Reality and Idols

“Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.” --Psalm 115:3-8

A statue. It looks like a human; it is given the features of a personal being and it is made in our fashion. It has eyes and ears and mouth; it has the illusion of motion and facial expression. The best sculptures look alert and expressive, as if they were really alive--but it's all a facade. The carefully crafted cheek bones have never smiled and their eyes receive no light--the statue is dead and cold inside, human expression decorates a rock. 

When it comes to the meaning of life, humans believe a lot of lies. First, they think that they are very much alive. This is rarely ever questioned outside of philosophy or deep depression. Second, they believe that their five senses are the means to experience life--the scientific method and proofs through data and evidence-- thirdly, they believe that their senses were designed to serve themselves: I have taste receptors so I can detect poison, I have eyes so that I can see my prey, my sense of hearing allows me to listen for predators, and so on.

 If some don't think quite that much, they at least use their faculties in that way: I am hungry so I eat. I see what I want so I will take it. I think a thought, so I will speak. They use their senses to accomplish their ends. This leads to people justifying all types of evil because they saw, heard, felt, smelled, tasted, something that they desired--and they never question these appetites. 

"Food for the stomach and the stomach for food" --do we ever consider that our bodies were made for something more? 

Now even if we humans do belive that there is something more, that there may possibly be a "spiritual realm", we rarely think of it as interfering with the senses. It is the oil that floats on top of the water and cannot mix, so to speak. Isn't whatever's "up there" spirit? 

And then we start to believe that it is somehow less real. It is the translucent but we are solid. We have life and food and forests and mountainsides and rivers, and heaven has only clouds and halos, and it's hard to ever break free from the mentality that we are more alive.

But this passage says something radically different about the senses and challenges each of the lies we are prone to believe. First, Life is defined by what we worship. It is not something that everyone shares in. "Their idols are silver and gold...those who make them will be like them." We turn into the things we worship. If we praise a dead thing, we will become a dead thing. Just like an idol, we will have eyes and ears and mouths, but they are useless to us--they do not work the way they were indended.

This is how Jesus could say that the Jews "had ears but cannot hear and eyes but cannot see." Just like a statue, these people had the faculties, and yet they were of no value. They were useless. 

Then biblically speaking, what is hearing and and seeing? How is one to know if he really sees and hears? 

The second lie is perhaps a lie because it is a truth that has been chopped in half. Humans Do experience something true about life through their senses. But it works the other way around as well: Humans experience their senses only when they are alive. A dead man has no feeling or eyesight; he cannot without life. So then, regardless of our eyes and nose and mouth, they are useless if we are dead. But if we live, our senses serve their purpose. And if we live according to whom we serve, then we live when we praise the Living God. And then our senses reach their full potential!

This approaches the third truth: our senses were not intended for our own ends, but they were designed to serve God, and anything less is a misuse of what he gave, a waste of design. Are not eyes to seek His face? Are not the ears to listen to His voice? Are not the feet meant to share his gospel? And of course: "Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who puts his trust in Him." 

We humans look and listen and talk and walk around, assuming that we are fully alive (and yet how many of us acually feel that?)--do we ever consider that we were made for more than preserving ourselves until we cant? When we use our senses to glorify God--when we look at nature through the eyes of a thankful creature or listen to God's word with humility, we use what God gave us to its fullest extent. As we worship the Life we become more alive too. Our eyes and noses and mouths are no longer decoration but they are an instrument of God's glory. 

"Do not offer the parts of your body in wickedness but offer yourselves to God, as those who have passed from death to life, and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of holiness."

And that life was made fully manifest in Jesus Christ. Christ is who our eyes have seen and our hands have touched--who was real and physical and alive--who entered into our life to show us what true life really means. 

Because aren't humans just the image? Arent wenjust  the artwork, the statue, the creation? God was not made in the image of man, or fashioned from the human hand, as idols are. But in fact, God fashioned us in his hand, and we are in his likeness. 

"God created man in His own image,
In the image of God He created him; 
male and female He created them." 

What does this mean, to be created in the image of God? It means that the life we have is a mere microcosm of the fullness of life that is God. 

"Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man." We are not the makers, but the made. We are not the fullest reality. We are a mere statue of the Life that created us. We are the thought, we are the representation, we are the mirror. What we do of idols, God did of us. And yet his life is of a different magnitude, because his creation has a life in itself.  It has God's own "breath". The artwork of man crumbles and degenerates. The creations that God made can themselves recreate—they can sustain the life that God infused them with. God's life is so rich, so full and so complete, that even his artwork proliferates itself. And in Christ, the created can enjoy the same degree of life and realness as the Creator. 

Idols are fake because they have no life in them. The God that lives is the real God. He fulfills his promises and displays his power in creation, but idols have nothing in themselves--they are fake. Those who worship idols become like them. But when we worship God, we become real in the sense that Pinocchio became "a real boy" in the end. We live, as we were intended. The spiritual realm rushes into the physical, death is swallowed up by life. God is reality and he brings us fully into that when we believe in him. This is the "new life", the "born again." 

“You who fear the LORD, trust in the LORD! He is their help and their shield.”

Freud's Mind in "Moses and Monotheism"

Readers of Freud's works stigmatize him pretty quickly; Freud has quite a reputation. But people don't give Freud enough credit—he really is an intelligent guy. Yes, his ideas are outdated, wacky, bizarre etc, but he is consistent in his thought pattern, and this is what makes him outlandish. For being so wrong, Freud thinks through things in a consistent, and maybe even admirable way—because given his world view, what he says makes sense. A lot more people would be like Freud if they followed their beliefs to logical conclusions.

For example, take Freud's belief on loving your neighbor as yourself. He thinks that it's a restraint upon our society, creating an "antagonism to sexuality". This sounds like typical Freud. But look more closely: why does he believe that? Freud explains that society is made of men who naturally hate each other and tend to act aggressively. Therefore a neighbor is "someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus" which means "Man is a wolf to man." Though society may try to restrict this impulse, it is an inborn and immutable part of human behavior.  Therefore, Freud sees the commandment to love as bewildering because it is impossible to carry out. "Why," asks Freud, "should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible?...Not merely is this stranger in general unworthy of my love; I must honestly confess that he has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred." And again, "nothing runs so strongly counter to the original nature of man." Freud presumes that the commandment arose as a means to control society—and it failed. Therefore, he rejects it. His assumption about the command leads him to this extreme belief.

Likewise, in his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud follows his assumptions to their logical end. He reasons about the nature of the Moses account, and his criticisms are spot on, given his presupposition that the whole thing is a fable. He attempts "an application of psychoanalysis" on the Moses account in order to decipher its meaning. "...almost all important civilized people have early woven myths around and glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties, empires and cities—in short, their national heroes."It basically follows the same pattern as Romulus and Remus, Oedipus, and a lot of other people: two families are involved, one rich and one poor. A child is removed from one family and raised in another; yet, in due time he uncovers his true ancestry. Freud thinks that Moses is merely an historical person to whom the myth has become attached.

Yet Freud recognizes a major problem in his theory: the motive. If the whole story is a myth superimposed onto a real person, then who wrote this particular version and why? The myth, he reasons, could only have come from the Egyptians or the Hebrews. “For the legend is either Egyptian or of Jewish origin.” But what does either side gain from fabricating this myth? In this version, no country really benefits. "The Egyptians had no motive to glorify Moses; to them he was not a hero. So the legend should have originated among the Jewish people; that is to say, it was attached in the usual version to the person of their leader. But for that purpose it was entirely unfitted; what good is a legend to a people that makes their hero into an alien?” Good point: adding all that stuff about Moses becoming an Egyptian would seem to detract from national pride. At one point, our greatest leader was our oppressor. Freud doesn't seem to think that this makes sense.

There is another explanation, one that Freud ignores, that accepts the story without mutilating its content. This explanation is one that reveals a lot about the nature of the God in this Moses story. It cuts through national pride and personal glory to focus on a Savior instead of a leader. Maybe the myth glorifies neither side because, regardless of Jew or Gentile, it speaks the truth.

Hahahaha!!! laughs Freud. And this explanation comes from the same group who believes that people should actually be loving their neighbors as themselves! Anyways, Freud finds another, more creative explanation: "Moses is an Egyptian—probably of noble origin—whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion!" If the historical Moses were an Egyptian, of course the Jews would want to say that he abandoned his own country for them—ah, there is the motive, there is the Hebrew's national pride.

