Thus sayeth the late, very great John Lennon, a man who knew a lot of pain in his too short life.
The more I listen to and ponder on this extraordinary, to me very profound song, the more I think I agree with him. What do you guys think? Do we believe more the more pain we have? Is that one of the reasons God allows pain? Or does that make God cruel?
Or was Lennon just wrong?
Peace and love
Johnny
Hi there Johnny,
A good question Johnny
I think for many folk they do turn to God when faced with pain whether physical or psychological or perhaps in response to the pain they see in the world. May be if life is too comfortable we are apt to live as if we’re immortal. Yet I think most of us (Christian or non Christian) spend a lot of our efforts in pain avoidance… But in some cases perhaps pain is the only way God can get our attention. Is pain then sent and directed by God or does He allow it and use the circumstance to His advantage, or is it the hand of the Devil or the twist of fate?
The thing is that there are probably an equal number of folk who have lost there faith due to pain in their lives. As with many of the imponderables of life I guess we will only know when it all comes out in the wash.
Reading the rest of the lyrics of John Lennon’s song the conclusion he comes to is, I think “I believe in me”.
Sorry Johnny, I don’t want to cause any offence (especially to a fellow Englishman) but I’ve always felt the profundity of John Lennon’s lyrics a bit over rated, myself; but I’m willing to concede the problem may be with me!!
Cheers S
PS to the above: A good quote from CS Lewis in ‘The Problem of Pain’ about pain shattering the Illusion that all is well:-
“We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone
who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods
as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we
can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists on being attended to.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience,
but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
True or Not - always or sometimes?
Hi Sturmy
Thanks for your thoughts. My own belief is that God uses pain to rouse us, as you (and Lewis; you’re in good company 
) suggest, but he does not cause it. As we have discussed at length in other threads, the existence of pain is a very great mystery. Personally I believe it is a necessary corollary of freedom (moral freedom, but importantly also the freedom of all created matter). So far so classical, you might say.
The thing that bothers me, that gnaws away at my faith, is the idea that we ‘only’ believe in God - in the teeth of our and the world’s obvious pain - because we - because I - cannot face the massive existential pain of the alternative.
You make an excellent point about those who lose their faith because of pain. This is just one reason I am a Universalist. I defy any Christian to condemn a person for turning their back on God, or for not believing in God in the first place, because of their pain. The man who was savagely abused as a child; the mother whose daughter dies of a horrible cancer; doubtless we could all think of dozens of such examples. How dare we judge those people as deserving eternal ‘hell’ for their unbelief when clearly they have already experienced it in this life? (Oscar Wilde wrote a prose poem, The House of Judgement, which said much the same thing, only much more eloquently.)
John Lennon was a brilliant man who treated sone people very badly, some of the time, by all accounts. (And in the latter he was no different from the rest of us … ) But look at his life, look at the pain of parental rejection he suffered as a child, followed by the shattering death of his mother as a teenager, and it’s not hard to see why. Again, I defy anyone to listen to the song Mother on his Plastic Ono Band album and not feel his pain, not feel heartbroken for him.
Yes, in God Lennon does indeed reject all his - and the world’s - idols (“myths” according to him) and declares that his belief is only in himself and his wife. Along with his ‘obvious’ rejection of religions, including the Indian mysticism that the Beatles embraced for a while (and George Harrison for the rest of his life), Lennon rejected his own musical icons, Dylan and Elvis, along with the Beatles themselves. And I can’t help admiring him for his courage in jettisoning what he clearly came to conclude were false, man made belief systems. Although I think, ultimately, he was mistaken. I think …
As for his lyrics being overrated, I agree - up to a point. Imagine is often voted the greatest song of all time - by shallow numpties if you ask me . Dreary, monotonous, trite, hypocritical (imagine no possessions sings the man who owned a white Rolls Royce) tosh. And some of his more outré musical experiments with Yoko are, quite frankly, crap. But he was undoubtedly a genius, somebody who wasn’t afraid to bare his own soul as an artist. And let us not forget, he was one half of the greatest songwriting duo of all time.
All the best
Johnny
Hi Johnny -
God is also a ‘concept’ we measure by our joy. Even people with little or no religion sometimes feel overwhelmed by the need to say ‘Thank-you’ to the source of life and blessings.
