My first postcard from Japan, sent two days after arrival from Siberia |
Diary Sunday 6 October 2019:
Forty
years ago today (6 October 1979) I set off on my first journey to the
Far East.
The
trip, lasting about 4 months, took me by train from Luxembourg (where
I had returned from New York just 3 months earlier after 52 months -
4 years 4 months in the USA) to Liège, Belgium, then to Moscow in
what was then the USSR, - Soviet Union - then from Moscow across
southern Siberia to Nakhodka on the Soviet Far East coast, then from
Nakhodka on a Soviet passenger ship [SS Baikal] to Japan through the
remnant of Supertyphoon Tip in the Pacific, to Yokohama, Tokyo,
Kyoto, Nara, Itoh (on Izu Peninsula) and Chiba for 2 weeks, then on
an Air India Boeing 707 through stormy weather via Hong Kong (Kaitak
Airport) to Bangkok (Don Muang Airport), my final destination.
The
train and boat rides across Siberia, the Sea of Japan, Tsugaru Strait
(between Honshu and Hokkaido) and down the Pacific side of Honshu
through very heavy seas to Yokohama took exactly 14 days -- 2 full
weeks.
In
Thailand I traveled twice to Si Khiu near Nakhon Ratchasima to bring
supplies to a refugee camp, also visited Thonburi across the river
from Bangkok and Bang Pa In just north of the city, and went twice by
bus and train for a few days to Georgetown on Penang Island, Malaysia
to renew my Thai stay permit. I did not have enough money for tourism
there.
At Si Khiu refugee camp December 1979, with Japanese doctors & nurses |
After
about 3 months I was invited to return to my work in New York (for
The News World daily newspaper), and since I was fed up with Bangkok
anyway I gladly accepted. At the beginning of February 1980 I flew in
a TAROM (Romania) Airlines Boeing 707 via Abu Dhabi or Dubai or
Manama (Bahrain -- I forget which of the three) to Bucharest Otopeni
Airport and then on a Tupolev 154 to Frankfurt, and from there by
train to Luxembourg, where I stayed about 2 weeks before traveling by
car to England, London, Nottingham and Mansfield for a few days, and
flying from London directly back to New York.
It was
a very memorable journey, and I was most impressed with Japan.
--------------
On
God:
Not
long ago I went to an African evangelical Christian service and was
struck by how much the believers there praised God. To most religious
people, especially those of the monotheistic faiths, this would seem
quite normal. Many seem to believe that our lives here on earth and
in the hereafter have meaning only insofar as we can serve and
glorify God. From my experiences with Muslims and Christians, and
Jews to a lesser extent, I know that praising God and thanking Him
(/Her...) for our existence and for saving us or at least offering us
salvation is one of the most important elements of worship (this term
itself says it all).
The
implication is that we live at His pleasure and have to offer Him
devotion and praise. This is the most extreme in Islam, where God's
name is invoked for just about anything, as if believers had to be
afraid to be punished for not praising God enough.
I have
often wondered what this reveals about the personality, the
psychology of the postulated and adulated God. Why would God, who is
supposedly almighty, all-knowing and eternal, need to receive so much
praise and glorification? Doesn't that seem extremely narcissistic?
In Sun
Myung Moon's Unification Church we believed that God was suffering,
grieving for fallen humankind, which was mostly in thrall to His
adversary Satan -- whom God Himself also originally created as a good
angel, Lucifer. We believed God could not interfere directly with
humankind's responsibility to recognize our fault and return to Him.
This was because God had to follow the Principles which He Himself
had laid down in creating the Universe and us.
But we
also believed God was ultimately almighty and would certainly succeed
in His effort to bring humanity back. His will to do that was
paramount and unchanging. This was because we were to be God's
children, whom He originally created for love, a love that is
supposedly the greatest force in the Universe.
So if
we wanted to return to God we had to repent and do penance (pay
indemnity as we called it in the church), and to love God by doing
His will. God was our original parent, we believed, and He created
the Universe for us. But this God was not only a pitiful suffering
God. He was also an angry, even vengeful God, as Rev. Moon implied
many times in his speeches to us members of his church, and as is
told in many passages of the Bible and the Qur'an as well as in some
of Jesus' parables. God was suffering because we had fallen away from
Him and spurned His love, and we continued to either ignore or oppose
His efforts to win us back. And we had to pay a ransom to this
imaginary Satan, and repent in order to alleviate God's anger (I
think this is the underlying reason for the need of repentance).
Over
time all these ideas lost every vestige of sense and meaning to me.
This God was either a conceited narcissist or a pathetic yet vengeful
character whom I simply could not love or praise. Believers of
monotheistic faiths could not
convince me that there is such a God. I have come to think this God
is really a delusion.
We are
not children of a God -- we are God, in a way. We are
infinitesimally tiny parts of God, yet God develops and changes
through us. As individuals we are just sparks in time that leave a
residue in God's Universal Memory when we fade away. But as humankind
we represent a substantial part of God.