24 November 2005

Reading God against gods by Jonathan Kirsch, I can't help thinking of another difference between polytheism and monotheism, that is, another besides his notions of tolerance vs. intolerance, open-mindedness vs. close-; or besides notions I had encountered elsewhere, (Nietzsche) that distinguish between the pagan religions as concerned with the welfare of mankind during lifetime and the Judeo-Christian as concerned with the afterlife. Specifically, I am thinking of the superimposition of the notion of 'true' to the notion of 'faith' in the JudeoChristian tradition. True, these musings have their source in Kirsch's text, but I am thinking here not of the way he views this co-mingling of the two notions as an illustration of the intolerance of Judeo-Christians compared to the tolerance of the pagans. No. What I'm driving at is the superimposition of the epistemological category of truth on top of the theological discourse. When this happens, the religious discourse takes over a new sort of gravity, of seriousness: beside its essential function as preserver of the natural and moral order of the world, religion now becomes, or attempts to become the describer of the universe. The reason this happens is because now the religious discourse attempts to motivate its restrictions and regulations of human behavior in terms of that picture of the universe. Mankind has to act in a certain way because this is the way ordained by the Creator of the Universe. This is an unfortunate connection, and a totally unnecessary one. For millennia before, mankind had lived in a world where moral codes were not necessarily tied to the idea that they were ordained by the creators of the universe: true, the current masters of the universe were in most religions viewed as enforcers of a certain morality, but that morality had little to do with the actual creation of the universe; (I will return to this later); in the Judeo-Christian tradition on the other hand, the idea of morality is intertwined with the very creation of the Universe: here we don't simply have an abstract entity, like the Night or the Chaos or the metaphoric image of the Sun creating the cosmos without any ulterior motive or without any explanation; rather God creates the world and the birds and the animals and the fish so that Man may rule over them and Man so that he may imitate God.

(In saying this I ignore the prelapsarian stage, because it seems to me a mere pretext; in his almightiness, God could easily have removed all sources of temptation for Adam, so that he

could never taste the fruit of knowledge; the fact that God chooses not to remove the temptation, but rather to point to it and place it out of bounds I take to mean that in fact Adam was from his very creation potentially 'lapsed' or potentially 'victim of temptation', and that God not only knew but even desired this. That in tasting the forbidden fruit Adam was merely fulfilling God's expectation, sort of like a test that God wanted to submit his creature to, in order to make certain that he had succeeded in creating the sort of being he had intended to, that is one capable to make choices. I take it (and though I never read anywhere anything like this, I don't imagine that I'm the first to view this episode in this way) then that the pointing of the tree of knowledge and the prohibition attached to it by God are in fact quite the opposite, pointers meant to insure that Adam quickly finds it and (with a little help from his helper...) tastes it.)

So if (freely) imitating God is what the purpose of Man on Earth is, if moral codes are viewed in this exalted light where they are tied to the creation of the Universe, it is obvious that for these moral codes to endure that story of the creation of the Universe has to be true. This is where the epistemological dimension of religion comes into play: if faith is wrong in its story about the universe it follows that it is wrong in its prescriptions for a good life. But as mentioned before, there were countless religious (or philosophical) cosmogonies that were in no way tied with the idea of a Moral Being creating a universe governed by like-minded creatures. And that disconnect of course did not make the enforcement of morality less stable, because while the creation of the universe doesn't need to be related to a moral act, the preservation of the universe could still be viewed in terms of such moral terms, and the moral codes could still be granted the importance of actually preserving the world, which is in fact of an even greater urgency than the Judeo-Christian notion is: for in truth, I am more likely to obey the moral codes if I am fearful that my disobeying might provoke the end of the world than I am to obey the codes if disobeying them simply means I come in discord with the Creator of the Universe and His universal mandates. Truly, by stressing the inscrutability of

the ways of the Lord, Judeo-Christianity in effect chips away the notion of moral preservation of the universe: the universe endures through the grace of God, we are so small that we can't even effect the destruction of the world we live in. And while this has the positive result of placing us in a more correct position in the universe (at least up until the advent of atomic

