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What does it feel like, to love God?
At times In baffled anger I have raged. More times Though, I have ignored, or doubted. And yet, Sometimes Inexplicably, I am drawn. Is there a love unrequited To which I must, this time, respond?
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God's presence is in the absence,
The shaped emptiness that shows Where He and She, was. Leaving us, alone? To ponder the gap. Trying to patch it With theology, Cover it with rites, or asserting that, fundamentally, there's no gap at all. Waiting for those times we are sure enough That our humanness can fill it, Shaped into the space God has left. A couple of days ago I came across online arguments and discussions of the later work of the scientist and militant atheist Peter Atkins. It was mostly what you'd expect; Atkins giving God both barrels and declaring he'd blasted deities into oblivion, believers saying that whatever Atkins thought he was aiming at wasn't any sort of god they'd recognize. Pretty futile. I read Atkins' book The Creation in the 1980s and I was impressed, indeed it made a great impression on me, but it seemed at the time (and still does) that it was not at all as harmful to faith as he assumed it would be. Perhaps if I believed in the sort of god he propped up as his Aunt Sally I would have been more dismayed. The ultimate reduction of matter into energy seems a way of understanding God as Mind.
Most debate seems to centre on his account of how 'something' appeared out of 'nothing', which essentially means understanding nothing, 0, as the result of 1 + -1. Such an understanding is compatible with the traditional explanation of a creation from the void by a creator God. Atkins' weaknesses are curious ones, coming from a combination of scientism, nihilism and arrogance. One gets the feeling that a whole chunk of his brain is missing. He gives the impression, indeed he seems at pains to impress upon us, that he doesn't think truth can be conveyed by anything other than scientific discourse, that understanding not based on scientific methodology is of no value, and that human concerns not related to the acquisition of knowledge of scientific 'facts' are unworthy of consideration. There can be little doubt that as an ideology neo-liberalism is dead. It survives because it is believed that there is no political alternative to it that isn't even worse.
No political alternative. With the recent impotence of the political Left in the West, it has been the Churches that have provided the only alternative vision. God has been left as the only source of value that is not wholly compromised by neo-liberalism's relentless reduction of all life to the status of commodity, and the Churches left as the only organised radical opposition. So how do the forces of neo-liberalism react? Is there any connexion between the relentless reductionism of neo-liberalism and the relentless reductionism of militant atheism. Perhaps not intentionally, and indeed some of those most hostile to religion regard themselves as politically Left wing, but they are fulfilling a crucial role for neo-liberalism by undermining the religious concepts that are challenging the dominance of materialist commodification. Their replacement of universal and authoritative 'values' with provisional, variable, transitory and consumer-based 'choices' fits neatly with the rule of the market and the supremacy of capital. |
What's hereA quick look at the 'blogosphere' shows that the nature of the medium means it is all too easy for a 'blog' to convey the impression that its compiler is, at best, self-indulgent and verbose, and at worst, a narcissistic bore. Religious blogs are by no means immune from this. Archives
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