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God-Obsessed
Sep. 4th, 2011 07:37 amIn recent years, we have seen a lot of attempts to sort of scientifically explain and understand why so many people believe in God and such supernaturalism. And I thought this was a nice counter-move.
_ _ _
Except that man isn’t god-leaning, he’s god-obsessed.
We are god-obsessed and god-seeking and at least the intellectuals of earlier ages—even if they couldn’t bring themselves to belief—recognized this. So many of today’s intellectuals are so far removed from religion that they don’t know the half of how deeply it’s intertwined in the lives and hearts of the rest of us.
This is perhaps the chief reason why so much of modern film and fiction feels false, because its creators are downright unnatural in their self-enforced secularization. Only in modern American novels does no one go to church, or pray to Christ or Allah or Shiva when they get cancer, or worry over the souls of their children.
We are god-obsessed because we have lost God or we are running from God or we are hopelessly seeking Him, and maybe all of these at once.
We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees.
And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof that the brain just evolved to work that way.
It’s the only narrative that fits the facts while affirming the skeptic’s presupposition that all this mother business is just leftover hokum from the dark ages.
Except that in a century, when the most famous of the skeptics is long forgotten, broken men will still be telling stories about what we have lost, and what we pray is still out there, coming even now to set all things right.
-- Tony Woodlief
_ _ _
Except that man isn’t god-leaning, he’s god-obsessed.
We are god-obsessed and god-seeking and at least the intellectuals of earlier ages—even if they couldn’t bring themselves to belief—recognized this. So many of today’s intellectuals are so far removed from religion that they don’t know the half of how deeply it’s intertwined in the lives and hearts of the rest of us.
This is perhaps the chief reason why so much of modern film and fiction feels false, because its creators are downright unnatural in their self-enforced secularization. Only in modern American novels does no one go to church, or pray to Christ or Allah or Shiva when they get cancer, or worry over the souls of their children.
We are god-obsessed because we have lost God or we are running from God or we are hopelessly seeking Him, and maybe all of these at once.
We are god-obsessed the way a child snatched from his mother will always have his heart and flesh tuned to her, even after he forgets her face. Cover the earth with orphans and you will find grown men fashioning images of mothers and worshipping strong women and crafting myths about mothers who have left or were taken or whose spirits dwell in the trees.
And at the edges of their tribal fires will stand the anthropologist and the philosopher, reasoning that all this mother-talk is simply proof that men are prone to invent stories about mothers, which is itself proof that no single story about a mother could be true, which is proof that the brain just evolved to work that way.
It’s the only narrative that fits the facts while affirming the skeptic’s presupposition that all this mother business is just leftover hokum from the dark ages.
Except that in a century, when the most famous of the skeptics is long forgotten, broken men will still be telling stories about what we have lost, and what we pray is still out there, coming even now to set all things right.
-- Tony Woodlief
