The Godlessness of my Worldview.

This will be quick and not at all scientific. I'm about to get whiny.

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not afraid of the nonexistence of a god, gods, god-like creatures, or their earthly manifestations. I think it's too late in the human game for that, and anyway, it's vulgar to believe in the validity of one over the others in the ever expanding pantheon of deities.

So, bracketing that initial assumption ([there is clearly no god]), all that is left to attend to is the rhetorical existence of a god, gods, god-like... etc. Due to my particular context, let us also assume that all future references to God (who I will call god, or "a god") refers specifically to the one of the Abrahamic faiths (as much as practitioners of each are willing to disparage the others, the continuity between their traditions is indisputable, and from my secular, heathenish standpoint, in the most literal sense of the word, remarkable). This is precisely where the trouble begins for our wanton, stupid, excitable species. Remember, after all, that as god recedes from the realm of the "magical" (Zeus is a god of lightning, gods bring us crops, gods make mountains explode, they oversee our celebrations -- Bacchanalia anyone?), he must operate in even more shadowy, even less quantifiable realms: now, god makes us who we are, we are his hetero or queer creations, or, he spookily knows the entire future of the world, all of our individual identities, but will not intervene on behalf of a single sinner who, after all, he created in his own (debatable) image, because his test of our free will is more important than a decent, livable existence on earth. At this point in this little rant, I'll mention the catalyst for it as a means of moving forward: I got in an argument. (Not uncommon for me...). The argument was, at first, about gun laws, and then the nature of the United States' relationship to Israel, and eventually, about god. The points I want to explore are twofold: 1) This is a backwards way to go, isn't it? We sort of swim upstream if we start from various political positions and trace them back to their (allegedly) religious undergirding. And 2) I think one of the dominant issues of our day will be our navigation of exactly this nexus between religious and political beliefs.

Let's begin.

1)The Chicken,The  Egg, The Christ and an AK-47.

At the point in the conversation in which my interlocutor invoked her belief in god, I stepped away. To me, it is useless to attempt to carry on a conversation about real, material circumstances in the world when the other individual assumes that all of what we experience was manufactured, first, in the head of one invisible, non-present, (specific to this case) biblically represented being. Let us not be derailed by a conversation of world, universe, or all-of-existence origins: I don't give a shit where it came from. Much in the same way it would be absurd to argue who the architect of the burning building you're standing in might have been, it seems irrelevant to conversations about the nature of gun laws in the 21st century United States whether the universe blinked into being for the fuck of it, or was snot-rocketed into existence by the big man upstairs.

The important thing to think about is the rhetorical nature of her invocation. At a point in which all of our cards were down on the table, where we could either agree or disagree based on any single policy point whatsoever, she bracketed and set aside our entire conversation and said, (paraphrasing) "Whatever the policy problem, at base, God is the solution." So, in some sense, god not only created the impossible-to-comprehend physics of the universe, but he's really concerned that Obama might regulate gun ownership before his four years in office is over! This is a powerful (thought content-less) argument. I can't possibly disagree with you about what your faith tells you god wants for our country (because he gives a shit about invisible lines on the map): this would be reckless, insensitive, condescending, and a whole lot of other pretty negative things. Fine. What I can do is put god back into the historical context from which he arose, and point out that your invocation, and the invocation of others are completely at odds with each other. We're certainly used to hearing the religious themselves talk about this very point: Islam is a religion of peace, Islamic terrorists have perverted the message (I do believe that's the case), Christianity is a religion of high moral standards, child-raping priests and their subsequent coverups don't really represent the mainstream of religious thought (again, I concede the point, and in this case, it's the nature of the coverup not the crime itself that is...  fuck this will be misread... so reprehensible. By that I only mean statistically, child sexual abuse doesn't happen at greater rates inside the church than it does outside the church, what varies in the case of the church is the scale and duration of protection granted to known pedophiles). So, if in those cases, the nature of the religion doesn't determine the nature of the acts done in it's name, why should we assume anything different for the case of rhetorical deployments of religion for political ends in the United States? The easiest counterpoint to today's rabidly free-market conservative evangelicals is the existence of the liberation theologists of South and Central America. In that it would be impossible to argue that either one or the other represents a truer representation of the will of god, the equation deployed by the religious conservatives here is flipped on its head: it is not that Individual A <believes in god> and therefore <holds these specific political values>, but that Individual A <holds these specific political values> and this determines the means by which they <believe in god>. My own sense is that there is much more scriptural evidence to support the notion that god (and his kid, born of a virgin on exactly December the 25th, at which time a Christmas tree was erected in a stable and Joseph received a gift card to Macy's from three wise uncles he never sees but, whatever, at least he can get that kitchenaid now, amen) is a dirty redistributionist ( I don't remember how much Jesus charged for the loaves and fishes, or how much he put in stock with the moneylenders in the temple, do you?) rather than an American individualist. That's neither here nor there. Here comes a random paragraph break!

