Collaboration Between Artist and Audience

[Res Ipsa]

I really don't like the term atheist, and refuse to assume that label. It's partly due to the wide misunderstanding of it's modern use, but the main reason is why should I assume a label that describes something I'm not? I wouldn't assume any other label which told someone else what I'm not, because that list is endless. I'm not an afairyist, or an aflatearthist, or any number of other things I assume to be unlikely until proven otherwise. I'm also not a dentist. Should I call myself "not a dentist?"

The other problem with the word is that it is reactionary. People are taught about this abstract god, and those who question that "lesson" should assume a label describing their skepticism? It makes no sense. The default position is no knowledge of a god, not the other way around.

There are regular people, and then there are those who have assumed this layer of belief they can't validate or prove. They deserve a label for having taken part in building an unprovable story. Those who don't simply don't. We don't need a name for that. Giving non-believers a label validates the dubious position, not the rational one.

I feel the same way. It's odd being assigned a label based on something I'm not.

[Physics Guy]

When did God become God rather than god? I think it's an interesting question.

On the one hand I think that theistic theology is really different from just imagining a sort of superhero. It's not enough to say that humans are to God as characters are to an author. It's not even enough to say that humans are to God as semicolons are to an author. Humans are to God as semicolons are to God. There's a line that has only God on one side, and everything else that can possibly be imagined is all on the other side.

That's theism, and at least in the sheer sense of scale it's different from believing in merely superhuman powers. When did this idea appear?

I'm not sure it can really be so recent. The Gospel of John already has the idea of "the Word" through whom all things came to be. What I can more easily believe is that people only learned to articulate the God-god distinction clearly in more recent times.

The notion of a big god does kind of slide naturally into the notion of God, in kind of the way that one can indicate the concept of infinity by calling it "the biggest number you can think of, plus one." I don't buy Anselm's "onotological proof"—I think Kant nailed its fallacy—but a being who isn't just one notch higher than the next-greatest being, but is rather in a class all by itself, does seem to be greater than a merely first being. So in that way the simplistic idea of a biggest possible god does seem to slide into the notion of the one necessary God.

Looking back, you can see it both ways. "Mine are the cattle on a thousand hills" is an absurdly small claim for the Lord of the starfields, let alone for the author of reality, but for people whose farthest view has been from one hill to the next, it's a plausible placeholder. Exactly when did we move from "biggest" to "only"? It's a tricky question because it could well have been a gradual shift. To see the issue as a stark divide is already to have crossed the divide.

[honorentheos]

To speculate, human group structure and identity typically includes shared beliefs. As humans developed the means to organize in more complex ways those relationships inevitably evolve. The emergence of the nation-state as an invention of human culture and our largest, most complex form of human society, required more complex explanatory foundations. From Rome and deity emperors, Hobbs and Leviathan, Mohammed and the Koran, Western liberal democracies and Providence, authoritarian cults of the leader, etc., the shared concept of God within a culture isn't purely theological. It's part of the cultural fabric that makes up it's coherent structure, and it's evolution is traceable through the emergence of a society's current form from past forms.

And it seems theologically complex monotheism works better than animism, polytheism, shamanism, or ancestor worship in providing some type of necessary function to allow a society to scale to that of the nation-state.

It seems at least in part the label "atheist" is a social indicator to say someone is threatening that particular pillar of perceived social order more than anything else. The god being considered is inferred out of the social context.

I personally think our current social deconstruction and reorganizing in the global digital age is challenging the cohesion of the nation-state which seems to require significant inputs to maintain that level of organizational complexity. The result of a society being unable to maintain organizational complexity is forced simplification.

[Physics Guy]

That's an interesting point, except for me it's dauntingly large. The relationship between religion and politics must be too big a topic even for a fat book, let alone a thread. If anyone does undertake a book within the topic, just figuring out how to carve out a book-length subtopic is going to be a hard job. I reckon there will be frustratingly many stray threads that you'll just have to ignore for lack of space even though they could be important.

If we're focusing specifically on the transition from merely superhuman deities to the ultimate being of Theism, then maybe the appropriate political counterpart would be the idea of universal human rights and justice, as opposed to the legitimacy of any particular state. Kings used to claim rule by divine right; even today the coats of arms of Commonwealth states often include the royal slogan "Dieu et mon droit", "God and my right." The "and" implies that God and the royal right are different things, but it associates them.

