Day 2: Is God Still Necessary?

From: Douglas Rushkoff To: Andy Bachman Subject: The line you won’t cross

Dear Andy,

“Means” and “ends” are only relevant when we’re stuck in this darned illusion of linear time. On the one hand, I see God as a great excuse—a great image we can use—to go ahead and do good works. So, in this sense, he’s a means.

But, since I also happen to see God as more of a future unfolding than as an historical Creator, God is also an “end.” Mitzvot coming into full consciousness. Matter and energy becoming aware of themselves, and progressing to a consciously enacted ethic.

I think the problem today is that, like our politically motivated evangelists, almost everyone in America has become illiterate and image-oriented. Brand-focused. Our mythos has devolved into chronos and logos, neither of which allow for the reconciliation of myriad perceptions. There’s a bit too much right and wrong (or Right and Left), too much emotionally charged knee-jerk reaction, and not enough thought.

This is because hot-button issues like third-trimester fetuses or the War on Terrorism provoke responses more easily. As Karl Rove learned early on, send people letters saying that your opponent wants to make the Bible illegal, and they’ll get up in arms (he actually did this). When people are encouraged to regress to a childlike state, they make more immature decisions, and cling to less dimensional, parental understandings of deity.

It is too late to entertain these notions as a first step in bringing people out of the hypnosis perpetrated by their political and so-called religious leaders. It’s time to get tougher.

For a rabbi in America, that’s a lot harder to do than for a secular writer. There are people depending on you to uphold their understanding of who God is. I mean, don’t you have people come to you who believe outrageous things? Don’t you want to whack them on the head? Is it only those who come with spirited intellectual arguments who get the full weight of your rabbinic perspective? Or do you also lay it on those with superstitious and regressed relationships to God?

In other words, I know there’s a line you won’t cross on the Godlessness side of the equation. Is there a line you won’t cross on the other?

—Douglas

 

From: Andy Bachman To: Douglas Rushkoff Subject: The Messiah’s not coming anytime soon

Dear Douglas,

When I was Hillel director at NYU, a young student came into my office after 9/11, clearly traumatized by the event, and explained to me that after smoking marijuana for the past several days, getting no sleep, and desperately trying to understand what suddenly made her world into a radically different place, she concluded, “I think the Messiah is coming.”

I said, “No, he’s not. Some very bad people did horrific things with their sick human ingenuity and killed thousands of people. You need help.” And I got her to a counselor on campus to help her lay off the pot and try to see things a bit more clearly.

Though God is not a means, in dark times such as these God gets used as a means by all manner of people, on every shade of the spectrum. During certain traumatic spasms of history, this is what some people do with God. One of the only exceptions was the communist and fascist governments’ slaughter of millions of Europeans. Both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were godless secular madhouses, which, as historians have pointed out, erected religious-like rites around their totalitarian leadership and placed an atheist Almighty at the center.

When people can’t explain the world or regret losing control over events, they reach for an all-encompassing answer—God, religion, system—and find comfort there. No news in my
telling you that!

It takes a long time for people to catch on, but once they do, as with anything else (fashion, music, rumors, and so on) fervor spreads like wildfire. That’s what we have with religion in America and religion in the world today. Generations have allowed long-neglected problems (poverty, war, scarce resources) to fester, so they seek solutions in the apocalyptic brush of reactionary, religious paint. To the innocent, religion is a salve, a refuge, a comfort from the storm of societal dystopia. But one look at President Bush signing into permanent law $70 billion in tax cuts in front of a rogue’s gallery of well-fed white males, and you have a whole new Golden Calf incident all over again.

Here’s what I mean.

Moses is up on the Mountain, trying to get it right. The people down below don’t have the time. They want nothing less than immediate answers, and they want it to look good, too. And so resources are consolidated, transformed into a material, golden, divine being, and delivered as the redemptive tool to a mass hungering for instant gratification.

Sound familiar?

To our ever-enduring tragedy, the Calf is reborn over and over as a cultural and historical motif throughout history.

By the way, to finally answer your question: I have never chased anyone out of my office Shammai style. I definitely strive to take the Hillel approach for certain stubborn minds: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.

If only people would listen!

—Andy

Next: "God-centered fascism" or the root of our highest ideals?