Johnny - I’m sure John Lennon did write some moving and heartfelt songs by the way. My reaction to him is not as measured as Sturmy’s gentle critique. It’s based on pure prejudice. As the great Ten Pole Tudor once sang - ’ Never Trust a Hippy’ 
I know you - so I can pull your leg… you old hippy (even thought you don’t look a bit like an old hippy 
) Pass the patchouli oil…
On a related note,
Google just purchased a few quantum computers and teaming up with NASA in developing a true artificial intelligence. One of the key factors of recognizing one exists, and related to this blog post, is the ability to feel pain and pleasure. Without this type of sensory input, computers will lack the ability to become sentient. So perhaps not God is a concept in which we measure our pain, but by the measure of pain we gained our own self-awareness and intelligence and if this is the case, our ego manifests its as God.
Just thought about this the other day.
Hi AUniversalist
Thanks for your very interesting comment. I really don’t know what to make of the idea of artificial intelligence. But I would agree that sentience - axiomatically, I suppose - involves being aware of the experience of pleasure and pain, as opposed to simply being subject to a neurological event.
And much as I admire him in so many ways, it does seem to be the case that, in the end, John Lennon’s tortured ego got the better of him. He enshrined himself and Yoko as his ‘God’, turning his back on everything ‘ordinary people’ put their faith in, including - some might say especially - religion. (And there’s no doubt the Beatles were a religion for many.)
In that sense he was very much an existentialist, in the classical mould of Sartre and Camus, only with a lot more jokes.
All the best
Johnny
Dick
Me old mucker, thank you for reminding us - and me in particular - that the flipside of pain is joy. And praise God for that.
I do believe there is no light without dark. I just can’t help being affected, or afflicted, by the ongoing prevalence of the darkness sometimes. Somebody I love has just been admitted to a psychiatric hospital suffering from psychosis. Their pain radiates out through all of us who love that person. And yet even in the darkness there is light, because now proper treatment can start, and maybe one day the pain will be gone.
Me a hippy? Johnny Ramone himself? Never!
Peace man
Johnny
I’m so sorry about your friend Johnny - but it is excellent news that he is getting the right help. There must be people around him who love him enough to have realised that something has been going very badly wrong. I always know when seomthing is up with you - you start quoting John Lennon, William Golding or E.M. Forster (and such likes). So I try and cheer you up 
Think ‘Kirsty MacCool’ - she always cheers me, up just to think on her
Ah Dick, you read me like a book. Or boook, as Lennon might have said .
But seriously (me, serious? Never!) things have been going wrong with R for years, but none of us were aware quite how bad it had become. Hopefully this is a corner turned.
You’ll know the situation is grave if I start quoting Larkin 
.
Peace and love
Johnny
I think maybe that pain is the concept by which we measure God?
Thanks for the link, Dick. Cheers me up, and saddens me not a little, to see dear Kirsty, in the words of Ian Dury, “young, and old, and gone”. 
J
Hi Nimblewill
Perhaps you’re right.
What Lennon was getting at in God, of course, is the idea that God is a man-made concept, something we have constructed to, as I mentioned earlier, enable us to cope with our existential pain. If atheism is true, this seems like one plausible explanation for humanity’s belief in God (or gods). As Voltaire rightly observed, “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
I think Lennon’s problem was that in throwing out God he elevated the self into too exalted a position: “If there is a God,” he said, “then we’re all it.”
It troubles me that Lennon has been adopted by atheists as their poster child. Despite the famously atheistic lyrics of Imagine, I don’t think he would have wanted that mantle.
CS Lewis said something along the lines of indifference to God being far ‘worse’ than militant atheism. Listening to Lennon’s vitriolic parody of his friend Bob Dylan’s Grammy award-winning Christian song Gotta Serve Somebody - it’s called Serve Yourself, and it’s on the Anthology collection - it’s quite obvious Lennon isn’t indifferent to religion; he’s passionately, angrily against it.
One has to ask oneself where did that anger come from? Is Lennon exhorting us to reject the God who failed to prevent his mother’s death, I wonder?
All the best
Johnny
Does that mean ‘If God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him’ Johnny?
Oui, bien sur mon ami .
Yes, sorry Dick, I was going to add the English translation of the Voltaire quote, but I never got round to it. I’ve noticed a lamentable trend on t’interweb of the attribution of either mangled or downright erroneous quotes - transmitted blindly and unquestioningly from one website to the next. These linguistic memes take root in our cyber consciousness and become as entrenched and hard to dislodge as Japanese knotweed . The quote about Hitler disarming the populace is an egregious example.
