A year or so ago some zealous atheists in the United Kingdom spent a rather large amount of sterling paying for advertisements declaring “There’s Probably No God: Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life” to be plastered on the sides of buses. A similar campaign is now being arranged here in New Zealand.
These campaigns show more very clearly just to what extent popular conceptions of God (including some popular conceptions within the theistic traditions!) conflict with the very traditions which with they are commonly associated. And they reflect how the rampant individualism of capitalist society shapes our thinking about pretty much everything.
Think for a minute about the Christian tradition. How has fear of God traditionally been understood within that tradition? In orthodox Christianity, fear of God is inextricably tied to the moral condition of a believer’s soul (the notion of soul being itself closely tied to moral sensibility!). “Fear God” standardly functions as an exhortation to live a life of love; keeping watch “for you do not know when your Lord is coming.” In that regard, fear of God is to some extent different to fear of powerful individuals. My fear of powerful individuals is a product of a (warranted or erroneous) belief that they may exert power over me and do me harm.
In the case of God, who is Love, there is no question of his letting me down or abandoning me, for his love is steadfast and unyielding. Thus fear of God cannot fail to have everything to do with my moral consciousness, and nothing to do with being subject to the capricious and subordinating power of an authority. So, if I cease to fear God, this must simply mean that I cease to have regard for the external consequences of my moral behaviour. This, of course, does not mean that any morally sensitive individual fears God, even if they do not believe in God. But it does mean that from the believer’s perspective regard for her objective moral standing is what constitutes fear of God.
Stop worrying and enjoy your life? Cease to fear God and be merry? Well, if merriment involves simple self-gratification, maybe. But, from the standpoint of the Christian believer, that’s false happiness. Jesus himself says “I have come that you may have life, and live it abundantly” (John 10:10). And Christianity’s claim is not that true life involves submission and obeisance to a celestial Superpower. It is that power corrupts, and that true happiness and power is found through rejection of the false promises of the world. It is not, as the Gnostics thought, that the world is debased and corrupt. It is that true life involves living a mystery of love which involves rejecting domination of things and people.
Now if religious ideas and discourses are to have any intelligible sense at all, they must have some analogy with secular (or, better, non-religious) ideas and discourses. And here is a point where the Christian notion of fear of God can be grasped by the infidel. By secular eyes, is true happiness really to be found in not worrying about the way one lives one life? And does one even need to be, or even have ever been, a believer to find the notion of God something other than frightening? Many an unbeliever thinks finds it otherwise Perhaps if anyone, believer or otherwise, finds it so, then they are either labouring under a crude caricature of the concept of God or recognising the deficiencies in their moral state. Or maybe both.
In any event, these campaigns really involve just a waste of time and money.
“Baptisms, marriages and funerals BY APPOINTMENT ONLY”
Thank the Lord Jesus Christ for that!
I haven’t updated this blog for several months, due to health difficulties and the pressures on my time presented by my MA research. But, I have always intend to continue developing this blog; and in any event it is a productive thing to do: part leisure (ranting about whatever), part pleasure (ditto), part work (allowing me to air various thoughts and ideas that I develop through my study).
So, I hope to post on a range of philosophical, political, theological and miscellaneous topics over the Christmas/New Year break…and beyond. Watch this space, if anyone’s there!
