Common to Nothing

Sources:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2022/01/how-religions-go-global/ by Philip Jenkins

https://www.patheos.com/articles/is-there-a-god by Brad Wilcox

I've got to address some matters here, and I know my techniques might make this less readable (as if anyone reads it.)

I came across the following in the above Patheos post from Philip Jenkins:

Between the fourth and second centuries BC, the great Hellenistic empires made it possible for inquiring minds in any society to sample from a sumptuous buffet of beliefs, including Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Jewish, and Indian ideas.

The sentence seems valid enough, but a great deal is assumed in such a statement.  Who, after all, are the "inquiring minds in any society," especially when one might describe the pre-Christian Hellenistic world?  Would we not be describing here a privileged segment of that (or indeed of any) society?

We speak so easily of the debates about religious issues, yet it is with awesome presumption that we group such issues with the general experience of personhood.  In the second century BC, how much of the population really had the luxury (or the burden, or the luxury of the burden) to consider the great questions of religion?  Life was short, and child mortality high, and prenatal mortality high.  Lives were racked with disease and hardship, and the genial, cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Greek-dominated world would have come as a surprise to the Maccabees, among many others.

Just who are these people privileged "to sample from a sumptuous buffet of beliefs" around the ancient Mediterranean, or in any other setting?  Even in our own day, a disturbingly small percentage of souls can ponder such questions as "Does God exist?"  The number of human beings who might ever ponder so would have to be reduced by the number afflicted with intellectual infirmity or derangement, and reduced again by those dying before an age of mature reason, and reduced yet again by those perishing in the womb.

(We might add to this--on the side of the "unpondering"--the uncounted and uncountable billions of never-born "souls" held by feverish pro-lifers to be dateable from fertilization.  While such math might serve my point, it would seem unsporting to make too much of it here.)

And what of those persons whose afflictions arise from their fellow humans, and who are herded and worked and tormented as soon--and as long--as they are of value to oppressive systems?  Who then is left of humanity to ponder the great questions of religion?  And is it not wholly repugnant--when it has at once occurred to us--that so much of religious thought will describe the all-too-rare phenomenon of unharried (and adequately nourished and educated) contemplation as some sort of given, some sort of divinely-ordained baseline of human experience?  Is all (or even most) of humanity--conceptualized as a roll of souls against the Judgment--ever to be afforded opportunity for such contemplation?

And yet we have such as this, from above by Brad Wilcox:

"Is there a God?" . . . One way or another, everyone seems to take a turn asking this question of all questions. . . . Concerned observers ask what ultimately determines an individual’s choice. Surely it varies, as each must make his or her own decision. But one piece of evidence that has been crucial for me as I step back and consider the options is that I can step back and consider the options.

Fair enough, as far as it goes, but the fact that Wilcox (along with many others) has presumed too much about common human experience is revealed in that he goes still further:

To me the very possibility for debate is strong evidence that a supreme being does exist—one who has created us in His image and allows us to reason and make choices as He does.

For much of thinking humanity--and here I am speaking about the lucky subset of eternal souls who ever survive to exhibit rationality--the first possibilities of reason are how to placate a god stuffed down their throats, or how to swallow a godlessness stuffed down their throats.  Or how to intellectually maneuver around rage or despair or disillusionment directed at such imposed belief systems.  The part where God--described by the pondering faithful as deeply concerned with whether or not we believe in him--"allows us to reason and make choices as He does" comes later, if at all.

And yet the cruel logic of God-existence-pondering will not stop there.  Wilcox continues:

I don’t see plants and animals having discussions about whether or not God exists. Simply being complex enough to consider both possibilities sets humans apart.

We must assume that Wilcox grants humanity-defining complexity even to persons fundamentally incapable of rational thought.  It would, however, be important to note that--while we can credit Wilcox with seeing humanity in the mentally infirm--we can simultaneously understand him to be arrogating to himself the perspective of God:

As humans, not only can we separate our actions from ourselves, but we can also reflect on them. What animal can say "such behavior wasn’t like me"? What animal is capable of honest introspection? . . . We can step outside ourselves and consider questions that go far beyond the bounds of our own life experiences.

"As humans, not only can we separate our actions from ourselves . . . . We can step outside ourselves and consider questions . . . ."  Well, yes, arguably we can do such things.  We can also be profoundly mistaken, and making such mistakes from a godling's perch of our own imaginings, not only can we conjure up distorted versions of ourselves and of our species, but we can also make a mockery of belief.

When we imagine we understand ourselves--when we deny that we ourselves are questions and that we are mercifully answered by our graciously-supplied individual abilities to ask and seek and knock--then we mistakenly imagine that we understand existence:

We can step outside ourselves and consider questions that go far beyond the bounds of our own life experiences.

Having imagined we understand existence, we can then declare that God satisfies the conditions of that existence:

To me the very possibility for debate is strong evidence that a supreme being does exist—one who has created us in His image and allows us to reason and make choices as He does.

All that I have quoted above is folly.  Reverent and well-meant, to be sure, but still folly.  It is hard to know which is worse: believing we've gotten our metaphorical feet under ourselves in the religion argument (and thereby making ourselves likely to fall), or failing to realize that relying on such a rare and privileged stance places us farther from our common human selves and no nearer to the God who is common to nothing.