The Death of God. Again.

The short version: God and Religion are not the same thing.
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Here we go again.

Serious people are writing about the death of God in an Of Course kind of way.

We all know, they seem to say, that God is dead. Now what do we do?

Such is the tone of Alasdair Craig in a recent issue of the British magazine Prospect, in a thoughtful look at two recently published books, with references to several others.

The title of the essay says it all: God is dead--What next?

Craig's thesis accepts the value of religious belief in human life, one of giving meaning and purpose. Equating the existence of God with this value, with particular emphasis on the personal and intimate vision of God the Father posited by Christianity, he wonders how the impersonal world of scientific thought can replace such an important human institution.

His alternative to religious belief appears to be art and literature, though he recognizes the lack of overall narrative in these endeavors that will leave them shallow by comparison with the Quest story inherent in religion, which flows through time from creation to after-life. Quoting the author of one of the books under review, he notes that the popular atheism

comes at the “enormous price” of “renouncing depth.” Little wonder, he implies, that its dismal art is so at home in the shallow worlds of “fashion and design, the media and public relations, advertising agencies and recording studios.”

In other words, the art of atheism finds comfort in the service of the world of commerce.

I don't think we're talking about the death of God here. Not at all. We're talking about the death of Religion. Survey data continue to show that few people profess to be atheists or even agnostics. Most people in the western world continue to have some deep sense of something more powerful in their lives than their own meager minds and selves can comprehend.

Mr Craig and the authors he is studying are omitting the most important question of all: what experience underlies, drives, the need for religious belief? In an historical sense, what needs have art and history addressed so well for the course of human civilization?

To put it as succinctly as I can at the moment, the core question has something to do with whether we understand ourselves to be something more than human to begin with. Where I've come to in my own explorations so far is that we are at core not humans seeking spiritual experiences: we are Spiritual Beings presently engaged in Human Experiences. We all have some deep and unspoken memory of being a part of some vastness, and we are searching for a connection to that mystery.

We simply have lost our ability to come together in a coherent way to tell and retell the story of what that vastness may be or may mean. We know intuitively that our birth and our death have some connection to where we are. We want desperately to hold on to our deep memories.

And our institutions have failed us, floundered on the shores of human venality. Based as they were on primitive levels of education, short and brutal lives (with limited accumulations of experience), few and simple communication technologies, restricted contact with alternative institutions, they have proven inadequate to the task of providing plausible comfort and support to a searching humanity.

Paradoxically, the blessings of long life, communication beyond human imagination, education and resources for the millions, we wind up alone with God while we await the slowly developing group consciousness to carry us forward. God is still there. Most of us recognize something larger than ourselves in the universe. We simply have no way of systematically finding contact with that Something Larger.

Building and maintaining a Belief System is a complex and energy-intensive proposition. It's one of the crucial elements of being human that is best done as a group. But group problem solving takes time as well.

As a culture we are between worlds. The old one no longer fits. The new one is still forming.