The impulse and motive for divine creation

Kristor at the Orthosphere has written a post in response to mine of yesterday and others by Francis Berger - that asks several questions. These seem to require and deserve a more extensive elucidation than can be done in comments, including an expansion of underlying metaphysical assumptions; so here it is. 

This procedure distorts my metaphysical views, because they are being expressed in response to Kristor's framework of ultimate assumptions - so that, even when I try to elucidate - means that my account is fragmentary and seen from an alien angle. But maybe this is the best that can be managed in the circumstances. 

(Obviously, I usually and by preference express my metaphysical ideas in their own terms, trying to make a model or paint a picture of how reality is structured and proceeds.)

 

From Kristor is in italics - edited by me; my responses follow BC: 

The situation prior to creation that Bruce describes is already a world: a disharmonious congeries of eternal conscious selves, purposive beings who suffer affects, who feel, want, act, and so on, 

BC: That is a correct description of my views

who relate to and influence each other (so that they can love, or not), all more or less ordered to a good, which apparently they can all more or less recognize, and to which they are more or less attracted. 

BC: No. Before creation there is no such interaction or harmonization. 

They are from eternity past together in a temporal – and so, presumably also spatial – milieu, in which they have and prosecute lives, but only messily. 

BC: Sort of... but before creation there is no comparison by which their autonomous lives can be called messy. 

Thus they can apprehend each other, and God, and his creative plan; they can find it attractive, can want to participate in it, and can then actually do so. 

BC: No. I regard the above description as happening after creation has been initiated. 

The question then arises, what is the reason of this world that was running along from eternity past, all on its own, before one of its constituents got started on his creative project – or after, for that matter? If we answer that there is no prior reason it is what it is, that its eternal existence is a brute fact, we have admitted that it is fundamentally unintelligible; for, what has no sufficient reason to be what it is cannot be reasonable, either in whole or in part: for, brute facts are utterly inscrutable, in principle, thus even to themselves. 

BC: Correct. Before creation there can be no reasons, except internally - "privately", within beings. Things Just Are.  

What is not reasonable cannot be a world, or for that matter any such thing as the items we find all around us, and in us. It can be rather only just stuff happening for no reason: the chaos of Democritean atomism, but with the atoms all sentient, solipsistically. 

BC: Yes, pretty much a correct summary- except that having sentient beings/ "atoms" makes all the difference. Divine creation is (pretty much) the transformation from solipsistic to ongoing-creation - insofar as creation has happened (which changes through time, because creation is linear and sequential).  

If we say that this world prior to creation has no cause because it is necessarily what it is, then every detail of it must be necessary; in which case there is in it no freedom, for it is a spatiotemporally extended block, in which nothing really moves or acts, or therefore is. 

BC: No, this is wrong. "Necessity" does not come into it when things Just Are. Things really "move" but only within beings, not between beings. 

What we end up with then is either the pure chaos of brute unintelligible fact, and no world, or else the wholly determined motionlessness of universal necessity. 

BC: No, neither of these alternatives; because they are regarding the primordial beings as if unalive. Starting with beings rather than "things" makes all the difference. 

There is of course a third option: the classical metaphysics of Nicene Christianity, in which God as uniquely eternal and necessary is the sufficient reason for all being, including his own: not a brute fact, but on the contrary the perfectly intelligent and thus intelligible fact, in whose light all other things are intelligible, at least in principle, so that knowledge is possible; and in which creatures are not eternal, but rather contingent upon God, so that as contingent they can change, act, suffer, move, love, learn, grow, understand and be understood, and so forth. 

BC from now onwards: 

This leads on to consider God's motivation for creation.

If God is a unity, there can be no motive for anything. Such a God Just Is. 

But my understanding is that God is a dyad of Heavenly Parents - Heavenly Father and Mother. My understanding is that it is the love between our Heavenly Parents that is the motivation for creation - in a way closely analogous to the spiritually-understood way that love between two (ideal) loving human beings may lead to the choice of initiating pro-creation - that is having children who are loved; and beginning what may be an extended family.

(Of course, mortal human parents are born as already part of an extended and (ideally) loving family. But I am here talking about how this all began.) 

Creation is therefore a concept that arises from love, and includes procreation as well as all the other many ways in which loving relationships between beings of all kinds may become.  

To put matters very simply: there is a Timeline for creation. The primordial situation of autonomous and not-relating beings becomes creation as a consequence of our Heavenly Parents meeting, becoming mutually aware, and committing themselves to eternal love. 

Our Heavenly Parents thus became God, and creation began by God's "interventions" on primordial reality; and to the extent that primordial beings opt-in to live by love. 

This was not the original situation of reality, there was a time when it happened, and it might not have happened. 

Furthermore, beings are usually only partly capable of love; and presumably some beings are incapable of love (and therefore do not participate in creation). 

Thus God's primary creation is a mixed state of love, and not-love. 

And it is this deficit in primary creation that led to the need for Jesus Christ and the Second Creation, "needed" because Jesus completes the work of creation by enabling Heaven which is the eternal situation of beings living by love; leaving-behind other and evil motivations at resurrection.

**

By Contrast: Orthodox-traditional "Nicene" Christianity perhaps needs to posit a motive for creation - a motive for God creating rather than not; and therefore (sometimes) posits an analogous impetus for creation in the love of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost - each for the other. 

It is the differences-between the Trinity that enable the love that leads to creation...

However this explanation is made confusing/ incoherent by also insisting that the Trinity are not only different from each other, but also simultaneously the same as each other (because there is only one God). 

(This is required by the insistence on a monotheistic Omni-God creating ex nihilo - such a God cannot be internally subdivided.) 

And furthermore; ortho-trad theology has it that that the "process" of creation (and of love among the Trinity) happens outside of time - so creation always-was-and-is; so there is no "Timeline" of creation. All that is now, ever was and shall be. 

And this is the point at which orthodox Christianity reaches its particular It Just Is assumption - explanations stop at this point.

All metaphysics must reach this point, sooner or later - the point at which we must make assumptions regarding the ultimate nature of reality. 

The goal (as I see it) is to become aware of where this point is reached, to acknowledge this; and to know that here we are indeed making assumptions... 

Which activity is (I suggest) properly called "metaphysics" 

What is God like? What does God want from creation?

I have had the privilege of reading in manuscript a collection from letters from William Arkle to a young friend and spiritual-disciple/ -colleague; spanning from the middle 1980s to near the end of Arkle's life (in 2000).  

These have provoked all kinds of thoughts on that vital matter which Arkle 'made his own': questions on the nature of God, and God's hopes and aims in creation. 

 

For all Christians; God is (or should be) a person, not an abstraction. 

We are God's children (that is related-to, descended-from God); and God loves us. 

Beyond this, there are differences of understanding; and there is indeed a difference in my understanding and that of Arkle. More precisely, in his early work, Arkle described what I believe is true: God is a dyad, Father and Mother in Heaven: God is our Heavenly Parents. 

This is also the understanding of Mormon thelogy; and it natually goes-with an understanding of each Human Being as - in his or her eternal primordial essence, and eternally in future - either a man, or a woman (never neither, nor both). 

This metaphysical reality does not necessarily map-onto what may happen to an individual man or woman in terms of biological sex and/or sexuality during this mortal, earthly incarnation - which has the nature of a temporary experience for us to learn-from. My understanding is that - whatever happens 'superficially' in mortal life - each of us eternally has been, and eternally will be, essentially (by the nature of our true and divine self) a man or a woman eternally. 

 

But by the 1980s, Arkle had apparently moved to a view of God as primarily both man and woman simultaneously (a He/ She); and this goes-with an idea of sex as relatively superficial to the essence of Human Being - and with reincarnation as potentially alternating (as 'required') between the sexes; neither being the essence of a Human Being. Or with sex (and marriage, and procreation) being 'discarded' when a Human Being has reached Heaven

(Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield also share this understanding of sex. And it also goes-with an understanding of spirit-form as both the past and future of Man: Man was a spirit, will become a spirit; and physical incarnation is an intermediate stage, for experience and learning only.)

Whereas by contrast; my view (and the Mormon view) is that physical incarnation is higher than spirit life: bodies are better. Including that God is embodied - i.e. God is physically-bounded and in the same as human form (or rather, causally vice versa); God is not an omnipresent spirit. 

So, for me, God is embodied, and indeed two bodies: God is a dyad: Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

This matter of "what God is like", whether God is One or Two, is a vital to our metaphysics; because it decides our understanding of why God embarked on creation. Our inferred motivation of a unitary, solo God is very different from that of two Heavenly Parents, distinct but united by their mutual love. 

 

(Traditional Christian theology has it that God was utterly self-sufficient, and without needs (or desires). Trinitarian theology makes the love of this unitary God also be (somehow) sub-divided into the mutual love of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But either way, the creation of Men and everything-else by God is an ultimately gratuitous act - and Not a matter of God seeking greater satisfaction, Not a matter of God needing, wanting, desiring or yearning. I personally reject this line of reasoning on the basis that God is a person, like our-selves in an ultimate sense; and that God does have passions, wishes. In particular I regard Love as the primary passion of God, and I regard Love as having in its nature many aspects such as needing, wanting, desiring and yearning.) 

Arkle's inference, based on his understanding of God as unity and a real person - is that God before creation must have been lonely and bored. God's greatest need was for things to do, and people to do-things-with. 

From this, Arkle derives an understanding that creation is essentially a matter of overcoming loneliness and boredom; of creating Beings who can develop to become like himself, and of creating many other things 'for fun'. 

Arkle encapsulates this in the ideas that in making Men who can evolve towards full-deity God is literally Making Friends; creating Beings who - it is hoped - will become 'friends' at the same divine level as God. And secondly that all the other Beings of Creation are made as a kind of ultimate 'play'. So that for Arkle life is - at its highest, most divine - created life is about play with and among friends.  

It should be noted - and this comes through repeatedly in these late Arkle letters, that loneliness and boredom are negative motivations - therefore creation is a kind of cosmic therapy for the unitary God.  

My own view, based on God as the loving-dyad of celestial husband and wife, of Heavenly Parents; is that creation is a natural consequence of the existential nature of Love. Creation is the positively-motivated overflow and expansion of spousal love. 

This is nothing esoteric, but a motivation that has been experienced (albeit perhaps partially and temporarily, as is the nature of mortal life) by countless husbands and wives through Man's history. Parental love seeks its own increase through children; and through a creative attitude to life and living.

In different words, the spontaneous expression (consequence) of parental love; is to co-create (in harmony with God's already in-progress creating) an open-ended, expanding-and-harmonious world; in which the family lives creatively. 

In a nutshell, God is like the perfection of married love, and what God wants from creation is analogous to what a loving husband and wife want, given a husband and wife who are themselves members of loving families. 

Thus (in an eternal persepctive) God wants children, and loving-developing family relations; wants new family and friends (i.e. permanent friends, maintained in harmony by analogously-familial love); wants a whole created-world of other (increasingly creative) Beings of many kinds, natures, motivations - but (ideally, and in actuality in Heaven) all maintained in Harmony by their mutual love. 

 

Heavenly Parents and the dyadic/ one-creator God - an update

As I have often written, but not recently, I believe that God is dyadic - consisting of a Heavenly Father and Mother, a man and woman who are (in some sense) incarnate and not spirits. 

This is the Mormon understanding, and reading about Mormon theology was where I first came across it. 

I am not trying to persuade other people that I am right; but I shall here consider why I personally believe this, and what it is that I believe. 

In the first place it is due to what might be termed intuition; in the sense that when I first encountered this idea, my heart seemed to jump and warm; as if I was discovering something true, good and with great possibilities of more-good. 

There was an immediate and positive sense... not so much that this was true, but that I wanted this to be true - this came before my conviction that it was true.  

Following this I read more about Mormon theology, and realized that the dyadic, man-woman nature of our Heavenly parents was just part of an entire metaphysical understanding of creation (including procreation - the creation of beings including people) as something dynamic, interactive, developing, evolutionary, open-ended, and expanding. 

In other words, that creation itself was creative (and therefore creation was not, as I had previously assumed, a done-thing, a closed accomplishment, a finished totality - once-and-for-always.) 

I then began to explore the implications of these ideas for myself; using concepts I got from William Arkle (and his reflections on God's motivations for creation); and Owen Barfield, including Barfield's accounts of the 'polar' philosophy of ST Coleridge. 

I was also building on a longer-term fascination with 'animism' - with the (apparently innate and spontaneous) tendency to regard the world (the universe) as consisting primarily of beings - all of whom were alive, purposive, conscious - albeit in different ways, at different scales and timescales etc.

The motivation for creation, and why God should have created this kind of creation, was something I had found difficult to grasp (none of the usual explanations made much sense to me). But when I conceptualized God as the loving dyad of a man and woman, then it seemed obvious why such a combination would have wanted to create - including others who might eventually become like themselves.   

Furthermore, it did not seem possible that creation had arisen from any state of oneness of self-sufficiency, since this would make creation arbitrary; nor could creation arise from a tendency towards differentiation, because that would lead to meaningless-purposeless chaos. 

There must (I felt) have been some kind of original 'polarity' - in abstract and physics-like terminology, there would need to be at-least two different kinds of 'force', the interaction of which would be creation. Coleridge (also Barfield and Arkle) saw this in terms of a 'masculine'-tendency for expansion and differentiation; and a 'feminine'-tendency for one-ness and integration.  

But in terms of my (non-abstract) preferred metaphysics of beings and animistic assumptions; 'masculine' and 'feminine' simplifies to just a primordial man and a primordial woman; this would mean two complementary, unlike-but-of-the-same-kind, beings; the love of whom would lead to a desire for creation.  

(In the same kind of way that - in this mortal life - love of man and woman usually leads to a desire for procreation.)

At some point I validated this understanding by means of meditative prayer; by refining and asking a simple question, feeling that this question had 'got-through', and receiving a clear inner response.  

In summary; the above account is something-like the sequence by which I desired, concluded, became-convinced-by, the metaphysical assumption of God as Heavenly parents; by some such mixture of feelings, reasoning, and 'feedback'. 

All this happened a good while ago (about a decade); since when I have been interpreting things on the basis of this framework, and it seems to 'work', so far.

What the real-life, this world, implications are; include a reinforcement of the idea that the family is (and ought to be) the primary social structure; on earth as it is in Heaven; and a clarification of the nature of creation - starting with the primary creation by Heavenly parents and also including the secondary creation of beings (such as men and women) within primary creation. 

This metaphysics has further helped me understand both why and how love is the primary value of Christianity; i.e. because love made possible creation in the first place, and is the proper basis of 'coordinating' the subcreative activities of all the beings of creation.  

And it helped me understand how creation can be open-ended and expansile, without degenerating into chaos; because it is love that makes the difference.

Also, it helped me to understand the nature of evil; and how evil is related either to the incapacity for love or its rejection. Without love, the innate creativity of individual beings is going to be selfish and hostile to that of other beings: non-loving attitudes, thinking, and actions by beings, will tend to destroy the harmony of creation.  

I don't talk much about this understanding, and I often use the generic term 'God'; because it is difficult to explain briefly and clearly that the dyadic God of our Heavenly parents serves as a single and 'coherently unified' source of creation

But God is two, not one, because only a dyad can create, and creation must-be dyadic. 

And the dyadic just-is the one-ness of God the primal creator.  

