The Best Analogy For Your Relationship with God

Analogies are powerful mental tools to understand the world and have a strong influence on our thoughts and beliefs.  We should be careful to understand that an analogy is necessarily limited and cannot provide a complete understanding, but at the same time they are unavoidable for approaching otherwise mysterious topics such as our relationship with God.

A common analogy for God's relationship with us throughout the parables of Jesus is that of a father to child.  For example, see the well-known parable of the prodigal son.  Other common analogies include God as master or as property-owner.

An unfortunate effect of the father and master analogies is that they suggest a view of God as a powerful patriarch figure.  Why did Jesus choose these analogies instead of using a mother analogy?  Perhaps Jesus did and these were not recorded in the Bible, or perhaps he thought such analogies would be rejected by his audience.

As science and philosophy have advanced, so too have our range of experience and ideas.  Religion also ought to advance as we understand more about the world and can use this understanding to inform our views of God and our place in the world.  In particular, new theories and ideas can provide the means for better analogies with respect to God.

One such analogy was provided by biology over the past several centuries and gives what I believe is a far superior analogy than any available in the time of Jesus.  This is the body-cell analogy, where the relationship of God to each of us is said to be like the relationship between each of us and our bodily cells.  In other words, we are all like cells in the body of God.

A cell lives within a body but responds to its environment as an individual, giving the appearance of some degree of creativity and self-determination.  I would suggest that this is not just appearance but actual creativity and that the cell has some aspect of mentality.  Furthermore, the many cells in your body combine to exert the central influence on your own experience, and you in turn influence the experience of the cells.  This mind-body relationship is one-to-many and is one of intimacy (often mistaken as identity).  Charles Hartshorne remarks, "What is pain, some of us wonder, if not our participation in cellular damage or discomfort?" (Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, p. 55)

The body-cell analogy suggests a relationship of mutual influence with God.  Hartshorne describes it further: "God's cosmic body is a society of individuals, not a single individual.  The world as an integrated individual is not a 'world' as this term is normally and properly used, but 'God'.  God, the World Soul, is the individual integrity of 'the world', which otherwise is just the myriad creatures.  As each of us is the super-cellular individual of the cellular society called a human body, so God is the super-creaturely individual of the inclusive creaturely society.  Simply outside of this super-society and super-individual, there is nothing."

I believe the largest shortcoming of this analogy is that it does not emphasize the degree to which God may experience what we as individuals experience.  That is, you cannot isolate individual cells in you body but rather experience the cumulative effects of many cells.  However, I do like the analogy in that it points us in the direction of viewing God as a sympathetic participant in our lives, one who experiences what we experience; suffers what we suffer.  In addition, we each influence God in a meaningful (though almost trivial) way through our feelings and actions, and in some way we each receive influence from God. 

Tolstoy's John Galt Speech

I completed Resurrection, which was the last full-length novel of Leo Tolstoy and the only one written after his spiritual crisis. The book's introduction includes these summary remarks:

Resurrection is the great imaginative synthesis of Tolstoyism, gravid with the fruits of a lifetime's agony. 'It is a kind of shrapnel shell of a novel,' declared one contemporary critic. 'The novel is but the containing case. The genius of the author is the explosive force, which scatters its doctrines like the closely packed bullets among the enemy' - the enemy on this occasion being the whole fabric of society, the Law Courts, the prison system and, in particular, the Church.

One certainly gets the sense that the main character, Nekhlyudov, is largely autobiographical. Tolstoy's strength is in his characterization and description, particularly how he can portray the regeneration of spirit in a man. Resurrection is similar to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in that it is fiction chasing after its author's ideals of life. However, beyond that there is little resemblance between the two: Atlas Shrugged is built around a terrific mystery and turn-paging plot, but with one-dimensional characters making pages of speeches at each other. On the other hand, the story and pacing of Resurrection is only slightly compelling, but the characters are rich and believable. In contrast to the epic 3-hour-long speech of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged (the only part of the book I skimmed through), Tolstoy's main character summarizes the author's driving point in under 2 pages. Here it is (taken from pages 449-451):

