Little Black Rosebuds – Monographs by Fr.

Jaime

Monograph Nº1: Duty to God?

What is duty? In the past, long-gone days, when I used to mark

essays submitted to me, students’ discussion habitually started
with dictionary or textbook definitions. I always used to berate
and take them to task for lack of originality, for starting with
someone else’s notion of a particular concept. And so I would
here, except that, for some concepts – such as duty – one is
ineluctably bound to start from the other position. Take
another abstract, art, for example. Asking the question “what is
“art”?” neither requires nor is conditional on either a concrete
example or an input. That is not to say that one may not be
educated to the nth degree in any of the fine arts as a means to
understanding. Of course, that is eminently possible: merely
that it is not essential. My grand-daughter’s understanding of
“art” or, perhaps, aesthetic values, as an illustration, is
already well developed at the age of three with no input from me
(or anyone else, for that matter). Though I do not share her
notion of the suitableness of virulently tinted almost
fluorescent candy-pink coloured clothing for everyday wear, her
own feelings on the matter are quite emphatic. Wendy’s notion
of “duty”, on the other hand – even as an abstract idea, let
alone in terms of what it is she must do – is not yet formed.
Perish the thought that it should at that age!

In this sense, then, duty always has to come from an external,

an “other”. Whereas, once upon a time, a general idea, “duty”
might have been susceptible to individual interpretation,
nowadays the notion of duty is incorporated into law: the “duty
of care”, (or, more accurately, the lack of) for example, in
statute is enforceable and its omission punishable. In previous
ages, particularly the 18th and 19th centuries in Western
civilization, codes of gentlemanly conduct were never written
down: there was no need – those things that made a gentleman a
gent were generally known and accepted by all. Frequently
copied or aped, and always the stock-in-trade of novelists and
dramatists alike (reaching its apotheosis in the plays of Oscar
Wilde), the real thing could never, ever, be mistaken for the
counterfeit beyond a certain point. That it could be copied by
transformation was entirely down to a code of behaviour, which
could (and still can) be summed up in one word- “duty”. Some
would argue that the “gentleman” is now defunct, and dead as a
dodo precisely because this code, this sense of duty no longer
obtains. It may be that because duty now has to be defined in
law, and its lack proscribed, as I have observed above, the
demise of the Western gent fact. Were the Victorian gentleman,
however, to be neglectful in his duty, the proscriptions against
him were equally severe if not absolutely enshrined in legalese.

When I was a lad, I was a member of an organisation that had as

its motto: “Country (or Nation), Fellow-man, and Christ”. The
movement’s highly respected founder rather neatly (and quite
deliberately, I suspect) reversed the traditional English “For
God, King and Country”, but the effect is, largely, the same,
the inescapable and ineluctable inference being that one owed a
duty – no-matter whether first, middle or last in the list to
the three entities in turn: taking King and fellow-man as
synonymous for the moment. (Arguable, I realise!) Nowadays
it’s quite fashionable to “Cry “God for Harry (Wills, Kate,
Charlie, Lizzie, etc) England and Saint George!”” so that there
is all the more reason for thinking persons to enquire more
deeply about the reasoning that lies behind that imperative.

Starting with duty to God, one is bound to ask “which god?” for
starters, as even the text upon which the whole of Christianity
is based acknowledges that there is, in fact, more than one
(god). The point being, of course, that the god of the Old
Testament by whatever name (who is, by extension, identical in
every respect with that of the new) can abide no rivals: “Thou
shalt have no other gods before me.” (Ex.20:3) Logically,
assuming one believes in the possibility of the divine as a
being or beings one has a choice of nomenclature. Just to
sidetrack, for a moment, the most up-to-date scientific
research, particularly in the realms of theoretical physics
shows that our reality may not actually be all it appears to be.
In the halcyon days of pre-quantum physics, atoms were regarded
as pretty solid things: if our world was filled with atoms there
could not be room for anything else. Unfortunately (or not,
depending on your point of view) more recent discoveries show
that matter is permeable; there are spaces in between atoms, and
within or inside atoms and matter can, and does under certain
conditions, behave completely unlike a solid/liquid, and more
like an electromagnetic wave (think of light). Liquids cooled
to temperatures approaching absolute zero, for example, pass
through substances previously held to be impermeable. Walking
through a solid wall doesn’t now sound nearly so ridiculous a
proposition when the evidence shows liquid nitrogen dripping
through solid glass. By the same token it is eminently possible
that other beings might inhabit the spaces where we fondly
imagine we have sole occupancy. Some theoretical physicists
suggest parallel universes, universes within universes and
holographic universes.

