God has an immaterial presence in this world. An overarching conception of spirituality that allows us to interact and develop a moral conscience, and from it a conception of ethics and culture that binds us into social units. The position of God does not need to be something material, as in the parables of the Bible or the miracles of the saints. Instead it has a binding construction from which we recognise the innate characteristics of humanity and morality. Whether written through the ideas of non-aggression or in the ideas of natural law, God and godliness play an intrinsic part in discovering these moralities, and recognising the imperfection of human character.

It does not deny the tenets of free will, but instead allows for the constructions of human activity and the developments of spontaneous order to flow freely, leading to both beneficial and destructive consequences. My kingdom is not of this earth recognises the inherent character of the Christian God. It does not prescribe the full idiosyncrasies of socio-economic and political relations, but rather acts as a guiding tool through the Ten Commandments and the tenets of Jewish law as prescribed in the Old Testament, as well as the moral teachings of Jesus Christ in recognising our sin.

In this sense, God is the immaterial perception of collective human conscious and the recognition of both imperfection and moral action. His kingdom is the higher nature of conscience and unconscious dynamics, such as that seen in the concept of the Jungian collective unconscious, or the Durkheimian idea of a collective conscience of human activity in creating shared circumstances and outcomes. In these collectivities there is the core of godliness, or that of the shared experiences of family and community. And going further from this, in the shared collective unconscious there is the higher ascendance of human intellect into different planes of thought that increase our individual and collective enlightenment. This is the Kingdom of Heaven, something unattainable in our current plane of existence and our inherent imperfections.

Effectively, our current existence is what we see, developed through our social and ethical constructions. They are certainly influenced by our relation to a higher faith, helping construct our conduct and culture through art, human experience and education, acting as the foundation of our “‘primordial images’ or ‘archetypes'”[1] and allowing for their deeper use in wider socio-political expanses. But they do not allow us access to the higher planes of conscience as represented by Heaven. Our existential position means we can only partially understand the means of God through moral tales, parables and the heterogeneous interactions such a being has with individuals and with our collective unconscious. For some, it is deep, retroactive thought that requires introspection, while for others it is particular circumstances and events that radically alter one’s life.

Even in our deeper physical constructs such as our universe and the galaxies and planets that inhabit it, or in the sub-molecular realm of particles and basic matter, there exist subconscious constructs and Einsteinian wonders that have rhythms and laws completely irrespective of our interaction with them. Whether represented by Schrodinger’s cat or the peculiarities of space-time, physical laws represent a construction of reality that requires contradictory forces to interact in multitudinous ways. Putting it simply, the interaction of atoms and quarks in their construction of particular designs represent the innate forces of natural law and its originations in God. God has not purposefully designed every intricacy of the universe, but rather shaped forces and directions that create various outcomes.

Going back to the question of God’s foundation in humanity, Dawkins and other atheists have attempted to explain the move toward theological thought and religious desire as an innate trait of human evolution. The theory of memes suggests that particular ideas and conceptions are selected as beneficial to human procreation, in the same way particular genetic makeups are. It’s certainly an interesting theory, but it cannot truly explain the range of psychological and subconscious activities and experiences which humans engage with both with purpose as individuals and subconsciously through shared archetypes of human thought and existential reality. These may simply be explained away as our lack of understanding of the human brain, but when seen through the prism of particular ideas of natural law, through the reality of heterogeneous religious experience and the miracles and wonders it can provide, I do not see a coherent theory of religion as memetic evolution in practice. Rather, much like the physical laws of particles and galaxies that contain peculiar forces, our innate tendency to group together into in-groups, and with it develop unique religious relationships with God, shows a tendency toward natural laws of development and coexistence. The Holy Spirit in this sense can be seen as the representation of human collectivity in a religious commons alongside the Father and the Son.

These are the fundamental foundations of our theological understandings and of God as an immaterial being that interacts in our limited fields of conscience and knowledge.

Now more than ever there needs to be a requirement to rediscover and redevelop these theological concepts for our time. Modern culture in the West has become a desert. In place of the foundations of God, we see a utopian reliance on the demos or the market as the saviours of human imperfection. They are idealised through weak theories which suggest a desire to create a framework of theology for these concepts. An attempt to replace God with Mammon, or with the politics of the mob. Now there exists no true authority of morality and ethics. Instead a society of anomie and personal greed exists, destroying the socio-economic institutions of Western Europe which were themselves founded on the tenets of Christian religiosity. The relations of the Church to the family and the community have been eroded. As a result, there is a need to return to past conceptions of society and morality, informed as they were by our relations to God and our particular social circumstances combining together into religious interpretations and the application of natural law. Fundamentally, there needs to be a realisation of what constitutes right and wrong, good and evil. Without it, we risk fully realising the development of cultural rot, with a society of hedonism and degeneracy becoming the unfortunate norm.

[1] Jung, C. (1960). The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology. In: Adler, G., Fordham, M. & Read, H. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche: Vol 8. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. 112.