There is an old joke about a rabbi speaking with an atheist. The atheist says to the rabbi, “I don’t believe in God,” and the rabbi replies, “I don’t believe in the god that you don’t believe in either.” In the case of Clif High, he is not an atheist as he claims to be, he just believes in a different god from the God of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims (though there is some question as to whether Allah is the same god as Yahweh). Clif’s god is called “Consciousness” and it is amazing how similar his conception of the god Consciousness is to Yahweh.
Consciousness is at the center of Clif’s ontology, a philosophical paradigm of being and reality based in metaphysics that essentially serves the purpose of what we generally consider the purpose of such major religions as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, etc. Indeed, Consciousness is the creator of the Universe…so much so that the Universe only exists to the extent that Consciousness wills it to exist some 22 trillion times a second according to Clif. Yahweh in Judaic thought is similarly considered to be constantly creating his creation which is never really defined as the Universe in the liturgy, but may as well be. This concept of constant creation by Yahweh is a surprise to most Jews and certainly Christians whose common religious teachings assert that God created the earth and everything and every being on it, the planets, and the stars in six days and then rested on the seventh day while getting ready to watch what would become of his creation. But, in any case, there it is in both Clif’s and the Abrahamic religions’ god concepts…a creator of everything who (or that) is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient and who (or that) is constantly re-creating his (or its) creation in real time.
So, let’s cut to the chase here… Clif High is professing a new religion that he claims is “catholic” in the classic definition of the word catholic, which is “universal.” What is a religion? It is simply a belief system. A religion can be a belief system about anything, but we generally associate the word “religion” with some god-centric and/or spiritual paradigm that defines the nature of our being and of existence in general. Religions as we know them today (and have known them for millennia) generally involve a creator, a creation story, an existence model as deemed by the creator, and an eschatology or “end times” scenario that effectively wraps everything up in some way…sometimes in apocalypse and sometimes in redemption and a messianic era. Either way, there is a beginning, a middle, and some sort of finale.
Religions are for the most part based upon faith. In fact, religions are often called “faiths” because for the most part religions are built around beliefs in the happening of events and the actions of the people and spiritual characters who are supposed to have participated in those events for which there is no actual proof. Adherents to most religions take the building blocks of their religions on faith. An adherent will say, “I believe it because I believe it, it serves my spiritual requirements as it did for my parents and their parents, so it’s good enough for me.” Western religions are for the most part based upon mythology and mysticism, and their liturgy is generally laden with allegory that is meant to relate the basic principles of the religion to humans and serve to guide their conduct. This is where lies the uniqueness of Clif’s Consciousnessism.
Clif is a scientist of a sort with his own concept of physical science that is completely at odds with physics as it is generally understood by most physicists today, and, believe it or not, is also completely at odds with the creation story of the Abrahamic religions. Clif is making the claim that his new religion, Consciousnessism, is the only true religion, and that all of the other religions on planet earth are mere cults.
What is a cult? A fair definition is a quasi-religious belief system commonly considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional, self-sacrificing manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader with whom the followers are obsessed. Clif finds Judaism to be the most extreme, the most false, the most dangerous to humanity of all the religions on earth. He calls Judaism the “Elohim Worship Cult” as it is supposed to be the result of an unfortunate, abusive encounter between evil space aliens called “El’s” and human proto-Jews about four thousand years ago that caused those humans involved to become subject to Stockholm syndrome. According to the Cleveland Clinic, Stockholm syndrome is “a coping mechanism to a captive or abusive situation where people develop positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time.”
In other words, the proto-Jews came to worship the very evil El who was particularly abusing them as their only way of coping with him or it or whatever the El was. According to Clif this El ultimately morphed over time into what is known as Yahweh, the god/creator/central figure of the Abrahamic religions and those religions came to embody the evil El. The El space aliens were supposed to have messed with multiple other religious belief systems on earth at the time, but the proto-Jews were the ones who decided to literally worship the El who was abusing them as the “one God,” and that is why Clif considers Judaism to be the ultimate quasi-religious cult on earth, and any religion based around Judaism to be similarly reviled as false.
The problem with all of this is that in the Jewish liturgy and commentary, God is not some reprobate space alien…an evil ET biologic in modern terms…but rather something infinite…not a being in any sense of the word. One of the best descriptions that I have seen in Jewish literature is, “In all that exists, there is really only one force, one grand will and consciousness that directs every detail of the cosmos, from the galaxies and superstars to the tiniest worm beneath the earth to the movement of every subatomic particle. Even within our very sense of existence and autonomy, our discretion and agency, there lies God.” By the way, Clif, did you notice the word “consciousness” in that definition? Maybe your god, Consciousness, is a lot closer to the god, Yahweh, than you would care to admit.
