What reason is missing
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - may 10 ]
Listen – God only exists in people's minds... A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't. And if that's what God's like, I wouldn't worry about it.
Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Reason has got a bad name recently. Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and defender of secular reason, reckons that science alone cannot determine what is good and bad. Fruitful ethics, aesthetics, and morality do not come from profane reason, which deficiency leaves modern secular man without truth and purpose. Shortly after the Pope spoke about faith and reason at Regensburg University in 2006, Habermas sent an op/ed piece to Zurich's Neue Zeitung, stating:
Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.
In the light of exaggerated self-confidence (Enlightenment), we reasoned we could tame the naked ape and teach him to work toward tolerance, equality, freedom, worldliness, progress, and the benefits of humane society. That is to say we have expected, since the Enlightenment, to pick the fruits of reason and live happily ever after. What a joke! We now know from experience that there is no such thing as progress, no natural law, no wisdom of the ancients, no timeless concepts of justice, freedom, property, or civil rights. In nature an egg does not become a chicken and winter does not become spring, temporal delusions all. Evolution is not improvement.
Now Habermas' 2008 conversation with four Jesuits has been published [Wiley], An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age.
They say what's missing from our big-headed, self-worshiping reason is dramatic religion and sincere humility.
However, no matter what the Jesuits say, it remains problematic to say that reason would be enhanced by affixing to itself the tale of God begetting a Son in the body of a Virgin, a Son whose capabilities include giving eyesight to the blind, among the performance of other miracles including the assurance of life after death.
Neither would our worship of science be enhanced by a strict, protracted, secretive, cruel hegemony of elderly men, ostensibly celibate, dressed in bejeweled vestments.
Nor could intellectual harmony be improved by the Church Without Christ, "where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way" [Flannery O'Connor], the sort of shit-leg sects and country-club congregations who go to church to be seen there because it's good for business.
No, what's missing is humility, a little contrition all around, and a coming to terms with demands made on both reason and religion. We must remember that religion is an art form, a type of theatre, of ritual and drama. Public worship has its origins in the spectacle of Ancient Greek plays in which a God is cranked down to the stage in a basket, deus ex machina, condescending to solve human problems. When we can't see the forest for the trees, when we're stuck in the swamps we get ourselves into by means of our wilful greed, we turn to another product of our imagination, religion.
However, it could be the case that Americans, in their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, have perfected the construction of swindles and compromises necessary for success in rewarding the greed of the investment banks and the Federal Reserve, filling the treasuries of the kleptocrats and lobbyists while keeping the peace at home (such as it is) with bread and circuses.
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Tue, April 20, 2010 -- 7:37 AM ET
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Goldman's Revenue and Earnings Top Forecast
The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates. – Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone
Since the beginning, Americans have made a deal with the Devil like Dr Faustus, who sold his soul in exchange for getting what he wanted. The Devil presents them with his bill, such as the Indian Removal Act and the Dawes Act depriving the Native Americans of their land and resources, and yet today everyone tries to beat the Devil at his own game by having the governments borrow even more money to lend to leveraged speculators to inflate the prices of lousy assets again and again. American grifters sell the Brooklyn Bridge over and over to the next guy.
The United States is a jury-rigged country put together without principles according to whatever practice worked at the time (pragmatism), following the outlines of a myth of future triumph suggested in the Declaration of Independence, that sublime scripture, which Americans think is part of the Old Testament.
Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Galatians 5:1
Religion in America looks robust and healthy compared to Europe, where governments simply ignore it rather than paradoxically outlawing it in their bill of rights. When the tired, poor, huddled masses first swarmed over virginal America, they were a new people free from the subjugation of the past, like the ancient Hebrews whose Bible was their guide. They believed that the grace of God was theirs for the asking, and success finally awaited them in their endeavors. They took what they wanted from the old Christian sects and re-formed them, producing Evangelicals and Adventists, Christian Scientists, Pentecostals, African-American churches, United Methodists, Mormons (Latter-Day Saints), Jehovah's Witnesses, Disciples and Churches of God and Christ, and Southern Baptists (with more than 200 denominations), to name the largest groups. What do they all have in common?
Jesus wants you for a sunbeam.
