GOD IN THE MIDDLE -- PART ONE

THE STORIES WE TELL OURSELVES ARE THE STORIES WE LIVE BY!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 

 © January 10, 2019 

PREAMBLE 

William L. Livingston IV, engineer, inventor, author and industrial/organizational thinker, has launched a powerful new website and blog on Man in the Middle (m-i-t-m.com/blog), which I urge readers to check out. This new venture of Sir William triggered a different characterization by me of our current situation (i.e., GOD IN THE MIDDLE). God just won’t go away. 

A READER WRITES 

A few years ago, you gave a talk at the Temple Terrace Library (Tampa, Florida) where you gave those in attendance a copy of “The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend.”

Recently, I opened the book and started reading it. I find many of your observations in my opinion correct. However, toward the middle of the book you bring up that the loss of religious faith and belief in the soul as part of the problem (re: Chapter Seven – Beyond the Pleasure Principle). 

I am one of the people who believes agnosticism is the only answer to the religion dilemma because neither science nor any religion has the ultimate answer to anything. For example, Christians and Muslims believe in this powerful god who according to the Bible created two humans (Adam & Eve), then destroyed them all except for Noah and his family. 

Apparently, this powerful god knew nothing of genetics. Then he committed other atrocities like killing the first born of the Egyptians. After that, Christians and Muslims who believed in this all powerful god seemed to think he needed help. 

If people want to believe in a religion, I have no problem with that as long as they leave the rest of us alone. But they can’t seem to do that. Even Buddhist in today’s crazy world are not able to resist this impulse. 

Religious people who want to make everyone believe as they do are no different from the Nazis, Communists or the current state of our political parties here in the US. 

It appears to me that most people in the world seem to feel a need to belong to a group that provides them with all the answers without realizing there is neither a group nor a person who can do that. 

Even today, I see this spurious thinking applies to the nomination of Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, which is crazy. I don’t know what happened years ago, but as a lifelong registered Democrat I see that the motive of the 10 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee was simply to stop this nomination using Dr. Ford’s accusation (Dr. Christine Ford came forward to accuse the nominee of sexually assaulting her 35 years ago when they were both in high school). Apparently, the Judiciary Committee’s only strategy was to derail the nomination. It is always the same: that is, our way of thinking is correct and your way is wrong.

MY RESPONSE

Curiously, I've reread most of The Taboo, including your referenced Chapter Seven, and wonder how you came to make this statement. 

The Taboo is about the loss of personal and political identity in the context of self and collective responsibility noting the deterioration of individualism and independence in matters of mind and behavior to an increasing dependence on others and societal institutions in general for identity and legitimacy, while retreating into self-pity and self-indulgence. 

To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. But alas, this is not our mindset. Alas, we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and therefore lost our way. 

Politicians play to the meme of this deficit as do intellectuals, theologians and gurus, and in a more obsequious sense, journalists.

The Taboo attempts to show the cultural drift (or might it better be described as a shift?) which has come to hold the collective American conscience hostage since WWII. 

For more than fifty years following that war, the world was America's oyster with the American nation forgetting its core values devolving into self-negation, cynicism, insensitivity and nihilism. This collapse has been essentially concealed in its technological prowess and advancements, which, sadly, has gravitated to a social psychological economic and political conundrum. The evidence?

Polarity has been institutionalized as the cultural norm under the shroud of social, economic and political enterprise. 

The Taboo, written 25 years ago, focuses on this country’s pandering to its weakness rather than to its strength resulting in a deepening divide and collective despair that translates now into the "United States of Anxiety." A nation cannot exist on bread alone!

THE RETREAT OF RELIGION & THE IDEA OF GOD, WHICH IS THE CONSCIENCE OF A PEOPLE

It is apparent that “the idea of religion" and "the idea of God" are trigger words to you whereas for literally centuries these abstract designations have kept men of diverse race and ethnicity upright, engaged and essentially whole if not always sane.  

With conscience, there is a sense of things, an invisible hand of shame and guilt if you will, that assures people will think and do the right thing to ensure their sense of belonging in good standing to the wider group.

CHAPTER SEVEN (Beyond the Pleasure Principle)

Modern religion lacks imagination with only a capacity to mock itself. Meanwhile, modern man has the key to the Gates of Paradise. This same key opens the gates to his torment as well to his comfort. It is his choice to make, clearly the choice of a mature adult and not a spoiled child. 

