Humanism as Worship
by Karim • July 26, 2010 • Philosophy, Theology & Religion • 4 Comments
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’
— Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Matthew 25:34-40 (NIV)
The burden of consummating God’s success rests squarely on the shoulders of humanity.
If we are God’s creation, then we are also Their experiment. As such, it is only through our achievements and deficiencies here on earth that Their success or failure can be determined. Our God’s right to divine claim exists in direct proportion to our austerity in this fleshy life. In this way, tribute to the Creator cannot be paid only through quiet reflection, but must be waged actively and with zealous devotion to the progress of humanity. In order to love God, we must first love man; for we are Their creation, and what fool is fascinated by the cobbler while traversing indignantly on blackened soles?
We determine the substance of our God by the quality of our actions. If those actions are insubstantial in our complacency and apathy for the sacral privilege of having existed and even lived, then much as though we make ourselves inconsequential, we also snub God out of any meaningful quality of existence. We cannot undo God, be assured and I am not claiming that our incompetence renders us atheists; though if humanity is worship and living its church, then it does make us a lazy congregation, and all the apolitical laity are sleeping in the sweeping pews of civilization. The Creator of an irrelevant thing renders Themselves illogical. The God that speaks to a sleeping congregation serves no purpose but to provide a consistent droning sound by which their unproductive slumber is made all the more gentle in its insolence as they and They slip deeper into unconsciousness. We being the physically expressed qualities of a metaphysical Divine, give it its physical substance, and if we lack momentum, then we relegate God from a position of sentience to that of a stone. And a stone becomes no more useful when spelled with a capital S.
This is our interesting dilemma: to act upon each other in kindness and charity reflects these qualities on God, which in turn shifts God’s motive factor for our creation and continuity as having been from those same qualities. This then increases the value of our worship, because it increases the value of God. The propensity of our meaningful worship through action in life makes life itself both a gift and a responsibility to God to maintain Their image for posterity. The coffers of our divine reason for being are only as great as the contributions we are willing to make. The question now is, are we willing to tithe for humanity or will we continue to greedily hoard the contents of our lives to ourselves?
I find it somewhat troubling that all too often your prose is to me what Kant’s is to you. In plain words, absolutely exhausting.
I don’t intend that as the inane mockery you’ve come to expect from me; I mean to say that either I am too dimwitted to navigate the electric complex of your restless mind, or you need to attempt to write in a language more digestible for the Everyman. That is unless you’re comfortable with only a fraction of humanity being able to weather the storm of your dense prose to arrive at the fundamental ideas. If it’s all about you, by all means, continue using a collective pronoun to refer to God (etc.).
I think what you said here is that God wants us to be good, and your version of being good is to live to our fullest potential for the sake of human progress, rather than our self interest. There’s some sentiment in there about humanistic spirituality. Or something like that. If I could muster the energy to reread this, I might be able to walk my rounds in closer to the black, but I’m gonna call it good and settle for a Kentucky-windage interpretation.
So to be clear, what I’ve tried to say here is simply this: Can you write dumber please? I think you would express yourself better in doing so.
Just my take.
Or maybe you wouldn’t “express yourself better,” necessarily. Rather, you would make your ideas more accessible for dunces like me.
Think of it like this: If Fever Ray sold out and started making really good pop, maybe everyone would suddenly love her on the same scale as, say, Lady Gaga. That’s what I want you to do — sell out so dumb people want to listen to you too.
That’s it. I’ll be the Lady Gaga of philosophy.
I leap from point to point in these entries without much sympathy for explanation. I know it can be pretty dense, but usually these blog writings are more for personal reference for when I finally decide I’m ready to publish anything, at which point I’ll try to make my writing as accessible as possible without losing the point or poetry of it.