{"id":35,"date":"2012-11-12T17:41:50","date_gmt":"2012-11-12T22:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/?p=35"},"modified":"2013-07-17T21:15:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-18T01:15:39","slug":"the-holy-ghost-in-the-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/the-holy-ghost-in-the-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Holy Ghost in the Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every time I see that TV commercial for\"Ghost<\/a> the Christian Mingle dating service, I am torn between the rival urges to vomit and to laugh. Please understand me: my reactions stem not from any anti-Evangelical animus, though, as you know, I am pleased to have put those childish things behind me many years ago now. Nor do I even think the Born-Again dating computer idea is a bad one. The pain of loneliness is a severe one, and I am happy when people find a kindred spirit and a welcome heart. I can even appreciate the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Christians only\u00e2\u20ac\u009d policy. Why invite unnecessary obstacles and tensions by initiating a relationship with someone who does not share your deepest beliefs? You won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to have to sacrifice your beliefs (and with them your integrity) in favor of your heart\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s desire. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What shall it profit a man if he gains the world but loses his own soul in the bargain?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Amen.
\nInitially, I cannot help thinking these poor Christians are being exploited, but that is probably groundless. What gets my hackles up is the pretentious claim that this electronic lonely hearts club is God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s medium for setting you up with a mate, or at least a date, like the Reverend Moon matching you up, by inspired intuition, with a partner you have never even met before. The commercial\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pitch smacks of medicine show rhetoric, of the boasts of TV evangelists. But there is a deeper and more important issue here. Christian Mingle embodies, of all things, a reductive and insidious God concept.
\nThe commercial promises the viewer God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s guidance through the medium of their computers. When people are desperate enough to try this gambit, it means they have given up on their prayers to God to reveal his choice for the lonely Christian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mate. It is to admit that no name or picture will come in a dream or a still small voice. In other words, God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s will is not going to be revealed directly. One has given up on miracle and switched to providence, that tendency to look at the state and outcome of mundane events as having been orchestrated by the deity behind the scenes and through secondary causes.
\nWe see the same phenomenon when we look at the advice given to earnest young Evangelicals for vocational choice: should Tim become a missionary or should he serve Christ \u00e2\u20ac\u0153under cover\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in a secular occupation? And if so, how to choose the line of work? Evangelical counselors are reality-minded enough not to encourage their youth to rely on voices from heaven or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153feeling led.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d They know they would be inviting trouble through such subjectivity. Remember the joke that these very people sometimes tell as a cautionary tale. Some guy, seeking God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s will for his life, prays, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Show me your will\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and lets his Bible fall open randomly. Closing his eyes, he stabs a finger at the text, which happens to read, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Judas went out and hanged himself.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Spooked, he tries again, only this time he comes up with the verse, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Go thou and do likewise.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Really alarmed now, he makes one last attempt and gets \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What thou doest, do quickly.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d One hopes he did not carry out the suicidal mandate of his imagined oracle but instead concluded that this was not the method to pursue!
\nSo, counselors tell him, he ought to assess his interests and abilities, ask himself what work would make him feel satisfaction, on the assumption that God has assigned him his talents and proclivities and hence wants him to pursue them. Check into the jobs that interest you. Talk with people already thus employed. In other words, it is simple common sense, good advice. It assumes that God is at work through secondary causes. Maybe so.
\nBut then there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Occam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Razor, the principle of simplicity. If apparent and immediate factors are sufficient to account for a phenomenon, then it becomes superfluous to posit some other, more elaborate causal factor. My old pal Lin Carter, the fantasy writer, used to amuse himself by saying a little incantation before leaving his apartment: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Go, gnomes, and cause money to come!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Then Lin (often a poor man\u00e2\u20ac\u201dyou know how it is with us writers) would look down on the ground, on the sidewalks, as he ran his errands for the day, and if he spotted spare change, he would pick it up and playfully give credit to the gnomes. He didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe in gnomes, of course. He knew his good fortune was attributable to people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tendency to pull keys or a handkerchief out of a pocket without noticing that coins are dislodged along with it.
\nI have to think that crediting God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s providence for a good romantic match is no different from Lin Carter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s thanking the gnomes, only Lin was fully aware that he was playing a game. You might ask, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What harm is done in either case?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d None, in these cases. But there are others where it is more dangerous. How about the submission of billions of people to religious institutions which are the creations of human beings like themselves but who claim to be the mouthpieces of the gods. The Iranian mullahs. The Roman Catholic Church. The Protestant megachurches with their Bible ventriloquists barking marching orders from the pulpit.
\nLet me hasten to admit that there is<\/em> a superhuman dimension to all such institutions, and not just religious ones. Lutheran sociologist Peter Berger (see Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality<\/em> and Berger, The Sacred Canopy<\/em>) explains how institutions of all sorts are the creations of mere human beings but soon come to possess a reality above and beyond the humans that created them. Governments, societies, religions, corporations, you name it, they all come to dominate the people they also serve. A second generation arises, whose forbears created these entities (the Constitution, the Creed, the Papacy, etc.). These people did not create the institutions they have inherited, and so they do not experience them as human creations at all. Rather, they are simply given<\/em>, part of the landscape of the reality people are born into. Several institutions stand ready right outside the delivery room to baptize, to circumcise, to register, to catechize, to indoctrinate.
\nAs Jacques Lacan says, one only becomes a person, a subject<\/em>ivity of a specific kind, by becoming subject<\/em> to what he calls \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the law of the father.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d DeLeeuze and Guatari (in the Anti-Oedipus<\/em>) urge their readers to affirm their freedom by repudiating this defining yoke. Such rebellion will look something like insanity, as it did to the Soviet government when they used to send political dissidents to the gulag as mental patients to the asylum. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t agree with reality as the State defines it? Then you are insane, Comrade!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Certainly, many have regarded me as crazy or at least heretical for views I hold. But I take my clue from Patrick McGoohan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s TV series The Prisoner<\/em>: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I am not a number. I am a free man!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d At least as free as I can be from the cookie cutter catechism of the institutions around me. That doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean I cannot approve and agree with some or many things they do or say. It just means that the choice, and the obligation to make an informed choice, belong to me. I am not sure that Nietzsche\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153transvaluation of values\u00e2\u20ac\u009d means much more than that. It does, however, mean at least that.
\nI am far from where I started. If lonely Christians find mates through something like Christian Mingle, good for them. But I believe that many pretty harmless things hint at tendencies, principles, realities that underlie them and may manifest elsewhere in more serious, even dangerous forms. Especially when they claim to be representing Almighty God.\u00c2\u00a0 It is your own voice that is the voice of God, for there is no God besides you.<\/p>\n

So says Zarathustra.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Every time I see that TV commercial for the Christian Mingle dating service, I am torn between the rival urges to vomit and to laugh. Please understand me: my reactions stem not from any anti-Evangelical animus, though, as you know, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com\/zblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}