Note added: It may be said, correctly, that the above does not depend on the Bible; but then neither does the metaphysics of orthodox-classical theology depend on scripture. We can find resonances and consistencies within the Bible - but assumptions such as: strict monotheism - creation ex nihilo (from nothing) by a God outside of creation and Time, the Athanasian Creed descriptions of the Trinity, God's omnipotence and omniscience, original sin... These are ideas that would not be derived-from a reading of scripture - the most that can be said is that someone who already ideas can find Biblical references that can be interpreted as consistent-with these assumptions. They are (apparently) products of philosophically sophisticated theologians who brought these ideas to Christianity from earlier and mostly pagan (Greek and Roman) sources. Also, these kinds of metaphysical assumption are theistic - to do with a personal god - but not specifically Christian. The salvific work of Jesus Christ (principally: making possible resurrected life everlasting in Heaven) was done within already-existing creation, and Christianity is not therefore an explanation of creation-as-such.   

Is God's motivation for creation 'play' or 'love'?

If the primal reality of God is imagined before the beginning of creation, and if God is single and personal; then creation can be understood as God's 'play'.

This is made simple and explicit in God, the Player Friend; a rare 42 page booklet self-published by William Arkle in 1993, which I only discovered-about a couple of weeks ago, and which I am currently reading.


Typically (and valuably) Arkle boils it down to God alone becoming bored with a world in which everything was caused by himself; and from this dissatisfaction manifesting creation so that divine 'Friends' - that is, fully-developed men and women - could gradually evolve, and become genuinely independent sources of surprise and innovation.

As so often, much hinges upon the primary assumptions; and here Arkle makes the primary assumption that the beginning of everything - God - is a unity. When this is the assumption, then I think it is 'inevitable' that there is an 'arbitrary' quality of 'play' about everything in creation.

Reality is because creation is more 'fun' than no reality; as Arkle sometimes put it.


When creation is driven by something negative like boredom, and negativity is cured by the independent play of other agents or actors; then we get this kind of double-negative theology which I always regard as secondary.

Yet, if creation is dynamic, expansile (as I believe) then it must indeed be motivated by some kind of (negatively) discontent, or (positively) yearning.


My own understanding is different from Arkles, and is pretty-much the Mormon Christian theology; which is that 'in the beginning' God was two, a dyad, man and woman, Heavenly Father and Mother.

By this understanding there never was 'unity' - unless the unity is regarded as being divided in twain. The 'unity' comes from Love: love between our Heavenly Parents, which eternally 'binds' them (in a 'celestial marriage'). That is my primal reality.

The primal reality is therefore one that is dynamic, as love is dynamic; and it is one of yearning, as love contains yearning. By my understanding, then, creation is the result of an overflow of this yearning love; so that there be more autonomous, agent, independently-creative persons to love.

This is a familiar motivation arising between a loving husband and wife: the positive desire for children to expand the scope and possibility of love. The married couple's aspiration for pro-creation (and also to create a home, a family, ideally one that is ever-growing and inter-linking - with all that entails in terms of the context for such growth) is thus seen of a microcosm of the divine impulse to creation. 


The classical 'Trinitarian' formulation of Christian theology 'has it both ways' in asserting that God is both undivided-unity (with no sex) and hence of its nature static and self-sufficient; and also a triad of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (with no sex) - who are different enough to be bound together by love, hence dynamic and motivated to grow.

By this classical account; sexuality is secondary, temporary, inessential; whereas for Mormon theology sexuality is primary and causal; deriving from the nature of God - our Heavenly Parents. 

I can make no rational sense of classical Trinitarianism; but as a form of words, it covers all the bases!

However, for me, God must be either one or more-than-one; and my understanding is that God is (or rather was, primally) two. And these two were a man and a woman. And their love was the fount of creation.

The polarity of love and agency

Christianity is based upon love and agency (that is, autonomy of free will); yet these concepts are often understood superficially. In fact, they are deep, metaphysical principles: they are, indeed, a polarity - which means that we can distinguish between love and agency, yet they cannot be divided (the one requires the other).

And this is important because love and agency are both active processes, and it is the interaction of these active processes of love and agency that we can call creation - which is what leads to more love, and more agency.

The importance of love to Christianity scarcely needs emphasis; but it is neglected that love entails agency. Love is not a state of being, rather love is a thing that happens (a process) between agents, and by choice of these agents.

Love can only be a product of free will, and if there is no choice there is no love. One thing cannot love itself, two things cannot love unless that is chosen - a coerced love is not love. So for Christians, for this reason alone as well as other reasons, agency is a necessity.

I think this is fairly clear; but the fact of agency being dependent on love is less clear; because we have tendency to emphasise that agency is not predictable from the causes impinging on an entity (agency entails an uncaused cause, an unmoved mover); and then this truth is misunderstood to mean that agency is arbitrary and 'random'. Then agency gets confused with the models of unpredictable randomness form science - such as quantum theory.

But agency is not randomness; agency comes from the self, it is an 'expression' of the self - indeed agency is when the self is active (not merely responsive). (We are not always agent; but it is only when we are agent that we are as we are ourselves.)

Indeed, agency comes-from the already-existing state of love - which is what binds the universe of agents.

Agency alone (a situation which is impossible) would indeed be randomness (indistinguishable from randomness) - it would be multiple selves simply doing unpredictable things for no reason comprehensible to anything else.

But agency is in a pre-existent situation of love - agency operates from a universe which coheres because of love; therefore agency is expressed from a background in love.

Love is what makes agency agent and purposive; without love there would not be agency but only unpredictability and meaninglessness.

We can indeed see that meaning and purpose are themselves dependent on the continued reality and interaction of love and agency - agency is what divides things so they can be in relation to one another (rather than just being the same thing) while love is what maintains these divided things into a cohesion which is not unity; agency points the direction while love makes coherent that which goes in any direction.

My impression is that most Christians acknowledge the reality of agency, but in a falsely superficial way; they see agency as a gift bestowed y God upon an already-existing situation; they regard agency rather as if it were an 'optional extra' for Man. Yet, if agency is understood as polar with love, then agency is built into the fundamental nature of reality - it is part of the basic design of the universe of creation.

Just as love without agency is not merely flawed but incoherent - not love at all! So agency without love is not merely flawed, but ceases to be agency.

Those (many) people and religions which tend to deny the one (whether it be love or agency) will find that they are gravitationally impelled towards denying the other; because that is the direction which explanation pushes them.

...Love and agency need to be held together in the imagination as a dynamic dyad - distinguishable, but indivisible.

Salvation and theosis - God's two goals in creation

I think it is necessary to assume that God had at least two goals in creation. 

The first was to create Heaven - which means to create a world ruled by love. I tend to think of Heaven as a place where all relations between beings are loving - love, not coercion, is what gives cohesion to Heaven. 

And I assume that any being can enter Heaven who is prepared to discard everything of himself which contradicts the primacy of love. 

But God wanted more than this.

As William Arkle describes it - God did not want to remain 'alone, but God wanted divine friends. 

God wants not just 'children' (immature, undeveloped sons and daughters of God, like most mortal Men) - but God wants some of these children to grow-up to become like himself: that is a fully creative being - a being able to continue and enhance ongoing divine creation.  

So divine creation makes this growing-up of men to gods a possibility. Everything is provided to enable this to happen for a Man - except the vital ingredient that a Man must want it. 

Overall, God wanted a Heaven in which dwelt other gods. (...As many as possible, each unique.)

That is what God is working-towards, by means of creation.

In other words, to summarize the argument; behind divine creation is God's desire for a loving Heaven that includes (but does not consist entirely of) many other gods, of the same nature and type as God-the-creator. 

To become a god, a Man must want to become a god - that is, a creator on a level with the prime creator, albeit working within God's prime creation... 

(Why must he want it? Because a god must be conscious to be free; God must be conscious to be an autonomous agent of creation. An un-conscious 'god' would simply operate as a tool for creation - he would not be a god.) 

But that is not enough. As well as desiring full divinity; a Man who wants to become a god must also want to enter Heaven. 

That is how God set-up reality. 

One can have Heaven without wanting to be a god - e.g. wanting to remain a child; but one cannot become a god without also wanting Heaven. 

To be a god outside of Heaven is forbidden, it was made impossible. 

Theosis is only made possible to those who want to become a god - i.e. by those who will enter Heaven. 

Salvation to escape sin and dwell forever in Heaven is available only to those who will make an eternal commitment to live by love.

