Searching for God # 15

 Just as there is both an overlap and a kind of Swiss-cheese boundary between psychology and religion, so too is there a similar kind of porous boundary between ideology and religion.

Indeed, depending on where one ‘begins’ one’s approach to any subject, one is well advised to reflect on the nature of relationships between perspectives….as there is no boundary constricting God, it is inconceivable to completely separate one’s faith from one’s ‘world view’.

A quote from Irving Stone’s book, Love is Eternal, attributed to Abraham Linvcoln has some relevance here:

I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.

Some have described Lincoln as a deist, one who believes God or a Supreme Being  created the universe but does not intervene in its affairs after creation, which operates under natural law.

With an appreciation for reason and observation of the natural world as the only valid ways to understand God, a rejection of revelation, and miracles, as well as God’s ‘speaking through scriptures, prophets or other texts, and an emphasis on ethical conduct as an understanding of God’s design for rational design for the world, the deist has God bound within reason, morality, creation time and event and unrelated to mystery.

I wonder how many deists are parading through the streets of Washington, where the attempt to ‘establish the Kingdom of God on earth’ is a prominent and motivating testament to their ‘belief’? It seems that deism is a beginning of a journey in search of God, and one that offers little by way of enhanced perceptions and expectations. I also wonder how many ‘deists’ actually occupy pews in various church communities?

If deists have proscribed and pre-conceived boundaries around the nature of God, the concept of putting boundaries around many other notions is rampant in our culture. For example, the current Secretary of Health and Human Servies, Robert Kennedy Jr. at this moment in under attack for his disparagement of the science of the MNRa vaccine model, the very model at the core of the Warp-Speed vaccine product of the former Trump administration in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid this firestorm of political and health care and human ethics debate, two separate issues are being conflated: the inordinate influence of the pharamaceutical industry on the CDC and on government generally, and the scientific merit or lack of scientific merit to a particular vaccine model. The conflation of these two issues renders both ‘lost’ in the fog what amounts to a political, partisan, war of words with much more sound and fury than actual reasonable and substantive debate about the merits of each issue. In that context, all parties are effectively disempowering all other parties. In fact, to engage in such a debate of conflated issues (where even the conflation is not recognized, acknowledged and separated into different s or debating time schedules) is to acknowledge that, ‘unless I show up and take part in this hearing, I will not have my perspective represented, even though I recognize that two different issues are being harangued over.

The news media, of course, merely echoes and then ‘comments’ on the sound and the fury, asking ‘experts’ about the truth and validity of arguments that have captured their attention. In that wider context the media is merely transmitting the conflation under the guise of providing ‘public opinion’ about what is going on in Washington. Perhaps the occasional pundit, after sorting the facts from the fictional rhetoric, might actually refer to the conflation issue, separate them out and provide a clearer and more cogent case on both issues. (A sardonic aside: Would we have go have two ‘experts’ to untangle this conflation, one from government and political funding and the other from vaccine and biochemistry science?)

Doctors, however, for their part, have been so seduced by the largesse of the exaggerated lobbying efforts by which the pharmaceutical industry ‘pays’ doctors with both cash and luxurious vacations to promote their most recent chemical concoction, for which adequate clinical trials have been ignored by the regulations established by the Congress, thereby offer another conflation, the responsibility of the medical profession and the public responsibility of the Congress, whose members are also financially supported by that same pharmaceutical industry. Money, sloshing around in so many different industry and political bank accounts, all of it directly or indirectly feeding the political process under which the health care of the country depends; and let’s not forget or ignore the insurance companies that have their hands in the cash drawer, permitting and/or forbidding treatments that have or have not secured regulatory CDC sanction and approval. And of course, to bell one cat is to outrage several others, given that so many hands from so many different constituencies are ‘feeding at that trough’.

A similar template applies to other issues, considered, detailed, debated and rarely resolved in the public interest. First, the academic model of separating philosophy from religion, for example, or psychology from religion, or either philosophy or psychology separate from politics, while appropriate for the doctoral candidates and the researchers in their labs, offer cover for the politicians, the industrial capitalists, and any attempt to litigate crimes against humanity, and any philanthropic foundational initiatives to seek surcease from the wars, famine, environmental devastation and poverty and the tidal wave of refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers.

I first noticed an overt attempt to ‘divide’ issues, in order to ‘save money’ when the provincial Ontario government of Mike Harris moved road maintenance from the provincial budget and offloaded it to the municipalities. In that way, the provincial government no longer had to be taken to account for that spending line in their budget. It may have been a creative political move; it has resulted in some of the worst asphalt deterioration on streets in municipalities in decades. And the province swims away on that issue blithely, while the towns and villages endure potholes and tire blow-outs, shock absorber failures and resentment.

Just to illustrate another example of how silently, and imperceptibly the words of scripture seep into our consciousness, without necessarily being even debated, or fully comprehended, especially in light of contemporary culture which has obviously changed since those words appeared in Mark:12:17:

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.

