The Big Picture

All the changes we have undergone in the past and are undergoing now as a result of scientific inquiry and technological innovation challenge traditional perspectives in all areas of life. Culture, government and business are all affected. The market place has generally been able to incorporate new ideas and perspectives more easily than institutions like government and religion. Businesses have found new philosophies and new ways of structuring themselves that are total departures from past practices in response to the changes wrought by the electronic age of information. Government and religious organizations have been floundering precariously in recent years as they struggle to maneuver through an ever-changing landscape with their outmoded concepts, structures and policies. In the commercial market place there is a survival of the fittest element, a selection process that is not subject to the bias, prejudice, tradition and convention that so constrains the market place of ideas. Significant cultural change is usually brought about through violent revolution or as the result of a culture’s total collapse, the Soviet Union, for example.

The collapse of the ancient City of Ur is another example. The demise of that culture seems to have led to the idea of one God. The many Gods of Ur were supposed to provide for the city’s welfare but they did not hold true to their promise of ongoing prosperity. A series of crop failures brought about an economic collapse of such magnitude there was nothing that could be done to remedy it. The Gods that the people of Ur had relied on to hold things together had utterly failed them. There was nothing left for them to do but leave the city and hope to find a home elsewhere.

Among the fleeing people of Ur was Abraham who is credited with conceiving the idea of one God. Jews, Christians and Muslims alike speak of the God of Abraham as the wellspring of their religions. This God appeared to Abraham as a way to fill the void within that was created by his disillusionment with the gods of Ur.

The scenario could have been something like this: On the disheartened journey away from his collapsing world Abraham felt that he alone was now responsible for the health and well being of his family. Everyone relied on him while he had no one to rely on but himself. Charged with this greater sense of responsibility, a God like position in regard to his family, along with an eagerness to fill the emptiness resulting from his shattered faith, Abraham envisioned God in an image created out of his own situation. One God. God the Father. With people as His children. Abraham was stripped of all the material wealth his civilization had provided and hence his new God did not have an interest in such things. Abraham was on a journey, a long and arduous journey, without any certainty as to its outcome. Where was one to go after one’s world had collapsed? And if one’s whole world could collapse what was the point of earthly existence? Again, the vision of his new God provided answers to his questions. Life itself was merely a journey one had to make in order to gain acceptance into a really permanent world beyond this one. The world where God existed. God’s world was the important one. The only one that mattered. The many Gods of Ur were unable to secure things in this world. But one could surely believe that one God could be relied upon to forever secure things in his own world. A world where all His children would be welcome to live after completing their particular journeys on earth.

This must have been a great relief to Abraham as well as an invigorating stimulus to his dissipated spirit. He now had a God whose efficacy was not connected to the impermanence of this world and one’s faith could be preserved regardless of earthly disasters. He now had a God who was not concerned with earthly success but by spiritual worth i.e., how one behaved on the journey. He now had a God who gave him a purpose beyond the outcome of any particular journey through this world. The real journey was connected to another world assured by the vision of his new God.

Religious/cultural beliefs can evolve with respect to cataclysmic change. But belief in God, whatever that may entail, endures.

GOD IS DEAD was the cover story for an issue of TIMES magazine around 1965. Fredrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God about one hundred years earlier. Both obituaries were the result of similar context. Nietzsche lamented the transformation of God from being perceived as a reality to becoming a mere concept, theory or ideology. The announcement on the TIMES’ cover was a result of the ascendancy of secular humanism over orthodox religious doctrine, which, again, usurped the position of a reigning God with an academic refinement, in this instance, Social Science.

To proclaim the death of God by mere mortals seems a curious matter. If God exists, there is no way in which we could arrange his death. All it really means is certain perceptions of one’s world, one’s self and one’s God have changed in such a way as to require a reassessment and realignment of one’s world, one’s self and one’s idea of God. No one has ever known God. No one has ever known the very essence of God. We can only relate to God through the world we live in, how we perceive ourselves in that world and our knowledge of it.

So, perceptions of God can change though God, if one actually exists, remains the same. It is only through this world that we can know anything at all about God and it is through our knowledge of this world that we create perceptions of God that serve as reasonable facsimiles of what God might be. Any personal contact one feels one has with God amounts to reverberations of one’s intense belief in the Godly perceptions one creates. So it is not a question of whether God is dead or alive or even whether God exists or not. It’s a question of what is the best view of God that can be created through the enlightened perspectives afforded us by our knowledge of this world.

Belief in God provides a focal point for the values that one must put above one’s self in order to maintain a cohesive society. A civilized society of disparate individuals competing with each other for survival requires a belief in a god that demands obedience and instructs people on how to behave. The birth of Islam among the Bedouin tribes serves as an excellent example here.

