Dare to think about the wholly spiritless

By Richard Dickenson

I listened to a Very Prominent Churchman as he sought to explain the Christian take on what he called The Holy Spirit/Ghost. What a job he was having explaining this curious entity. No wonder. I looked up the Wikipedia offering: ‘The Christian doctrine of the Trinity holds that God is one God, but three coeternal consubstantial persons or hypostases as ‘one God in three Divine Persons.’ Presumably therefore the Spirit is not a mere spirit but a person. The three Persons are distinct, yet are one ‘substance, essence or nature’. Could someone explain, please. It seems that this spirit or ghost is some sort of ‘emanation’ or energy derived from a god. It appears to have some sort of separate yet associated existence with the other parts. D’you understand?

What was clear to me was that the man had virtually no comprehension of what he was explaining. No surprise there as the real answers are unknown. The consequence was yet another effort to cloak ignorance with a load of meaningless metaphysical jargon. Clearly the man’s hope was that the enquirer would eventually be satisfied by the voluminous answer and would simply give up on the question. No bishop or pope will admit he hasn’t a clue as this would rock the foundations of the organisation.

No working definition of Holy Spirit is available. And that’s that.

There is no way to reconcile the oddities, errors and deliberate obfuscations of the Old Testament. The one thing that’s virtually sure is that the events related had little to do with those wandering nomads of Palestine and their self-appointed, capricious and multiply criminal YaHWeH,.. the name by which their supreme god was sometimes named. The Jewish religion and its daughter sects have all had to prop up their stories by introducing a total dependence on faith. If there is something inexplicable and which cannot be understood, then apply faith to it and it ceases to matter. All you need is faith and you magically avoid all the glaring inconsistencies and the lack of historical confirmation. But I suggest that nowadays, in the 21st century and three hundred years since the Enlightenment, doing the ostrich bit and pretending the difficult parts are not there just isn’t good enough.

Miracles, partings of the Red Sea, sticks changing into serpents and so on are obvious nonsense. Things that are physically and chemically unable to happen do not happen. All the magic in the world can’t get a rabbit out of a hat if there isn’t one in there. The events written in the Bible seem almost certain to have been fragments of events occuring in the greatest culture of that place and period, namely Egypt. Forget fairy tales like gods bellowing out of burning bushes and starving wanderers wolfing down manna. These are all distorted reports of things that just might have happened but which happened in Egypt. No-one there would have cared about a few traipsing Jews. There were empires, cultures, religions galore without any fiddlesome new sand-trekkers.

Of course it’s hard to see beyond the deliberate indoctrination to which most of us were subjected. Our grandparents believed and taught our parents. So our parents believed and taught us. No one sat back, thought, and said ‘Whoa, let’s stop this automation.’ Only with the pitifully slow spread of education have a few been able to shake free from early brain-washing, one funeral at a time. Islam is currently stuck in a cruel medieval time warp. But it has a great tradition of science, medicine and learning. Once the imams and the ayatollahs lose their grip then Islam will surge forward again. Cultured Jews everywhere are turning from Judaism. I suspect that if the religion were not so closely tied up to nationalism and ‘Jewishness’ there would be fewer adherents; no wonder circumcision has to be commited before the years of discretion and the right to resist. Christians everywhere except where the priests still have a stranglehold, or in the Red-Neck-Lunatics Bible Belt of the US, are straying away from religion in their thousands.

Meanwhile the priests who usurped their fictitious authority stemming from their utterly unfounded claim of intercession between gods and men are starting to run scared. Some of the more enlightened thinkers among them are already starting to recant on their erstwhile beliefs in imaginary godheads.

Clergy need to come up with far better ideas than blind faith if they are to get away with their charade much longer.