And if Jesus’ salvation is taken a stage further by the interpenetration of minds, it promises still more.
In contrast, the strait jacket of Islam allows only one outlet for the imagination to express itself, when confronted with the spectre that the Koran and the interpretations put on it by the mullahs are inadequate to cope with the complexities of modern life; and that is the suicide bomber. Of course Muslims can use the imagination to express themselves in other ways, but none of these ways dispels the melancholy thought of being cut off from the living God by the deadening interpretations of the mullahs. These interpretations too cannot be set aside; they are like pronouncements of the Vatican that are declared to be infallible. Putting it another way, Islam rejects emphatically the Christian companionship with the Deity, whose spirit lurks in the depths of the psyche. If Jung is right that the spirit of God does lurk in the depths of the psyche, then the result is that the Muslim’s conscious mind is cut off from all that is best within himself; and if you are cut off from what is best in yourself, naturally you are liable to end up wishing for death if things do not go according to plan. If your inmost being harbours such a wish, it follows that an unscrupulous mullah is able to manipulate this wish for his own sinister purposes. And I see an exact parallel with Hitler manipulating the collective unconscious of the German people in his Nuremberg speeches.
Islam, like Christianity, has dug itself into a hole, in which no accommodation with modern science seems superficially to be possible. Christianity can escape, but only I suspect with a drastic modification of the concept of the “Saviour”. Whether Islam can escape, is not for me to say.