[Peace-discuss] "God and government"

[Morton K. Brussel]

Ruminations on a word, one with no accepted meaning, and, I would  
posit, therefore only obscurantist. --mkb

Published on Monday, October 17, 2005 by the Boston Globe
All God, All the Time
by James Carroll

When they told us in Sunday School that God is everywhere, they could  
have been talking about the recent news cycle. With Harriet Miers, we  
see that God lives in the politics of the US Supreme Court nomination  
process. In a culture defined by the separation of church and state,  
President Bush and his allies have mastered the use of religious  
affirmation as a deflection not only of criticism, but of critical  
thought. God is thus a trump card, a free pass. If the president,  
senators, and members of Congress can justify their decisions by  
appeals to God, why not judges?

''Acts of God" is the phrase applied to staggering natural disasters,  
from Katrina and the Pakistan earthquake to the coming avian flu. At  
the same time, survivors of such catastrophes credit God for having  
saved them, as if God callously let all those others die. Humans are  
perplexed when wanton suffering occurs, especially among children,  
and assumptions about God are overturned. The question becomes, How  
could God let this happen? Today, in Pakistan, where fatal disease,  
hunger, and thirst go unabated, the very ones who praised God last  
week for sparing them are pleading with God now, to no avail.

In the argument between creationists and scientists, those aiming to  
defend God make absolute claims about mysteries of the deep past as  
if they themselves were there. Air Force flyers have thought of God  
as their co-pilot in the past, but in today's Air Force, God sits  
atop the chain-of-command. At the US Air Force Academy, which was  
rocked by sex scandals not long ago, God is now the designated dean  
of discipline, but this jeopardizes infidel careers. Unit cohesion  
requires conversion. Indeed, displays of faith can be a prerequisite  
for promotion throughout a government where the White House itself is  
a House of God. In Iraq, meanwhile, someone will turn his body into a  
bomb today, killing others by blowing himself up while saying, ''God  
is great!"

Who is this ''God" in whose name so many diverse and troubling things  
take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one's faith in  
such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence?  
Most striking about so much talk of ''God," both to affirm and to  
deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know  
exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is  
the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand  
Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is  
the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every  
set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things.

But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation  
that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of  
revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false?  
Who is the atheist then? The glib God-talk that infuses public  
discourse in contemporary America descends from an anthropomorphic  
habit of mind, dating to the Bible and beyond, that treats God like  
an intimate friend or well-known enemy, depending on the weather and  
the outcome of battles. But there is another strain in the Biblical  
tradition that insists on the radical otherness of God, an otherness  
so complete that even the use of the word ''God" as a name for this  
Other One is forbidden. According to this understanding, God is God  
precisely in escaping and transcending comprehension by human beings.  
This can seem to mean that God is simply unknowable. If so, humans  
are better off not bothering about it. Atheism, agnosticism, or  
childish anthropomorphism -- all the same.

But here is where it gets tricky. What if God's unknowability is the  
most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would  
mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute  
certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based,  
would open into true modesty. The closed creation, in which every  
question has an answer, would be replaced by an infinite cosmos where  
every answer sparks a new question. If what we mean by ''God" is the  
living pulse of such open-endedness, then God is of no use in systems  
of dominance, censorship, power. God is everywhere, yes. But, also,  
God is nowhere. And that, too, shows in America, especially in its  
fake religiosity.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most  
recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

Copyright 2005 Boston Globe
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