Addictio wrote:Don:
So, I'm not suggesting that collective humanity, across time and including its cumulative effects through culture, is a stand-in for the supernatural God, but, rather, that the notion of a supernatural God has served as a stand-in for this collective humanity. What has been termed "God" has always been colletive humanity, however badly supernaturalized and otherwise misunderstood. The cultural and personal function of the concept of God, quite often, served to focus energies on larger life of the community, and therefore of humanity. From a functional perspective, I think collective humanity is simply what "God" is and always has been.
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The problem as I see it, though, is that for most people the concept of an evolving, progressing "collective humanity" by itself doesn't provide sufficient basis for agreement on -- maybe not even for serving as the focus of useful discussions about -- moral, social or political issues. I'd say the same is probably true about the idea and ideal of "community," at least at a relatively focused, practical level.
There are probably social groups that have this kind of concept at their core, and it motivates and helps them cohere. I'm thinking of groups like Unitarian-Universalists, maybe Quakers. I think certain socially progressive and activist sub-groups within (or maybe on the fringes of) the Catholic faith probably have essentially humanistic ideas and ideals like this at the center of what motivates and focuses them.
Outside of these kind of liberal, humanist off-shoots of Judaism and Christianity, I'm not sure what kinds of humanistic organizations or social groups have this type of idea or principle as one of their core values and motivators.
Hey Addictio,
It's good to see you, and thanks for weighing in on this topic.
I agree that the concept of an evolving pan-human God does not, in itself, provide a basis for close-knit community and for agreement on a variety of important issues. One thing it
would tend to do is to promote global community, in which persons of all religion could participate. It's ironic that while the various religions all promote a common core experience of religiosity or spirituality, their adherents tend to reject of the religiosity of others, seeing it as very different and as illegitimate. If there were various communities, or religious cultures, but with a shared, naturalistic understanding of God, this problem, and that of inter-religious warfare, would not exist. One's own spiritual tradition would be seen as providing a means of access to this larger something, and thereby to spirituality, but would not be seen as
the way to it. Of course, we are very, very far from such a shared understanding, though we have arguably edged closer over time.
Back to the problem of the basis for guidance, agreement, and community, my thoughts are that these are often best provided by the particular culture and subculture in which people live. Cultural traditions don't exist because people are just
block-heads. Traditions have often been handed down because they have
worked for people.
Let's take an example, or set of examples, rather distant from our own culture. Attempts to promote economic development among peoples of traditional cultures have often failed, and even turned disastrous, because the new approaches ignored the wisdom encoded in tradition. Traditions among hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, etc. have often served to maintain environmental balance in the local area. Their taboos have not always been silly and unnecessary restrictions--though these surely exist among them. Some are wise, time-tested prescriptions that are ignored at great cost.
Why should tradition have functional value only among 'primitive' groups? Why should we believe that the myriad traditions of, say, Western culture, and of a variety of national cultures and religious communities are largely throwbacks and throwaways, with nothing worth saving? How do we know they exist because people of the past were ignorant, and not because they were prudent? While there are very clear examples of traditions that should be abolished (e.g., female [and probaby male] circumcision), most traditions are not at all of this nature. They are most often neutral at worst, and frequently represent constructive ways of managing the varied challenges of human life.
And if cultural systems tend to reflect ways that life has "worked" for their adherents, then communities would rightly be built in accordance with their respective cultural traditions, including religious traditions, as well as in the light of ever-advancing human knowledge, from the sciences and other domains of knowledge. Where tradition is deficient it can, perhaps most often gradually and in accordance with the integrity or internal logic of its enfolding cultural system, be evolved in a more enlightened and humane direction. Such an approach would be both conservative and progressive, combining the best features of both. It would be relatively certain of conserving that in a tradition which is of value, while growing the tradition into something that better serves the interests of human beings--the very aim underlying much, if not most, of the tradition as it has been handed down.
And individuals would perhaps also do well to most often conserve the tradition that has shaped and defined them. A person locating the God function in humanity could (but of course would not need to) continue to participate in the intellectual, communal, and ritual life of his or her origin, and continue to experience God (now as a natural entity) where he or she experienced "Him." Alternatively, one might "convert" to the tradition that idiosyncratically makes the most sense or "works" best.
We could, at least conceivably, have a pluralistic world in which there is a great deal of cultural variation between nations, regions, ethnicities, and religious communities, but a shared acceptance of natural, pan-human God (or something like it, with different understandings of the construct among Buddhists, Taoists, etc.). This may sound utopian or unlikely, and perhaps it is. But it's valuable to have a vision of the possible; and, as CaliforniaKid has pointed out, Christianity and Judaism have moved, not explicitly, but implicitly, in this direction. Christians and Jews already largely accept a kind of humanistic, utilitarian ethic over and against the theocratic ethic of their scriptures. The divine voice to which they hearken is less the thundering of the supernatural Yahweh than the reasoning of the collective, morally progressing human conscience.
Nonbelievers in the supernatural would better help facilitate this evolution, both in themselves and their supernaturalist fellows, by accepting the value of spirituality and the functional role played by religion and the concept of a supernatural God, and by sharing--in a non-supernaturalist fashion--in the spiritual life that is our common heritage. If the concept of a supernatural God has functioned in supernaturalist cultural systems as a stand-in or substitute for the human collective--as it has, then the mythical supernatural God can be 'substituted out,' or excused from service in favor of the natural, human reality for which it has stood.
Anyway, them's some comments re these ideas at a very pragmatic, practical level.
I tend to engage with ideas like this only at a relatively abstract/philosophical level. But your post about the resurgent health of religious fundamentalism prompted me to try to do something else. I think folks tend to be attracted to and focused on the promise/hope of living forever in some privileged, exalted state. For understandable reasons. (Maybe you can't take it with you, but you'll get it all back, somehow, and much more. Joseph Smith remarked that heaven just wouldn't be heaven without his favorite horse. I don't know how his horse will feel about being ridden forever. Maybe the hay in heaven is truly exquisite?) Given alternatives like that, the idea that this here too-brief mortal life is all we will ever have is kind of a non-starter.
Yes, the idea of having one's consciounsess extinguished is sure to be a non-starter for the great majority of sane human beings. If suddenly enfranchised by the Universe, we would nearly all vote to live forever as individual conscious organisms. I would! But, clearly, many people who would prefer such an eternal existence have come to believe that is impossible or highly unlikely. Self-honesty and critical thinking can Trump the wish to believe. And the more these former virtues are promoted, the more people will separate what they would like from what appears to be the case, accepting that a wish is neither a fact nor an evidence, and never will be.
If "God" is the element of a cultural ideology that functions as or stands in for the larger human whole--one's forbears, contemporaries, descendants; the givers of one's blessings, and the recipients of one's contributions, then skeptical persons need never live without God, and the spirituality which God provides, because God is not a hypothesis to be "believed" in, but a reality to be acknowledged and perceived.
Don