Should it be, “my God”: or “my” God?

Who can say with certainty that human beings are unique – or indeed that they are not unique? How can human beings know for sure whether one man is exactly the same as, or different to another, without being that other man

Virginia Woolf, her sister, Vanessa Bell, and the schools of writers and painters that followed them, adhered to the latter proposition: that humans were not unique.

How did they know?

Virginia Woolf had recurring bouts of mental illness – but her sister did not.

According to Genesis, God made man in His own image and the only conclusion that can here be reached is that one person’s idea of God must be the same as another’s, for all human beings were made in the image of God – and God, according to Rabbinical Judaism, cannot be many: God is one – a fact not revealed to Moses by God – or at least not apparently declared by Him according to the Torah.

Yet God, according to Moses, said “I am that I am” and the conclusion here must be that humans cannot know who God is – and this, in turn, means that one man’s conception of who He is, is going to be different to another’s.

Even if it is not accepted that the Tanach is the Word of God, the argument that one cannot say for sure that one man’s God is all men’s God, or that He is only that one man’s God, is just as relevant.

The mystic may say that he has experienced who God is; but he acknowledges that the intellect cannot grasp what his experience reveals. If the intellect cannot grasp tne mystic’s expeience, the experience cannot be compared to another mystic’s experience, and therefore cannot be said to be unique or otherwise. Will the intellect develop in time, though, so that it will be able to articulate mystic experience?

The person who has suffered or is suffering from trauma, eg, Simone Weil, who restricted her food intake for the whole of her life and thus traumatised her body and soul – such a person, it has recently been claimed, is prone to the post-trauma symptom of spiritual experiences which, again, cannot be articulated because they are beyond the reach of the intellect. If such spiritual awakenings cannot be articulated, if articulation is impossible, so is comparison with other sufferers’ experiences – and so therefore, again, what is experienced as the truth – the essence of God – cannot evince what God is or isn’t. Experience is not proof. Or is it?

The same can be said of those who suffer from delusional disorders and experience themselves as God, the Trinity, etc.

The fact that humans can cure delusional disorders with anti-psychotics is proof that trauma-induced spiritual experiences are disorders of the brain – not proof of the existence and essence of God. Or is it?

Where individuals who are taught to believe certain formulae, for example, Rabbinic Judaism contends that only certain beliefs are permissable, or are orthodox, those individuals may each interpret any given belief differently, for individuals may all be different.

Similarly, when politicians extrapolate from the commandments and laws of God – set out in the Tanach – into political action, those politicians’ interpretations may vary.

And these interpretations, whilst donning a certain degree of authority by referencing the Tanach, may corrupt the original meanings.