Eco: God isn't big enough for some people

[ananda]

This article was published a few days ago and I just found it at that awful Randian, neocon site that I won't mention by name but sometimes puts out great articles.

It's Eco at his usual brilliant, incisive and scholarly best, giving new meaning and wonder to the name nerd.

http://www.freedomunderground.org/view.php?v=3&t=3&aid=20990

Here's the intro and my favorite quote.

INTRO:
God isn't big enough for some people
By Umberto Eco -- (27/11/2005)

We are now approaching the critical time of the year for shops and supermarkets: the month before Christmas is the four weeks when stores of all kinds sell their products fastest. Father Christmas means one thing to children: presents. He has no connection with the original St Nicholas, who performed a miracle in providing dowries for three poor sisters, thereby enabling them to marry and escape a life of prostitution.

Human beings are religious animals. It is psychologically very hard to go through life without the justification, and the hope, provided by religion. You can see this in the positivist scientists of the 19th century.

They insisted that they were describing the universe in rigorously materialistic terms - yet at night they attended seances and tried to summon up the spirits of the dead. Even today, I frequently meet scientists who, outside their own narrow discipline, are superstitious - to such an extent that it sometimes seems to me that to be a rigorous unbeliever today, you have to be a philosopher. Or perhaps a priest.

And we need to justify our lives to ourselves and to other people. Money is an instrument. It is not a value - but we need values as well as instruments, ends as well as means. The great problem faced by human beings is finding a way to accept the fact that each of us will die.
END OF INTRO

========

MY FAVORITE QUOTE:
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." Whoever said it - he was right. We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity.

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.
UNQUOTE

Well, I have to admit that I loved TdVC, but I agree with Eco, via Jung, that people must believe in something with the fervor of religiosity... even if it's the way Freud substituted sex for God, as Jung saw it... and the way Americans worship money.

If Nietzsche were to write Twilight of the Idols today, I think we would be seeing the gotterdammerung of the American way of life.

Sue

[Warpy]

1. Actually, god may be too big for conspicuous Christians

The proof of that is in how they keep trying to shove god into a little box, restricting him to one text, denying all other possibilities including the scientific ones, trying to make him all comfortably easy to absorb in one sitting with a bowl of popcorn.

If you're going to believe in a god, why believe in such a small, restricted one?

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Exactly!

[Hardrada]

3. There was a book by a mainstream Christian pastor

and writer back in the 1960's. It was called "Your God Is Too Small!"

And was on this very topic.

[omega minimo]

4. "trying to make him"

"Him"



O8)