So What?

Idolatry 21: On the Advantages of Not Being Organised

In my last post , I suggested a materialist approach to the Christian faith; how we need to learn to read scripture and the world together, so that we can see the ways in which institutions dominate our consciousness through our uncritical acceptance of images or idols.

The problem atheists seem to have with religion is the wars it has fought and the evil it has done.  I can't help thinking that if atheists were organised they could show us how to run things properly.  I am quite sure the atheist no-church would never go to war, never torture, maim, unjustly imprison or dominate people who don't agree with them.

However, atheists are not organised and so we are invited to compare the atrocities and excesses of organised religion with the gentle benevolence of armchair critics. 

Let us remember times and places where atheists have been in charge.  The French Revolution, based upon the writings of Voltaire and others, shocked by the evils they saw God perpetrate through the Lisbon earthquake, led to the Reign of Terror.  Can we forget the excesses of the Soviet Gulag, China in Tibet or Pol Pot in Cambodia?  It seems being led by atheists is not always an entirely positive experience for those who disagree with them.

The point is all human institutions are potentially violent; it is institutions which cause the problem, whether or not they are religious.  This is why all religions can be accused of violence alongside atheist states.  So, why the sniping at religion?  There isn't shred of evidence that religions lead to more violence than non-religious organisations. 

I've never been sure whether Hitler was atheist or some sort of religious sectarian.  Let's assume his regime was atheist.  Now we have to face up to the collusion of the Protestant Churches in Germany and the Vatican.  This is well attested.  So, is the witness of the Confessing Church in Germany . 

Christian collusion with the Nazis was shameful and still is where Christians continue to pursue racism and oppress others.  But we need to ask ourselves what is the alternative?  If there is one thing we have learned from this survey of idolatry, I hope it is that people will believe almost everything.  Belief is something spiritual and almost always corrosive.

The mainstream churches all have disciplinary procedures for their ordained and lay members.  These provide a degree of accountability for their members, which would be missing if Christians simply believed and were not organised.  Discipline is a never ending task for the churches and doesn't always work; witness what has come to light about the Catholic Church in ireland recently.

But are we really saying that no accountability whatsoever is better than some accountability?  Of course, political authorities could send the police round but how soon before that seeped into totalitarianism? 

Atheists might be intelligent but in spreading their views they don't seem to think particularly strategically.  We all have to share our world with people who seem to us to act like idiots.  But most traditions have the means to restrain the worst excesses and should be encouraged to do so fairly.

So, my message to atheists is back off and credit religious people with some intelligence.  We're not all idiots just because you disagree with us.

Idolatry 20: Is the Universe Conscious?

How do you genuinely not know God?  The knack apparently is to set aside everything we know about God, except for God.  This is the teaching to be found in The Cloud of Unknowing , which is an example of the insights Christian mystics have made.  Here is a passage quoted in the Wikipedia article at the end of the above link.

Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God.

It might also be worth reading the following post in my other blog , which covers several others saying similar things.

We lack the language to express these things and even words we think of as certain can loop around with unexpected meanings.  Take the word materialism.  This can be used in two ways that are relevant to our interests.

It is used by atheists who believe the universe is made of matter, and spirit does not exist.  I have discussed this in my other blog, starting here .  Just one example of what I mean.  Belief in a material universe includes belief in nothing.  Is it possible to imagine nothing?  I don't mean the number zero, or what we say is in a box after we've emptied it but absolutely nothing.  Have a go, imagine it if you can.  There would be no space and no time.  Just about possible; the problem is we are conscious beings and our consciousness is always present.  What if there is no such thing as nothing?  What if there is always consciousness?  Atheists don't believe in God; why can't theists not believe in nothing?  Come on, there is no evidence whatsover for the existence of nothing, how could there be?  The materialist atheist has to concede ultimately there is no more a priori reason for the atheist position as there is for the theist.

The recent atheist campaigns have drawn Christians' attention to their a priori assumptions.  I welcome this and have claimed atheists are angels .  But is it not reasonable to ask atheists to do the same and re-examine theirs?

We all create our own realities.  Everything we perceive has been filtered by our senses and our brains.  We cannot conceive of nothing without using our conscious minds.  We cannot conceive of anything at all without our conscious minds.  We are saved from solipsism because at some point we encounter other minds.  We might fall in love with one or more of them or we might hate or fear them.  All this is in our minds.  Somehow, our institutions are created by our minds together and so we collectively create our institutions.

