reality sand: John Lennon's "God"

God is a concept/ by which we measure our pain/
I'll say it again
GOD is a CONCEPT/ by which we measure/ our pain/ yeah

John Lennon was shot dead by a mentally ill person on Monday, December 8, 1980, when I was a little under two years old. The photo at the right, taken about eight hours before his death by Annie Leibovitz, eventually appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. John was pronounced dead on arrival at Roosevelt Hospital, near Columbus Circle, having lost 80% of his blood.

John's now-famous song "God" was released ten years earlier, on December 11, 1970, shortly after the catastrophic breakup of the Beatles. Atheists have co-opted the song for their ends, but I'd argue their interpretation is both cynical and prosaic, and, more to the point, masks Lennon's intent. "God" strips the human conception of God down to its naked existence, to the point where it is understood as a function of suffering. This is most definitely in contrast to the Judaeo-Islamic-Christian concept of "original sin," where human suffering is understood as a function of our intransigence vis a vis God. No; God and man go hand in hand; the creation is reciprocal. Suffering applies to God as much as it does to us.

Apropos or not, my favourite word in the English language is "holophrastic," which can be defined as "expressing a complex idea in a single word." God is not a word that properly applies to an individual, per se. God and the universe are coextensive, and all human attempts to identify, to codify, and to localize God are not only misguided, but actually blasphemous. In my opinion.

I don't believe in magic/ I don't believe in I-ching. . ./ I don't believe in tarot/ I don't believe in Hitler. . ./ I don't believe in Kennedys/ I don't believe in Buddha. . ./ I don't believe in [Bhagavad] Gita/ I don't believe in Yoga/ I don't believe in kings/ I don't believe in Elvis/ I don't believe in Zimmerman [Bob Dylan]/ I don't believe in Beatles

I just believe in me
Yoko, and me
And that's reality

John's song destroyed God as an instrumentality of faith, and redeemed God as a living conception of the human soul. Once John disclaims the false conceptions of God, he is free to believe in what is naked and alive: his own psychic reality, and that of Yoko's. Their Double Fantasy. A philosopher might argue that this line of thinking descends from Descartes, but I prefer to believe that this understanding is divinely inspired, and that John Lennon found, in his mutual reality with Yoko Ono, an iteration of God's love which transcends all human conceptions of God. If we listen closely, the scriptures warn us against programmatic interpretations of the divine:

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?
Job 38:1-2

The story of Jesus's martyrdom is so powerful to so many of us precisely because it is a human quality to sacrifice one's self for an ideal, for the human race as a whole. This quality is not an aberration; it is the sine qua non of our race. It is what we work towards every day, it is what we measure ourselves against. Nietzsche thought this self-sacrifice weak, of course, but that's just Nietzsche being Nietzsche. The really interesting question, to me. . . what precisely is the relationship between the ideals of the human race and the divinity of God? This question, it seems to me, can only be answered anthropologically, so to speak: through a cross-cultural study of various forms of advanced life "across the universe."

Yeah, I guess I'm a deist.