: God, Life, Soul contain
the conclusions, conjectures and answers I have
arrived at regarding mankind's relationship with
God. Those essays discuss God's special
dispensation of intelligence and free will to the
souls of human beings, and the expectations he has,
in turn, of us -- expectations which still hold us
subject to his laws, including an extraordinary set
of laws designed specially for us. These special
laws accompany the gifts of intelligence and free
will which he has bestowed on our souls.
During the last five years or so of my search
for answers to what God wishes of me and of other
men, I have often asked myself, How logical are my
conclusions and conjectures, and -- going beyond
conjectures -- how substantial is my faith in God?
I can be absolutely certain (and this I certainty
share with all rational human beings) of the
existence of the physical laws which we observe at
work in the material world. Then, if I believe like
most people believe, including most scientists, in
a Creator God, of necessity God is also the author
of the laws I speak of. The last stage in this
process took more time and effort, because at first
I could not find a solution for the most important
aspect of it. As I noted above, there is no way one
can imagine that God would exempt mankind from the
laws he has instituted for all of his creation. But
man is an exceptional creature with an exceptional
soul; his soul is conscious of itself and can
exercise free will. Therefore, God must have
instituted additional laws applicable to man,
different from those that govern the rest of
creation which has no self-consciousness, a limited
intelligence, and little free will, if any. It was
clear that these special laws have to do with the
morality and ethics of man. The problem I was left
with was where to look for such moral and ethical
laws, which one could say were as natural (and
therefore instituted by God) as the natural
physical laws that everyone recognizes as such.
My life's experiences, observations of mankind's
behavior during my lifetime, plus the historical
record of mankind's behavior back through the ages,
convinced me beyond any doubt that, with few
exceptions, mankind in general has a very poor and
erroneous understanding of God and an even poorer,
or non-existent, understanding of God's
expectations of mankind. The three monotheistic
religions which still dominate mankind's thinking
and attitudes give the wrong answers. Just because
they claim as "truths" the tales of hallucinatory
experiences millennia ago, does not make them so.
But by insisting on these "truths" (of so-called
Divine revelation, no less) they have been the
primary instruments of mankind's abysmal
performance in every respect, because they have
imposed their own primitive superstitions and
fantasies on man's intellect, thus stifling
development of a true understanding of God and his
expectations from us. In one word, the three main
religions, with a common root going back to
Abraham, have been disastrous for mankind.
Initially, in my ignorance, I was left with what
appeared to be a hopeless situation. It seemed that
there was no place I could turn to for support for
my beliefs. Then, while investigating what
literature there was on morals, I soon encountered
Mortimer Adler and through Adler -- Aristole. Here
was the "missing link" in my conjecture of a
natural code of morals and ethics that encompasses
God's special laws for mankind. Very aptly, Adler
calls his normative prescriptions of oughts and
ought-nots "the ethics of common sense." This
common-sense ethics was the bulwark I needed to
support my conjecture of God's special laws for
human beings, in order that they should understand
his expectations from them and in order that they
could meet those expectations. I believe firmly
this to be the case. Only in this way can the role
of mankind be logically integrated within the rest
of God's creation; and only when men recognize and
accept their proper role will they cease being at
war with the rest of creation, and thus with God
himself.
I conclude with some comments on the immortality
of the soul. As I say in God, Life, Soul, I
subscribe to the hypothesis offered jointly by Karl
Popper and John Eccles (in The Self and Its
Brain). Based on many observations of the
brain's activities, they conclude that the Self (or
soul) is the immaterial self-conscious essence of
the individual which uses the brain for all
intellectual and other deliberately-willed
activities. The next step is to conjecture on the
survivability of the immaterial soul beyond
physical death of the brain. I believe in the
survival of the soul, under certain conditions
which I describe in God, Life, Soul. This
is, of course, a matter of pure faith, based only
on the reasoning that God preserves souls which
have attained a certain level of conscience and
understanding of his laws. In believing this, I
subscribe in part to John Eccles reasoning that,
surely, it makes no sense for God to create from
oblivion (exnihilate) a soul and allow it to
experience a short period of exquisite
self-consciousness, only to consign it again to
oblivion (annihilate it). I believe that many souls
are not annihilated at death. This belief is
supported only by what to me is a common-sensical
inference that God would not exnihilate something
only to annihilate it again, if that something --
for example, the human soul -- has proven to be a
worthy addition to his creation. But, no human
being can, while his soul is anchored within the
corporeal body and has at its disposal only the
physical brain whose capacities are circumscribed
by the material universe of which the brain is
itself a part, claim to have actual evidence of the
where and the what of the afterlife. Since time
immemorial, there have been people who have claimed
to have such evidence. These people were (are)
either hallucinating simpletons with wild
imaginations or clever bunko-artists and
flimflammers who feed on the gullibility of the
simple-minded.
I think that I have arrived at a worthwhile and
tenable set of beliefs, the foundation of which
consists partially of deductions and conjectures
with at least some factual and rational support. I
do not think these beliefs can be called a
"religion." Making a religion out of my beliefs is
the last thing I would want. The question arises:
can these beliefs be adopted and sustained
universally by all mankind. I think they could be
universally adopted and sustained, but I do not see
it happening in the foreseeable future. In other
words, unforeseeable events in the affairs of
mankind would have to take place before the
universal adoption of these beliefs could be
realized.
Can and will these beliefs be pooh-poohed as
idle ramblings by an uninformed mind? They
certainly will be so characterized by the august
establishment of theological philosophy or
philosophical theology, or whatever they call
themselves, because my beliefs do not conform to
the definition of faith, truth, belief, and
religion as laid down by their not-to-be-questioned
reason and logic. And my set of beliefs rest on
precious little, if any, of that necessary element
(according to the reigning gurus of philosophical
theology ) of "supernatural knowledge" -- whatever
the heck that is! I am convinced that the phrase is
an oxymoron. If someone relates a tale about what
he has seen, heard, or felt while dreaming or
hallucinating, his account does by no means
constitute knowledge; even when the tale has been
handed down through millennia.
My belief in God is now settled and it is
simplicity itself. I do not need visions and divine
revelations to know him. I do not have to grovel in
worship of my God, nor pray to him for special
favors and deliverance. I know what he expects of
me and every other human being. God wants me to be
his willing servant and collaborator in managing
his creation according to his laws here on Earth,
and (in the not-distant future) elsewhere in his
universe. I am to make a good life for myself in
the Aristotelian/Adlerian meaning of the term, and
show my own goodness and respect toward all living
things and toward all God's creation. My soul must
earn the reward of continued existence after my
biological death by meeting God's expectations. It
is all so simple. I cannot understand why men have
always misinterpreted (and still misinterpret)
these common-sense expectations that God has of
them. The only logical answer is that men have
deliberately chosen to ignore them.
Questions/Comments? Post them in The
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Mr. Irbe's Website: Classical
Liberal George
E-mail Address: George
J. Irbe
A Brief
Autobiography of George J. Irbe
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