Thursday 19 May 2011

The challenge of polarity

Polarity has always been a theological challenge to monotheism. In attempting to make the deity universal, that is to be all encompassing, the deity becomes just as strongly identified with all that is harmful, destructive, negative, "evil", or repulsive as with all that is constructive, positive, healing, "good" or attractive. An omnipotent and omnipresent god is equally good and bad, equally loving and hating, equally constructive and destructive. If not, then they are not omnipotent and omnipresent.

Watching the apologists for monotheism attempting to salvage a “loving” god from that paradox is interesting. 

The Zoroastrians did so by having two opposed deities and life as a battle ground between the two. It is likely that the Jews incorporated this into their theology during their exile in Babylon, only in a lop sided way, with their “God” on the side of goodness and, as a result of the fall, “Satan” leading the opposing team. In time the resultant lapsarian theology has become much more pronounced in many forms of Christianity than in Judaism or Islam, but is implicit in them all.

That is the problem with calling things “God” - they inflate into monsters who run eternal concentration camps called “hell”.

But why go down the route of using a noun? Why not a verb? Why not “godness” rather than “god”? Why not a quality that things can possess, a bit like a static electric charge, but which can not exist independent? That is the approach taken by Shinto. Kami are a quality possessed by things, not something that exists independently. They are not universal, nor are claims made about their being omnipotent nor omnipresent, but we all know the tangibleness of special places that fill us with senses of wonder, or of peace, or of calm, places that move us. They do indeed seem charged with something indefinable.

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