Monotheism of an absolute sort has a high probability of producing a rather boring story. One ultimate will, with no opposition, no rival, no equal. We see it depicted in Genesis 1 to at least a certain extent. Even if the origin of the original chaos is left unaddressed, we still have a depiction of a will that speaks and it is done, with no other characters unless that sovereign entity wills them to be. If he wills, they cease to be. It makes an odd and somewhat ill-fitting prelude to the story that actually follows it in the rest of the Bible.
A student recently lent me a copy of
Van Helsing
, which for some reason I missed seeing when it came out. It is full of action, monsters, rebels against God. It has twists and turns of plot, and where God is and why God allows these creatures to roam the darkness and terrorize humanity is unclear. It certainly seems to depict a world that is not monotheistic in any meaningful sense.
Humans have a low tolerance for absolute monotheism, perhaps because of our experience of the complications of real life and of rival wills conflicting with our own. We invent stories of monsters, of angels both upright and fallen. We invent rivals for God in stories which are of course the product of our own hearts.
I find myself intrigued by all this. Perhaps it is symptomatic of having spent so much time in Transylvania, and having found it far less terrifying, and at the same time far more interesting, than the typical cinematic depictions.
In the real world we inhabit, there certainly are “monsters” – there are among other things microorganisms which ravish and damage and terrorize, and humans who do the same. Yet there seems to be a certain irony in the other side of the coin. Our world seems to be absent of those supernatural intermediary figures of good and evil that religious imaginations have tended to populate it with. Could it be that the non-existence of figures popular in allegedly monotheistic traditions could turn out to be one of the best arguments for monotheism? How ironic would that be?
On a related note, in my religion and science fiction class recently we looked at Scientology. While it is easy to be dismissive of a religion so recent, founded in more ways than one on science fiction, and with figures like Tom Cruise associated with it, its popularity presumably has to do with the fact that it is felt to be therapeutic by many of its practitioners. I suspect that one reason why humans are attracted to Scientology’s offer to remove negative engrams is the same as the reason people are attracted to the offer of a
Pentecostal preacher to cast out a spirit of alcoholism in the name of Jesus. It is helpful for us to put a label on our problems, to personify or symbolize them. This process makes it easier to address them than as the nebulous web of habits, influences, experiences and much else the tangled cords of which vanish from sight into our subconscious, the place from whence these entities of our imagination come forth. Unless we find ways of envisaging these complex realities in simple and manageable ways, we find it hard to think about our issues, much less address them effectively.
I’ve just finished reading the book Beyond the God Delusion
by Richard Grigg. Its author advocates for a pantheistic “radical theology.” Thinking of God as personal is viewed by Grigg as something worth preserving nevertheless, since he believes we need such language as one of the few ways we can relate to the ultimate. He makes a comparison to a symbol like the American flag, which helps us think about America in a way that simplifies the reality of our diversity, the sheer number of people that make up the country, and all its varied aspects.
Is this why supposedly monotheistic systems produce stories that seem to be anything but monotheistic? Are the monsters we invent the only way we can personify the evils we seek to face and confront, evils which like Castle Dracula or werewolf venom in the movie Van Helsing, can be found within the hearts and homes of heroes, and not merely as a demonized other?
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