Of course this leads to Freud's next questions of why an Egyptian would care about the spiritual welfare of an inferior people group. And by the way, why did he abandon his native religion and where did he get this new religion, this "monotheism" if he grew up with innumerable gods—it also seems unreasonable for one man to conjure up the Torah from his head. "If Moses, who gave them a new religion, was an Egyptian, then the surmise cannot be rejected that this other new religion was the Egyptian one." And again, Freud is off!—surmising away at all the possibilities.

"If...one...tries to take seriously the conclusion that Moses was a distinguished Egyptian, then very interesting and far-reaching perspectives open out. With the help of certain assumptions the motives guiding Moses in his unusual undertaking can be made intelligible..."

Freud lives his whole life this way. His questions are brilliant; his answers are ridiculous because he begins with faulty assumptions. Moses was certainly not an Egyptian, and few people ever try saying so, even if they consider his story a myth. But Freud's conclusion makes sense given his assumption.

A lot of people start with faulty beliefs and expect to find truth. It's like they plant apple trees and expect to find bananas. But most people don't nurture their tree enough to let it bear fruit. Most people's trees are so dead that they can call it whatever they want and get away with it. Freud plants the apple tree and nurtures it until it bears apples. He then deems them yellow and tries to peel them. And people laugh at him because he is ridiculous. But aren't they also looking for bananas on their own sickly little apple trees?

Freud is not afraid to start with an idea and run with it. Most people start with the same kind of idea, but he reaches extreme conclusions because he runs farther than anyone else. They do not want to catch up, and they refuse to turn back. That way they can keep their half-baked ideas while still appearing reasonable. At least Freud is not pretentious in that way. He tells the truth backwards, like the druggie who thinks it's a really good idea to let kids do drugs in school. He's dead wrong, but at least it's consistent; it makes sense that he would think that. And his life is one of the best arguments against drugs in school... Same with Freud. The best argument against his worldview is the fact that his conclusions about life are really distorted! Freud's works are valuable because through them Freud demonstrates such a consistency and such error to the world. And if more people lived out their own assumptions, Freud's level of "mixed-up crazy" would be the norm.

Too Much of Life

What is the purpose of this blog? Why was it created and what does it mean?

Well, the title, Too Much of Life, is a good indicator of what this blog intends to convey.

So many blogs are highly personal, random mumblings, scraps of thought here and there pieced together onto an internet site. And it allows people to express themselves as they are: disorganized, impulsive, egocentric, brief, shallow, fun-loving, etc. And all those things are real human experience and they find a place in blogs. But this human being is tired of reading about people who write about themselves. It's all first-person, subjective, emotional, capricious...too much. Just too much.

This human being wants to explore "too much" of something very different. Not too much subjective touchy-feely writing, but too much of all the topics that a lot of people don't really discuss. Out of all the discoveries, all of the arts, all the interesting things in the world, it seems that most people really limit themselves to a few narrow topics that they talk about all the time, over and over, day after day, continuously... when there's more than what they encounter. Too much, in fact to be uncovered and upturned in a lifetime. There's too much of life for humanity to explore, and it frightens people off-- "go back to talking about sports, or clothes or this morning's breakfast or (hopefully) me. Your topic of interest, or disinterest has no place here. It's irrelevant, too much to deal with right now."

Now, can life really be too much? According to that Einstein email floating around, evil is the absence of existence, and if existence is ontologically good, then evil is the absence of life. Evil is death. Then how could too much life be a bad thing?

Do you really intend to get into a discussion about the nature of existence? I just rolled out of bed—too much! Exactly the point.

Maybe this human being is too much for readers, like too much of what nobody else wants. Or maybe this human being shares a common interest with others who come across this blog. It will cover a wide range of topics, and will certainly be just as disorganized, scattered, and egocentric as all the others. But  it will try to cover ideas that some will consider "too much" to handle or deal with. And some will also consider them as fascinating and interesting as this human being finds them. Whatever your interests, there is more out there than anyone can fully appreciate or even understand. Too much of life is what we have all been given...