Obviously, the issue of the separation of church and state, the contemporary rendering of that biblical injunction, has devoured the academic and political lives of many men and women, without a final resolution. And, indeed, can there ever be such a final and firm resolution? In the public square, conflation of issues is one thing; in the human mind, quite a very different thing.

Creation versus evolution, is another of the plaguing conflicts, that is not resolved by a dogmatic declaration from either side. Nature/nurture is another of the overlapping and tension-ridder ‘either-or’s that defy separation.

Another, public interest versus private ideology is a conflation to which we are all ‘velcroed’ and, the like the head and tail of the dog, refuse to be disentangled with destroying the dog.

Why all these words and examples of dichotomies, that demand academic, cognitive and intellectual separation, while in reality cannot and will not submit to such divorces?

One obvious answer to that question is that in a society obsessed with and compelled to value literal, empirical, perceptions and apprehensions of reality, the template of the separated either-or has become welded to the perception and apprehension of both ethics and morality, among other issues associated with our personal and cultural faith and religion. Similarly, the religious among us defer to any formal linkage to psychology, unless it comes from demographic sociological or social psychological research. And religions, generally, consider their ‘identity and application’ to human lives to be paramount, over all other human considerations including cognitive, emotional, philosophic, political. The merging of morality and ethics with religion, (which colonized the other?) has rendered both somewhat handicapped. And religion and ethics are intimately related, they are different. Nevertheless, there is an apparent reductionism in our appreciation and apprehension of both.

There is another tension that confounds most of us, and that tension focuses on the issue, in any given situation of ‘what to do’? Do I speak up, take action, offer help, make a suggestion, ask a question, or do I rather hold back, show deference by keeping my nose out of his/her business….and the list of optional framings is endless. The  implication and inference of an activist God, one who engages with humans instantly and well as reflectively over a longer period, is a model for many.

On the other hand, the Jewish concept, known as ‘tsimtsum,’ a Kablalist notion referring to the perception of God’s voluntary act of withdrawal to create empty space for the finite universe, has definite and clear application upon reflection for many situations. One application comes from a doctor colleague who noted that, at one time, the medical profession was telling the fine details of cancer diagnoses, until the evidence showed them that such an approach was leading to rapid and serious decline in their patients’ condition and health. And then the approach changed to a more modest encounter, depending on the perception of the strength and readiness of the patient to deal with the darkest truth.

The Christian faith has other ‘epithets’ floating among, and dancing within the community: out of the Old Testament tradition, the prophetic voice, that tells truth to power, the visionary voice that expands on the imagined utopia of an afterlife, as exampled in Revelations, or the historian’s voice that details ancestry, or the healing voice that attends to the illness, as Luke depicts it, or the pragmatic voice as Mark details it, or the teacher/shaman voice of writers such as Paul. Also in and through the scholarly work of James F. Hopewell, entitled, Congregation, Stories and Structures in which the Emory university scholar details various perceptions of God. Borrowing extensively from Northrup Frye, whose work on the human imagination as a literary scholar, attempts to break down world views from the perspective of literary models: Ironic, epitomizing an empiric world view and perception/conception of God; comic expressing a gnostic world view and sceptic perception/conception of God; tragic holding a canonic view, and charismatic with a romantic world view and perception/conception of God.

Ironic: empirical view

Comic: doubtful, questioning world view.

Tragic: legal, regal world view

Charismatic: romantic world view

It may well be that many people are unaware of their preferred or more ‘go-to’ lens on the world, and the implications of that view as to how they might ‘envision/see/imagine God. And, certainly none of us is chained to a single perception/conception/apprehension and its concomitant ‘projection/image of God.

Given me background and preferential slant to my own mélange of the influence of each world view, as expressed in literary models, I could rank my preferences or inclinations this way:

1: comic 2: tragic 3: charismatic 4: ironic

In short, I question everything, especially about the multiple intersecting mysteries that pertain to and encompass any ‘search for God’.

Frankly, I ‘see’ God’s hand in places where I stand incredulous, amazed that, when I least expect it, some form of a helping hand appears….perhaps in the mode of  those words from Footprints in the Sand:

Footprints in the Sand

One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with
the Lord. Scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In
each, I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were
two sets of footprints; other times there was only one.

During the low periods of my life I could see only one set of
footprints, so I said, "You promised me, Lord, that you would
walk with me always. Why, when I have needed you most,
have you not been there for me?"

The Lord replied, "The times when you have seen only one set
of footprints, my child, is when I carried you."

And in those moments, all of the intellectual and philosophic and liturgical and historical and traditional concepts, teachings and ruminations fell away into gratitude and awe. I did nothing to merit, warrant or deserve those moments, and I could do nothing to either avoid or deny those moments. And they have sustained me throughout.