I Fear ´the Fear of God’ that Does not Lead to Wisdom. by Najeeb Awad

Few years ago, one of my secularist atheist friends asked me whether I agree with his conviction that the third millennium would witness the withdrawal of religion from the public square and would inaugurate the end of religious existence on the actual level of influence in human history. I disagreed with him then, zealously affirming that the third millennium would actually 1) experience a revivalism of the phenomenon of religion 2) a new image of religiosity would witness birth out of the main-stream religions that exist in the world today, and 3) religion would play again a role in shaping the world’s fate, which has not been played for centuries by these main religions. Today, in the light of the recent worldly dramatic events that either happened in relation to religion or fed itself on it, I see that what I have predicted with many thousands others around the world has become a bitter reality, the ugliness and bleakness of which make me wish that my friend’s expectation was right and mine was proven wrong.

 

Many researchers, thinkers and intellectuals around the world share a consensus that the age of modernism and modernist thought form has reached its last days in today’s world. Gone is the era of the domination of the rejection of religiosity and of undermining the rationality of the phenomenon of religion. Gone astray the theories that aim at proving that ‘God’ is just an intrinsic feeling or a pure mental imagination after these theories’ epistemological deflections were disclosed and their moral defects were scandalized. Human reason and science are no more the ones and only masters of the human existence. A tree of a new season has grown up, the sowers of which have pledged to destruct and de-construct all the modernist hegemonic, exclusivist, absolutist, colonialist and monistic ideologies. Today’s age is called ‘post-modernity’, the authority of which is rapidly expanding around the corners of the glob and its prophets proclaim the return of notions like ‘spirit’, ‘experience’ and ‘feelings’ back to the centre-stage of the public square that was for a long time occupied by reason and scientific evidentiality. It takes the form of the return of the ‘other-concerning’ as over-against the old ‘self-concerning’, the return of pluralism as over-against singularism, the return of ‘relationality’ as a challenge to ‘self-centredness’. Riding on the back of the high horse of ‘relativism’, ‘communication’, ‘intermingling’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘the multiple sources of truth’, religion proceeds back to the square of history, and witnesses birth a new form of religiosity that is part of a ‘language-game’, of a form of a discourse, and ‘God’ is a mere linguistic expression in the new form of religiosity and a key-hermeneutic tool in the contemporary religious reading of the world.

 

Thus, then, falls religions back on our heads from the window of discourse, language and textuality. Yet, this time the term ‘God’ is used as a categorizing and bracketing-out vocabulary that is supposed to differentiate me, and part me away, from any other who is not ‘me’. Its role is to defend my convictions and verify the truth of what I believe. In other words, the term ‘God’ became a weapon in the hands of the religions’ followers: each religious group uses it to fight other groups, religious or non-religious alike, when it feels that these latter do not acknowledge it and disagree with what it believes and practices, or when these latter maintain an attitude of indifference to this religious group. After ‘God’ was considered the black sheep, which the modernists took to slaughter, it became now the most lethally functional weapon religions use to protect itself, to pride about its message and to force its presence in the postmodern world.

 

Religion is now offered a chance to avenge its past defeat and to emphasize that the world needs religion. It does this by dominating the daily-life scene’s stories and becoming one of the judging and valuing criterion after starting to interfere again in the human appraisal of life’s multifarious aspects, whether this is accepted and welcomed by all people or not. Religion is back to the centre-stage of the theatre of media, politics, economics but also art. It has managed even to sneak back into the scripts of Hollywood movies. One of the movies Hollywood produced few years ago is called ‘The Return of Superman’. The movie reminds us of a classic, Nietzschean-like, heroic character we saw many cinematic productions on in the eighties of the last centuries. This new version presents a new visual depiction of the same old superman, yet this time in a content noticeably immersed with religious connotations we have not comparatively experienced in the old cinematic versions. We see Superman this time inaugurating sort-of a ‘second-coming’ to earth after he disappeared for many years. Also, the movie states clearly that he was this time sent by his father, whom we do not see, yet we know that he communicates with his son spiritually, or via their souls. We also have in the contact between the secret son of Superman and his father a reminiscence of Superman’s relation to his extraterrestrial father: the idea that the father appears in his son and the son appears in his father (in a clear implementation of the idea of the mutual interrelationship between the three divine persons in the Christian doctrine of the trinity). Superman returns to earth to be the saviour and rescuer of human beings again. The movie starts with Superman’s earthen lover writing an article titled ‘Why the World Does Not Need Superman?’ in an implication to the modernist rejection of the idea of salvation and of the character of the heavenly (or cosmic) saviour. Yet, the movie ends with her writing another article titled this time ‘Why Do the World Need Superman?’ which reflects the postmodernist salvific awakening and re-attention to the transcendent, as well as its re-obsession with the question of the salvation of the human race. This time, the salvation instrument takes the form of a heavenly source, not human one; salvation, that is, that is given to humans from an invisible source via this source’s super-heavenly son. In almost all Hollywood movies in the last century, the saviour of humanity was always an ordinary (usually the most marginal, the most abandoned, unimportant and miserable) human being, whose enemy has always an identity rooted in mythology and religious background. His weapon has always been his (rarely ‘her’) purely human intellectual and physical abilities.

 

In today’s world, religion and religiosity, religious terrorism, religious enthusiasm, interreligious relationships, the relation between religions and science, the influence of religions on politics, economy, art, culture and media, its role in extinguishing but also creating wars, etc. etc. are all major, complicated and bewildering issues, which force its dangerous and catastrophic consequences on human life and storm fiercely the fate and the future of the glob, from east to west and from north to south, from its poorest parts into its richest and from its most scientifically advanced into its most illiterate.

 

I wonder, me the publically and explicitly religious person: is this how we wished religion to gain attention again in the life of human beings? Is this the religiosity we wish the world would realize its need of? Is after ‘the madness of superiority’ we suffer from a ‘religiosity-madness’? Is after rejecting God and casting deity out of human existence we now control and abuse ‘God’ as a tool for gaining power and dominance by means of developing a polemic, judgmental and exclusivist religious discourse? Is after the obsession with freedom from religion, we are now occupied with terrorism in the name of religion?

 

I fear the world of today in its amateurish jump into the lap of religion and religiosity in this childish, reckless, reactionist and violent way. I worry from the religious discourse of postmodernity, as much as I worry from the modernist blind refutation of religiosity. I fear the ‘God’ of post-modernity as I fear the ‘super-human’ of modernity. I fear what the followers of religions do in the name of religion. I fear ‘the fear of God’ that does not lead to wisdom.