'This is what it comes to,' thought Nekhlyudov, 'these people accept as a law something which is not a law, and they do not acknowledge the eternal, immutable, pressing law that God Himself has written in man's heart. That is why I feel so depressed in their company,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'I am quite simply afraid of them. And indeed, they are terrible people - more terrible than brigands. A brigand might, after all, feel pity, but not these men: they are insured against pity as these stones are from vegetation. That is what makes them so terrible. They say Pugachev and Razin were terrible. These men are a thousand times worse. Suppose a problem in psychology were set to find means of making people of our time - Christians, humane, simple, kindly people - commit the most horrible crimes without having any feeling of guilt, only one solution would present itself: to do precisely what is being done now, namely, to make them governors, inspectors, officers, policemen and so forth; which means, first that they must be convinced that there is a thing called government service which allows men to treat other men like inanimate objects, thereby banning all human brotherly relations with them; and secondly, that the people entering this "government service" must be so conjoined that the responsibility for the results of their treatment of people can never fall on any one of them individually. Without these conditions it would be impossible in our times to commit such atrocious deeds as those I have seen today. The whole trouble is that people think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love, but no circumstances ever exist. Inanimate objects may be dealt with without love: we may fell trees, bake bricks, hammer iron without love. But human beings cannot be handled without love, any more than bees can be handled without care. That is the nature of bees. If you handle bees carelessly you will harm the bees and yourself as well. And so it is with people. And it cannot be otherwise, because mutual love is the fundamental law of human life. It is true that a man cannot force himself to love in the way he can force himself to work, but it does not follow from this that men may be treated without love, especially if something is required from them. If you feel no love - leave people alone,' thought Nekhlyudov, addressing himself. 'Occupy yourself with things, with yourself, with anything you like, only not with men. Just as one can eat without harm and profitably only when one is hungry, so one can usefully and without injury deal with men only when one loves them. But once a man allows himself to treat men unlovingly, as I have treated my brother-in-law yesterday, and there are no limits to the cruelty and brutality he may inflict on others - as I saw this morning - and no limits to the suffering he may bring on himself, as the whole of my life proves. Yes, yes, it is so,' thought Nekhlyudov. 'It is true, it is right,' he repeated to himself again and again, enjoying the two-fold delight of refreshing coolness after the torturing heat and the assurance of having arrived at the clearest possible understanding of a problem that had occupied him for a long time.

Pacifism on the Road

You click a radio preset to test what the morning zoo show will be discussing during this commute. Maybe I'll pop in a CD instead, you think, but then realize (as you do so many mornings) that you've listened to these CDs too many times and keep forgetting to rotate them out. You notice some movement in your rearview and watch a Ford Explorer rush up behind you and nearly bump your car. Instead of pulling off, it keeps its close proximity, as if its driver wants to tunnel through your car. You alternate looking at the road ahead and glancing at the rearview toward the Explorer. With each glance, its headlights appear brighter. Finally, there is a straightaway and the Explorer weaves into the opposite lane to blow past you.

***

You can probably relate to the experience above. If it's not someone tailgating you, it's someone cutting you off, or not properly yielding to you, or perhaps not letting you merge. There are lots of opportunities to feel wronged and aggrieved on the road.

For me, these situations would induce a rush of negative feelings and sometimes even lead to dangerous retaliatory actions. Eventually I knew I had to re-evaluate my approach to driving. I had to reject the negative feelings and their justifications. Further, I realized that some of the same feelings and rationalizations that fed my responses were the same ones that lead people to justify the evil of government. In particular, there were three psychological obstacles I had to overcome before I could "let go" of road justice and instead adopt road pacifism:

1. Desire for revenge

This was the most base response of mine; the desire to pay back evil with more evil. If another driver caused me anxiety or stress, I wanted to inflict that same suffering back onto him. But the primary effect of this desire was to cause more suffering for myself! If I did not act upon my desire and instead let the other driver "get away" with it, then I would stew in loathing and frustration. But acting upon my desire would only serve to escalate the situation and perhaps even endanger myself and others.

I realized my responses were unhealthy and harmful after one incident where I tailgated a car that had just been tailgating me. I was glad to be causing the driver anxiety and stress, just as he had caused me the same a few minutes before. Now he was in the same situation I had been in, only the situation was escalated with more tension. His response was to hit his brakes, and I almost bumped into him. After counting my blessings that no accident had occurred, I understood that my desires for revenge on the road only caused suffering.

2. Justification of punishment

The desire for revenge was an emotional response to situations on the roads where I felt wronged, and it was the strongest influence that I had to overcome on my way to a more peaceful driving practice. But there is also a more intellectual counterpart to the base desire for revenge, and that is the justification of punishment. That is, once I could suppress the emotional response that I knew was unhealthy, I was still left with the thought that enforcement of rules and punishment were necessary. After all, there have to be some rules to dictate how to behave on the road, and we all had to follow them.

But this line of thinking can only lead to support of institutionalized violence. Once you start drawing arbitrary lines to justify force, you immediately justify an imaginary government that enforces your lines. And so even if I had no desire to personally "get back" at a driver, I nevertheless would approve of (and hope for) a policeman punishing him accordingly. If there was no policeman around, I took some solace in the fact that eventually he would be pulled over for a similar infraction and be punished.

It did not take me long to realize the great contradiction in my position, which was that the people who were the worst drivers on the road, who caused me more anxiety and stress than anyone else, were the police themselves!

Aside from the issue that no one can police the police, there are lots of problems with the intellectual justification of punishment. I will highlight one here that is especially relevant to driving. This is that this justification anesthetizes one to the pain caused to others. Whereas the desire for revenge makes one wish to cause pain to someone else, the justification of punishment makes one unsympathetic to pain caused to others. It was, after all, "what they deserved." Ultimately, this coldness and lack of compassion struck me as potentially more dangerous than the desire for revenge.

3. Thinking in terms of external rewards or punishment

Even after intellectually accepting that the desire for revenge only caused suffering, and that I could not justify punishment, there was one niggling issue that prevented me from accepting road pacifism. This was the more existential moral quandary of why we should do good for others instead of evil. Or more relevantly with respect to driving: why not drive like a jerk if it gets you what you want? Shouldn't there be some ill consequences for driving like a jerk?

