Beyond Religious Conflicts--2

In the first posting to this blog, I suggested we might find it useful to search for a common denominator of all religious in the emotional comfort they provide their believers.  Today I will say a bit more about this comfort.

First, we should recall that in the Enlightenment period, the 18th century, reasonable thinkers often cited a belief in God as the element shared by believers as different as Native Americans, Europeans, Africans, Moslems, or any other believers Euro-Americans could imagine.  My sense is that the word 'God' has proven such a broad term and has so many different meanings to the various believers that it has lost his usefulness in seeking the unifying factor of the many faiths that find themselves in conflict with one another.  Otherwise, why would they fight the way they do?  Certainly their doctrines and dogmas differ more than they would vary if all these believers were speaking of the same God.

For that reason, it may be valuable to seek a unifying energy in the psychological comfort each group of believers finds in its religion.  Even though the types of comfort may vary greatly, the psychological gain of each would be both vital and a force they share.

For example, when the West shifted in the years between 1 AD and 325 AD from polytheism to the monotheism of Constantine I's Christianity, Europe was substituting the comfort of a centralized religious vision for the various comforts of a more diverse system.  Seen differently, it was sacrificing Diversity in an effort to establish Order.  Whereas Zeus/Jupiter, on the one hand, had sometimes had difficulty maintaining order in his own household and throughout the Olympian system, famously so in THE ILIAD,  Jesus/Yahweh, on the other hand, had 'given' Constantine victory in a great battle.  The psychological gains of diversity and order differ, but they are both comforting.

Similarly, for the family of Abraham, members of a small tribe endangered by the great empires surrounding them in the second millennium BC, it was no doubt comforting to identify with a single omnipotent being like Yahweh who for regular sacrifices of a few birds, sheep, goats, even an occasional son, would grant them his protection as well as all the lands between the Nile and the Euphrates.  Later, the followers of Mohammed received a comforting empowerment and justification from Allah for their campaigns to conquer even greater lands as they swept across north Africa in a crescent stretching from eastern Europe to Spain.  Again, differing comforts but equally vital ones psychologically.

With such examples in mind, I find it useful to apply a view to religions that is both polymorphic and psychological--in short, that is psycho-polytheistic.  Since this approach is not original with me and may have been used by the early Hindus, by Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and many others, I refer to it as neo-psycho-polytheism  (NPPT, for short), a term which is both descriptive and good-natured. 

In coming weeks, NPPT will allow us to consider a variety of religions as well as such associated entities as the French Grail, Mary Magdalena, the Black Madonna, Black Sarah, Holy Blood, Deepest France, fictional knowledge, all of which figure in an eccentric pair of novels I will publish either this summer or in the early fall. 

Let us continue this conversation with your comments and objections.