Theosis and salvation are thus bound-together and made one by resurrection. 

It is only by resurrection that a Man is made both eligible to enter Heaven and takes a decisive step towards the eventual goal of becoming A-god, like-unto The-God. 

Therefore, salvation is primary and must come first, before full and permanent theosis is possible. But theosis is the reason for creation, the reason for Jesus Christ, and the highest desire of God. 

Notes: When I write 'God' in the above post, I mean the Christian concept of God. 

The God/s of other religions are differently motivated - and non-Christians do not intend that Man should be raised to the level of full-creator God: i.e. to that level of divinity which Christians believe was seen in Jesus Christ. This elevation of Man to god is the possibility of which Jesus offered to those who believed-on and followed him - an equivalence of status whereby Men are regarded as 'friends' of God, not as 'servants'. 

I have also deliberately left open the structural aspects of the Christian God: I personally believe (with the Mormons) that God is our Heavenly Parents - that God is a dyad of Father and Mother; but the above argument works also for the more common and 'traditional' Christian trinitarian monotheism - where the love of God originates from the triadic love of Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

Also, I believe that the above scheme can be discovered from reading the Fourth Gospel ('John'); when that Gospel is assumed to be the primary and qualitatively most authoritative account of Jesus's life and teachings.  

Why categorize evil? Why categorize Good?

 A couple of profoundly-clarifying posts by WmJas Tychonievich have led to the following thoughts. 

Good and evil are not symmetrical - not mirror images - because Good is positive divine creation; while evil is 'various ways' of being opposed to divine creation. Thus Good is primary, and evil cannot exist without Good. 

(This is why I habitually capitalize Good, and make evil lower case - subliminally to emphasize their qualitative difference in kind.)

The reason that I have suggested considering evil as Luciferic, Ahrimanic and Sorathic is a matter of expediency - it need not reflect and actual categories or distinction in the real world. It is a (more, or less) useful way of understanding evil. 

The reason for doing it was becuase Ahrimanic evil was not being recognised consciously as evil. I think most people spontaneously feel that Ahrimanic evil is indeed evil - i.e. the modern workplace and mass media makes people feel bad (e.g. afraid, resentful, despairing). 

But they do not consciously recognize it as necessarily evil by nature and motivation because they do not understand that Good is rooted in God and divine creation; and even if Christians have become transfixed by ancient lists and exemplars of Luciferic sins (murder, torture, rape, arson, theft etc) which are not what it at issue in a totalitarian Matrix of omni-surveillance and micro-control. 

OK so much for evil; but why divide and differentiate Good? I think that a categorization of Good ought to reflect actual, natural reality - rather than being merely expedient. 

And this seems especially important in this Ahrimanic age, when we so often categorize to kill: categorize in order to destroy that which is alive, organic, conscious, purposive...

Lists of virtues, laws of behaviour... these Now (however it was in the past) function to short-circuit thinking from our real and divine self - and to make us bureaucratic functionaries, being instructed by checklists and flow-charts. 

All language, and all concepts, are merely 'models' of real-reality; but we should only be categorizing Good in so far as this is really based-on the categories of real-reality. 

Good is rooted in divine creation, which is rooted in love - so Good is ultimately a unity of motivation. For a Christian Love is Good and it is the single Good.  

Indeed, the purpose of Jesus making possible our resurrection to eternal life is that we may each become able to contribute, each in our unique way - from our unite nature, to the single harmony of many unique goods - to help-make a creation that is always (but always differently and changing) Good. 

But WmJas reminds me that (as we both know, from our acceptance of Joseph Smith's Mormon revelations) behind the integrated harmony of divine loving creation are Two divine beings: our Heavenly Father and Mother. 

God is a dyad, and the single harmony of creating comes from the love of our Heavenly Parents; who are therefore, two qualitatively-different kinds of being that is Good. 

In a sense Heavenly Father and Mother can each be understood (i.e. can be abstractly modelled in language) as what Wm terms Ahuric /Seeking-Good  and Devic Avoiding-evil; or active versus passive* Good - or (as I now think of them) man-good and woman-good.  

Mormon theology has it that sexual difference (male and female) is an essential characteristic of individual pre-mortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose. God the Father is not a self-sufficient 'monad' of Goodness. Instead - God is two kinds of Goodness. 

Instead "God" is a dyad of Heavenly parents, a man and a woman. It is their love (and love is always between Beings) that is the cause of creation: thus all creation is loving-creation. 

(I will now modify, summarize and expand on some comments from Wm Jas.) 

This implies that there are two complementary types of good. No being, no person (not even Jesus) can fully embody both. And, as Wm says, Jesus was indeed an exemplar of positive, active Good - but not so for the negative, passive* kinds of Good (which are instead represented in Catholic Christianity by the figure of Mary his mother). 

Since sexual difference is an essential pre-mortal characteristic. This difference comes before observable chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, motivations, abilities and behaviours. Sexual difference therefore reflects a fundamental division of primordial Human Beings - into promordial men, who are (insofar as they individually are Good) are orientated towards positive Good; and women who are orientated towards the avoidance of evil.

And that causal primary division of ultimate nature is usually reflected, or approximated, in the 'sexual dimorphism' of anatomy, physiology and behaviour of mortal incarnate humans. 

(...Remembering that this mortal life is individually tailored for our unique personal learning requirements - so no specific generalizations apply universally.) 

In sum: it is legitimate to state that really there are two qualitatively different kinds of Good - and that these are the two characteristic Goods of our Heavenly Parents. These are reflected in their Heavenly Children as we observe them - mortal men and women; and will be reflected in Heaven. 

That is the reality - and we can then summarize, model, and in general try to capture these reality-differences in language - but these linguistic descriptions will never be more that partial and distorted representations. 

The reality is in the distinction between the two persons of our Heavenly Father and Mother.

*Passive and negative are wrong terms - for reasons described in the comments. In truth, I think the distinctive complementary qualities of good in a man compared with a woman are irreducible; because this sexual difference of human Beings is primary (hence irreducible). 

What is the ultimate role of 'the feminine' in divine creation?

Many writers on theology (in many religions, including Christianity) believe that the masculine principle is primary in divine creation; the feminine being secondary, or perhaps inessential.  

Or else, they believe that such sexual differentiation is superficial, and that primarily/ originally there is no sex, no masculine or feminine - but a single creative principle that includes both. 

Others believe that sex is merely an earthly and mortal accident or expedient; and that the highest form of after-life entails loss of sexual differentiation (either as spirit, or as resurrected Man). 

But I regard God as a loving dyad of man and woman, masculine and feminine; and that original divine creation comes from this creative love. 

This dyadic quality is not a matter of 'equality' - it is simply that both man and woman are the actual basis of this divine creation that we all inhabit. 

A man and woman, who are coherent on the basis of love, were and are the true spiritual 'unit' of both divine and human creativity: thus God (the prime creator) is a Heavenly Father and Mother - both. 

The destiny of individual mortal men and women is a different question. Each person's mortal and resurrected destiny is unique - and we are not supposed to conform to a template, not be poured-into a standard human (or male, or female) mould. Love of God first, and fellow Man second, is mandatory for salvation - because only such persons want Heaven. 

Thus woman/ the feminine is Not subordinate to man/ masculine - both are absolutely spiritually necessary; just as (by analogy) both have been necessary for reproduction in this mortal life. 

We were not originally, nor will we ultimately become, de-sexed or a single sex. The dyad goes 'all the way down' to before creation; because dyadic love was what made creation possible. 

Ultimately; in absence of both - there cannot be love, therefore no real creation nor creativity. 

How do I 'know' this? Simply by having formulated the question; after which it 'answered itself' as these things do. I other words by 'intuition', by direct knowing. 

By contrast, when I asked other questions, when I formulated my understanding in other ways; I came up with answers that did not suffice - as became clear after a while.

This is not the kind of thing that anyone should accept from external sources - not from me, nor anybody else, nor institutions. 

