The God Need

When I went back to read my last post tonight, these sentences struck me:

From the stories came inexplicable characters who had powers that man did not. Like the creator in the rainbow crow story. So from myth-making we move to religion, which organizes and places our Gods in time and space, gives them attributes we know of, give them powers over us that we fear, and craves their grace, which we recognise as necessary for our existence.

I realized that in describing man’s progress from myth-making to religion I had already distanced myself from the faith enough to study it. Only a bystander or an observer can study something; a participant would be too close, too much ‘in’ it to study it. It is an aching thought but honesty requires that I face it: though not a non-believer, I am also not a devotee, or even a serious practitioner of the faith. To say that first man made stories, and from stories to religion was just a leap – is saying that man made god.

 In other words, I was adopting the mind and words of historians [who study the progress of man over time] and scientists [who make the progress happen] and speaking like one who was gliding further and further into the ocean and watching the shores recede.

So what makes the shores seem remote today?

For one, as I said in my last posting, our lives and identities have become many-stranded.

For another, the triggers that led to the founding of religions may just have gone dormant. Death, natural disasters, darkness, fear of wild animals, pain, disease, fear of the unknown and wonder at the mysterious ways of the world – these must have been early man’s responses to his environment and these must have led to religion.

Today both these feelings – fear and wonder – have receded from our lives. Longer life expectancy has pushed death to a remote future.  The progress of health sciences, medicine and the promise of anti-ageing and death-defying therapies and technologies have pushed even that remote possibility to some numbed part of our brains. Our active seeking of material progress has more immediate appeal to us than the looming of death in some distant future. With fear receding, the need for God has receded.

Nature too is no longer a presence in our lives. The skyline is cluttered with highrises and the darkness of night shattered by the glare of lighting. We shut the sun and wind out with glass frontages and  we control temperatures. Our shoe-clad feet rarely leave naked footprints in pliant mud or grainy sand. We are no longer ‘connected’ to the earth as our ancestors were.

Nor indeed do natural disasters threaten our lives quite so much as they earlier did. We predict earthquakes and warn against tsunamis and prepare for storms and hurricanes. Of course, in spite of all these, the odd disaster still does leave us devastated, but they only have us seeking better ways of prediction, preparation and prevention. No more do we go down on our knees in supplication facing the skies.

 Let’s face it: the God need has receded. There's evidence for it - as I have been observing at every festival these last few years.