Harold Bloom, the sage of Yale, claims that the common religion of Americans is Gnosticism, that is, Americans share elements of faith with the major Protestant Christians and everybody else too, Jews, Orthodox and Roman Catholics, Buddhists, and Moslems, because the American ethos is so strong it is in the air they breathe. They could not grow up Americans without being Gnostics too.
In The American Religion, Bloom describes the varieties of original Protestantism and later varieties of religious faith that originated in the United States, holding that most of the newer sects share more in common with gnosticism than with the older national Christian churches (Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, etc.) as far as the American denominations are not just systems of faith but declarations of special knowledge embedded in the minds of their followers. Bloom stresses the importance of religious experience as central to a widespread American search for the presence of divinity within each individual, as opposed to the secularized, intellectualized, syncretic universalism of the older national churches, which may well be echoed in their ongoing demise.
The effects of the inner light that guides those who claim such religious knowledge and insight, which is the special, spiritual, personal knowing called gnosis, in spite of a generally private rejection of many other religious and absurdist claims, are such that the knower has the love and care of a personal savior, a guardian angel in the form of self-confidence that never fails to provide support and satisfaction.
We must observe that some people have a way of coming out on top, no matter how formidable the obstacles. They know that through thick and thin they will get to where they want to go. They have assurance and strength, self-images of cool aplomb, of much-admired chutzpah, along with the expected greed, hypocrisy, sanctimony, and sickening smugness. Like Gordon Gekko, Americans know that greed is good, and so they openly celebrate their financial heroes real and imaginary like Scrooge McDuck, Bernie Madoff, Montgomery Burns, Carl Icahn, Ivan Boesky, Mr Potter, Michael Corleone, Captain Bligh, Bonny & Clyde, Auric Goldfinger, Michael Milken, Cruella De Vil, Charles Foster Kane, J R Ewing, Lex Luthor, Daddy Warbucks, and so on.
We are disappointed every day to learn that prophecy is always false, that the world never seems to come to an end, and apocalyptic spirituality, belief that the End Is Near, has nowhere to go but to the inner gnostic self. The end is always near for each of us. "Failed prophecy becomes apocalyptic and failed apocalyptic becomes Gnosticism," which is the Biblical demiurgical tradition, according to Bloom.
MAX: Oh ye of little faith.
What did Lewis say to Clark
When everything looked bleak?
What did Sir Edmund say to Tenzing
As they struggled toward Everest's peak?
What did Washington say to his troops
As they crossed the Delaware
I'm sure you're well aware...
LEO: What'd they say?
MAX: We can do it, we can do it
We can do it, me and you
We can do it, we can do it
We can make our dreams come true...
– from The Producers, Broadway Musical
Christian gnosticism is “praying through" to personal salvation, reaching into the imagination to release the inner spark, to leave behind the fallen material world, to recover knowledge of the divine Fullness, the pleroma, pleroma. It is knowledge of the Supreme Being's love, the love for each of us given by the true God who is above and beyond the demiurge who mediates between us and Him.
The inferior creator deity, the demiurge who creates Satan and his accomplices, is responsible only for physical matter, the material universe of earth, water, air, and flesh, not for the Cosmos of many dimensions and ages past and future, but the slice of time here and now in which we suffer and bodily die. Consequently,
God is hidden from us, Deus Absconditus, or He died finally in the 19th Century as far as many today are concerned, the victim of popular science.
Our political and religious authorities and regulators are often wrong, selfish oafs that they are, and our technologies are ruining the planet through spoliation and waste. Most people go to bed hungry. Dirty bombs are on their way to a city near you. It's the same old human condition.
What can we do? We can join a militia and die in uniform, or hide in the mountains and die from radiation poisoning.
It is Satan, the Tempter, the demiurge angel, “the most beautiful angel," and his minions, those appealing shape-shifters who may promise heaven while whispering malice and appear as what we have to have or do, the Devil and his helpers, or Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, the demon, fiend, ogre, imp, or hellion, the Dickens, Lord of the Flies, Old Harry, Apollyon, the Serpent, Old Scratch, el Diablo, the Father of Lies, the Beast, or Antichrist…
Kyrie eleison!
Gospodi pomilui!
Domine, miserere!