If your concept of God is of a tribal deity, then a tribal ruler who represents that god on Earth is kind of automatically doing a good job in representing the god just by wielding power over the tribe and successful competing with other tribes. As states got bigger, I guess it made sense for the gods to get bigger. A God bigger than any one tribe was a better support for the legitimacy of a multi-tribal confederacy.

At the same time that Divine Right theory tried to establish royal prerogative as unassailable, though, I think it also accepted that there was an authority above the king, namely God, who could in principle withdraw the king's right. Rebels might declare that the king had lost the Mandate of Heaven through misrule. A theology that made God more universal and transcendent was a two-edged sword for rulers. It could justify expanding their power, or it could challenge them.

[honorentheos]

That's an interesting point, except for me it's dauntingly large. The relationship between religion and politics must be too big a topic even for a fat book, let alone a thread. If anyone does undertake a book within the topic, just figuring out how to carve out a book-length subtopic is going to be a hard job. I reckon there will be frustratingly many stray threads that you'll just have to ignore for lack of space even though they could be important.

True. It's essentially asking that the entire discipline of anthropology be laid out in such detail anyone could follow it from beginning to end without disagreement. That said, if we accept the level of detail required to get that kind of agreement is unavailable, and instead accept a level of detail required to frame the premise for further discussion, maybe we can do something with it that is appropriate.

To do that, we may want to look at one god rather than all of humanity. And where better than the one with which we're most familiar, the Judeo-Christian god?

Before going that far, it's important to acknowledge the evolutionary nature of cultural constructs. They aren't designed in the way past folks often assumed creation demanded a perfect design from a perfect creator. Instead, culture is the product of pressure, failure, change, and successes that are constantly being exerted. The the word meme originated from this concept, and it's valuable here to see transitions in theology being integral to transitions in the culture in fundamental ways. Rather than as scaffolding or skin, the changes in one were emergent and essential to change in the other. Attempts, probably not directly intentional, to expand the size of a human group from that of directly related kin, to groups of distantly related folks, to groups that lack shared genetics required changes in their economic behavior, changes in how they collected and consumed resources, and how they defined their identity as a group. Something starts to fail due to pressure? Cultural evolution doesn't need to wait for a new generation of better adapted genes to make it through that filter. They just need an idea and buy in from elements of the group good enough to allow members of the group to succeed and other groups to adopt those cultural constructs to make it through the filter and replace any that failed to do so.

If your concept of God is of a tribal deity, then a tribal ruler who represents that god on Earth is kind of automatically doing a good job in representing the god just by wielding power over the tribe and successful competing with other tribes. As states got bigger, I guess it made sense for the gods to get bigger. A God bigger than any one tribe was a better support for the legitimacy of a multi-tribal confederacy.

The cultures, plural, we think of as the people of the Bible have gifted us with the evolution of their beliefs kept as clues in the changes of their combined and curated scripture. We're lucky that the apparent editors of the books that became the Torah weren't willing to offend and replace references to El, the Canaanite deity, with Yahwey the war-god. Instead they packaged both up in retellings of their mythology. And in those retellings we see how the evolution of their beliefs likely moved from truly pantheistic to having a chosen war-god who blessed their conquests, to their struggles of faith during their own subjugations, to their relation to the Persian zoroastrian belief that the Hebrew god was one of many who was fortunately on the right side of the conflict between good and evil. But the new post-exile Israelite national identity had evolved as well from centuries of attempts to maintain an identity that demanded they reframe their own beliefs to be their god being the only true god, and their misfortunes being the result of not having kept faith with their one true god. This necessary identity that allowed them to survive the return to Palestine also drove revolts under Greek and Roman rule, with the result their identity as a people lost a geographic center so they made it a scriptural one that still claimed a right to that lost geography. We lost the northern kingdom to myth because th Assyrians were successful in replacing the culture of their conquered foes so we get the imagined stories of the God of Israel who is the one true God having maintained their integrity in some protected geography just waiting to be discovered or reconnected in God's own time.

