A friend of mine told me recently that her teenaged son has suddenly begun asking about churches. Since she has raised him and his brother areligiously, it surprised her. He hasn’t yet asked to begin church-going but something has piqued him.
It’s an innocent enough interest in an adolescent, but it has larger implications. At his age, and in the cultural environment of Tennessee, it might just be a desire to fit in, or a kid at school evangelizing…or mere curiosity. But interest in the spiritual–at some stage of life–seems pretty much universal among humans. Anthropology and archeology suggest it always has been.
We want, we need, we seek some kind of connection to the divine…or perhaps just to a divine we create. I don’t know one way or another whether any are real. But it certainly appears that, save a few exceptional minds, we as individuals do not feel complete without such a connection. I certainly do not.
I have to wonder from whence this springs. Claiming it is just a cultural norm is not enough. Culture only shapes its form, culture and perhaps experience.
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I think a craving for Divinity has as its source an unreflective desire to MATTER at the level of the infinite and eternal through God’s infinite and eternal love and solicitude; the individual harbors a claim to the effect that validation must occur at the level of GLORIFICATION, the apex of the stages of salvation; in its absence life seems drab and meaningless. This is a compensatory mechanism to deal with our deeply felt sense of finitude and ephemerality. A conviction of my own radical finitude in space and time occasions no existential anxiety whatsoever and I can live serenely without compensation or validation of the kind that strikes me as so extravagant and self-indulgent as to be preposterous. Plainly, this is NOT about God’s existence but about the motives that entice believers to WANT God to exist. From this perspective, atheism is a peripheral issue. The central issue is one’s unarticulated need for a level of validation that a different sensibility would regard as extreme or even unintelligible. I am content with modest, quotidian levels of validation and that may define a new position: I am an AVALIDATIONIST because I don’t need glorification and I do not believe any rational person educated by science would even want it either.
I agree that there is a desire in each of us to matter, to be significant (in the existential sense), and that this is part of it. But that element (certainly the “glorification” part) plays out mostly in the monotheistic traditions. It is not apparent in the Eastern traditions, nor (as far as we know) in aboriginal ones. I think there is also the element of fear (fear of the unknown after death, fear of the inability to control one’s existential situation). But also, I think mankind also wants to participate somehow in the great play we are all living. I’m not sure how best to articulate this, but I will give it some thought.
I think we have been participants since the moment of conception, or at least since the moment of birth. We are ALREADY immersed in the panorama of life on Earth as human primates pursuing our lives with varying degrees of care, energy and commitment. Moreover, we are now in a way to knowing that with a wealth of detailed evidence of which the founders of religions had no inkling My position is that for most people, participation at everyday levels is simply not enough even if there is compelling evidence that that is all there is. Wish fulfillment and an ill-defined craving for MORE, even up to the infinite and the eternal motivate a lust for the transcendental. It hardly needs articulation that a deeply felt need assures the existence of nothing in the form of a gratifying object. One might be better advised to examine the craving itself to evaluate its rationality rather than take it at face value as a point of departure.
Michael, I agree with you on pretty much all points. We are participants. I suspect the frustration and fear that have resulted in religion (the “glorification” religions, at least) derive from our suppressed realization of the insignificance of our individual roles. As you said, participation at everyday levels is just not enough. Certainly it does not assuage the fear. Isn’t this pretty much Yalom’s point…insignificance. And it touches on another of his points (which you allude to in your last sentence): responsibility. Very few people will take responsibility for their own lives and convictions. Those that do are the seekers, the ones you and I prefer to hang out with.