Jung and Moon: A Counter-Argument to the New Atheists.

The New Atheists make a common, compelling argument: Why does the all mighty, all good God commit immoral acts (murdering the first-born Egyptians, instructing genocide against the Canaanites, sending plagues and pestilence to innocents, etc etc)? Clearly, they argue, God is not all-good, and religious people hide such facts in order to save their dogmatic belief systems.

The young intellectual Alex O'Connor recently presented the same argument in a debate with conservative Christian Dinesh D'Souza. As a fundamentalist-type who's first line in the debate was to highlight that "all you atheists seem to have British accents" and that he needed to "stand up" to counter it , needless to say D'Souza failed to counter O'Connor's barrage of excerpts from scripture and sound logic. 

How do religious people grapple with the clear immorality of God, particularly in the Old Testament? Many explanations and doctrines, particularly among Catholics and other Christians, have sought to explain the difference between God in Christ and the God of the Old Testament. Other Christians simply put the Old Testament aside and focus on the New Testament. Some early Christians, such as Marcion, formed the Marcionic Church and help develop Gnosticism, which holds that the Old Testament's Yahweh is actually the evil Demiurge who trapped human beings in the physical world of matter, and that Christ, the Heavenly Serpent, came to liberate us all from this evil.

Another development coinciding with the New Atheist movement is the discovery of the historical origins of the Israelites and their god, Yahweh. Justin Sledge, another famous intellectual on YouTube, is an example of someone (a religious Jew, mind you) explaining in plain terms that Yahweh is, in fact, one of many gods within the Canaanite pantheon. Yahweh is actually just a minor desert-storm raiding god, dwarfed by the major thunderstorm god Baal. 

If you're a well-read Christian, I know. Perhaps I've committed four or five heresies thus far. But please, I beg you to hear (and read) me out. 

The head of the Canaanite pantheon was El. El may actually be familiar to Jews and Christians. El is the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. This is a fact. El is the old grandfather with the beard. El is the wise old man that calls Abraham out of his father's house so that he may be blessed.

So now we have two gods in the Bible: El and Yahweh. Can both of these gods be the same God?

To my New Atheist friends, to keep myself from writing an entire book, for the sake of discussion, let's assume that a Conscious Creator exists. Call the Being whatever you please. And I'd invite you to bear with a second assumption: that the Conscious Creator, God, is indeed perfect (whatever that means). We do not have to assume that human beings, on the other hand, are imperfect. That's easy to agree on. The point of this discussion is to address the immorality of God, not whether God actually exists.

Father Moon offered a unique insight: for a relationship to occur, two partners must have a common base in order to engage in give and receive action. In other words, if nothing can prompt the relationship on both sides, there is no relationship. A perfect God, therefore, by definition, cannot engage in any relationship with human beings. 

Consider the idea of Utopia. Fyodor Dostoyevsky rightly points out that human beings, if freely given Utopia, would destroy it in an instance: "He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive rationality his fatal fantastic element...simply in order to prove to himself that men still are men and not piano keys." Humans cannot handle perfection. Not only has no one achieved it, when given it, we're so filled with contradictions that we'll ruin it. Father Moon called this reality the Merit of the Age.

What's worse is that Father Moon, along with other East-Asian spiritual Christians, believed and felt that God is a God of sorrow and dismay. If everything exists in relationship (even at the most fundamental level with protons and electrons), and God is the Origin of the universe, then an implicit motivation to create was to create another equally conscious partner to form a relationship with. Yet, since God's creation lacks the common base necessary for a relationship, God is still left without a relationship. What is God, the perfect Being, supposed to do in such a situation? How can God relate with human beings? To solve this puzzle, one must look to the work of Carl Jung.

Jung, as a psychologist, noticed the detrimental effect the collapse of value that Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and others predicted was having on western society. Jung was particularly interested in the collapse of religious symbols. For Jung, religious symbols were grounded in myth; in particular, myth of a universal nature, common throughout religions and narratives, that spoke to archetypes: the contents of the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is Jung's psychological concept of that which is unseen, and needs to manifest to the conscious level of human psyche. They are fundamental truths about the human condition, truths that are within the collective of human beings. When stories consistently speak to people for centuries on end, evidence mounts that the stories have fundamental archetypes, manifested over time in the group's conscious psyche, whether the stories are literally "true" or not (although the question of did the story actually happen is an important one to answer).

The Bible contains many myths in which Jung would identify as containing fundamental archetypes: the benevolent father, the anima, and the wise man to name a few. What were the gods? Jung believed they were archetypes of the collective unconscious individualized in the individual consciousness of a group of people through individuation: a process of mapping onto the conscious psyche in a the maximal manner the group can handle.

Jung's thought offers an explanation for how the perfect God can relate with human beings. God, using the highest archetypes possible, or the common base that's highest in goodness within a human being within his/her unconscious psyche, calls the person through a god: the archetype manifested to the conscious psyche. God then appears as that god. What better god to call Abraham, the father of nations, than the wise, grandfather god El, the head of the Canaanite pantheon. What better god fits the minority, wandering, aimless, desert dwelling Israelites (or the Canaanite sect of the Shamu, to cite another popular historical theory) than the minor, desert-storm raiding god Yahweh, the nemesis of the coastal storm god Baal?

This theory holds true in the thought of Father and Mother Moon. Exposition of the Divine Principle explains that God manifested to people based on their region and culture: Budda, the Greek gods, and Confucius to name a few cited examples. The archetypes manifest in the same manner according to Jung. The difference is that Moon starts from the religious with a perfect God and an Original Mind, while Jung starts from the scientific with the psyche and the collective unconscious. It is important to note, however, that Jung believed psychology was a field unlike any other in science due to the necessity of its research being so empirically based.

If the perfect God has no choice but to manifest through imperfect archetypes that require being mapped onto the human conscious psyche, then the actions committed by the god are an expression of the highest level of morality the people can handle, and NOT God Himself. It's a well known fact for historians that people, cultures, religions, and moral systems change *overtime*, not all at once. The perfect God cannot change things all at once. To relate with human beings, God must obey the Principles in the world that he created. As Jung points out, archetypes are mapped onto the human psyche in a manner to which people can maximally handle. 

The New Atheists are right on two accounts: God is not all powerful, and Yahweh and El are not God. Instead, they are imperfect *expressions* of God. But this also means that the true Being of God is not committing the immoral acts of the Old Testament. The morality of God is expressed at the maximum level human beings can take, meaning that the rest of the religion of the Old Testament is filled with the negative side of archetypes and the imperfection of human beings. 

If Jung's thought is integrated into the religious enterprise, and vice versa, the historical of Yahweh and the religious experience of God have the possibility of being united. Only a united Truth can make up the backbone of arguments that can fully defeat the New Atheists. Strictly adhering to religious dogmas or narrow-readings of scriptures only fuel the fire of the New Atheists, who rightly question the immorality of religious deities. The key to answering their profound question lies in the necessity of existence in relationship, and the tragedy that the all mighty God is relegated by his own Being to settle for human morality in order to preserve any relationship with us.