 Today I want to discuss with you God as a narcissistic parent. It's a touchy subject. My name is Sam Bakni, and I'm the only author of Malignal Serf Lab, Narcissism Revisited. We kill our gods. We kill our gods even as we worship them. In Jewish mysticism, in the Kabbalah, God reduced himself. This is called the Tsimtsum. He had to reduce himself in order to create the world. The act of creation also involved mayhem on a cosmic scale. It is known as Shviratakelim, the breaking of the vessels. Christianity is equally founded on the violent demise of God at the hands of mere mortals. God dies, and he dies very often, very frequently. Literally, symbolically, he dies metaphorically, but he dies in almost all religions. Such hate, love, is known as ambivalence in psychoanalytic theory. Ambivalence is when we feel conflicting emotions towards the same object. Such love-hate relationships, such love-hate ambivalence, characterizes our relationship with our parents, especially when these parents are self-absorbed, when they are disempathic, when they are manipulative, when they are toxic, when they are objectified. Such parents refuse to allow their children to separate and to individuate. They never let go. Such parents emotionally blackmail their children, their offspring, and they engender an environment of ambient insist. Indeed, the gods, these substitute progenitors, the gods are often described as petulant, capricious, and narcissistic attention wars. They are clinging, needy, histrionic. They rage uncontrollably when you ignore or abandon them. They are jealous of other gods. They are aggressive. They have poor impulse control, and they have impaired judgment. In short, the gods are childlike. They are like cases of arrest and development. If it reminds you of anything, you are right. The gods are narcissists. The gods abuse their unbridled powers, abundantly. And so from time immemorial, we have been killing our gods. We have been slaughtering and massacring our gods more or less gruesomely. This kind of act, the killing of our gods symbolizes our autonomy as individuals. We need to repress to oblivion the inner representations of our parents in order to emerge as independent individuals. Killing God is an act of liberation and of identity formation. In the past few years, I have been researching and writing a book about God that I hope will introduce new themes to a 4000-year-old debate. The first four chapters are available online. On my YouTube channel, I release two videos about narcissism as a new faith. Actually, it is the tip of an iceberg. The re-emergence of secular religions in distributed form, with all of us as equivalent godlike nodes. God as a network. We are all equal to God, and we are all gods. Satan is merely one of God's attributes. This yields a new form of theodicy, regarding God's relationship with evil, free destination, and free will. There are precedents to this kind of thinking, the Gnostics, the Boba Mills, the Cathars. They distinguished the world's creator. It was a satanic evil entity, the Demiurge. They distinguished this evil entity from the Supreme Being, the essence of good. But I am reverting to strict monotheism. Evil is an aspect of a single God. Creating the world was a form of acting out, reminiscent of breaking the vessels in the Kabbalah. And our reality is a projection of God's shadow, His darker side. We are perhaps His darker side. I follow the Kabbalah in answering the question, what is our role in all this? What is our role in the world? What's the meaning of our existence? And the answer is that we are placed on this earth, we are placed in this universe, in order to heal God, to restore the unity and integrity of the world, and thereby to restore the unity and integrity of a broken, reduced deity. I believe that Peterson got a disastrously wrong. It is God who is suffering. Our pains and confusions are His, not ours. Our spouse suffering is a path to healing, to a spouse suffering is a form of self-absolution, in my view is blasphemy or sacrilegious. We cannot heal ourselves before we heal our Creator. Our suffering and sacrifice are not the path to healing and to making peace with the world, because they perpetuate the rift between God and His creation, and they enshrine the schism alluded to in Genesis and referred to explicitly in the Kabbalah and in other mystical traditions. Christianity understood these truths intuitively. God in Christianity is an agony. He had to sacrifice His Son, a part of Himself actually, in order to provide a solution and to restore harmony to the world. But He, God, is inconsolable if His sacrifice is rejected by His agents in this world, by us, by mankind. The parallels to abnormal psychology are uncanny. God is mentally ill, and creation is His disorder writ large. We have the function of restoring to Him, restoring Him, so that He can help us. First, we have to heal and cure God before He can heal and cure us. It is a partnership, not a top-down hierarchy. Suffering is another name for even, not the solution. We want a need to be seen by God, but God also needs and wants to be seen by us. The raison d'etre for God's creation, the very reason for His creation, is exactly that. God needed the other's gaze. He needed to be seen by sentient beings. So He created the sentient other, the intelligent observer, the intelligent world. By seeing God, we affirm His existence in His own eyes. He can see Himself only through us. In turn, this validation allows Him to sustain our being. It's a symbiotic relationship. We have intimations of this in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The observer in this interpretation creates the world, not the other way. We recreate God, we recreate ourselves at the same time, and we do it every time we see Him. We see Him, He says, sees us. This is the principle of the double gaze, the double reflection. As the Book of Job states clearly, suffering interferes with this virtuous feedback loop. It disrupts the cycle of being. Suffering sows doubt about the very existence of God, makes it impossible to see God. Suffering is from the devil, not from God. Suffering is also the punishment for supplanting and disobeying God, the original sin in the Garden of Eden. It signifies a breakdown in the publishing. It signifies the polar opposite of true faith. In this sense, suffering espouses, espousing suffering is espousing a kind of satanic teaching. Goethe's devil says exactly this to Faust. He says, you have to suffer in order to realize your potential as a human being. The Faustian deal is built on this. You enjoy here, you suffer thereafter. Suffering is an integral part of the package deal to become fully actualized, to use Maslow's term, to become fully actualized. You must strike a deal with the devil, you must suffer. The suffering entailed in the crucifixion was a huge, almost irreparable rupture in the cosmic fabric. Jesus understood that on the cross he claimed that God had forsaken him, had forsaken his creation, suffering symbolizes the absence or absenting of God from his creation. And it was not for the first time. Remember Noah and the Floor? God breaks up with humanity frequently, but only when he is not seen by humanity anymore. The creed of the likes of Peterson unites the most pathological aspects of Christianity in Catholicism, asceticism, Puritanism, and Calvinism. It is also, mind you, very Eurocentric. There is no trace of such thinking in Judaism, or in Judaism, or in Islam, or in Shinto, or in any other religion I'm aware of. Suffering is a very European concept, and more precisely, a very Christian concept. But the killing of God is not. And the need of God to interact with his creation in order to feel whole, in order to be complete. This completion of God via creation is a universal principle, literally, in every religion of every age. I myself am a magnostic, I'm not an atheist. I don't believe in God because I don't believe in things. I firmly espouse the view and am convinced that there is no way to prove or disprove the existence of such a supreme being. There's no way to prove it, there's no way to disprove it. Consequently, I'm a magnostic. There may be, there may be not. But this has nothing to do with the fact that God is a presence in human history, in human literature, in human art, and in human affairs. This presence has parallels. This presence has levels. This presence affects the bulk of human history. To ignore it would be full-heart. Whether it exists as a separate physical entity or not is besides the point, because it exists in our minds and our hearts. And this is where true history always takes place. Thank you for listening.