Whereas the Jews profess to be a light of good and holiness to the world, Clif sees the Jews as the proverbial root of all evil. Indeed, the Jewish people are viewed by Clif and his acolytes as the cause of virtually all of the suffering endured by humankind down through the ages including all of the wars, slavery, poverty, economic disasters, and just general depravity. In fact, Clif goes so far as to accuse the Jewish people of being “traitors to the human specie,” and you know what ultimately happens to traitors!
Why such hatred, Clif? Why such accusations, Clif? How is it, Clif, that such a tiny fraction of the human race as the Jews should warrant such invective? More to the point, how could such a tiny fraction of the human race as the Jews have the ability to literally ruin existence on earth for everyone else as you profess?
I think that I know why Clif takes this extremely negative attitude towards the Jews. Like most religious leaders down through history, Clif sees the religion that he has established, Consciousnessism, as the only true religion…the reason for everything, the answer to why and how we exist, the who or what that created everything. You’ve got a question? Consciousnessism has the answer! Why is there good and evil? Is there life throughout the universe or are we alone? What is the universe anyway? Just ask Clif and he’ll tell you in no uncertain terms the answers to all these questions because he is the pope of this new catholic (universal) religion, Consciousnessism. So, like most religious leaders have done down through history, Clif must powerfully defend HIS religion as the only truth, against all the imposter religions that have beguiled and fooled the people up until Clif’s revelation.
What’s the best way to do this? … the way most religious leaders have done it all along? Demonize the other religions and their followers…call their beliefs illegitimate and declare that those that hold those beliefs must convert to the only acceptable religion or be exiled from society or simply killed off. In other words, if one religion claims its truth to be the only truth, it cannot exist next to other religions that also make a claim on “the truth.” If there can only be one truth, then there can only be one religion. This is why down through history the political leaders of most societies have either claimed to be the leader of the society’s religion (or even its god as was Louis XIV of France who claimed the moniker “Sun God”) or claims to serve in leadership at the behest of the society’s dominant religion. So, Clif is just doing what any self-respecting nouveau religious leader would do when he seeks to demonize Judaism, its adherents, and the Abrahamic religions that derive from Judaism. If Consciousnessism is now to be the only truth among the western religions, all the others just have to go. It must be noted here that Clif seems to have a special affinity for Islam and gives it somewhat of a pass because so much of Islamic liturgy castigates the Jews and calls for their destruction… ideas with which Clif is definitely on board.
So Clif, welcome to the club… you are now a charter member of civilization’s eternal club of religious leaders whether you like it or not. How have you definitively attained this status? It’s simple: through your study and analysis of ancient texts and human experiential data from the far past and near present you have developed Consciousnessism to explain everything, and I mean everything… space, time, life, you name it. You are absolutely sure that everything you say about Consciousnessism is THE absolute truth. Not only that, you make absolutely definitive interpretations of other religions’ beliefs that you claim to be absolutely correct even though they are diametrically opposed to the beliefs of the followers of those other religions.
But that’s OK, Clif! When you are a religious leader it doesn’t matter. Nobody knows infinity… nobody knows when time began if there was a time when time began and nobody knows if or when it will end, nobody knows the dimensions of space and no one ever will, no one knows what life is…what animates living things, no one knows how it is that there are sentient creatures like us, no one knows where we came from or where we are going. There are clues to some of these questions In “science” and indications of answers from historical events that may or may not have happened over the millennia, but there are no real answers to these questions… that is where the supernatural and the spiritual comes into play… that is where religious belief and faith are supreme, and that is where you are Clif.
Clif, you are entirely entitled to ask people to take on faith everything that you say even though everything that you say about Conscousnessism is uniformly stated as fact while actually being based in the supernatural. You are entitled to say that you are right and that just about everyone on earth regarding the subject is absolutely wrong because you are stating a belief system about things that are beyond proof. That’s the nature of the beast, in order to be a successful religious leader, you have to be absolutely certain about that which is at its core unprovable.
The real problem comes in when religious leaders like you, Clif, accuse other belief systems like Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Hinduism, etc. as being illegitimate because they are contrary to the belief system that you espouse. In the worst case, religious leaders like you call for the destruction of the people who hold those faiths… as when you call Jews “traitors to their specie” and the source of all evil.
So Clif, you are perfectly free to lead your new religion. Your belief system is perfectly free to claim whatever it wants about the supernatural and the spiritual as well as about perceived reality. You are perfectly free to claim that your belief system is the absolute truth as you do all the time. All that I would ask of you is that you stay in your lane… say what you want about your beliefs but at least have the decency to respect the beliefs of others. You don’t have to admit it, but you really don’t know the answer to infinity…nobody does. Your truth is just another truth in the panoply of truths that suffuse the human outlook on existence. If you don’t accept that basic truth, you just look like a narcissistic jerk to the rest of us who do have the decency to respect the supernatural/spiritual belief systems of others, no matter how contrary they are to our own.
MAX
