Carl Jung on God

Jung said a lot very stupid things, this one among them.

I never said he was stupid, just that he said a lot of stupid things. He was actually brilliant, and I am most certainly not.


Very smart people can delude themselves in all kinds of ways, and he was a perfect example of that. It's what you get when you don't submit your ideas to scientific scrutiny and just rely on your intuitions and wish fulfilment.

She has no clue in what context Jung meant by God. 

You know what? I need to admit that I myself was being very lazy in calling that statement stupid, for the very reason you give--that Jung's concept of God was not what most religious people have in mind, and was many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than theirs.

Do I think he had a lot of deluded supernatural beliefs? Yes, he was more of a New Age freak than a legitimate scientist. But I was too quick to jump on the "belief in god is always stupid" train. Most of the time it is, but there are nuanced beliefs to be had.

I don't know much about Taoism or Buddhism, and yes, that connected consciousness God is what I was referring to.

It’s this realization that we all are and feeling this connection in a spiritual way that is the enlightening moment.

Jesus as a messianic preacher was calling for a Jewish enlightenment as he understood it possibly from Essenes philosophy, as the coming Kingdom of God the later Jewish prophets wrote about in light of Judah’s fall to Babylonia. Once the Jews were enlightened, by example so would the rest of humanity. This was what the Essenes were about also. The truly enlightened give off divine sparks. Enlightenment was a raising oneself to a divinity or sainthood level like the Prophet Elijah. 

Jesus was also an anti-war messiah/king, rather than a war messiah/king which pissed off the very large population of Jewish zealots, who were hurtin’ for another Maccabean rebellion against Rome, were desperately hoping for. Per the prophets, there should be one any minute, God had promised. 

So Jesus’ mission was to bring all the Jews back to the true righteousness of God’s commandment to love another and not fight over dry toast and divorcing wives, the Kingdom of God was at hand, get right with God before he destroys plant earth. It’s coming he was sure of and he had the correct message, not those other false prophets who want more violence and hatred. 

And he was talking to his fellow Jews only, not the gentiles. He did not come to save them. He came to save the Jews. Be a light unto the nations was an old Hebrew commandment. Righteousness was his idea of enlightenment because in true righteousness commandment by the God of Israel was not showy, cruel, punitive, proud, or full of empty gestures and blood offerings, it is the outward expression of God’s own love and mercy humans should aspire to and that will be the Kingdom, that will save you from death and you will join the risen Jews whose God will deliver them from the enemies for all ages to come. 

In all likelihood we would not have heard of Jesus if not for another apocalyptic Jew, Paul of Tarsus. He was a genius and hit upon a brand new way to spread his enlightenment cult beyond his fellow Jews who’d gotten tried of listening to him go on and on about “signs and wonders” and the end of the world. 

But we know we exist and we think up the idea of God.

Anthropomorphic gods are a recent human concept that correlates to humans settling into organized agricultural city/states when living directly off and at the mercy of nature was not the only option to survive. Prior to that, humans didn’t believe in gods but in nature spirits. One appealed to and made offerings to these nebulous spirits for protection from violent people, finding new hunting grounds, curing illness, bringing rain, child birth, etc.

In Norse paganism, Mighty Thor does not just wield thunder, he is Thunder and we still to this day, he reminds us who he is in every electrical storm. Thor’s fearsome and danger, yet mercy if you praying for rain, is an archetype Jung recognized as appearing over and over in mythology. Thor is a non existent being, yet we still make up new stories about him. 

This form of spirituality has survived in the “primitive” (vs civilized) societies until 19th and 20th centuries and was studied by Carl Jung and others. He took all cultural information into consideration to form his theory of the collective consciousness that he saw as God or Enlightenment.

Toward the end of his life, Jung was big into UFOs. He didn’t necessarily think they were real real, but possibly a collective consciousness phenomenon being manifested.

John Mack, a Freudian who studied the UFO and alien abduction phenomenon by talking to the witnesses seriously, thought similarly.  

I dunno very much about Jung, isn't Jordan Peterson a fan? That's kind of a red flag for me.

Absolutely. He is very much informed by Jung. One can be a hero if one finds a heroic path and sticks to it.