A QUESTION OF GOD

By Detrimony

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Iwas travelling the freeway the other day, a metaphor perhaps for life’s own journey or even in this instance ‘the road less travelled’ as per the author Scott Peck. That it was a church noticeboard that caught my eye pronouncing as it did; that it is our own shortcomings that signify how truly great god is. I thought to myself of ‘learned helplessness’, ‘victim mentality’ and another term used in psychology called ‘locus of control’.

Locus of control being as it is the attribution of self-control that can be related to either internal or external factors. An internal locus of control refers to an existentialist style of outlook in that one’s life circumstances are seen as the direct result of one’s behaviour and choices, whilst an external locus of control refers to the belief that one’s life circumstances are the result of intervention by god’s will or that of some other deity or things such as luck, chance or fate.

The Christian gospel tells us - the Kingdom of God is within you - and yet deigns to an exterior god separate from ourselves in the same the animal kingdom is deemed to be separate from humanity. Native and Eastern spirituality on the other hand describing a concept of god that is in everything and especially within ourselves.

People having an external locus of control don’t look within themselves for answers to the state of the world. Instead they look to the heavens asking such things as why does god permit so much suffering and why does god permit evil to dwell amongst us and in times of trouble to even save them from themselves. They look for signs and miracles and seek to find them in evangelist’s tents, weeping madonnas and crucifixes dripping blood. Never it being within them to consider the majesty of a sunrise, the magnificence of a snow capped mountain, the pyrotechnical wonders of a thunderstorm or the simple beauty of sunlight dancing in the water on a sunny afternoon.

In the book The Dark Side of Christian History by Helen Elerby [Morning Star&Lark, 1995] it is described thus:

Orthodox Christianity fostered humanity’s shift towards a world view that pays little heed to the idea of divinity. By teaching that the earthly realm is devoid of sanctity, Christians built the ideological foundation for modern society.

So to take this argument now into the sociological realm it becomes necessary to define the basis for which objects having no god in them derive existence and what part this has played in man’s historical development. Thereupon to examine further the aforementioned statement regarding the consequences of theocratic involvement being dependent upon externalised gods and its effect on all humanity.

Karl Magnuson, in his book, The World From Within: Triumph and Failure of an Evolutionary Adaptation [see http://www.saivo.com/book2.pdf] speaks of the birth of the scientific world view as follows:

A conflict ensued which consumed the energies of artists, philosophers, and scientists in England and elsewhere - On the one side were the romantics, to whom all surface evidence of life was the reflection of internal process. Life was animated, i.e. imbued with meaning or soul. And emotion was the language in which internal process, or meaning, found surface representation. Meanwhile, in scientific circles, and in the corridors of academia, the terms 'romanticism' and 'romantic' underwent a comprehensive devaluation. The 'romantic conception of life' was variously 'impractical', 'visionary', and/or (the strangest of all these disparaging epithets) sentimental. The concept of sentimentality seemed somehow to combine emotional excess with the implication of superficiality!

Karl Marx’s theories of capitalism and commodity fetishism also tell us that:

Considered as values, all commodities are qualitatively equal and differ only quantitatively, hence can be measured against each other and substituted for one another (are mutually exchangeable, mutually convertible) in certain quantitative relations. Value is their social relation, their economic quality. A book which possesses a certain value and a loaf of bread possessing the same value are exchanged for one another, are the same value but in a different material. As a value, a commodity is an equivalent for all other commodities in a given relation. As a value, the commodity is an equivalent; as an equivalent all its natural properties are extinguished; it no longer takes up a special qualitative relationship towards the other commodities; but is rather the general measure as well as the general representative, the general medium of exchange of all other commodities... as a value, every commodity is equally divisible; in its natural existence this is not the case [Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) 1857-8, London, 1973, p 141].

What follows is the idea of a world in which science has taken up the idea of an external god to somehow extinguish the sentimentality or natural properties of things in a move to make them purely objective. The objects thus taking on the quality of alienation or to use yet another Marxist axiom:

Alienated labour has resolved itself for us into two elements which mutually condition one another, or which are but different expressions of one and the same relationship. Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation, estrangement as true enfranchisement. [G. Petrovic, 'Alienation', in T. Bottomore et al., (eds.), A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Oxford, 1983), p.15].

Not be biased here however and to look upon the words of a staunch oppositionist to Karl Marx known as Max Weber in his argument of the rationalism of modern society thus that; the impersonal struggle in the marketplace is ‘an abomination to every system of fraternal ethics’:

Where the market is allowed to follow it’s own autonomous tendencies (i.e. where the market is left unregulated and formal rationality is thereby maximised), it’s participants do not look towards the persons of each other but only toward the commodity; there are no obligations of brotherliness or reverence, and none of the spontaneous human relations that are sustained by personal unions. [R.Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber, Economy and Society]

What we have yet again is the reduction of all things to objects having no god within them and, thus, in the words of Weber, ‘no obligations of brotherliness or reverence’.

So where does this leave us? In a world where such unconscionable acts as the destruction of forests, strip-mining, genocide and overpopulation with no regard to effect on world resources has been allowed to continue throughout the last two millenium no less.

I’d like to conclude this essay first with a phrase Chief Seattle of the Suquamish Indians allegedly wrote to the American Government in the 1800's, entitled Letter to the People [see http://www.barefootsworld.net/seattle.html]

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Not least then now with some inspirational words from Nelson Mandela’s 1997 Third Inaugural Speech:

"We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us: It is in everyone.

And, as we let our light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others".

Finally to leave you on your own journey to form your own conviction as to the question of god.