2) Now, let us use the two assumptions from above -- 1) god? Not so real, 2) In the main, ones politics determines their reading of god, god does not determine ones stance on politics -- to end with a brief discussion of what these things mean for us, as political beings, members of a species called homo sapiens, citizens of individual countries, and eventually, the entire world. Let's examine the list of things god cares about in the United States, right now:

 -- Gay marriage (Against!)
 -- Lower taxes (for "wealth producers," like, you know, Paris Hilton)
 -- Gun Rights (For!)
 -- Bible in School (For!)
 -- Evolution in School (Against!)
 -- Lady Gaga (Against... but secretly For)
 -- Israel (For it whatever the fuck that means!)
 -- Global Warming (Not happening!)
 -- Globe-as-financial-resource (Happening!)
 -- Abortion (Against!)
 -- Muslims at Ground Zero (Against!)
 -- Muslims preserving their social practices (Against!)
 -- Muslims using airplanes (Against!)
 -- Muslims (Come on!)


How has it never struck any of our churchgoing friends that god happens to line up exactly behind Rick Santorum's presidential platform?

In disregarding the various objections to the possibility of god's existence put up by Richard Dawkins and Christoper Hitchens, the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton rightly, though, I think, too condescendingly, notes that the problem with their objections is that they take religion at it's word (when Christianity says there is god, and he created the world in 7 days a few thousand years ago, this is exactly what Christianity means to say) rather than recognizing religion as the most perfect deployment of that weighted Marxist term: ideology. As an ideological system, that is, as a system of beliefs that effects your actions in every day life, there probably isn't a more perfect historical example than religion in all of it's forms. How else to explain people kneeling on a rug five times a day, people avoiding certain animal products in combination, people not trimming beards (I thank god for this specific practice. Beards or bust), or playing with snakes and all the rest? Think of how less complete all other similar systems are: even the most ardent capitalist might eventually take their social security benefit, even the most prominent Republican might accept a loan to their state, even the most liberal democrat might eventually vote to keep Guantanamo open, etc. In all of those cases, the ideological standards of the system aren't nearly completely encompassing in the way the standards of any of the Abrahamic religions are.

The problem this poses for us is a complex one: How can we ask the right questions of religious people, if "God is the answer" to questions we've not yet even formulated? How convenient for God that he gets to occupy the space at the outer most limits of our imaginations so that his powers, paradoxically, increase even as they decrease. Wherever I don't understand something, in steps the omnipotent. Politically, the issue is more straightforward: if we leave our politics to god, we're fucked. For whatever reason, he's figured out how to paint us beautiful sunsets each evening, but he hasn't gotten around to a reasonable distribution of food, so that, as we enjoy the sunset tonight (which I undoubtedly will, California has it's  benefits) another day will have closed during which 26,000 children have died because they literally couldn't gather the calories together necessary to sustain a human life. If you're wondering where those extra calories are, look at your Big Mac, Big Gulp, Double Downs and five pounds of grilled cheese. The issue is, in this sense, very material, very basic: god is behind very many causes, ideas, and political stances, but, except through human actors, he hardly ever gets anything done. So what humanity needs (not America, not the US, not the West... I'm an unrepentant universalist -- yes you can have your individual identity, but it is our collective future that is the realm of politics, proper) is to put god's political platform aside, and formulate a different, inclusive, secular, creative one.

The goal then, is to create a rhetoric that excludes god from the sphere of politics.

I promised brevity and instead gave you this rambling (riddled with intellectual errors, I'm sure, riddled with grammatical and punctual errors, I'm sure) bit of psuedo-intellectual nonsense: Whine about it.

That's what I do.