>Stated differently, the word "god" is a reification of epistemological
>notion that our knowledge is necessarily limited, that there are things "out
>there" that may shape or lives (or may not) but exceed not just our current
>state of knowledge but human capacity to understand. If we keep it as an
>epistemological postulate - ignoramus et ignorabimus - which is the true
>meaning of agnosticism - we are fine. The problem starts when start leaving
>epistemology for ontology and start reifying, and then go back to
>epistemology seeking certitude.
god is really society -- which is why people believe in some kind of deity in all cultures. this explains a great deal -- such as why our civic religion in the u.s. is individualism. in all kinds of ways, we worship the individual.
thinking of it this way helps us understand Marx's argument that criticism should not mean that we "wear the chain without consolation" but, rather, we should"break the chain and cull the living flower" The living flower is us -- society. (think of his stuff on alienation and fetishization....)
"But there is one reality that has all the characteristics that people attribute to the divine. It is not nature, nor is it metaphysical. It is society itself. For society is a force far greater than any individual. It brought us life, and it can kill us. It has tremendous power over us. Everyone depends on it in innumerable ways. We use tools and skills we did not invent; we speak a language passed on to us from others. Virtually our who material and symbolic world is given to us from society. The institutions we inhabit. ..came from the accumulated practices of others, in short, from society. God is a symbol of society.
This, it is not an illusion to feel that something exists outside of ourselves,...Moreover, this something--this feeling of our dependence on society--exists simultaneously outside and inside ourselves. In religions there is always a connection between the sacred world beyond us and the sacred world within us. ...
Most intimately of all, our very consciousness is social. We think in words, but we did not invent them. We could not think at all if we did not have ideas, and we guide our behavior by certain ideals. But neither ideas nor ideals could have been created by ourselves alone. Ideas and ideals must have something _gneral_ about them; they are concepts that transcend the particular and that make out each particular thing to be an example of a larger class of things. But nature always presents itself to us as particulars, never as generalities. ...
The only way we can transcend the hear-and-now of _this_ particular thing as _this_ particular place is to put ourselves on another vantage point, one that cuts across time and space. This is what society does. Hence, whenever we think, we do so by means of concepts that originated in social communication. Communication must always jump above any one person's particular viewpoint to a bridge of generally connecting one person's reality with another's Social communication is what creates our basic repertoire of ideas, insofar as ideas are abstract concepts. Since we use these ideas to think with, our own minds are permeated by society. We cannot escape society, even when we are alone. As long as we are conscious, society is implicitly there.
Thus society is both outside us and within the very core of our consciousness. This is what makes the symbolism of religion so very powerful: it expresses the essential facts of our human existence. That is why religious symbolism has incorporated ideas of human identity as well as of social obligation.... And since religion symbolizes the major facts of society, it has always had to make room for social conflict in its system of symbols. Since societies are never totally unified, religion must always describe the existence of rival gods, heretics, evil spirits, or the devil. The symbolism of religion mirrors the social world.
--Randall Collins, "The Sociology of God" in _Sociological Insight_. p. 35-7
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling