TOMORROW'S GOD?

THE CHIEF BUSINESS OF RELIGION is to provide meaning and a means of ordering life according to valued ideals . We understand a person's religion by observing how they live. As we have seen, the original and fundamental meaning of the word 'religion' refers to the ordering of actions according to cherished values and ideas. We may fall short of these values from time to time but, as religious persons, we keep returning to them. The concept of 'god' may or may not assist in this search.

It is also true that the concept of 'god', as we trace it in the long human story, has been central in our search for meaning. This need to understand the meaning of life seems to be built into us. Almost as soon as a child acquires language we begin to hear questions like,
'Who am I?'
'How did I get here?
'How did this world around me get to be?'
The child is not the first to ask such questions. Human kind has been asking them for eons. Culture stands ready to assist us with answers. At convent school, my catechism class informed me that God made me, and the world, for his glory.

From ancient stories and from the living fossils of the beliefs and stories of original humans, such as the Australian aborigine, the Inuit peoples, and native American tribes people, we may conclude that the world they experienced they understood to be moved from behind, as it were, by supernatural forces. These eventually became personalized as powerful ancient creatures, or as gods. In those days, we learned to accommodate to the wishes of these forces through rituals, perhaps hoping also we could influence events that were powerful and utterly mysterious. These rituals and the beliefs were central to life and rigorously guarded.

Another profound aspect of early human life appears to be that we then saw ourselves as part and parcel of the world around us. We came from the earth, were of the earth, and returned to the earth. Man and nature were the same, as with every living thing.

About three thousand years ago, as agriculture freed a class of thinkers to reflect more on the nature of the world, the notion of many gods that could be placated by rituals began to be 'pooh poohed' . The prophets of the Old Testament and the Greek philosophers even poked fun at these ideas. Buddha likewise argued their irrelevance. An enduring outcome of this radical thinking was the rise of monotheism, that there is just one 'god'. Associated with this was the loss of feminine attributes from the notion of 'god' and the tendency to move the concept of the deity out of nature to 'another' level of being. Likewise, man became removed from nature and began to be cast as created to have dominion over other animals and nature generally.

If you wish to follow this development, there are many sources but the writings of Lloyd Geering (the title of whose book, Tomorrow's God, I have borrowed to lead this posting) can get you started.

Western Christianity, heavily influenced by Paul (whom many regard as the founder of Christianity and a profoundly Greek Jew) absorbed and promoted a form of monotheism along with the dualistic view of nature vs. man and 'God'. It is ironic that Paul who, on his own confession, never met Jesus or heard him teach, paid scant attention to the teachings of Jesus but preferred to concentrate on the death and resurrection of Jesus and through this the notion of the creation of a 'New Israel' in the life of the churches he influenced. Though Paul may be special case, because of his wide influence, it is very probable that none of the writers who contributed to what we now call the 'New Testament', had met or heard Jesus. The same can be said, but more forcibly, of all who have written about Christianity since.

The other monotheistic faiths, Judaism and later Islam, have followed a similar course, masculating the deity, separating the domain of the deity from the earth and nature, and casting humankind as the center of the universe and the chosen master of nature.

But wait...in the last two hundred years another world view has emerged. The stuff of life is also the stuff of the universe. Elements that make my biochemistry possible, that make me work as I type this posting, were manufactured only lately in the life of the universe, in the collapse and explosions of fourth generation stars, blasted across eons and finally collected here in our planet, Earth. Scientists, delving laboriously into the nature of things, tell me that matter is not what I think it to be but continuously disappears and reappears, and that the 'vacuum' of space is full of energy and stuff the like of which I will never understand. Meanwhile the biologists, delving into the DNA that has driven my own personal development from conception, contains the DNA of bacteria that may have been the first forms of life, and then of primitive plants, and all manner of creatures that have come and gone in the generations of life on this planet.

So, in a fundamental sense, the wheel of meaning has turned an entire circle, back to where we are beginning to see that human kind, and all kind, are part and parcel of the earth, coextensive and one with the universe, a concatenation or merging once more of the secular and the sacred. However, this cannot support the notion of a 'god' who is 'up above', or 'out there' in a higher level of being.Now we may see how we differ from our ancestral seekers of meaning.