The Taboo is a systematic exploration of the "reality of the imagination" in the context of the "imagination of reality." Reality and the imagination have been the kryptonite memes of man since his beginning.

That is to say that society, or the “Story of Man,” is not simply built of steel, concrete and glass, but also of illusory properties difficult to define or fathom such as the “idea of God" and "the role of religion" as an expression of the imagination. 

There are nearly 8 billion souls on this planet, 6 billion of whom believe in some God and 2 billion of whom are Christians.  

OUR DEBT TO STORYTELLERS

We live by the veracity of the stories we tell ourselves, stories we believe to be true as they have ultimately become the cornerstones of our lives and the belief systems that give us a sense of belonging to something greater than ourselves: 

BELIEF + BELONGING = BEHAVIOR 

One of the great touchstones is the stories of The Bible composed by ancient   storytellers whose stories have come be considered myths by nonbelievers, stories fundamental to our Christian identity, and yes, stories of "Adam and Eve" and “Noah and his ark,” among others.  St. Paul the Apostle was also a storyteller who gave substance and direction to his time as did Sigmund Freud to ours.

St. Paul was a Christian; Freud a Jew, but both accomplished storytellers and mythmakers. Although they are both in some disrepute today, they fail to fade from our consciousness.  Were they not such good storytellers, mythically or otherwise, we would not behave as we do; nor would they continue to have such obvious impact upon our lives. Scholars and critics, philosophers and etymologists attempt to decipher their words, testing the legitimacy, rationality, credence and historical relevance of their contributions bypass what is germane to the impact these stories. 

God and religion are not rational pursuits, so why treat them as if are?  How can you know what you cannot prove? 

James, the brother of Jesus, was not a storyteller but a stubborn believer in only the Old Testament and The Torah. This does not make these stories less valid, or James less honorable, as Judaism is a vital institution, then as now in our modern society. 

Likewise, The New Testament is a collection of contradictory accounts of the "Life of Jesus" written decades after The Death of Jesus by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Christian scholars probe discrepancies in these accounts for credulity when limited by historical confirmation. These great stories inspired the Christian religion 2,000 year ago to take hold. Western Civilization which has been built on Christianity would not have been possible without the passionate acceptance of these stories, Western man might still be living in the "Dark Ages."   Take away Christianity and God over these millenniums and insert agnosticism or atheism and what do you have? Postmodernity!

A CATHOLIC AUTHOR’S VULNERABILITY

On a personal note, my Irish Roman Catholicism and belief in God were vital anchors that lifted me out of myself into the life that I have had. As a small boy with no sense of what parents were, lost in the confusion of that absence, I might have been thought to be autistic, but fortunately that labeling had not yet been invented. Miraculously, when I was five, my mother fresh from hospital appeared and then guided me into the person that I have become.  The reality of my imagination about Catholicism, as a viable faith, has faded in my imagination, and as a consequence, its fallible authority has faded in my consciousness. Still, in point of fact, I am a Catholic who writes and views his world from that perspective.  

 

A person risks being inauthentic to himself if he denies his cultural DNA. It is as real as is his biological DNA. I embrace my cultural DNA as it has opened my mind to understand that Irish Roman Catholicism, and indeed, religion in general, is a faulty but vital institution vulnerable to the vagaries endemic to life as it is a product of man. Fanatics of all religions are basically scoundrels perched essentially on the periphery of legitimate religions while the majority of believers live in the calm valley beyond these mountains of extremes. Yes, it is true that sometimes radicals take over a religion descending it into chaos, dysfunction, violence and irrelevance. It has happened to Roman Catholicism during The Spanish Inquisition and to Islam today with similar disastrous results. That said religion is an invention, as is everyone's life. That does not make either religion or one’s existence less valid, only more real. 

The Taboo, like Herman Melville's Moby Dick, was not well received when it was published. Melville didn't write for 20 years so stung by that rejection; I, however, still write every day. When you write as you perceive things, awkward or unpolished as that might be.  If there is a grain of truth to what you say, it will eventually prove relevant to others in due course when they are ready. 

The irony is that such books, however flawed, will not go away since they deal with the subtext of life brought to the surface in their stories. These stories that are germane have a persistence that defies the times as they confront the unchanging reality of the imagination in terms of that imagination of reality.