As Karen Armstrong describes it in A HISTORY OF GOD: “…Muhammad was acutely aware of a worrying malaise in Mecca, despite its recent spectacular success. Only two generations earlier the Quraysh (A Meccan tribe.) had lived a harsh nomadic life in the Arabian steppes, like the other Bedouin tribes: each day had required a grim struggle for survival. During the last years of the sixth century, however, they had become extremely successful in trade and made Mecca the most important settlement in Arabia. They were now rich beyond their wildest dreams. Yet their drastically altered lifestyle meant that the old tribal values had been superseded by a rampant and ruthless capitalism. People felt obscurely disoriented and lost. Muhammad was aware that the Quraysh were making a religion out of money…They felt they were the masters of their own fate, and some even seem to have believed that their wealth would give them a certain immortality. But Muhammad believed that this new cult of self-sufficiency would mean the disintegration of the tribe. In the old nomadic days the tribe had to come first and the individual second: each one of its members knew that they all depended upon one another for survival…Now individualism had replaced the communal ideal and competition had become the norm…family groups of the tribe fought one another for a share of the wealth of Mecca…unless they learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egoism and greed, his (Muhammad’s) tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife.”

And the Middle Eastern prophets Amos, Hosea and Isaiah saw that the social fabric of their respective cities was being eroded by greed and corruption as individuals put their own welfare above that of the entire community which they sought to remedy with the concept of one God. There were similar developments in other parts of the world as well.

Karen Armstrong writes: “The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age. In all the main regions of the civilized world, people created new ideologies that have continued to be crucial and informative. The new religious systems reflected the changed economic and social conditions. For reasons that we do not entirely understand, all the chief civilizations developed along parallel lines, even when there was no commercial contact (as between China and the European area). There was a new prosperity that led to the rise of a merchant class. Power was shifting from king and priest, temple and palace, to the marketplace. The new wealth led to intellectual and cultural florescence and also to the development of the individual conscience. Inequality and exploitation became more apparent as the pace of change accelerated in the cities and people began to realize that their own behavior could affect the fate of future generations. Each region developed a distinctive ideology to address these problems and concerns: Taoism and Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India and philosophical rationalism in Europe. The Middle East did not produce a uniform solution, but in Iran and Israel, Zoroaster and the Hebrew prophets respectively evolved different versions of monotheism. Strange as it may seem, the idea of “God”, like other great religious insights of the period, developed in a market economy in a spirit of aggressive capitalism.”

“Strange” may not be the adjective for this particular phenomenon. Interesting to be sure, but where else could one turn to remedy the inequality, exploitation and social chaos of the time other than to some presence or idea that all must be beholden to. It is, of course, true that people are basically out for themselves. That is a fact of life. Nature creates individuals with an intense fundamental interest in their own survival. In the natural world this serves to bind members of a group together because each member realizes one’s absolute dependency on the group for one’s own survival. Civilization had substituted the natural world’s conditioning properties, with respect to channeling individual self-interest into the formation of cohesive groups, through the power of the state in the form of king and priest. With the rise of the market economy, however, that system failed to hold things together and self-interested survival became the order of the day, or rather the disorder. Divisiveness took over for lack of a unifying force. The idea of one God above everyone and everything, a God who was intensely focused on the everyday affairs of people was one way of installing a new force for cohesion. The one God was a means by which self-interest could once again be used to bring a people together. A means to put universal values above one’s own personal gain and provide a perspective through which a people might come to see and appreciate the big picture.

Isaiah’s unpopular message to his people was that Yahweh would turn against them if they continued in their selfish and wicked ways. The prophet warned them that their callous indifference to the misfortunate among them and the worship of other gods would cause Yahweh to bring catastrophe upon their heads. Isaiah’s warnings materialized with a vengeance. Israel and Judah were invaded and conquered by Assyria. As a vanquished and exiled people the Israelites and Judaeans began to consider that perhaps Yahweh really was the one true God. After all, what had been prophesized in His name had come to pass. Still, this Yahweh was a difficult God to accept. He was not merely acting on behalf of His people as provider and protector but He made them painfully aware of the error of their ways and would make them pay the price when His laws and warnings were not heeded.

As mentioned above these events were mirrored in other disparate geographical regions around the same time and for the same reasons. In each region the new gods, ideologies and philosophies were spawned out of disparate cultures and therefore took different forms. But they grew out of the same need and administered similar remedies. They were concepts that grew out of certain individual natures that stood apart from the cultural status quo. These were individuals who possessed an intense awareness of the big picture. They had, as it were, a god’s eye view of things. It was a vision that manifested itself in various ways within the different cultures but was constant in reacquainting people with the awe and mystery once found in the nature of things. Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism all reached inside people and brought them outside themselves through the invocation of something for greater than themselves and yet was immanently part of their individual lives. These visions were not from another world but from an earlier time in this world. They were not divine inspiration visited upon human nature, but were divined by human nature in response to cultural inadequacies. The cultural inadequacies all had to do with a lack of binding power between a people and the solutions were similar in various cultures because religion had evolved from the same wellspring - the awe of nature and the strictures nature imposed upon primitive people as they went about the business of survival.