This is the other meaning of materialism.  It means to understand the spiritual entities described in our religious stories as creations of our collective consciousnesses.  We lose control because we cannot know all the contributions made by all who are involved.  All of this fully engages our attention from an early age, it is formed by the stories we are told, eg of Father Christmas. 

And God?  Somehow God is the reality beyond all this, a reality that enables us to see clearly.  Perhaps all things are held in God's consciousness.  We encounter God, on the interface between the material world and consciousness.  Consciousness is as fundamental as the material universe, it is only through consciousness we know the material world at all. 

Idolatry 19: Why Atheists are Not Very Good at Atheism

In my last post , I referred to a passage from Philippians.  Here it is in full:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in  human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death

- even death on a cross.  (NRSV, Phil 2:5-8)

The Greek verb, translated as 'emptied' in the third line, kenosis is usually understood as self emptying.  We can see in this very early hymn the clarity with which people saw the incarnation.  It is an emptying of all power, and at each stage, more power is lost.

The question Christians should be posing to atheists is not whether they should believe God exists, but whether they are serious about the non-existence of God.

Christian mystics know that to find God, we have to lose God.  To rigorously discard every idol, every illusion we have about God, is extremely difficult.  Atheists seem to have an image of God based upon certain fundamentalist traditions.  This parallels very much the unnoticed assent we all make to consumerism by our supposed unbelief in Father Christmas.  Our denials count for nothing but self-deception unless we change the way we live to one not controlled by the ideology of consumerism.  So, if you have an idolatrous image of God, it matters little whether you believe in it or not. 

This false image of God, colours atheists' statements, so their attacks on liberal Christians sound very similar to fundamentalist attacks on liberal Christians.  Indeed, the first target of fundamentalists is always their co-religionists.  Their false God dominates their perceptions as much as it dominates the perceptions of atheists.  The issue is not about belief in God, it is about false images of God.

I do not count myself as a liberal theologian.  The problem is any Christian who is not fundamentalist is counted as liberal by both fundamentalists and atheists.  Neither will listen, both are convinced they are right and there is nothing further to be said on the matter.

It is not about picking a new image of God to not believe in.  It is about rejecting all images of God.  But to do this requires the path of the mystics.  Real atheism is a Christian activity.  It is not a matter for arrogance, it is hard work to genuinely not know God.  I will explain this further in my next post.

Idolatry 18: Christianity, an Atheist Faith?

Last time I mentioned Bertrand Russell's essay 'Why I am Not a Christian' and his claim that Christians must believe in God and immortality.  Today I will show it is not essential to believe in God if you are a Christian. 

First, to say all Christians must believe in God, ignores what is meant by 'believe in'.  Many Christians would argue they believe in God, in the sense that we believe in a friend upon whom we rely for something which is not in their own interest.  I see nothing wrong with this but would respectfully point out we have a perfectly good word for this, namely faith, and it is better to use it than 'believe in' which has too many ambiguities.  I should add that I know faith is more than this, but this definition will do for now.

Second, we need to be clear that if we mean by 'belief in God' that we believe God exists, then we have a problem.  What do we mean when we say God exists?  I believe Russell is perfectly right when he says there is no way of proving God's existence using reason.  The problem is we have a category error here.

If we imagine the set of all things that exist in the universe (leaving aside the possibility of other parallel universes - but do include everything they contain too if you must) then how can God be a member of that set?  God is not someone who exists like Gordon Brown exists.  If God were something in the universe God would by definition not be the creator of all things.

So, why are Christians not atheists?  Well, curiously it might be a very good idea for Christians to reclaim the name atheist.  The incarnation is mind boggling because Christians claim this inconceivable God, a God who is not something in the universe, became human.  If we believe God exists like everything else in the universe, the incarnation becomes far less of an impossibility.

The God in whom atheists allege Christians believe, is a false God.  It is a projection of self-interest by both atheists and some Christians.  For some Christians, their faith story is a journey into darkness as they lose the faith of their childhood and only in time find a way back, through a rejection of their false images of God.  They return at length to the old stories but this time understand them in a new light.  As you would expect some people get stuck in false consciousness but all at least set out on the journey and return as atheists, atheists who have faith in a God they know they cannot ever know.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(TS Eliot Little Gidding)

The thing atheists miss is that Jesus was an atheist too.  On the cross tortured and killed for no other reason than that his tormentors had the power, abandoned by his friends, Jesus experienced, so we are told, atheism, the loss of God.  His early disciples tell how he gave up everything and became a human being, a slave and then was put to death on the cross (see Philippians 2).  At that moment he lost everything, including his faith.  That moment has sustained many Christians as they too weather loss of faith.