We are supposed-to discern such matter for ourselves - and there is no substitute for this conscious choice. 

(Probably, it was not always thus - at times and among some peoples, it was right that Men be ruled spiritually by their environment or society or church - but here-and-now we must choose consciously.)

To know-for-ourselves, from experience, the nature and motivation of God is perhaps the primary task of Man here and now; given that almost-all external sources of such 'information' are deeply corrupted. 

At the very least, we need to exercise experiential direct personal discernment in relation to the external sources that we choose to accept as authoritative; for instance, choosing a denomination and church; and then choosing-between the conflicting views emanating from denominations and churches. The requirement for each individual person to discern is unavoidable. 

Having gone through this process of discernment - rooted in formulating a question such that the answer is coherently self-validating in ones actual and examined life - I don't really care what 'other people' say about the problem - and certainly will not abandon my direct knowledge of such matters on the basis of people pointing at 'authorities' whose authority to determine my spiritual life I do not acknowledge!

Others should do likewise. 

And what if/ when they come up with 'a different answer? What then?

What then depends upon each individual for himself or herself. Group-orientated policies and behavioural/ belief compulsions can have nothing to do with such matters. 

But whatever happens in each mortal life, we certainly should not attempt to avoid personal responsibility for deciding upon such matters. Salvation is between each Man and God (God would not have it otherwise!); and 'my' salvation depends on 'me' discerning the nature and motivation of God. 

What is Love? Not cohesion but Polarity

I have had considerable difficulty in conceptualising Love - but I keep trying because it is at the heart of Christianity, and because false conceptions cause trouble; especially in a society like ours, where The Good is under continual attack; and all Good things are subject to subversion, corruption, inversion.

Obviously (to a serious Christian) Love isn't a feeling-just; and obviously also it isn't a justification for sex - it must be a metaphysical (structural) reality of creation. But if one makes a serious formulation of Love along the lines of its being 'cohesion' (as I have previously done) then Love comes-out as being something like the imposition and preservation of 'order'...

And if order is achieved then love will stop, because everything will be frozen, static. Most Christian metaphysical understandings of Love do exactly this, and therefore end up trying to assert that something which is unchanging and eternal - all knowing, omniscient - is also-somehow dynamic, generative, and the primary motivation.

Yet, to conceptualise Love as expanding, always changing - open-endedly and forever - is to fall into something akin to the sexual revolution (as approximated by a free love commune or 'bath house' culture); a continuously-expanding appetite for variety, intensity and transgression.

*

In fact, Love turns-out to be the best example of polarity (or polar logic) as described and proposed by Coleridge as the fundamental metaphysical reality. Once this is grasped, we can see that the usual way of dividing up the world into alternatives - as, for example, the division used above that Love is either static or dynamic - when what we actually get is alternatives neither of which is true.

The idea of polarity asserts that at the very heart of things is a principle (or are principle) that have the character of being indivisible; so Love must be envisaged as containing stasis in terms of its poles of cohesion and expansion - but the things itself is living, dynamic and continually re-creating itself; re-creating its differentiations (into cohesion and expansion) and recreating the tendencies (of cohesion and expansion).

(I picture this polarity, metaphorically, as a swirling, dyadic, bipolar 'star'; in which each different star that constitutes the system orbits the other, and the orbit oscillates in diameter - now larger, now smaller - but growing over time, in which energies are continually generated and continually thrown-off. The stars are complementary - each differs from the other and needs the other. The two-fold and orbiting nature of the system is perpetuated forever, but/ and the other features of the system may change open-endedly by expansion, contraction, combination etc. It's only a metaphor and breaks down it pushed, but it helps me.)

If we can suppose that the heart of reality is a polarity of love-as-cohesion ad love-as-expansion, then we can understand how Love may be perpetual - because creative. Love as a polarity is the kind-of-thing which might make the universe, the kind of thing which might keep it alive even while holding it together.

And creativity itself has to be understood as polar - because it includes preservation as well as novelty. And Life, likewise.

*

This is a profoundly different way of understanding reality than we are used to - it requires a fundamental change in assumptions. And one reason that polarity has never become normal (although the idea has been knocking-around since Heraclitus) is that - taken seriously - it destroys the established way of understanding things, including mainstream-established Christian theology.

And like any metaphysical change, polarity doesn't make sense when considered in the light of a different and habitual metaphysical system, such as we deploy in public discourse.

Plus there are distorted and misleading versions of failed-polarity knocking around; such as the idea that the ideal is some kind of balanced-mixture of opposing forces - for example the common modern trope that Order and Chaos ought to be in balance. Yet the Order versus Chaos idea is typically one in which the opposition is between static-states, not between forces or tendencies; and is often poisoned by the dishonest attempt to destroy order and allow something otherwise forbidden (sex, drugs, unconstrained pleasure-seeking etc). Order-Chaos might be conceptualised as a true polarity, but in fact it very seldom is.

(It is always possible to reject metaphysical discussion as too theoretical, but it seems to me that in an age such as this one (an age of questioning) wrong metaphysics will sabotage the Good, even when the attacks on it are incoherent.)

A further problem with polarity and Christianity is that most Christians attempt to be monotheists, and are very concerned to assert the one-ness of God. Whether they are successful (given the full deity of Christ) is moot. Non-Christian monotheists such as Jews and Muslims (and common sense analysts) would say that Christianity is polytheistic - but Christian philosophers have regarded it as metaphysically crucial that God should ultimately be one, However, if God is ultimately one then polarity is not profound - only superficial.

Therefore a metaphysics of polarity implies that deity be polar - and Coleridge argued this using the Holy Trinity as polar components - although I find that I cannot follow his argument. Nonetheless, for a mainstream Christian to believe in polarity as primary, it seems necessary the Holy Trinity somehow be understood as a polarity. 

For those, like myself, who believe that Mormon theology is correct, the answer is obvious - that God is a polarity of masculine and feminine, that the ultimate basis of polarity is God conceptualised as a complementary dyad of Heavenly Father and Mother; and this primary polarity creates all others.

This idea of polarity at the root of everything fits with the Mormon understanding of reality as evolving, because evolution is also a polarity of continuity and newness. Evolution is a transformation, a changing of form in a retained entity, not the substitution of one entity for another different one. Evolution is about eternal lineage as well as here-and-now difference. 

*

It is not easy to grasp; but I have found that the idea of polarity as the fundamental metaphysical reality is one of great clarity, strength and power; and I recommend it.


(Further reading on polarity is What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield, 1971.)

Why did God create?

 Painting by William Arkle - this blog post is also based on Arkle's insights

This question (why some-thing, why every-thing; rather than no-thing) is - or ought to be - uniquely easy for Christians to answer; compared with any other religion that posits a creator-god.

The question arises from trying to understand why a god that is powerful enough to create everything should have any reason for doing so; since presumably such a god would be utterly self-sufficient.

The Christian answer relates to such facts that all men are Sons of God-the-creator; that God-the-creator loves all Men; and that Jesus was divine, was the ('only begotten') Son of God, and he told his disciples that in knowing Jesus they also knew his Father.

Thus: we are like God; God is like me and you and anyone else. In vital ways, God's primary motives are therefore understandable by you and me and anyone else. From this, we can infer that God created everything, including men and women, for the same basic reason that you or I or anyone else would create such a universe.

So if we imagine ourselves as God before creation (whether you regard God as a single being of no sex, or - as I do - regard God as a dyad of man and woman, bound eternally by love) the purpose of creation is 'for' making other gods, beings qualitatively like oneself - drawn and held together by eternal loving relationships, and working together - mutually aligned by this love - on the endless business of creation.

(God's creation just-is this state of loving creativity. Thus, creation is Not about 'making stuff' - it is instead establishing this 'process' of beings creat-ing.)

God wants a family, wants friends, wants others of his kind: the same kind as the Father and the Son, and more such people would be better: Sons of God bound by love, and doing the work of creation.

