On Page 92 of his book, The Passionate State of Mind, Eric Hoffer writes one entry which I will quote and then comment on.
Hoffer: “ 162
It is perhaps true that each era demands a particular kind of God.”
My response: I agree and have argued this elsewhere. Secular humanists, being atheists or agnostics or theologically indifferent, suggest that humans, as they evolve in culture, knowledge, and sophistication of consciousness, fabricate a God or gods that reflect their spiritual (the spiritual may not exist, they claim), semantic, evaluative or metaphysical needs for meaning, that posing a sympathetic God that runs parallel to the metanarrative of a historically situated generation.
I do not disagree that humans invent a version of God that matches the needs and limited consciousness of each generation, wherever it is at, but this is not the whole story.
Rather, God exists and plays an active role in religious formation: God reveals Deself to successive generations as successive deities, names, and personalities that the people of that generation are able to understand, feel attracted to and do business with.
These names, various deities and personalities are not fake—at least the good deities are not fake or evil—or transitory and may even be fruitfully worshiped hundreds or thousands of years after humans and moved on, abandoning these manifestations of these benevolent deities.
God wants progressing, developing humankind to worship De, and, as they grow in consciousness, love and understanding, God reveals Deself to them in ways they, in consecutive generations, can relate to God. God will not push us beyond what we can handle. It is not kind or merciful to push poor humans of limited intelligence, and a near-fatal weakness of being radically conservative and painfully superstitious about change or being drastically introduced to new ways of doing things.
As humans slowly, excruciatingly move forward and upward towards thinking, self-realizing, and loving God virtuously and piously, then God can introduce to them, via a prophet, a new deity, or deities. It is not out with the old, and in with the new: rather it is adding or introducing new members to the pantheon of benevolent deities; people can worship anywhere along this line, but worship they should and must, if they would elicit divine approval.
Hoffer: “There are eras when people can believe in God far off in heaven, never to be seen, and eras when they need a tangible God. Our age, it seems, needs a tangible God, be it a Hitler, a Stalin, or a Father Divine.”
My response: God exists spiritually and physically; humans exist spiritually and physically. We are innately weakened, sickened, prone to madness and cruel outrage, if our spiritual craving is not met through proper, wholesome religious channels, worshiping a benevolent deity.
The Age of Enlightenment made Westerners feel alienated from God, each other, nature, and oneself, when Modernists introduced the idea of God to be Deistically encountered and worshiped. The loss of faith was unbearable.
Then people lived through the 20th century with scientism, humanism, world wars, totalitarianism, postmodernism, mass movements and holy causes. Whatever vestiges of faith in a good deity, a tangible loving deity like Jesus, still existed by 1985, are now in danger of going extinct today.
People, frustrated and desperate to find a faith and deity to worship and serve as their cause in which they are able to hide successfully from their spoiled lives, their unwanted selves, will find a tangible deity to worship, either a neo-attraction to a great deity like Jesus, or they will find false, wicked gods like Hitler, Stalin or Satan to serve. They will invent meaning, fraudulent, self-contradictory, and wicked faiths, if necessary, but they will have meaning in their lives, a deity, mass movement, abstraction, or holy cause to worship, or they will invent it.
It would be better for all to provide people with benevolent deities to worship. The human requirement for religious comfort, the bottomless need for satiating spiritual hunger, cannot be extinguished or rationally explained away by haughty intellectuals; spiritual hunger, suppressed, denied, and wronged, will come back with a vengeance--as a holy cause and accompanying demonic demigod.
If the young can be instructed to self-realize as supercitizens, and to serve the benevolent deity of their choice, their spiritual hunger could be fed and satisfied, without social and political convulsions resulting from humankind torn up over spiritual hunger being thwarted and not met.
Hoffer: “Is this primitive need for a tangible God somehow connected to a lack of faith in the future?”
My response: Hoffer is an atheist with a profoundly religious worldview, perhaps as a lapsed illegal Jewish immigrant from Bavaria, who retains his cultural values, though he was ever after a secular thinker.
As an idiosyncratic theist, I here might quibble with Hoffer a bit. I do not know that the need for God, tangible or intangible (an abstract, remote, never-heard-from Prime Mover that created the world and then remains incommunicado, though existent and present in heaven), is a primitive need. This need is real and wholesome, and it may be negatively primitive in the sense of being childish and a sign of human weakness, a lack of self-esteem, an inability to survive on our own without an immediate, emotional, complex, daily relationship with a deity that we converse with in person 12 times per day, but I deny this.