But these questions rely on a sort of materialist way of thinking, where we think of good and evil as external things that happen to us. If we see someone drive like a jerk and get away with it, we think that something good happened to him because he met his goals without any ill effects to him. It's similar to that old childish question: why do bad things happen to good people?

I believe that the solution to these questions is to recognize that ultimately doing good can only be its own reward; doing evil its own punishment. Even if an evil-doer seems to live a plentiful life and reach his apparent goals, he has chosen the wrong goals and at the very least missed an opportunity to live a more fulfilling and happy life. Happiness can be obtained by anyone and has to do not with external wealth or conditions but with how one chooses to live.

Once I overcame this final obstacle, I could internalize what I knew to be right, which is that I should never respond to other drivers with anger and should not even hope that they are punished for bad deeds. Rather, I ought to pity them for what I know their frame of mind must be, and when faced with a dangerous situation on the road I respond by doing what I think is best for everyone's safety and well-being, even if it means letting other drivers "win".

I am not a perfect driver and occasionally I may still succumb to anger and frustration, but overall after having undergone this process I can say with certainty that my driving experience is more fulfilling, and it is one area where adopting pacifism has both spiritually and materially improved my life. Perhaps it seems like a trivial area to say such a strong statement, but if using peace and compassion can have such an effect in this area, I think of the power it can have in other areas.

Why Pacifism

What “I am” depends largely on who is asking me and the context of the conversation. Sometimes I am an anarchist, sometimes a pacifist, sometimes a libertarian, and sometimes a Tolstoyan Christian. Sometimes I am even a Ron Paul Republican. These may seem highly disparate labels, but I hope there is one common thread in each: advocacy of peace and non-violence; opposition to war and government.

The exact term I use in any particular conversation would depend on the topic and who I am talking to. To most pro-government people debating national policy, Ron Paul’s position of ending foreign wars and dismantling most of the federal government might as well be one of an anarchist, so there is no point in bringing up subtleties of position at the risk of visceral reactions. On the other hand, a debate among libertarians would tend to focus on what laws are just or what the maximum scope of government should be, and then there may be more to gain from distinguishing between a libertarian and an anarchist. In general, if I want to effectively communicate my attachment to non-violence, I must put it forward in a position that meets people where they are. The important seed to plant in all cases is this: perhaps I should not seek to solve problems through use of force.

The label that jumps right to this conclusion is “pacifist”. Unfortunately, this label may be even more loaded than “anarchist”. It seems that “pacifist” is used almost overwhelmingly as a pejorative term, when one wants to accuse another of appeasing some evil-doer. Another problem I have with the term is that for most people it emphasizes the least important positions or scale of positions. On one hand, mention of being a pacifist seems to invite a cascade of what-would-you-do questions, like: what if someone attacks you? Or: what if someone is raping your wife? On the other hand, some people don’t interpret pacifism on such a personal level but instead on the opposite scale of human interaction, government relations. To them, pacifism means nothing more than the foreign policy of Switzerland. Their challenges would be more like: what about Hitler?

Labels are abstractions, and as a result they must leave out details and can never be perfect. Given the challenges of the term, however, I still suppose “pacifist” to be the best abstraction of my beliefs. This term means for me a radically different approach to moral and ethical issues than is otherwise common, even by most anarchists and libertarians. It seems to me that the misguided approach is to seek to divide all possible actions into hard categories: “good” or “bad” for moral questions, and “proper” or “improper” for ethical questions. We try to derive the “just” outcome for any scenario, as if any interaction can be approached dispassionately and judged according to some objective laws that have been formerly derived.

I disagree with this approach. I believe the alternative approach, embodied by pacifism, is this:

Do not seek justice but rather love and compassion.

This statement forms the core of my beliefs, though I would not be so attached to these particular words or sequence thereof to say it is the best statement or not open to semantic quibbling (as all statements must be).

I also do not wish to make this statement some sort of axiom from which to derive correct actions or subsequent moral laws. That would be to miss the point entirely, which is to say that the whole approach of deriving just laws is flawed and that instead we might rely on more spiritual, personal, and religious guidance in deciding what we are to do.

The desire to replace justice with love means that one builds voluntary relationships based on cooperation and mutual benefit, rather than relationships based on coercion and force. It means that one tries to serve others without demanding anything in return and without ever feeling that one is owed anything. It means that one does not seek to build great material wealth, and that one should not prepare to violently defend the wealth one possesses.

The desire to replace justice with love also means rejecting, through non-cooperation and non-violent resistance, all human institutions of government and law that enforce their decrees through violence. It means rejecting any institution that would systematize the use of force.

In any case, this is what being a pacifist means to me and are some of the ideals I strive toward.

I am far from perfect with practicing pacifism. I become angry and have bad thoughts. I pay an uncomfortable amount of tax money to governments. I can wish ill upon my enemies. I am sure there are situations where I might be moved to act violently. However, I view practicing pacifism as a process of self-improvement. For me, this requires constant meditation and self-awareness. I might not always know the way, but sometimes I at least see the next step.