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Last Updated: 8-26-2000
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved by Charles Notess, Loveland, Colorado.
Please contact Charles Notess to comment on, or for permission to use any parts of this paper. His e-mail address is: (cnotess@greeleynet.com). Feedback will be appreciated.
Several considerations act simultaneously to change how humans relate to their images of God over time. In the past few decades, much thought has been given to the idea: "Social Construction of Reality". How each of us interpret what our political and economic realities are, is strongly influenced by the mass media, business and government. When it comes to larger realities dealing with the cosmos, its ever-evolving creation, and God; the dominant religion in our life has influences our view of that reality. Since the growth of the modern era with its increasing emphasis on technology, science and consumerism, religions in the Western nations have lost influence over our dominant constructions of reality.
The number of differing realities that we are exposed to has increased to dangerous levels. Karen Armstrong, I feel, has almost drowned in the sea of changing realities. And she is not alone.
It is difficult to write about the many realities and the many considerations that cause changes in the ways these realities are interpreted. That is why, I believe, Karen Armstrong's book is so difficult for our class to digest. She has not given us a map or outline that helps us interrelate the many considerations.
The first consideration (not in order of importance)is changes in the quality of life of the community or larger tribal network. For example, when food or shelter become scarce, competition with neighboring tribes increases and warfare might result. Plagues, draught and other problems might appear and test the functionality of the community's faith. The politico-religious leaders have to assign blame for such problems and try to change their governing policies to improve the quality of life. In many cases they change the description of reality to provide acceptable explanations for the causes of the problems. Many times the inherent selfishness of those in power, leads them to blame others rather than their own mistakes or selfishness. In today's secular world, Republicans blame the Democrats and vice-versa. It is difficult to blame gods, the devil or sinful actions of the populace. In the days of the Hebrew Prophets, the Prophet could assign blame to such unlawful acts by the populace as worshiping idols, adultery and sexual licence, or other violations of the religious commandments.
A second consideration is the action of nearby societies, such as the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Israel. A third reason is over-population caused by cultural traditions; holdovers from times when the high death rates due to war disease and famines led to religious support for high birth rates.
Changes in the image of God are usually accompanied by changes in humankind's approach to God. Armstrong points out that when times are difficult for the people, they often place an increased emphasis on a more spiritual relationship. When a society values individualism, in contrast to an identity that focuses on ones community or tribe, a personal relation to God tends to gain favor. People view God as being all around them or within them. They can feel that they are in communication with God and experience the joy of "knowing" that He is approachable. On the otherhand when the community has a prophetic leader or leadership group, who are effective in their leadership role, persons who prefer authoritarian leaders tend to reorient their images of God toward what Marcus Borg called the Monarchial image.
A fourth consideration is the ever progressing roles of reason, logical thinking, and empirical science. This is an import consideration, because as increasing proportions of the population become involved and dependent upon an expanding technology and science, it tends to take over a major part of how they think. For example, those whose approach to thinking is almost completely dominated by their daily work, are identified today as "nerds". Their social skills are quite undeveloped; salesmen tend to apply their approach to getting-a-sale to other areas of life; politicans tend to rely on bribery and so on.
Our daily work also affects our language. In the modern (scientific and technological) era, we often use words such as mechanism, resonate, go into orbit, atomize. These trends lead to weaknesses in our language. Our vocabulary becomes inadequate and makes it difficult to convey to a reader ideas about human and social considerations. The complex of factors that influence our images of God are most difficult to communicate to another person because simple sentences with subjects and predicates limit our abilities for communicating. The way we all distort information according to our past experiences, and our biases also hampers communication.
A fifth consideration is also important, as the variety of occupations and professions increase with advancing science and technology and as our life spans increase to more than triple those in early biblical times. Adults do not all view the variety of considerations mentioned above, from the same stage of psychosocial and faith develpoment. As we grow older some of us reach the sixth or higher stage of development as defined by Piaget, Erickson, Kohlberg and Fowler. Some of us become arrested in adolescent stages. This consideration causes more variability in how people relate to their gods.
How do we communicate our images of God to other persons? How do we relate to God and communicate with God? These are important questions that we face from early childhood on. As we get older we have to seek new answers as our images of God change.
I believe that the answers to such questions are based on the following ideas. How we humans relate to other persons is strongly influenced by the early bonding to our care givers; in most cases, to our parents. Human beings are very dependent at birth. Their parents or another care giver has to nurture and care for them. As a result of this caring relationship, their brains develop in a way that includes a need for bonding to a caring other that remains, in most of us, throughout our lives. In other words, some say that our brain becomes "hard wired" in a way that creates a desire for trustworthy relationships with caring others. This proclivity remains with us, individualism not withstanding.
As the child becomes more independent of parental care and develops a concept of her/his SELF; new relationships with others, such as a favorite teacher or a relative tend to appear. Unfortunately, some children encounter inconsistent nurture and punishment and end up with deficiencies in this very important attachment to a care giver or bonding. This can lead to attachment disorders which can include distinctly antisocial personality traits.
The way that religion influences our daily living is through stories. The early mythological stories, and later, bible stories showed us how the gods acted. By implication, the stories showed us the values that guided the actions of the gods and in turn, how we should act in harmony with creation and the gods. What is so problematical is that, nowadays, the contexts of the stories are no longer familiar to us. Thus we have to spend time trying to emmerse ourselves in those ancient times and in the culture (traditions, laws, obligations and expectations) of those times.
Karen Armstrong seems to have organized the first five chapters of her book mainly on the passage of time. She started her book with the Hebrew stories starting with Abraham in 1948 BCE. There was the contention between the monotheists and those who followed stories of many gods. The monotheists seemed to have gained the upper hand and with their tribal level of commitment they conquered those who were not monotheists, in Caanan. In trying to cover the three main monotheistic religions, the author has to jump back and forth in time and she has to include the various swings among authoritarian dogma and spiritually ecstatic modes of faith which did not occur at the same time in each of the three religions.
In chapters 6-8, Armstrong discussed the impacts of Greek philosophy in the 350's BCE in Chapter 6. The impacts of mystical responses that tried to overcome the inhuman logic of the Greeks and the pragmatic domination of the Romans. The Roman domination led to destruction of the Temple in 20 BCE and set the stage for the coming of a Messiah. The Roman Church became too authoritarian and dogmatic and its expanding bureauctatic (top-down organization) became too corrupt. This led to the Protestant Reformation in chapter 8.
In chapter 9 she had to discuss the influence of science and technology and its effect of decreasing the power of religion. In chapter 10 she continues on in time and discussed the death of the old monarchial God and the rise of secular humanism which culminated in the socialist and communist attempts to replace religion's influence over the construction of reality.
The fundamentalist retreat back to a literal interpretation of the bible is another reaction which she touched on in the last chapter. She devotes a new book entirly to the fundamentalist response in great detail. It is called "Battle for God" and was published in March 2000.
Certain events that invoke fear and anxiety in the minds of the people, throughout history, lead to a search for an improved relationship between humans and their God rather than a reliance on a remote monarchial god in heaven, one whose image and the way to approach him are controlled by an authoritarian priesthood. This leads to a mystical approach to God which Armstrong mentions in several chapters, but which is discussed in more depth in Chapter 7.
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved by Charles Notess, Loveland, Colorado.
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