4. GOD, Being, and the Great Beyond (2)

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The immediacy of ‘I’ and ‘You’, beyond all questions of ‘what’, is a powerful affirmation of the primacy of heartiness over mindfulness in our lives. Could it be the character of the cosmos too?*

* The tendency of modern scientism to regard hard material realities – the world’s ‘what’ – as basic, and its indefinite moral or spiritual dimensions – where we look for ‘who’ in the world – as illusory or questionable, is rather like a person who sees a statue in the park as only an oddly shaped formation of granite, say, and various metals. He sees no meaningful distinction between the pedestal and the figure standing on it, and thinks that because the base supports the figure the latter owes its existence to the former. He would consider the evidence that the base was installed first as proof that his view of the matter is the correct one. In vain do we point out to him the purpose of the whole construction, that the sculpture represents a historical person or event, or that it has some significance greater than the matter from which it was made. All he sees is the material, and considers the pedestal and figure on it to be but one thing, differentiated only by shape and composition.

Although there are a few places in the Qur’an where GOD is explicitly referred to as something rather than someone (e.g., Q91:7-8), the language used to present AL-LAH is almost always personal, as in Q20:14:

This anthropomorphic colouring is elaborated even further by references – metaphorical, of course – to His Hands, His Fingers, His Eyes, His Throne, His Footstool, His being seated, His descending, His running, His watching, His listening, His anger, His sorrow, His laughter, His jealousy, His forgiveness, His mercy, and, obviously, the use of pronouns such as ‘He’, ‘His’, ‘Him’, ‘Us’, ‘Our’, ‘I’, ‘Me’, and ‘My’.

People who take all this literally often end up conceiving of God as simply a person on a larger scale, a ‘father-in-the-sky’ figure. Because of this, a rational adherent to the concept of a cosmic Intelligence may favour a depersonalized God for fear of what he/she sees many believers doing, namely projecting their egos and biases onto an infinitely powerful version of themselves. A personal God is seen as an overblown, ultra-privileged mental idol developed as a tool to dominate and intimidate others. Evidence of that tendency is rife in the monotheistic religions, as they seem to provide a megaphone by which ‘I say’ is converted into an overbearing ‘God says’.

Countering this argument, on the other hand, is ample evidence that a culture does not appear to become any gentler, humbler, or less violent when it substitutes for a single deity some form of animist traditions (20th-century Shinto Japan), polytheism (the Aztec Empire), nationalism (Nazi Germany), atheism (the Khmer Rouge), materialism (20th-century Maoist China) or neoliberalism (21st-century U.S.A.). (These ‘isms’ are not mutually exclusive.) Any type of faith, no matter how it is formulated, tends to be misused when its affirmations are distorted by poor judgement and bad character. Just as a rise in the crude materialism that sees the world as an amoral field for boundless exploitation and oppression would not justify our banning the teaching of science in schools, so also does the occasional coincidence of monotheistic faith and militarism prove nothing except that man is endlessly inventive in compartmentalizing his inner life and rationalizing whatever he does.

Proponents of the accusation that monotheism leads to violence and egoism obviously have no time to study or absorb what the faithful have known for millennia, namely that GOD is the supreme antidote to everything that the human race has agreed to be immoral or selfish.

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