Idolatry 17: The Cross

Bertrand Russell in his famous essay, 'Why I am Not a Christian' contends there are two beliefs that are essential for those who call themselves Christian.  He does not appear to have asked the churches what they think constitute sufficient beliefs, which I would have thought to be a fairly minimal requirement.  He also does not seem to understand that belief and faith are not the same thing.  However, we will leave that thought to one side. 

Apparently Christians are supposed to believe in God and immortality.  I will leave these to my next post.  The second belief is 'Christ, if not divine, was at least the best and wisest of men'. 

First, throughout the essay Russell refers to Jesus as Christ.  Christ was not his name; during his lifetime he was known as Jesus of Nazareth.  Christ was an honorific title given to him by the early Christians.  He was a real person, in a real place at a real time.  This is called incarnation.  Christians believe that God lived as a real human being in a real time and place.

It seems incarnation has in the view of many, although not all, Christians removed the ban on graven images (or perhaps on all images as the Orthodox Churches would argue their icons are not graven). The logic of this is that if God were human we cannot be mistaken in visualising him as a human being.  This seems to help a lot of people, although it's not really my cup of tea.  Methodism uses such images rarely.

The problem for me is largely the way in which these images are presented.  Many seem to be sentimental depictions of an idealised man.  He is often seen with children or small animals as we are told he was gentle and mild and meek.  Worse he is too often a fair haired Caucasian man.  It is interesting that every culture seems to depict Jesus as one of their kind.  If you see these images together, it can be very powerful.  However, there is a tendency for the images from dominant cultures to predominate.

Russell spends a lot of time demonstrating Jesus (or Christ as he would have it) was not the best and wisest of men.  He overlooks one fact.  Jesus was murdered.  He was murdered by the political and religious authorities of his day.  Just like millions of people since have been murdered by political and religious authorities.  They have also been enslaved, exploited and generally suppressed and dominated.

Why don't fundamentalist Christians walk around their communities wearing not crosses, but images of lethal injections?  That is what the cross was, it was an instrument of judicial murder and torture.  Lots of people have difficulty believing God was murdered.  It is what Christians believe. 

Surely, no-one could turn the cross into an idol?  Of course they can.  It should be seen for what it is, it is a raw image, not something to make jewelery out of.  But it is also possible to take it too far in the other direction.

Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ' was in my view a gross misrepresentation of the faith.  It turned a story about the struggle of people for liberation into a sentimental film of the horror genre.  The mixture of gratuitous horror and sentimental scenes of Jesus' nicer than nice friends was hardly edifying.

Worse was the film's misogyny.  Satan was played by a woman and certain scenes, eg where the two Marys wipe up Jesus' blood using towels provided by Pilate's wife for the purpose, were degrading. 

Throughout history people have dwelled upon the pain of Christ's suffering and less frequently on the injustice of his suffering.  This trend became sharper about 900 years ago when the idea that God killed Jesus through the atonement was first formulated.  And of course the idea that Jesus was murdered by the Jews has been an ineradicable stain on Christian history. 

The image of Jesus on the cross is an indictment of all concentrations of power in the hands of unaccountable authorities.  It seems this can be understood most easily by those who suffer at the hands of the powerful.  If we want to know God, this image is the one we need.  Not the image of God the killer of his son, but the image of God tortured and killed by unaccountable humans.

Idolatry 14: Where Atheism Might Have a Point

In an attempt to simultaneously wind up both atheists and Christians, I have on occasion referred to atheists as angels.  The word 'angel' comes from a Greek word which means 'messenger'.  Angels are messengers from God.  To be visited by an angel is as close as anyone is likely to get to a direct conversation with God.  There is a minor tradition of seeing people who play a part in someone's faith journey as messengers from God.

So, to describe atheists as angels means Christians should listen carefully to what they say.  It is also mischievous.  We should listen carefully to people telling us there is no God because they are messengers from God.

Atheists are right because they see through Christian false consciousness of God.  In the next 3 posts, I will explore how Christians are prone to a false consciousness of God.  If we are not prepared to listen to each other or to God, then God sends us other messengers.

Where I get impatient with atheists is when they tell me that fundamentalist beliefs are the true Christian faith and that I collude with fundamentalism by being a liberal Christian. 

Fundamentalism is profoundly influential within the Christian faith.  Even those of us who do not believe in this way find ourselves struggling to escape its influence.  As a Christian I feel my own faith undermined far more by Christian fundamentalists than by atheists. 

