Musings on God: half of Her is missing

I am not a theologian, and much of this post may seem pompous and amateurish, but here goes

There are two general attributes ascribed to God (as if He/She could be described…) – transcendence and immanence. I will call them the God of power/magic and the inner light, the God of love. Neither are in themselves good or bad. The abuse that can be made of the God of power is obvious, but , in modern business-speak, it’s no good having a strategy if you do not have an implementation plan. The inner light is more obviously appealing – but not if it leads to quietism and indifference, the two curses of Indian religions.

All the great religions have room for both attributes, although they come at them from different directions . At one extreme is Buddhism, so inwardly directed and seemingly without God that it is amazing that it could create gods of power – but that is what the boddhisatvas become in the Mahayana, because the faithful needed them to intercede for them.

At the other extreme is Islam. The warrior Prophet executing his enemies, and an uncompromising worldly theocracy, seems unpromising candidates for the inner light . Yet by the 9^th century, probably under the influence of contact with India, Sufism became established, and has been one of most powerful and beautiful mystical traditions of love for God and fellow man.

The old gods of power are obsolete – they have been superceded by science. It can explain everything except “why?” and the traditional religions are not much good at that either. Traditional Christianity, which tried to combine reason and faith, is merely dying as a result. Islam and Christian fundamentalism are both in denial (literalism cannot be reconciled with science: the order of creation in both Genesis and in the Koran is not in line with modern cosmology). One of the most tragic figures in Islam is Al Ghazali, the great 11^th century philosopher. He made Sufism acceptable in the Sunni mainstream, but he also discovered scepticism seven hundred years before David Hume. He concluded that God recreates the world each moment by acts of unconstrained will – there are no laws. End of Islamic science, which had been flourishing for three hundred years (Christians since Hume’s day took the opposite conclusion –there is no God; their natural laws work too well)

The other issue is that none of the three dynamically flourishing religions currently has any room for the inner light. Sufism is pretty moribund ( I think Spengler has a main post on this somewhere). Secularism has no problem with its God of power, and is not bereft of love and compassion for others, but it’s directed to greed and the ego, while the core of any belief which makes men alive and happy, is mutual love, and submission to, a higher power. Despite the “born again” phenomenon, the same narrow aim seems to characterise the Evangelical Christianity which Spengler puts so much faith in, greed being the besetting sin of Puritanism.

Apart from Oswald Spengler style resignation to History, what is to be done? The absence of the inner light is clear from the spiritual shopping in the East done by Westerners, but you cannot pick-and-mix from a tradition. Western Buddhism is just another Protestant sect, dedicated to self improvement, which misses the point.

A citizen of a great Western country - also a member of a zealous, exclusive, Middle Eastern faith which refuses to “integrate”, and whose violent rebellions are doomed to fail. He is caught between two cultures, at home in neither – and invents a great religion. Yep, that’s St.Paul. Perhaps his successor is already alive in Bradford or Corbeil-Essonnes today…. But no-one can consciously become a religious prophet.