Why this - rather than eternal solitude and no creation? Do you really need to ask? To answer, all you need to do is imagine, to empathically-identify-with, to understand how-God-felt in that primordial divine situation.

 

The metaphysical role of men and women in this world, and the next

Most versions of Christianity - and indeed of world religions - do not have any metaphysical role - that is any ultimate, fundamental, essential, necessary role - relating to the role of sex differences (i.e. the division of Man into men and women) that are concerned with the ultimate metaphysical nature and destiny of God's creation. 

This is evident in ideas that sex is often seen as merely a temporary and expedient factor of this ephemeral earthly mortal life; and the belief that sexuality and sex differences will be dissolved away in the life to come. The idea is that we will all be a single kind of being; perhaps differing in appearance and individual character - but most Christians (other than Mormons) do Not see men and women as having a different 'role' in Heavenly life.  

In this earthly world, there are all kinds of - apparently opposed - ideas of sexuality, which are nonetheless all rooted no deeper then observations regarding human psychology. Human psychology is affected by 'nature and nurture' and also by many other things such as illnesses, toxins, genetic problems (including, I believe, cumulative and cross-generational mutation accumulation), drugs and others. 

From a psychological perspective, therefore, many different conclusions can be reached; according to selection of the evidence and prior ideology. 

These range from sexuality being a matter of individual choice, and 'therefore' a matter of indifference to the bureaucratic state - to its being a relatively-sharp binary divide, with one sex as superior, and the other sex inferior; when judged by various criteria. For instance women are (on average and when interfering factors are controlled) healthier, live longer, and are more conscientious; while men are stronger, more intelligent and more creative.    

But here we come up against the fact that in this mortal life - in this material and entropic world - we are always dealing with change, with 'imperfection' and corruption (leading towards death and material destruction in general). So that we almost never get any clear, coherent and stable answers from analyzing the material appearances of things. 

Different attitudes are aware of different sets of data, and the same set of data lead to different conclusions - yet the prior metaphysical assumptions that structure this ephemeral world into data, concepts, and persons are themselves seldom acknowledged or brought to awareness. 

This is a particular problem when we are trying to understand ultimate and spiritual matters. Far too often these get mixed up with worldly factors, and worldly expediency, as well as with short term social and personal agendas. 

Metaphysics then gets reduced to psychology and social policy. 

When this happens, observations are being put before the assumptions that make them possible - which is incoherent, and an error. People then try to generate expedient (and changeable) metaphysical assumptions that seem to sustain whatever it is they want to do, how they want to live, what makes them feel better. 

The result is a mess! 

At the back of everything, the question towards which other questions lead - is the nature of God the creator, God's relationship with Men, and God's purposes in creation.

If, at the end of the line, God is one; then this implies that unity - i.e. one sex (i.e. no sex) - will be the ideal of theosis. 

However things may be in his earthly mortal life; the ideal of Heavenly life will be tending towards the God-like state of no sex differentiation. 

And if God is one and a man in His nature, then it follows that men will be ideal, and woman secondary. Our ideals will tend towards the masculine; and the feminine will be judged by masculine criteria. 

But if, as I believe, God is ultimately two, a dyad; and if that dyad is a man and a woman - then sex difference and sexuality is irreducible, and ideal. 

When one understands that the two-fold division into man and woman goes all the way down, then in an ultimate and eternal sense (not expedient, not temporary, not due to limitations of knowledge nor accidents of entropy) - both man and woman are ideal types, and (again ultimately) the role and behaviour of men and women ought to be regarded in itself, by its own role and criteria. 

(It is the primordial love between our Heavenly Parents that began creation. That is, indeed, creation itself.)

If God is a dyad, and if we are children of God; then man and woman are both finally irreducible; and each is incomplete in some ultimate sense.   

If God is a dyad; then the closer than men and women come to being like God the creator, then the more important will sexual difference become; until, at some point in divinization, men and women will need to become a dyad - if theosis is to continue towards God-like-ness.

Such matters of ultimate metaphysics do not have any direct 'applications' to mortal life. In other words; we cannot read-off social policy from metaphysics. 

On the other hand, some polices are ruled-out by metaphysics - such as the mainstream sexual revolution agenda, and the current gender agenda. 

And the metaphysical understanding does dictate that we do not unthinkingly, and in all situations, judge men and women by the same criteria. Men and women are both human, but neither is the totality of human; so there will surely be situations in which we need to regard men and women as different in kind. 

And when there is a difference in kind, it is wrong to assume that there is no difference, nor should we assume that both men and women can be evaluated and regulated using the same concepts or mechanisms. 

On the contrary, we need to be mindful that men and women are like two separate but intertwined 'species' inhabiting the same niche. While we need to do separate things much of the time and especially at the lower levels of expedient functionality; the more spiritually advanced and ultimate are our considerations - the more aware we need to be that men and women are necessary parts of that harmonious loving creativity of interpersonal interaction which characterizes God's creation as it will be manifested in Heaven.  

However we may be forced to manage affairs with expediency  in this temporary and corrupt mortal life; we ought, therefore, to strive for an ultimate understanding of the human condition which does not give primacy to either the man's or the woman's perspective; but should recognize that at the highest level there is a genuine and necessary complementarity of the two sexes.

Ultimate metaphysics and Mother in Heaven

In understanding metaphysics using the deepest and most spontaneous kind of explanation; I need to dispense with mathematics, physics and 'science' in general.

My aim is something much more like those Ancient Egyptian myths of primal beings - gods and titans emerging from chaos; or the folk stories about 'totem animals'... Instead of particles and forces we have beings with motivations.

As I have previously posted I have a personal intuition/ revelation that confirms the Mormon teaching (independently endorsed by William Arkle) that God is both Father and Mother (a 'dyad' - complementary - the whole God consisting of an eternal union of man and woman).

The implications are tremendous, and only incrementally becoming clear to me.

One is that this is the truth behind the principle of 'polarity' as articulated by Coleridge and clarified by Barfield. 'Polarity' is a concept derived from the physical sciences - hence is only a model: the reality is our Heavenly Parents.

Thus, the two interdependent forces - centrifugal and centripetal - about which Coleridge talks; and from the interaction of which, all may be derived in a dynamic and self-renewing way; are actually the primal man and woman.

If we ask what is the difference between the Father and Mother, we have actually taken a step away-from the primary reality, because our answer can only be in terms of abstract qualities - whereas our  divine parents are the irreducible units from-which all else (including all abstractions) are derived.

Our Heavenly parents are what they are. While we can know and understand them empathically, by direct intuition - because we are their children and of the same kind - we must (in the attempt to communicate) resist the false temptation to describe them in terms of lesser qualities, or to analyse them as quantities - and then to regard these partial, distorted, abstracted descriptions as the reality.

Heavenly Father and Mother differ; qualitatively and complementarily (to make a living unity in-time); but this difference can't be captured by a static, structural 'personality description'. 

Creation is the consequence of their love; and that is why love is (as the Fourth Gospel tells us) the prime relationship in the universe of creation. Nothing is more important than love; because love (between our Heavenly parents) is the causal basis and reason for all of creation (including, of course, the creation of ourselves, as children of God).

Having reached this point; it seems very important to pay more attention to both Father and Mother in the nature of God; this duality is neglected yet must be of prime importance. If this was physics, we would not neglect one of a polarity - how much more important when it comes to God.

Indeed, this seems a matter of urgent importance.

In what way does God value Love? What kind of Love does he want from us? From William Arkle

It is essential to stop teaching morality in terms which can be mistaken for the philosophy of external and obvious valuation; of valuation which concedes that behaviour must be good if it is not ‘found-out’ to be bad. Rather must it be said that unless the inner aspect of one's attitude is healthy, the result of any behaviour will be psychological unrest and discontent.

One may succeed in the world and gain the adoration of many people, but if this is to fail to remain true to innermost nature it will mean failure in our own judgement of ourself and in the relating of our many parts to our whole nature. Since this is the root cause of unhappiness it is also where real success and failure lies and where one reaps and enjoys the real treasures of existence.