At the same time, the jewish cult of Jesus had no issues editing away the evolution of their own god beliefs through the years as they found unbelievable success through becoming the right cultural addition for the Roman imperial transition and replaced the tolerant polytheism of Roman with what became a more demanding monotheism. Trinitarianism? Whew, good save but we can't have successful statecraft built on modalism. The structural evolution of Christianity as sect to religion-of-state affected both the beliefs of said Christians as said beliefs affected the nature of the state. Whether that was in the forms of the Holy Roman Empire or that of the Byzantine, their many offshoots of varied success, and countless forgotten failures, it's not difficult to see that as the identity of the nations that called upon the faith for portions of that identity did so out of a symbiotic need more so than either being able to stand alone. The kings relied on their divine chosen status to maintain power, the church relied on this relationship to assert their own, the people relied on the origins of said power to act as check against abuses so egregious that the kings who failed to honor them were replaced. The structural integrity of the whole only survives through mutual support.

The Magna Carta and the Enlightenment are products of other new pressures that asserted times needed to change as merchants and economics of national interest pulled power away from the throne rooms and into the counting rooms, and as the ability to expand with the discovery of a new world stretched the ability of said structures to maintain power through a common identity and associated rule. Human rights, god-given, began to replace divine rights of chosen monarchs, and with that came a different form of theology. There is no coincidence that the Gutenberg Bible, the Reformation, and the age of exploration overlap as they do.

The American Experiment further made demands of the past idea of who God is and what their relationship is with humanity. It was formed out of peoples seeking to escape the old beliefs and old structures, and then as the movements became the establishment here, new experiments and new beliefs fought to survive in the ever increasing pluralism demanded of a nation that lacked a shared original geography.

There's a reason that the biggest threats to democracy today come from Christian Nationalism and those who feel America is losing its way as a so-called Christian Nation. They believe America, a nation-state, was built on a religious identity with divine favor. Threats to that WASP-y identity in many forms given the label "leftist" or "liberal" aren't difficult to see as being essentially non-white, non-protestant, non-Anglo-European incursions into the assumed belief about who we are as a nation.

[honorentheos]

To add, look around the world at present. Putin in Russia is holding on to power through asserting Russian identity and Russian-Orthodoxy are the last strongholds of righteousness against a corruption being spread by the West. His allies here at home only differ with this claim in that they see the corruption as reversible if the West returns to God as they define it. Iran is a theocracy, India is balanced on the edge of being a Hindu theocracy as well. China has returned to a cult of the leader as representative of the people. European and North American democracies have meaningful internal threats from nationalist movements which draw their strength from religious movements. The left is in many ways attempting to redefine a shared moral identity built on values and asserted foundations that lack a deity but otherwise leave one feeling like they may as well be zealous religionists.

God is a construct of culture in so far as any three people can come to an agreement on what God is. And that construct has its roots in shared identity and power, where power is the ability to influence folks to act in ways they might not have acted in otherwise. And that construct is subject to forces that require it adapts to change, with the ones that emerge having been the most successfully adapted to the circumstances present at the time.

[yellowstone123]

A couple different points:

As to God, whatever a person says to me about their God is not important as watching where their feet are during the year as that will tell me more about their God than anything said; no filling or guessing is necessary. Are they into money or service as that will explain what God they serve.

As to Art and the Audience I could go on and on, but I’ll choose one. Many characters can be a combination of individuals in the authors life, 1/3 this person and 2/3 this person. To me of the greatest characters ever created was the in-your-face-gay student Anthony Blanche who is 1/3 Brian Howard and 2/3 Harold Acton, all friends of the author Evelyn Waugh at Oxford University in the 1920s. And to me one of the greatest books written and definitely always makes the 100 greatest books ever written.

Many people in this forum would love this book and more would love listening to Jeremy Irons narrate the book. Book one is titled ET IN ARCADIA EGO or WHEN IN ARCADIA I AM and is about the agnostic Charles Rider and the very childlike Lord Sebastian Flyte and his very Catholic family at their summer castle that has its own chapel and priest, fountains, lakes and countryside. The discussion the two have about a belief in God and Saints are just classic as Charles believes devotion to God is absurd.

Book two is about Charles and Lady Julia Flyte and their romance. Waugh shows you how difficult it is for children to give up a religion which has been part of their life since day one and is pounded into their emotional and psychological DNA. Sebastian thinks he’s always a failure and unable to live up to certain aspirations his mother believes in; Julia loves Charles but he is a non-believer, and those issues are serious for her.

I think I’ll stop there and not give the ending because of how powerful it is and shows how difficult it is for some to give it all up. Voted one of the 100 best novels ever written, a mini-series was created, and a film but both fell short as it’s just the reader that is needed for this one classic. I would say let Jeremy Irons narrate it first then read it. It will change the way you think about religion.