No, this is not another post about The Incredibles.
The real quote is: “The phenomenon is known as the Jerusalem Syndrome, though psychiatrists disagree whether it can affect otherwise healthy people, or causes only those predisposed to psychoses to believe they have seen the Messiah.”
Then I looked at the seven stages of the Jerusalem Syndrome psychosis and I’m a little worried. Stage 1: that’s me most days. Stage 2: while I’m not touring Jerusalem alone, I do spend most hours of the day not talking to anyone older than 21 months. I skipped stage 3. I went through stage 4 in college, although it was not ankle length. Skipped stage 5. Stage 6: if you count my favorite coffee house as a holy place (and some would!) then I’m in trouble. Stage 7: THAT’S MY BLOG!!
[Thanks to Matt at photomatt.net]
According to the psychological standpoint man cannot get outside his own psyche. All experience is therefore psychic experience. This means that it is impossible, experientially, to distinguish between God and the God-image in the psyche.
Edward F. Edinger
The Creation of Consciousness: Jung’s Myth for Modern Man
The Bible, it seems to me, (and especially the O.T.) is all about how God relates to people. And it was recorded by those people to whom God was relating. So, we end up with several layers of mediation: God — absolute truth, unchanging, eternal — interacts with people who mediate this interaction through their psyches — including all their biases, prejudices, preconceptions — and then record this interaction. We then have other people (like you and me) reading about those interactions but we are mediating what we read through our own psyches — including all our biases, prejudices, preconceptions — to arrive at “God” which is really just the God-image in our own psyches (reflected from the God-image in the Biblical writer’s psyches). And some people have the nerve to say that this IS God.
Suppose my daughter, in a few years, starts writing about me in a journal. Then, 20 years later, you read this journal. How close will the picture you have of me be to the “real” me? Now think about someone reading this journal in 2000 or 4000 years! Unlike you, they will have almost nothing in common with my daughter — culturally, socially, technologically. How close will their picture of me be to the “real” me? For them to say that they know me, in any definition of the word, seems almost ludicrous.
Polarized sunglasses work by letting through light that is aligned in only one direction. This acts to reduce the number of photons getting through and therefore reduce the intensity of the light. Polarized sunglasses work very well to reduce the intensity of light being reflected off (and therefore polarized by) a lake or highway. Polarized sunglasses also work very well to reduce the intensity of God and that’s exactly what religion does. As Carl Jung said, “One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.” After all, Moses could only see the fleeting arse end of God without being instantly killed and just that tiny peek was enough to make him glow.
Another interesting aspect of this analogy is the effect of holding two polarized lenses with one in front of the other and then rotate one of them 90°. What happens? Everything goes black! This is because the first lens is letting light through that is only vertically polarized whereas the second is letting light through that is only horizontally polarized (or vice-versa). The result is nothing gets past them both — they are mutually exclusive. Kind of like Christianity and Islam, for example. The trick is to realize that they are both looking at the same sun but have selected different aspects of that sun while the other aspects have been removed for our own protection.
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