Atheists expose the ways fundamentalism substitutes idols for God.  The mistake they make is to believe that having disposed of fundamentalism they have disposed of Christianity.  I have challenged fundamentalism all my life and see it as a corrosive and profoundly misleading approach to faith.  To be told by atheists, late to the debate, that I believe the same as fundamentalists believe is frustrating.  It effectively locks me into an argument I can't win.

It also locks atheists into an argument they cannot lose.  Their belief that fundamentalism is the only authentic Christian faith is so total, they believe they have won the argument.  In truth, they have hardly touched the surface of it.  One thing at a time.  In the next 3 posts I am going to take three instances of Christian belief and show how idols are substituted for sound teaching.  Then I will return to atheism and show where I think they are mistaken.

Idolatry 13: Life Without God

We're halfway through and it is time to remember the starting point .  Is atheism about the existence of God or about idolatry?

Let me come clean, I agree with an awful lot of what atheists say and I believe Christians need to hear what they are saying.  However, I remain a Christian. 

An interesting question is whether it is possible for any person to live without a God or gods of some description.  Western Europe is overall indifferent to the existence of God.  This is in marked contrast to most of the rest of the world where religion is if anything growing.  Atheists have a strong presence in Europe and they claim to be the second largest faith in the United States, presumably after Christianity.

Atheists claim it is possible to live without God.  I question this because I don't believe most people who are not believers are atheists.  What we have in the main is indifference.  People are simply not interested in formal religion or religious beliefs.  If atheists wish to count the indifferent they can but I would urge them to reconsider.  Remember the words of Socrates, by way of Plato, 'the unexamined life is not worth living'.  Is an unexamined life really what they wish to offer to humanity? 

I don't believe it is.  The vocal, erudite atheists are not, cannot be living unexamined lives. 

If atheists read this series they will probably protest they no more subscribe to the cult of Father Christmas than they do to the cult of Jesus Christ.  Yet, I think this is where I wish to ask in all seriousness, are you sure?  I do not consciously believe in the cult of Father Christmas and yet to be honest I cannot say I am free of the ideology of consumerism.  Our churches are certainly not, we are mired in this ideology and its god is Father Christmas. 

I will in a later post explain why I think atheism is mired in this deeper false consciousness.  Christians have a different way of avoiding it to atheists and we might argue about whose is most effective but I hope some atheists at least would see the problem of false gods is more difficult than it might first appear.

The question we must consider is: is it possible to live without a god?  I would expect most atheists to answer yes.  My answer is also yes but for somewhat different reasons.

So, the first step is to explore one issue where atheists are right about Christianity.  This will be revealed in my next post.

Idolatry 11: But I Don't Worship Father Christmas ...

The first thing we need to do is get ideas of formal worship out of our heads.  I am not in any way claiming there are groups of people who organise worship of Santa.  However, we need to be aware of the root of the word worship: to ascribe worth to something.

Also, we should remember idols have a material and a non-material aspect .  The image points to something else and that something else is where out true allegiances lie.  Father Christmas is the god of our consumer society.  I will describe how we worship this god in my next post.

This idol tightens its grip as the child discovers there is no such thing as Santa Claus.  The illusion starts once we persuade ourselves there is nothing to believe in.

First up, some Christians will say either (a) we don't worship Santa or (b) we know he is an idol and so we have nothing to do with him.  To both groups, I reply 'fine, if you don't worship Santa, there's no problem'.  But, are you sure?  Do you really focus on the nativity and cut yourself off from all the advertising and commercial pressure of Christmas? 

Christians can learn from Father Christmas, how the society we minister in works.  We are enslaved by this idol through debt, indulgence, damage to the environment.  It all derives from our annual celebration of consumerism.  Why are we unable to take it seriously? 

If we distance ourselves too much  from the fun, we'll be accused of being miserable haters of the simple enjoyment of family life.  The problem we face is that we're not supposed to take it seriously.  To take it seriously is graceless, it misses the point of the great big annual celebration.  In short if we take it seriously, no-one else will take us seriously. 

Now onto atheist objections.  I wish I was confident your scepticism extends this far.  The world is under colossal pressure because of the impact consumerism is having on its ecology.  Am I hearing you correctly when you say the greatest threat is Christianity or religion?  Really?  In Europe Christians have been crushed by the juggernaut of consumerism.  We're not the threat.  Whether we're part of the solution perhaps remains to be seen but try to get a little perspective please.

I don't hear an atheist critique of consumerism and this worries me because it suggests a blind spot.  Now I know many environmentalists are atheist but how many see the motivations that make humanity so helpless are spiritual?  Spiritual forces are not angels and demons (wherever do you get these ideas from?) they are the power our institutions have over us. 