The essence of real religious and moral aspiration is not between ourselves and God but between ourselves and our Self. At the same time the monitoring activity of God and his many divine assistants is necessary, but not as a substitute for Self-confrontation, but rather to ensure that this condition comes about.

Aspirations towards God are therefore of the utmost value, not as a means of becoming a slave or servant of God, but in order that they can be directed towards the true goal which is the valuation of our True Self.

As we direct the love our children have for us in such a way that it enlarges their own nature and not in order to make them more devoted and servile, so our divine parents divert our love in such a way that it reflects back into our own essential nature again.

Love is therefore valued by God, not as something he wishes to possess, but as a positive expression of our highest attitude which he can receive in the spirit in which it is offered and then use for his creative work. This is the bringing of our individual nature to a condition of divine Self-consciousness.
Extracted from the close of the Chapter 'Education' in William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness (1974)

**

This is a passage which is easy to misunderstand but which I have found to be important. Arkle is clarifying the kind of God wants for us by examining the kind of love we want (or ought to want) from our growing-up children.

In other words, God wants us to give our love from our deep and true self, by an act of agency - and not from the kind of servile devotion that is implicitly based more upon terror than adoration. Arkle is saying that we ought not to fear God (any more than an adult Man ought to fear his father) - but to trust in God's love. 

Of course, a lot of our lives are spent growing-up - but it is important to know what is being aimed-at in full adulthood - not least so that we don't get into bad habits or have false structuring beliefs and expectations. 

Arkle here, as elsewhere, is suspicious of the traditional Christian emphasis on 'worship' as the defining quality of Man's relationship to God. While it is right and proper for a young boy to worship his father - this is not a suitable basis for a grown-up child's relationship with his father.

Arkle is suggesting that the same applies to religion - and he bases this on his intuitive understanding of the fundamental reason why God (who is in fact a dyad of Heavenly Parents) created Men (their sons and daughters) and everything else.

Arkle believes that the rationale for creation was ultimately in order that some (as many as possible) Men might 'evolve' and grow from our current partial and embryonic divinity to a full divinity on the same level as our Heavenly Parents. Therefore, our mother and father in heaven do not want us to get stuck in a stance that regards them as infinitely remote - but rather as finitely (albeit vastly) remote, and incrementally approachable over time. 

We probably tend to feel a superstitious anxiety about thinking or doing this; as if God was some kind of hyper-irritable and easily-offended tyrant; but Arkle is trying to reassure us that friendly affection and trusting confidence is exactly the attitude that God most wants us to have; as illustrated here:

http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/the-final-words-of-geography-of.html.   

See also a fuller excerpt of the above at:
http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-deep-nature-of-morality.html
        

What do I personally mean by 'God'

My personal definition of 'God' is The Creator. This entails that we inhabit a created reality - a created universe; and that this was created by a 'person'.

That definition is my understanding of what A God is.

While not universal, this basic definition is pretty widespread.


Then comes the nature of this personal God; which is perhaps unique to myself and has developed from a personal, intutive-revealed process. So I do not try to persuade others of the truth of it; it is up to each individual to discover such matters for himself. But for those who are interested...

My understanding is that God is not one individual but a dyad - specifically the eternal and loving creative relationship of Heavenly Father and Mother; our divine (actual, spiritual) parents.

This understanding also informs me of the motivation and method of God; in that the love of our Heavenly parents is what led to the purpose of creation being the procreation of spiritual children of God, and their developmental growth (via mortal life) into divine Sons and Daughters of God (as described in the Fourth Gospel). That is the motive.

The method is love: love is what makes creation possible, because it is love that transforms the primordial chaos into creation.

Heaven is Not a place of perfect happiness (*that* is Nirvana)

Of course it isn't! Those who want perfect happiness, along with those who want freedom from all suffering, are seeking Nirvana, not Heaven.

Nirvana being just that: a place of unchanging bliss, in which time is not a factor and nothing happens. (Or, at least, we are conscious-of nothing happening.)

Nirvana is, therefore, a place in which the self, the person, awareness of individuality, is lost. Because there can be no awareness of oneself if perfect happiness and absolute freedom from suffering is required.

In Nirvana the individual is dissolved-into impersonal deity; experienced as a changeless state of simple being.


Heaven is altogether a different kind of place. It is a place chosen (as a permanent commitment) by those who wish to join the Good side in the spiritual war; it is the place where all participate in God's work of loving creation; it is a place of activity - in which motivations are Good, and all the inhabitants pursue these goals in harmony.

In harmony - yes; but harmony is more a matter of sharing (forever) a common goal, and dynamic harmony requires dissonance as well as resolution. Heaven is an endless, developing symphony; it is not a single chord (no matter how sweet that chord may be). 


Creation is dynamic and entails change, love is dynamic and happens between individual persons (God is a person, Jesus is a person, the inhabitants of Heaven are persons).

If loving-creation is the primary and eternal aim of Heaven, then max-happiness/min-suffering cannot also be primary.


One source of sub-optimal happiness would be that some persons whom we love will not choose Heaven; we will be saddened by their absence, at least to some degree.  We would prefer that they had chosen Heaven, but they did not. Our situation is by-that-much sub-optimal.

Another source of sub-optimal happiness is unrequited love. Especially when it comes to eternal spiritual marriage, it may well happen that our specific love for another specific person, and our desire to form a permanent dyad with them, is not requited.

Over the long term, presumably; adjustments are made and a better pairing emerges; but at least in the short term, it seems inevitable that happiness would be sub-optimal if we wish to marry another who does not wish to marry us - at least not for eternity.


In other words, the idea of Heaven as a place of perfect (= absolute and unvarying) happiness is a red-herring, a confusion, a case of mistaken-identity; or even a rejection of the actuality of Heaven and a preference for Nirvana.

Christianity aims-at maximum polytheism

The main point of creation is to make gods, as many as possible; living as a loving Heavenly family, and sharing the end-less work of creation.

The lesson of Christ's incarnation is that we Men are gods in our nature (albeit immature and flawed gods), and that God (the Father: prime creator) is a Man. So there is a continuum between mortal Men on the one hand; and creator gods such as the Father (who was the one prime creator) and the Son (Jesus Christ).

The Father is unique as prime creator, including being Father-creator of Men (including Jesus); and Jesus is the creator of this world (but not of the Men in it - as told and implied in the opening of the Fourth Gospel) - so creation is not restricted to the Father; creation has been done by both to Father and Son (at least).

Jesus tells us (clearly, explicitly, repeatedly in the Fourth Gospel) that if we know Jesus, then we know the Father; they are not the same person (else why would Jesus pray to the Father, defer to the Father, distinguish between himself and the father); but they are the same in nature: they are 'one' in love and motivation. And Jesus is a Man in his nature, therefore so is the Father.

Jesus is the Son of God, and tells us that we too can be Sons of God - we can be of the same kind as Jesus, and Jesus is of the same kind as God.

All this is perfectly clear and explicit in scripture; but it is obscured by the false (and wrongly-motivated) mania that Christianity 'must be' a monotheism. Yet it's a terrible and destructive error to try and argue that Christianity is a monotheism; because in a vital sense Christianity is an ultimate form of polytheism - maximum polytheism; (to repeat) that is the main point and purpose of Christianity.

Few, very few, errors have damaged Christianity as much as the attempt to insist that it is a monotheism: this was and is a primary error with often lethal and unavoidable consequences. It blocks understanding of the main purpose of mortal life. It puts an evasion at the heart of Christian theology. It institutionalises incoherence.

We need to be clear: the Father hopes for as many as possible of us Men to become gods and creators, like Jesus. That is what creation is for. There is only one God (capital g), one prime creator (albeit God may actually, factually, be - as I believe - a dyad of primary Father and Mother); but the plan is for there to be many gods (small g), many creators.

That's the main point of it-all.

The Big Problem about the whole business of Omni-God

In a sense the Big Problem about the whole business of God's supposed omniscience and omnipotence is Christians defining God in terms that contradict the basic stance of Christianity.

