Nature's Unruly Mob by Gilk

Author:Gilk [Gilk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9781498253840
Google: eScczgEACAAJ
Publisher: Wipf & Stock Publishers
Published: 2009-06-03T03:56:33+00:00

9

The Industry of Religion

The idea of calling institutionalized religion an industry raises some interesting possibilities. In fundamentalist religion, there is a clear and unhesitating assertion that the entirety of life, the whole of nature, is the product of “God’s Plan.” One hears talk of “God’s Blueprint.” In early Deist thought, God was cast as Master Mechanic of the clockwork universe who, although retired from the present scene, was still Designer in Chief. In all these conceptions, the Creator is depicted as the Cosmic Developer with a surpassingly rational male mind. This is a God of awesome transcendent power, outside of and beyond nature.

Intellectually, it is a short step from a theological blueprint to a bureaucratic organizational chart. Jerry Mander paints a very clear picture:

Judeo-Christian religions are a model of hierarchical structure: one God above all, certain humans above other humans, and humans over nature. Political and economic systems are similarly arranged: Organized along rigid hierarchical lines, all of nature’s resources are regarded only in terms of how they serve the one god—the god of growth and expansion. In this way, all of these systems are missionary; they are into dominance. And through their mutual collusion, they form a seamless web around our lives. They are the creators and enforcers of our beliefs. We live inside these forms, are imbued with them, and they justify our behaviors. In turn, we believe in their viability and superiority largely because they prove effective: They gain power.1

Bureaucracy replicates what is allegedly God’s primal pattern or impulse: a thorough ordering of society from the top down, with sovereign power in charge and in control. It seems credible to suggest, therefore, that mechanistic images of society have at least some of their roots (if it can be said that mechanistic images have roots) in religious conceptions. Certainly not all religious ideas or images are mechanistic; but let us consider what excessive rationalization has done to religious sensibility, and let us do so by attending to the thought of some additional weighty thinkers. First, from Man and Technics, Oswald Spengler:

But it is of the tragedy of the time that this unfettered human thought can no longer grasp its own consequences. Technics has become as esoteric as the higher mathematics which it uses, while physical theory has refined its intellectual abstractions from phenomena to such a pitch that (without clearly perceiving the fact) it has reached the pure foundations of human knowing. The mechanization of the world has entered a phase of highly dangerous over-tension.2

In behalf of “physical theory” and “intellectual abstractions,” it is necessary to point out that in the many decades since Spengler penned his words there has arisen a feisty band of impeccably trained scientists who hold that Earth is a living being and that life itself is sacred. These scientists are, of course, regarded as the hippies and beatniks, the bohemians and animists, of what is loosely called the scientific community; but the sheer fact that such dissenting scientists exist and that their conclusions

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