Do you know about the power of institutions?  Are you aware that you are subject to them, your actions are determined by them, just like everyone else?  If we're serious about tackling these insurmountable difficulties then you need to see what imprisons us.

Christians are not immune.  Many Christians live in fantasy worlds.  Ultimately they cannot witness to their faith because they see only fantasies.  However, faith sharpens the outlines of the world, brings things into focus.  So, if you are an atheist, you need to ask yourself are you sure you see things clearly?  How do the powers distort your vision?  How do you identify them and tackle them?  You might not believe in God, but can you in all honesty say you don't believe in Father Christmas?

Idolatry 5: Classic Idolatry in a Postmodern World

I will be making the case that classic idolatry is alive and well in our postmodern age.  Whilst I appreciate the view there are no longer any grand narratives, I am also suspicious of it.  Is it that there are no longer any grand narratives, or that we choose to overlook them?  It may be true the old grand narratives are no more but it does not follow there are no grand narratives.  Plato reports Socrates as saying 'the unexamined life is not worth living'.  The invitation to examine our lives is an invitation to step into another world, quite different from the one we think we know.

The first thing to do is to clear up some possible misconceptions about classical idolatry.

First, the prohibition of idolatry in ancient Israel, took place in a political context.  It is likely the concept of God developed from arguing that many local gods were each a manifestation of one God.  These local gods had idols and many worshippers transferred their allegiance to the one God, worshiped through their local idol. 

The Israelites were also known as Hebrews, a word which originates as a social rather than ethnic designation.  Often the idols would have been controlled by political elites, the one God was a movement of the nomad, the marginalised, the dispossessed.  Later we see the focus shift to the dominance of a temple elite. 

This complex history is fascinating and we need to take care not to confuse its vagaries with the deeper concern beneath the politics of the time.  What is important is the way our idols form our lives in the present.  We do not need to believe the nations surrounding ancient Israel were evil because they worshiped false gods.  Our task is to identify our own false gods and understand why they are so dangerous.

Second, I am not writing about bonkers sects.  There is no end to the bonkers things people believe in.  In this series of posts I am not concerned with debunking bonkers beliefs.  Plenty of writers have had great fun doing this but it does not concern me here.

Third, a discussion of idolatry carried out by a professed Christian is likely to raise the suspicion that the aim is to question other faiths.  This is not my intention.  The best way to settle this for the present is to say you will see in later posts, I do not see Christianity as exempt from the dangers of idolatry.  One way or another all faiths have to struggle with this issue.

In this series I will explore how idolatry works across the generality of Western society.  Once this is complete, it may be possible to engage with atheism in a constructive debate.  Atheists may be suspicious of what I write and so they should be.  If we take idolatry seriously we should all be radically suspicious.

What I hope to do is to show how idolatry is very much a part of our world.  Indeed, we make idols out of many abstract concepts but I want to show how so many of our idols are material, not far from the graven images in the second commandment  and described in Psalm 115 .

Idolatry 2: The Shema

The opening verses of Deuteronomy 6 state the basic principle underlying Israel's law.  A principle of friendship; the commandments were and are seen as a gift from God.  To follow them means the people will not make the mistakes so often made by nations.  The Old Testament is mostly about the consequences of breaking, ignoring or forgetting these commandments.

The main commandment is known as the Shema (Hebrew for 'to hear', from its first word) and is found in verses 4-6:

Hear,O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.  (NRSV)

In the following verses, the importance of remembering this commandment and passing it on to future generations is stressed.  This parallels the first of the ten commandments, in its emphasis on the one God.  Most people agree it is best to devote your life to what is right.  The problem is how to identify what is right. 

The closer we are to worshiping God, the more likely we are to deceive ourselves into believing our god is the God.  It is this the Shema warns us against; the belief that we have understood God and so are absolutely correct.  It is hard to know God, consequently the need for use of all our heart, soul and strength.  We need to heed this warning when we choose to enforce our beliefs over the beliefs of others.  No-one according to the Shema can be right; if you think you are right, you need to try harder.  Hence the details in later verses of the need for constant reminders that all are prone to forget who God is.

The Shema appears again in Mark 12:28-34, where Jesus is asked by a scribe, which commandment is the greatest.  Jesus quotes the Shema, subtly modified, and the scribe agrees with him.  Jesus responds by telling him 'You are not far from the Kingdom of God'. 

Why is the scribe 'not far' rather than 'there'?  After a lifetime of study, the man is not far.  Will he ever arrive?  He must try harder!  However small the distance he must travel, it is still significant as we shall see later.