Thomas in his comment on Post # 3, NPPT, said he was waiting for discussions of the divine and the comfort it provides.. In my response I wrote that in as much as all the posts here have dealt with deities, each has addressed forms of the divine in the ways each deity offers its believers comfort. Here I wish to elaborate on this notion that NPPT widens the net of divinity to include more comforts than we might expect as members of western culture. For Homer, his deities, as we discussed them, furnished the comfort of 'science' in as much as they were used to explain what is going on in the realms of nature and human nature. Other religions the posts have covered, from Hinduism through Greek, Jewish, and Islamic religions, provided comforts in the ways suggested earlier.
Even within the dominant western faith, Christianity, the sense or feeling of the Divine has varied greatly. Roman Christianity may have begun among poor or enslaved people in the catacombs but Emperor Constantine recast it as an imperial religion that combined political power with hierarchies of social authority and order. To reconcile contradictions in Christianity between the comfort the downtrodden had found in Jesus and what Constantine sensed as the power of its god, the Nicaea council of 325 AD fell back on the practices of older religions when it restored a variation of poly-theism by establishing a trinity of deities: a powerful father figure, a gentle son, and a spirit. It is also possible to consider the three as 'avatars' of a single deity, much the way Hindus viewed the transcendental Brahma and the incarnated Atman as one being..
Reformers of the 16th century, including Luther, Calvin, even Henry VIII of England, broke with the Roman church's structures of central authority and created other views of the divine that included a more immediate access for individuals to a transcendent deity.
In 18th century England, the Enthusiasts (who would become the Methodists) sensed they were 'en-thused', that is, inspired or possessed by divinity, the very presence of a god, and they expressed this comforting feeling with exuberant energy and joy.
From a less sanguine perspective, Kierkegaard, in 1843, wrote of the divine sense as the Fear and Trembling, the anxiety, that Abraham must have felt when commanded by his god to sacrifice his only son, beloved Isaac. A similar awfulness figures in the numinous Idea of the Holy that Rudolph Otto put forth in 1917. For Otto, the numinous quality of the holy combined a demonic terrifying power with the fascinating total otherness of the deity. As with Homer, the divinity provided a type of mysterious intuition of the noumenon, "an unknowable reality underlying all" phenomena.
In 1930, when Freud tried to describe the "true source of religious feeling," he spoke first of "a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded---as it were 'oceanic'." He dismisses this mother-like sensation as a "purely subjective fact," then goes on to locate the true source in a "feeling of infantile helplessness" that leads to a "longing for the father" and the "need for a father's protection." Drawing on this need for the patriarchal, Freud elaborates a convincing discussion of the conscience, the superego, as the cause of the Discontent we experience as we become adults adjusted to the demands of our Civilization.
In the 21st century, as we stare through the Hubble telescope at where it all came from, it is difficult to connect the Enthusiasts' union with the divine, Abraham's cozy relationship with his god, or even Freud's cosmic family romance to the remnants we see hurdling towards us from the source, the Big Bang. We ponder Orion's Belt until it is no longer a cluster of stars but a great womb of bright galaxies spewed out into the darkness of space and time. All the anthropomorphic notions of the caring divine seem to fall away as we stare into the mighty and violent universe in which stars--no, whole galaxies--are created and blown apart before our eyes. Granted that there are black holes in the sky; there must also be 'white holes' like Orion's Belt from which what has been sucked into the vortex erupts forth recreated in new colors and forms of astounding size.
To acknowledge this awful power can become a tremendously humbling experience, one closer to the feelings described by Kierkegaard and Otto than the family feeling that connects us to any of the anthropomorphic sky deities. Once humbled thus, we may accept the process the way Lao-tzu in the 6th century BC accepted the Tao as the Way of things, the energy that is like a well, "older than God," that is "used but never used up." Or, to bring that comfort closer to home, we may embrace it the way Dylan Thomas did, as "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."
It is in domesticating this continuous power once again that we arrive at the French Grail and the Dark Virgin that figure in the forthcoming novels, Deepest France & Mysterious Days..
You're having trouble with your Argument to Design... which isn't surprising. Everyone with an education has trouble with it.
ReplyDeleteI think that a lot of the comfort that any religion offers its believers is eschatological hope. Hope for justice to prevail either in this life or in another one. That's why so many of the Natural Theologians in the 19th century argued against Darwin's natural selection. It wasn't that evolution was a problem so much, but that the removal of a Designer challenged their eschatology.
I have a question for you. Why in Feb 2010 when the earthquake struck Haiti did the survivors get together in the streets and in the midst of so much grief and suffering, sing?
Having grown up in the American South where too many people still live in the past--that period leading up to the Civil War and, in some cases, stretching down to today-- I can't help but see living for a promised future as the reversed mirror image of the same state of mind. It may be why so many Americans refuse to vote their true class interests and instead vote in favor of the interests of the millionaires and billionaires they think they are going to become (if not president!) in the future. Sam Harris has very strong arguments regarding the effects this eschatological thinking has on people.
ReplyDeleteTeleological thinking is as misleading, even pernicious, as genetic or first cause arguments. Designer arguments always run into the vortex called infinite regress, a vortex that sucks their argument into a black hole where it's impossible to get beyond the next level of the question, Who/what designed or created the Designer.? Why does the East say the world is a huge disk or dish floating in a lake sitting on mighty pillars, which stand on the back of a elephant? This combination seems pretty solid--until some Smart Alec at the back of the room lifts his hand and asks the guru, "But what, oh Great Holy One, does the elephant stand on?"
Why did the Haitians sing? Why did American slaves sing in the fields? To distract themselves from pain? To express their fears and anger? To join with one another rather than face death alone? To seek comfort in something familiar they could understand? All of the above? And more no doubt.