The Omni-God arises from defining God in terms of divine attributes; and then this is compounded by these attributes being abstractions. 

But this is a strangely unnatural thing to do in the first place! For Christians, God is a person - primarily. 

To know God is to know that person - not to know his philosophical attributes!

Christians glibly pay lip-service to the Christian God being 'a personal god' - and indeed this corresponds to the sequence my own adult conversion (and that of CS Lewis); where I began as an atheist, then believed in a deity (philosophically understood - a deity of attributes), then finally a god who loved me and with whom I could have a personal relationship. 

But having arrived-at belief in a personal god, and arrived-at being-a-Christian, surely we ought then to realize that the 'person' aspect should come first? 

With the example of Jesus Christ (a Man, and divine) before us - and the way that Jesus speaks-with and refers-to his Father, repeatedly (especially in the Fourth Gospel); it seems plain and irrefutable common sense to recognize that the personal understanding of God ought-to-be primary!  

God is primarily a person, a particular individual* - God is a person who has-done and is-doing particular things; of which the most significant is creation. 

For Christians: God is the-creator; and the-creator is a person. 

Belief in God entails belief in that person. 

Only then may we move-on to discuss this God-person's attributes, powers and limitations etc - but these attributions are secondary and optional - and ought not to be made primary and defining. 

That God's attributes have-been and are, made primary and defining, is a deep and significant error; an error that leads to insoluble philosophical problems such as those relating to free agency and the origins of evil. 

...Then these insoluble problems serve to drive people away from Christianity; because belief in the attributes of God that lead to these problems is asserted to be mandatory for all Christians.

The fact that the divine attributes are doubled-down and insisted-upon despite all, implies that for such people God is not really being regarded as personal - but that, at best, philosophical abstractions are being dressed-up in a superficial personality. 

For such self-identified Christians, when the chips are down, God's personality is up for debate... but God's Omni-qualities are not negotiable but instead a dogmatic requirement. 

This is revealed by the insistence that Omni-God does not really have 'passions' or desires, that Omni-God does not hope, or suffer; that God does not change and is eternally, always 'the same'. So that Omni-God's love for his children (Men) is said to be of some qualitatively-different kind than the desiring and transforming love of persons for persons, beings for beings... 

Before long on this path, we may observe Omni-God's love is being regarded as so alien and incomprehensible a concept to our understanding, that the Christian is being pushed towards an attitude of 'oriental fatalism', obedience, and submission; and Omni-God is being attributed with a nature and motivations that - in a Man - would be regarded as evil - cold, un-loving, indifferent, heart-less... 

 

Continuing down this Omni-God path can easily take Christians away from being rooted in a relationship with the person of our loving-Father; and propel the Christian towards an attitude of unquestioning and uncomprehending obedience to an absolute judge and ruler...

And, potentially, then beyond that into oneness spiritualties of abstract universal deity, where 'love' has become so diffuse and depersonalized as to resemble an infinite force field or energetic vibrational frequency.

In conclusion; for Christians - taking the example of Jesus Christ - God the creator is a person; knowing God is to know that person - and loving God is to love that person. 

And the business of listing and defining the abstract attributes of that loved creator-God is no more necessary than it would be to list and define the attributes of Jesus Christ; or the attributes of our own parents, siblings or children...

Certainly, the loving does not wait-upon the listing! 

Adapted from a comment at WmJas Tychonievich's blog

*Note. In fact I personally believe God the creator is two persons, a dyad; but the above argument works the same whether the ultimate creator-God is one Heavenly Father or two Heavenly Parents. 

The Dyadic Holy Ghost

Since I regard God the Creator as dyadic, our Heavenly Parents, Father and Mother (actual, and presumably eternally incarnate, persons)...

And since I regard Jesus Christ's marriage to Mary of Bethany (Mary Magdalene) as a vital and transformative aspect of His work of the Second Creation...

Then it seems to follow - and has a intuitive rightness - that the Holy Ghost is also dyadic, and a consequence of the eternal commitment of Jesus and Mary in love (their "celestial marriage"). 

I think this is necessary because ultimate creativity comes from the eternal dyadic love of our Heavenly Parents (that is, the concept of creation includes (and/or arises from) love, as it includes freedom and agency - as distinguishable but inseparable aspects).  

Thus the Holy Ghost is both guide and teacher, and comforter; and it may be that these aspects reflect Jesus Christ the man and Mary Magdalene the woman; after their death, resurrection and ascension. 

In other words (bearing in mind these are emphases, not separate domains), the main theme of Jesus Christ in the Holy Ghost is to contribute discernment and purpose in a long-term, strategic way; while Mary contributes immediate help, here and now, in a tactical way. 

Jesus shows us the path, Mary keeps us upon it. 

Of course this cannot (even in principle!) be proved from the Gospels; yet the account of Mary in the Fourth Gospel strikes me as compatible by what I have just said - and from other traditions in Christianity. 

By my understanding, Mary Magdalene makes five appearances in the The Fourth Gospel: 1, implicitly in Jesus's Marriage at Cana (a passage that seems clearly tampered-with, including by deletions), in the resurrection of Lazarus (Mary's brother), the episode of the ointment on Jesus's feet in Bethany, at the foot of the cross and after Jesus's resurrection. 

Mary's concerns in the latter four episodes are very immediate, supportive, "caring" - and indeed it seems possible that Mary had a role in the resurrection of Jesus in a way analogous to John the Baptist's role in the divine but mortal transformation of the pre-baptism Jesus into Jesus Christ*. 

I get this from the hints contained in the reported conversation between the resurrected Jesus, and Mary, when she was the first to meet Jesus after his death, thus.

John 20: 14... she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus. [15] Jesus saith unto her, Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. [16] Jesus saith unto her, Mary. She turned herself, and saith unto him, Rabboni; which is to say, Master. [17] Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God.  

It strikes me that Jesus may here be talking of their future eternal union - to include the spiritual emanation of the Holy Ghost, available to all who follow Jesus - to happen (only) after Mary's death and resurrection. 

In very general terms - to include Mary Magdalene/ of Bethany in the Holy Ghost is a further development and explication of the deadly rejection of the feminine that afflicted Christianity from early-on (and which I blame of the monotheist philosophers who captures and continue to torment Christin theology!)

The progressively increasing emphasis on Mary the mother of Jesus in Catholic practice, I take to be a theologically-distorted - but nonetheless spiritually very valuable - manifestation of the reality of Heavenly Mother, and the wife of Jesus Christ. 

The fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary is mainly called-upon for aid and comfort in the difficulties of everyday living, fits with my understanding of the role of the divine feminine in general, and Mary Magdalene in her marriage-into the Holy Ghost specifically.   

Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, rediscovered the Christian feminine in God; but the CJCLDS have since neglected and suppressed this aspect of Joseph's revelation - and have chosen not to develop it, while never denying it. 

I am strongly of the view that an explicit inclusion of Heavenly Mother in the fundamental concept of God; and probably too a personal womanly aspect of the Holy Ghost; has (belatedly) become an all-but essential quest or project - for us, here and now. 

This is not something Christians can get off-the-peg or from any external source; but something each needs to work-through for himself - by the usual external and internal means of spiritual guidance. 

*Note added: This is easily (negatively or positively) misinterpreted in terms of divided stereotypical sex roles. I mean much more and almost the opposite; which is that the dyad of a man and woman eternally co-committed in love, can do something that neither can do alone - or, at least, one person can do less, and less well. That is something like a harmony of strategic purposive wisdom with immediate help. By analogy (very approximate) it is a bit like the benefit of being loved and looked-after by two people, a man and a woman, each with distinctive perspectives and capacities, eternally combined in love; who completely share divine purposes and method. This would be better than any conceivable single person, with only a single perspective and vision. That this is two persons creates and sustains a dynamic and growing aspect to the situation - whereas a single person would tend towards inertia and stasis. That this is two persons, rather than more than two, should be seen as an extra gift and potentiality added to the situation of single person - rather than a limitation.