Playing Devil's Advocate
My friends, how can you call merciful a divinity that desires our eternal unhappiness only to appease his rage of an instant? We must forgive our neighbour, and he need not? And we should love such a cruel being! Umberto Eco: "The Island of the Day Before"
There are those who have 'faith' and those who do not, in the sense of subjugating reason to hope in the Divine. There are those who had faith and in whom exposure to the most egregiously inhumane and dreadful acts of violence served to expunge their faith, to reach the realization that they could not conceivably continue to believe in the existence of an Almighty Spirit said to be a benevolent and forgiving one, but who would yet allow the slaughter of innocents. How, they reason, could one submit to such a belief when reason and experience tell us otherwise?
That there is no god, no all-powerful, all-seeing, forgiving deity whom humankind must recognize and pay obeisance to. That this belief is but a human construct, a way by which the faint of heart are able to face an existence that to them appears itself without reason or hope. Whose spiritual needs are fulfilled by the belief in the existence of a benign and loving God, one that has the best interests of His flock ever uppermost in intent, but who yet visits disaster on His creatures when they prove, from time to time, immune to His precepts and demands.
"So you truly do not believe in God?"
"I find no reason to, in nature. Nor am I the only one. Strabo tells us that the Galicians had no notion of a higher being. When the missionaries wanted to talk of God with the natives of the West Indies. Acosta recounts (and he was also a Jesuit), they could only use the Spanish word Dios. You will not believe it, but no suitable term existed in the local language. If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention...." Umberto Eco, "The Island of the Day Before"
"I find no reason to, in nature. Nor am I the only one. Strabo tells us that the Galicians had no notion of a higher being. When the missionaries wanted to talk of God with the natives of the West Indies. Acosta recounts (and he was also a Jesuit), they could only use the Spanish word Dios. You will not believe it, but no suitable term existed in the local language. If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention...." Umberto Eco, "The Island of the Day Before"
I would argue with the author, as well read and obviously creatively brilliant as he is, a wordsmith of the first order. For from time immemorial humankind faced uncertainties of existence, and fear of the unknown. Attributes of a little-understood and powerful Nature were ascribed to a Being on High, and to that great power was given respect and obeisance in the hopes that the Being would intervene on behalf of those who recognized His Sacred Being.
Not always a "him"; occasionally a "she" as in Gaea, as in Astarte, but always after females subordinate in religion to males in recognition of the 'natural order' of things, where in the real world, the world of substance, of humankind who eked out their existence at the behest and in the protection of theistic beings, women were always subservient to men (with the occasional blip of ancient tribes like those of the fabled Amazons, resolute and determined to rule themselves).
And then, of course, there have always been the doubters. Those whose native intelligence and seeming lack of need to believe in the existence of an all-powerful, unseen, unheard, unproven deity accepted the world as it appeared, accepted responsibility for their choices, accepted that their actions were theirs alone and there would be no sacred trust, no higher authority, no spiritual intermediaries to intervene and assist during times of grave duress.
They subscribed to doubt, instead of faith, to personal growth and search, and acceptance of responsibility as integral to maturation of the individual. There were no needs of spiritual supports to haul these individuals into adulthood and toward meaning in life. Life itself provided the opportunities to learn, to advance, to prosper on the authority of one's own attempts. Conversely, those who suffered life's challenges acknowledged the capricious nature of nature itself.
"Wisdom, Signor della Griva. Success no longer has the color of the sun, but grows in the light of the moon, and no one has ever said that this second luminary was displeasing to the creator of all things. Jesus himself meditated, in the garden of Olivet, at night." Umberto Eco, "The Island of the Day Before"
One's success or failure, for those without belief in the Divine, was one's own affair; the trajectory of one's life owed to happenstance and to choices, to chance and to opportunity - or lack thereof. There is, for those who find it redundant and unnecessary and illogical to believe in the existence of that which cannot be proven, a determination to make one's way through the application of logic and intelligence, not through a subscription to divine belief.
We have company, the unbelievers: In Canada fully16% numbered themselves among the atheists, agnostics, humanists or no-religion responses to census enquiries in 2001. And growing. In the United States, current figures in that very up-front religion-adherence, tendency-to-fundamentalism country, a growing number of Americans identify themselves as without religious affiliation, atheist or agnostic; some 20%.
Yet there are limits. Far greater numbers of individuals profess trust in those who are religious, no matter their social or economic strata, than in those who are agnostic or atheist. In voting for high political office, it's doubtful that a candidate who identifies as non-religious would receive an overwhelming percentage of votes, regardless of applicable attributes for the position. A greater number of voters would accept a position of authority for a woman, a gay, a Black or a Jew, than an atheist.
The majority in any society subscribes to religious belief. They view with apprehension and some little disbelief that they share their society with a sizeable minority that eschews religion. To label someone an atheist is in the way of a pejorative in the minds of those who trust in God. It's just of late that the minority group of agnostics, atheists are hitting back at the majority who consider their disbelief an insidious injury to society at large.
It has been pointed out by the non-believers that humankind-derived catastrophic events like wars, invasions, violent social upheavals, deliberate attempts to eradicate entire populations as existentially inconvenient could not possibly occur if the concept of an all-powerful, graciously loving God existed beyond a hopeful concept embraced by the timidly fearful among us. It is we ourselves who are responsible for the carnage we produce, and it is we ourselves who are responsible to ameliorate the worst behaviours that humans are capable of.
And sadly, it is religious strife that has claimed more human lives, caused more disruption in the world than any mere ideology. Yet any human construct, whether religious or political ideologies have equal opportunity to wreak havoc in the world, because humankind itself is given to illogic, to emotion-laden fear of the "other", to a propensity to settle differences with violence rather than intelligent discourse.
We are, like all other animals that inherit this earth, a wicked trick of Nature. We are territorial, avaricious, violence-prone, whether as individuals or as nations. We see the results around us everywhere, every day. This is high theatre for Olympians.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, August 04, 2007
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