CARL JUNG - HINTED AT HOW GOD CAN BE A FANCY WORD FOR MAKING AN IDEA
GOD
Having a God does not mean you have a God. It could be an idol. Ideology is the
power of the idea - the idea becomes all that matters. It is elevated to God.
And anybody who opposes it is evil and should not be allowed to speak. The
idea becomes a makeshift God. It is not a real God. But it is real in
its terrible consequences.
If it is a God substitute as some would say then surely that means God is not
a good belief in the first place? If you need a God and there is none then
what you end up with need do no obvious harm to others? Suppose there is a
God. Having the wrong God means that it is harmful to disconnect from the real
God as in failing to get help from him or more sinisterly the real God is making
sure you will suffer for not having him. Suppose there is no God.
Then God is as dangerous or otherwise a belief as any substitute. We need
to ask why belief in the tooth fairy harms nobody but belief in God has its
sincere extremists who are very harmful. The problem with the belief is
that it is a projection towards a supreme power.
In Jungian thought, if you take doctrines and religious symbols seriously and
literally that is a form of idolatry.
Taking them seriously is a bigger giveaway than literally. Literal beliefs that
should not be seen that way are one thing but they become a problem just because
they are taken seriously.
You know that God is not literally a wafer and if you treat the wafer as God as
in the Catholic Mass that is best seen as an attempt to take it literally. You
cannot really be insane enough to succeed. You cannot really see God as a man in
the clouds either. Taking symbol seriously then is more intelligent but more
subtly and dangerously idolatrous.
God cannot really be thought of without symbols. Using nothing or refusing to use images does not fix the difficulty for nothing or a void can be a symbol too. A symbol is anything you use to represent something. In fact using the void or nothing as a sign of God is the biggest form of idolatry. It is the best for it is so crafty.
The problem is insoluble and thus shows that if there is a God he is not about having a relationship with us.