So there might be a God, or gods. Or there might not. Almost

unavoidably, writing from the perspective of having been born,
raised and lived in Britain, questions of godhood have to be
discussed, first, in terms of Christian tradition. That is not
to say that starting from other gods, from other traditions is
not valid – generally. Merely that from my own point of view it
has to be the Christian god.

In my opinion there are and, from the Gnostic perspective, the

first deity is female, the Goddess. As always, the answer
depends: Pascal’s wager seems a more reasonable proposition now
that the evidence base has changed, in the sense that it now
seems entirely reasonable to claim that other entities can exist
in the spaces between the spaces. (Even if those entities are
ourselves in parallel universes!) Having made our choice, the
question is then what duty do we owe this superior being or
beings? The answer to this knotty issue largely depends on our
own view of ourselves within the cosmos. Are we here by
accident? Were we created as some essential component in a
divine or cosmic game? Were we made as toys or playthings for
the entertainment of more developed beings? And on it goes. .
. .

I maintain that there are two wholly rational answers. Or,

rather, one answer in two parts. Most, if not all, of the
world’s civilizations acknowledge a creator God/dess. So
acknowledging her existence might not be a bad idea. That
doesn’t mean to say, however, that the creator God/dess merits
ceaseless aeons of praise chanted by people with harps. (I
would refer confirmed sceptics who appreciate a good laugh to
Mark Twain’s Letters From Earth‫)א‬. My reason for supporting
Twain’s view is that to justify the endless harping in heaven
that he describes we have to impute to these deities,
Jehovah/God, in particular, very human characteristics, chief
among which – from the burning desire to be lauded without end
an inferiority complex of gargantuan and utterly
incomprehensible magnitude. The question of whether or not we
own a duty to praise our Creator depends upon this imputation of
a human psychological complex. The second point, about our
being toys and playthings of the divine is more vexed for, at
its heart, lies the classic Catholic doctrines of sin and of
free will.

I find both these doctrines quite abominable and genuinely

perverse. Here is not the place to tease out the justifications
and counter-argument for this assertion. In the context of
duty, however, the second answer largely depends upon the actual
and presumed degree of benignity we ascribe to the deity/ies.
Once more, we have to attempt an answer based upon what we may
reasonably surmise: some of the factors are intelligence, age,
ancestry and longevity. And of course the evidence base.

Allow me to start with that, first. There is so much anecdotal

and apocryphal evidence amasses over the ages from practically
every civilization to the effect that gods exist. Most of this
we declare to be mumbo-jumbo, not congruent with our current
state of civilization. Really? To justify such a claim on the
basis of a superior state of being (viz. our civilized-ness)
there would have to be evidence for that. Are we truly
civilized?

That evaluation requires such a subjective response that it

would be impossible, not o say pointless, to go into it here.
My own opinion is that though we preen ourselves on being
civilized, it is only a veneer- skin deep – and never consistent
at that. Given the sum total of human intelligence there should
be no famine, drought, unemployment, ignorance, preventable
disease on the planet. That there is famine, drought, etc.
anywhere in the world is ample evidence that we are emphatically
and collectively not intelligent beings. By extension,
therefore, I do not maintain that we are actually clever enough

‫א‬
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/twainlfe.htm
to be able, categorically, to claim that gods or spirit-beings
of any kind do not exist.

Are they intelligent? There is absolutely no reason not to

imagine so. Why should some numinous beings not be at least as
intelligent as humans are, collectively speaking. (I know that
this asseveration begs a whole string of put-you-downs, but,
bear with me, please? And, in any case I would refer you to the
penultimate sentence of the previous paragraph!) In fairness,
it is also possible that some are not. Those that enjoy fairy
tales are well ware that some species of troll are quite stupid.
So if one concedes the possibility that invisible beings exist
alongside us, almost but not quite of of our universe, it
follows that some will be cleverer, and some stupider, and some
the same.

Questions of age, ancestry and longevity can only be answered

through the mythological/theistic record: and these go back long
enough to provide some answers. As a Luciferian-Gnostic, the
answer is clear to me. Even though we, provided we acknowledge
their existence, clearly, know what our own feelings are towards
supernatural entities, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we can
use our own feelings as a reliable guide to attitudes these
beings have towards us. Much as we might like to thinks so, it
does not necessarily follow that every supernatural being has
benign. While some may, indeed, have our best interests at
heart, logic suggests that the contrary is, at the very least,
possible. Even our own mythologies and theologies suggest that
this is so. Christianity could not exist without its very own
antihero: Satan.