Early in the book, she asks an unanswerable question (which puts butterflies in my stomach if I stand on the edge of it for too long): Why is there something rather than nothing? (ponder what ‘no thing’ is, how it lies beyond comprehension and what could have been):
“Why has anything come into being at all, when there could so easily have been nothing? There has never been a simple or even a possible answer to that question, but people continue to ask it, pushing their minds to the limit of what we can know. One of the earliest and most universal of the ancient cosmologies is particularly instructive to us today. It was thought that one of the gods, known as the ‘High God’ or ‘Sky God’ because he dwelt in the farthest reaches of the heavens, had singlehandedly created heaven and earth. The Aryans called him Dyaeus Pitr, the Chinese Tian (‘Heaven’); the Arabians Allah (‘the God’); and the Syrians El Elyon, ‘Most High God’. But the High God proved to be an unviable deity and his myth was jettisoned.
It suffered from an internal contradiction. How could a mere being – even such a lofty one – be responsible for Being itself? As if in response to this objection, people tried to elevate the High God to a special plane. He was considered too exalted for an ordinary cult: no sacrifices were performed in his honour; he had no priests, no temples, and virtually no mythology of his own. People called on him in an emergency, but otherwise he scarcely ever impinged on their daily lives. Reduced to a mere explanation – to what would later be called First Cause or Prime Mover – he became Deus otiosus, a ‘useless’ or ‘superfluous’ deity, and gradually faded from the consciousness of his people. In most mythologies, the High God is depicted as a passive, helpless figure; unable to control events, he retreats to the periphery of the pantheon and finally fades away. Today some of the indigenous people – Pygmies, Australians and Fuegians – also speak of a High God who created heaven and earth, but, they tell anthropologists, he has died or disappeared; he ‘no longer cares’ and ‘has gone far away from us’.
No god can survive unless he or she is actualised by the practical activity of ritual, and people often turn against gods who fail to deliver. The High God is often mythologically deposed, sometimes violently, by a younger generation of more dynamic deities – gods of storm, grain or war – who symbolise relevant important realities. In Greek mythos, the High God Uranus (‘Heaven’) was brutally castrated by his son Kronos. Later Kronos himself was overthrown by his son Zeus, leader of the younger gods who lived more accessibly on Mount Olympus. In our own day, the God of the monotheistic tradition has often degenerated into a High God. The rites and practices that once made him a persuasive symbol of the sacred are no longer effective, and people have stopped participating in them. He has therefore become otiosus; an etiolated reality who to all intents and purposes has indeed died or ‘gone away’.”
Karen Armstrong (2009). The Case for God, p24
If you know your Saussure you will have recognised the use of ‘signifier’ in my title. He shows that our language is split into ‘sound-image’ signifiers (or simply ‘words’) and signified ‘concepts’ (which the word refers to). Today, whether we think of ourselves as theist, atheist or something else, we all still hold the conceptual idea which is ‘that which lies beyond understanding’ or ‘that for which there are no words to describe”. Historically this idea has carried the signifier ‘God’, but as our understanding and language has developed those gods have passed from the unknown to the explainable and are no longer our gods. But we are still left with unknowns: why is there something rather than nothing, for example.
So what should we do with the word ‘God’? Should we ditch it as a historic relic or retain it as a signifier for those things that lie beyond the possibility of knowing and used when considering the human predicament and our individual responses.
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