All of which is in roundabout apology for being a pretentious twit, which comes very easily to me.
Santé!
Johnny
I think it pretty easy to succumb to Lennon’s anger if we have a bad and uninformed portrait of God. And surely a dominant portrait of God throughout history, or even the portrait of God to many Christians, is that authoritative master — quick to coerce, condemn and cast out; and slow to hold, help and heal.
You have reminded me of my old chum Mikhail Bakunin, that fiery anti-theist, who said of Voltaire’s quote:
, Idealism and Materialism, p.62"][The Idealists] say in one breath: “God and the liberty of man,” or “God and the dignity, justice, equality, fraternity, and welfare of men,” without paying heed to the fatal logic by virtue of which, if God exists, all these things are condemned to non-existence. For if God is, he is necessarily the eternal, supreme, and absolute Master, and if such a Master exists, man is a slave. Now if man is a slave, neither justice, nor equality, nor fraternity, nor prosperity is possible for him.
They (the idealists) may, in defiance of sound sense and all historical experience, represent their God as being animated by the tenderest love for human liberty, but a master, whatever he may do, and no matter how much of a liberal he may want to appear, will nevertheless always remain a master, and his existence will necessarily entail the slavery of all those who are beneath him. Therefore, if God existed, he could render service to human liberty in one way only — by ceasing to exist.
A zealous lover of human freedom, deeming it the necessary condition of all that I admire and respect in humanity, I reverse Voltaire’s aphorism and say: If God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
I have to agree with Bakunin’s summation here. If God were that master, I’d probably feel morally obliged to accompany Bakunin and the anti-theists in that endeavour to dethrone him. But I do not concede that God is necessarily that “…supreme and absolute Master”. For God, “truly animated by the tenderest love for human liberty” does not coerce, he does not decree and he does not lord over others. Has not Yeshua taught us that no one is beneath God? God discards the pagan portraits that we erect for him (the same fallen “glory” that we would have of ourselves), and he lives amongst the Least — to be beneath even the poor, the oppressed, the sick and the marginalised — to serve humanity and its most vunerable, humbly and meekly. Servitude is the true glory of God.
Denying Bakunin’s premise of an authoritative God, Anthony de Jasay so forcefully explains how our servitude is coherent with liberty: “…freedom is most perfect when all are servants (more perfect even than if all were masters)… It is not the condition of servitude which contradicts freedom, but the existence of masters…” (just to clarify, de Jasay is not arguing for an anarchical theism). And if we lock in the portrait that Yeshua taught and modeled (one of universal, unconditional, unlimited, self-sacrificial, humble servant-love) we’ll probably have more of a capacity to recognise the value of universal justice, equality, fraternity and prosperity and less difficulty (not no difficulty) with experiencing suffering. The more we see God like Bakunin’s absolute Master the more we will (justifiably) succumb to Lennon’s evident bitterness.
Regarding the OP, I don’t believe pain is helpful for belief.
I was only pulling your leg Johnny 
Regarding memes - there are a huge number that do the rounds regarding the history of UR propagated often by other UR websites. The one about Luther being a post mortem Salvationist is a case in point
As for the other stuff you’ve said I read a review by Theo Hobson in the TLS of a Christian apologetic book that looked not at the intellectual integrity of Christianity, but rather at it’s emotional integrity. I must dig it out sometimes because the book sounded impressive and compelling.
If we are talking about the emotional integrity of Christianity against arguments that it is simply false comfort, I always remember Dennis Potter saying that Christianity is about the wound, not about the sticking plaster.
As for those who are young old and dead - well Kirsty left a legacy of love behind her; there’s cause to celebrate when you hear about a singer/songwriter who was also a kind and courageous person.
You take care Johnny - and never forget God loves us full courteously
Dick
Oops Andrew - we posted at the same time. Read Andrew’s post Johnny - and I’ll have a private post chat with you to see how you are sometime soon.
The book I mentioned – but have not read – is:
‘Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense’ by Francis Spufford.
The blurb says –
It’s an argument that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the bits of our lives advertising agencies prefer to ignore. Lots of good reviews - it’s a fresh angle on apologetics