Knowing the Mind of God

The world is rife with people eager to tell us what God thinks about this or that—marriage, work, family, food, entertainment, the purpose of life, and just about everything else.

I always wonder how they know.

Sometimes, they refer to the Bible. That’s silly enough to begin with. The Bible was created by people to whom the universe was little more than the Middle East—or in the case of the New Testament, the Roman world—and the sky above it, which they thought of as not very high up. Their god was an unpleasant and emotionally insecure father figure who insisted that things be done his way, or else. Like any such father, the only reason he gave was “Because I say so!” To follow rules supposedly laid down by this tiny, limited god of a tiny, limited world is absurd. But let’s accept that, for the sake of argument.

The Bible contains many dos and don’ts supposedly written by this god, or by humans inspired by him. Some of those rules are fundamental to the conduct of a sane society and are found all over the world; the most obvious one is “Thou shalt not kill.” Those rules are old, basic, and owe nothing to the Bible; they are recorded there but didn’t originate there. They are irrelevant to this discussion.

As for the others, they are largely nonsensical but in some cases clear enough: keep the Sabbath (why?); pigs are unclean (huh?). Many of the rules, though, are tricky because they were written in a far simpler time. People who take the Bible seriously must jump through strange logical hoops to figure out how to apply those rules to modern life. For example, the Old Testament forbids lighting a fire on the Sabbath. Modern observant Jews therefore don’t turn on electric lights on Saturday, even though no fire is involved. At some point, when electricity became common enough for this to become an issue, rabbis pondered mightily and declared that turning on lights violates this biblical proposition. God knew all of the past and the future, but he neglected to write down a rule for electric lights, the mention of which would have been bewildering to the ancient Hebrews but which God knew would become a problem for them in a few thousand years. Thus human religious authorities were required to tell us what God meant but neglected to write down.

If he didn’t write it down or cause it to be written down, how do they know what he meant?

This is very common in Judaism, the religion I was immured in until I was able to leave home. Almost all of what we now consider Judaism, such as the wacky dietary laws, was invented by rabbis centuries ago. Crammed into little rooms, they argued with each for hours other about the meaning of a word or phrase in the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament). The records of their discussions fill immense volumes, called the Talmud, which rabbis and religious students have studied and memorised ever since. The discussions of those ancient rabbis, along with later such theological squandering of brain cells, have been codified into detailed sets of rules that dominate food preparation, dining, and much of the rest of daily life among observant Jews.

(Those rabbinical discussions weren’t limited to the written version of the Torah. They also included discussions of a number of unwritten rules and regulations supposedly transmitted to Moses by God on Mount Sinai and then passed on, without a word being changed, from one generation of priests/rabbis/theologians to the next. The number of improbabilities and assumptions one has to swallow to believe in all of this is remarkable.)

I gather that something similar applies in Catholicism, where the rules by which the devout live were deduced from holy writ by theologians arguing with each other about what God–Jesus (remember that the two are mysteriously and inexplicably the same) meant by this or that phrase or sentence. For that matter, I think this is generally the situation in religions generally, monotheistic and otherwise.

The old men spending their days debating meaningless theological minutiae while being supported by hardworking peasants or family members are imbued with the aura of divine authority. Their supposed wisdom (they pronounce nonsense with great conviction), learning (they know their religion’s fairy tales in great detail), and holiness (they have big beards and soft hands) are taken to mean that their decisions about right and wrong bear God’s stamp of approval. He is speaking through them.

(“But, God, why didn’t you just cause everything to be written down in great detail in the first place. That way, there’d be no risk of a misinterpretation?” “I was busy, okay? I had a universe to run.”)

The religions these old men represent are granted elevated status by time. The dogmas are covered by the accumulated grime of centuries, which looks like a holy patina.

Actually, that patina isn’t even required. As we know, dogmas are revered even without that layer of grime. New sects arise in a moment—especially in Protestantism—whenever a self–appointed leader appears with a new dogma, a new claim to know the mind of God. The sheep line up to hand him their money and follow his new set of rules.

This is common in religion, and it’s even more common in the world of woo–woo. In that case, it’s not the mind of God that the new leader claims to know but rather the secret workings of nature, hidden to all save that new leader. But it amounts to the same thing: “Only I can see what’s beyond the veil, what God/the universe requires of you, how to propitiate/harmonize with the divine/secret force and live happily ever after.”

Of course, much of this simply a confidence game. But there are, I think, a fair number of religious/woo–woo figures who are sincere. They delude themselves before they delude their followers. They really do think that they—and only they—know the mind of God/true nature of the universe, and they burn with the need to impart hat knowledge to the masses. And there are masses, sadly, who are eager to believe them.

That raises a very different question: Why? Why are the masses so ready to believe these people? Rabbis, priests, imams, politicians, self–appointed health experts, music experts, fashion experts, wine experts, conspiracy theorists, talk radio babblers, and on and on. Why is their self–proclaimed authority so readily accepted?

There has been research on this subject, and it seems to confirm what I’ve long thought: that the believers and followers fear uncertainty, want definite rules, want to think the universe isn’t random, want to think someone knows the answer, and want to be part of an elect group of insiders who know the truth.

However, that’s not the question I started with: Why do the people who claim to know the mind of God believe themselves?

Again, I’m not talking about the con men, the preachers with immense incomes happily fleecing the sheep. They’re despicable but no more so than con men of any other type. I’m talking about the ones who are actually sincere. They are legion. They are everywhere. Most of them aren’t even preachers; they’re simply convinced that they know the mind of God, although they may express that knowledge by saying that “the purpose of life is...” or “I believe we were put on Earth to...” Others, though, are eager to share their special knowledge with the world, to preach.

No doubt a fair number of such preachers are bonkers. Perhaps the most famous example is Joan of Arc, who saw visions. I have the impression, though, that most of them are sane. They’re not hearing voices, let alone the voice of God telling them what he wants. They don’ t claim to have a literal direct line to Heaven. In a way, that would make a kind of crazy sense. What’s even stranger is that they seem to think that they have an extraordinary ability to simply know what God wants and what verses in the Bible really mean.

Perhaps in some cases, they never grow out of being nineteen–year–olds. That’s the stage at which people tend to think they know everything about everything. (In my case, that happened around seventeen, and by nineteen, I had begun to realize how incomplete my knowledge of everything was.) Maybe the people I’m talking about simply don’t progress past that point.

But surely that only explains a minority of them. Few people retain the ignorant certitude of nineteen well into adulthood. I have to assume that the people I’m talking about realize how little they know about other areas of life. So why do they continue to think that they know the mind of God? What is the nature of that part of their self–image?

I’m mystified.