bombs, though, in effect from what I have read there are disputes as to whether an all-out nuclear war would destroy life on the planet or merely provide for a fresh start in totally new directions, that would end up with totally different beasts than us: I mean, if cockroaches survive the nuclear holocaust I would imagine other living things do too, and the smaller the likelier to, because the smaller the shorter the lifecycle and the shorter the lifecycle, the oftener the reproduction and generation of offspring which in turn increases the chances for mutations in what to us seems like extraordinarily short periods but which for the concerned beings would be ages, but I digress), it also has a host of unfortunate consequences, first of which is that it paradoxically discourages the more straightforward reason for moral behavior, and thus requires a further rationalization of the reasons why it is good to be a moral being. Aside from taking away one of the essential reasons to be moral, or rather internalizing it (for what happens is this: we are now taught that ok, the world may not end if we are not obeying God's commandments, but we will eventually find ourselves in a hell of a lot of trouble), this new vision of morality as tied to the truth of the tale about the birth of the Universe has the unfortunate consequence of eventually bringing the religious and the scientific discourses in conflict. Truth is of course the province (or rather the besieged city) of other discourses, the scientific and the philosophic ones. Rather, what it is is the fact that the picture of the universe keeps changing: five thousand years ago, we had one, and that came to be incorporated into the Bible and tied to its moral code. (Boorstin I think makes this point too: the truth of religion is merely dated scientific truth.) Things changed in the meantime, but morality did not, and because it is tied to that dated scientific truth of yore, that dated scientific truth is held, by most strict readers of the Bible, to have also stayed valid. There is of course no direct relationship between the rising of the Sun every day and the goodness of people on earth: to the pagans the relationship was from the people to the sun: if the people are good the sun will continue to rise; to the Judeo-Christian it is the opposite: the sun is rising that the people may be good. In the former case the disconnect can easily be proved either by practice (of not being good) or by science. In the latter of the cases however, there is no way to disconnect the two statements: the sun is rising that the people may be good. Replace the sun is rising with some other observed truth about the universe, one that is actually correct in scientific terms of yore: the Earth is at the center of the universe that the

people may be good. In other words, there are two statements: one is that God created the universe in a certain way; the other is that he created it that people may be good. So any feature of the universe is by definition meant to advance (though implicitly) the goodness of mankind. There is no way to disconnect these two statements, and there is really no way to

disprove them both; one can disprove the first (the x or y truth about the universe) but not the second. (At least not scientifically.) What this should mean is that religion should simply adapt to the new scientific view: because the relation between the two statements is not one of reverse-conditionality (if the Earth is at the center of the universe people are good; if we are descended from Adam and Eve rather than from apes, people are good); nor one of causality: the rising of the sun or the central position of the Earth are not the causes of the goodness of people; rather the relationship is merely circumstantial, in other words the result of hazard, (or, to be more accurate, of ignorance). But accepting this circumstantiality is a big issue for religion. So to sum up (more for myself and to verify that I didn't get quite lost....) the pre-Judeo-Christian religion conceives the universe as preservable through moral behavior; the Judeo-Christian world however views the universe as created by the creator of the moral codes; as such the story of the creation and the story of the moral codes receive similar justification; this results in the disconnection of morality from the endurance of the universe, which is a good thing to the extent that it places us in our more peripheral place in the universe; but it is also bad because it does that only unawares; more significantly, the Judeo-Christian approach has the result of placing epistemological statements on the same footing as moral statements; and it mistakenly assumes the former to justify the latter, or at least it fears that undermining the former would mean undermining the latter, as though the epistemological statements were in a relation of causality (and not mere of circumstantiality) with the moral statements.

Yet another way to sum this up would be: the pagan religions connect morality with existence; Judeo-Christians connect morality with knowledge; the pagan morality is ontological; the Judeo-Christian is epistemological. The problem appears because ontology (just like a certain morality) never changes. Being is always the same, just as Goodness is always the same, within the same moral system. Knowledge of Being however does change, and connecting an

(unchanging) ethical system to a changing body of knowledge is sort of like Parmenides trying to build his house in Heraclitus's river.