Rather, I think this need is strong, healthy, loving, and consistent with an independent-minded, self-reliant believer—with high self-esteem--in God, who recognizes that God exists, and that this individual is willing to accept God’s existence and right to command human worship, obedience, and willingness to do our share to grow the kingdom on earth of the good deity/good deities.
This deep, powerful, unavoidable hunger to meet and know God, this primitive need for God, as tangible or intangible, is positively primitive in that it is an innate, primordial drive that suffuses the being and consciousness of every human being. This need is so strong, that either ultimate meaning (a relationship with a good deity) is recognized, activated, and practiced by every human daily, or the ism worshiped will be a holy cause, a fetishized ism, sickening and dark, whose evil deity will be worshiped by those who denied meeting their need for ultimate meaning by swearing fealty to a good deity. This need may be primitive, but, more so, it is brilliant, fulfilling and rationally—not just sentimentally—a need to be met in even the most subtle, worldly existent.
Does the need for a tangible God indicate a lack of human faith in the future? It may well be a fact, and it is a sign that we are weak, vulnerable, and need a tangible God to lean to stay sane and keep going forward. I would not regard this trait as a negative so much as just reality, or even a positive starting point, but I would recommend that an individuating believer, of immense competence, creativity, love, and confidence, would be well-served to acknowledge this need while approaching respectfully and with adoration a divinity that affirms the beauty and obligation for humans to maverize while being faithful, holy and virtuous.
It could be too that humans running in packs, not individuating, and living in accordance with evil, primitive, backwards altruist-collectivist morality, were so individually lacking self-esteem, that it is to be expected that they had no faith in the future, deepening excessively their dependency (They could not face the future based on their own efforts, talents and internal resources.)n God, viewed as tangibly or intangibly accessible.
If my theory is right, and the Divine Couple, the good deities and the Good Spirits are individuators and individualists, they will not require and do not approve of excessive human dependency and cloying, theatrical, self-debasing communing with said good spirits and good deities.
Hoffer: “The ancient Jews, who were the first to have faith in an invisible God, were possessed of a vivid faith in the future. Alone among the nations of antiquity they expected the future to surpass the present and the past. Apparently when we hope ‘for what we see not,’ we can also believe in what see not. It is perhaps a symptom of the hopelessness of our times that we need idols to worship.”
My response: It might be that Hoffer the genius, ever tapping into objective truth—and in spite of his atheistic revulsion against the ineradicable, “primitive” human search for ultimate meaning (God)—has captured something terribly, religiously significant and important here.
If the ancient Jews were God’s chosen people, and they were, and Yahweh was a bit an Individualist and Individuator, Yahweh would coax and educate these sheepherders and farmers to worship Yahweh as incipient individualists (still groupists and altruists, but more individualistic and egoistic than their pagan neighbors); this would be the birth of worshiping an intangible, invisible Father Sky God.
If the Hebrews became more individualistic, then they would discover the need for morality. If they thought that being moral could make one’s life better here in this world, and perhaps in the next (the other world in a future, after-life existence), then being moral and individualistic meant that activism pays off. With their lives guided by a weakened but entrenched egoism-altruism, they soon decided that the future could be better than the present or past, so they begin to have faith in the future. Hoffer is original in identifying that, if people have hope, they can face the future with some bravery and confidence.
Where people lack hope, they want a tangible, visible God and they have no hope in the future. To make this worse, it seems patent to me that when people are not egoistic, they lack self-esteem: when one has no faith in oneself, one loses hope, and then one has no sturdy faith in God or the future. When people are egoistic and confident, then they have faith in themselves, in God and in the future.
When we hope in what we see not, we can believe in what we see not. Still, we need to worship God in De’s transcendent, intangible aspect as well as in God as in De’s tangible, visible and immediate mode of existing. God reveals Deself to us both ways at same time without conflict or contradiction; it can all be balanced and reconciled honorably in the complex believers relationship with her chosen divinity.
We are altruists and groupists in our day, but we have no hope for the future so we worship idols (mass movements, gurus and holy causes) as poor substitutes for even a traditional relationship with a good deity.
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