Sophistication, more often than not, comes complete with toilet paper stuck to the heel of your shoe. We enter the world seeking to look au courant. We carry with us the latest news, the latest opinions, the latest tastes, all while wearing the latest clothes. We think we’ve reached the summit of human evolution, and then, right when everyone is looking, we start picking nits off our neighbors and eating them.
It was the Frenchman August Comte who first suggested that the history of any given culture could be divided into three epochs. The first was the religious age, wherein all of the great questions of live are answered through a religious approach. Everything from death to drought, from birth to prosperity would be understood as the workings of God or of the gods. As man matured he enters into the philosophical stage. Here all the great questions find their answers in the fertile field of philosophy. Man reached the highest maturity, however, when he entered into the scientific age, where science is the source of all our answers. Isn’t it just like us to create a worldview wherein in the end all that is good and right turns out to be ta-da, us.
Something has gone wrong on Comte’s road to paradise. Science hasn’t delivered the goods, and so we are back to the deity menagerie. Those ancient and backward cultures once had a god for everything. The Sun God out dueled the rain God, and that’s why there was a drought. The thunder God was routed in the same battle. Not so for we who are higher up the evolutionary chain. We don’t have a god for everything. Instead we have a god for everybody. The god we actually worship is the god of personal peace and affluence. The god we claim to submit to is God-to-me.
Of course it can, depending on how you look at it, either be terribly easy or terribly hard to submit to God-to-me. The difficulty is that scarcely have you wished for something, and getting it is suddenly God-to-me’s command. That is, it’s kind of hard to bow down to that which you have made with your own hands. On the other hand, the best attribute of God-to-me is that His will corresponds exactly with my own. That’s why I made him in the first place. This is our so called progress. Those fools in loin clothes that came before us fashioned statues of wood and silver. They made for themselves aids to worship, understanding perfectly well that the statues they bowed before were not gods, but merely symbols of gods. After all, can a man make a god?
It took millennia for the mind of man to sink low enough that he could speak of God-to-me without blushing for the insanity of it all. “Well, God-to-me is sort of like this amorphous life force, effused through with love. It makes no demands on me. It only wants me to be happy, and it trusts me to determine the path that will lead to my happiness.” If the gods of science could have constructed a time machine such that one of these ancient stone worshipping rubes could hear our modern sophisticate speak such words, what do you think he would say. “I’m sorry, are you talking about god or your statue? I understand how a man can make a statue of his Maker. What I can’t fathom is how a man can actually make his Maker. If you can actually construct your god, than how could He have ever constructed you? You, O modern one, must solve your rather primitive chicken and egg problem.”
This, however, is where we have come to. This is accepted wisdom, the very creed of our culture- everyone gets to make god in their own image. To argue with this folly is to offend, uh, what exactly? If we all make our own gods, here’s what I propose. I am going to construct a god who not only made me, but made everyone else. He has delivered law not only to me, but to everyone else. And everyone is obligated to obey and worship the god of my making.
Relativism of any sort, theological or ethical, is a workable solipsism, until our worlds collide. That is, we can indeed all get along with our own “God-to-me’s” as long as we never have our worlds intersect. What do we do, however, if God-to-me thinks you should give me your car, while God-to-you thinks I should take a long walk on a short pier? Whose god wins, and how do we decide?
This is why the peace promised by postmodernism will always and swiftly descend into the war of fascism soon enough. The gods we construct can only wrestle through us, and whomever builds the biggest army wins. Thus whether or not unborn children may be put to death comes down to how many votes this party or that can garner. When there is nothing above the sun, sooner or later everything below the sun devolves into perpetual war.
This is why we must pray for the peace of Babylon, because we are getting caught in the crossfire of competing false gods. When those outside the kingdom begin whimpering “Why can’t we all just get along?” soon enough those of us who affirm the living and true God find ourselves under the gun. We are the extremists, the fundamentalists, the enemies of tolerance that must be either re-educated, put on reservations, or removed from the planet. May we have the courage to tear down their foolish and silent gods, knowing with confidence that our God, the one who made us, not the one we have made, reigns.