The techno-god of childhood regression

You may have noticed that in traditional Christianity, churches and parishes are dedicated to patron saints whose names are always accompanied by one or several attributes. This is echoed by pre-Christian descriptions of gods, who were always referenced obliquely through attributes and metaphoric titles in prayers and incantations. The penitent invoked the deity with a specific bidding in mind and to this end would conjure up the relevant titles.

We may seek to explain (in Jung’s view, to explain is to murder) or to understand this phenomenon from various angles. However, even in modern Protestant denominations, people approach Divinity in different ways that best fit their moral intuitions. In contemporary Anglo-Saxon societies, God has been reduced to the caring, accepting dimension.

I was visiting Rochester cathedral the other day and noticed several written notes prompting the parishioners to guard the most vulnerable members of the community (children, weak adults) and think of ways to improve their safety by exposing potential bullies or abusers; they had a hotline for this purpose.

Shortly after reading those, the Evensong commenced and the local deacon started praying for the safety of refugees and ‘those vulnerable to wars and harsh conditions, facing discrimination based on gender, race or ethnicity’. This fixation seems to me to be the last relic of religiousness in a pacified, demoralised society. The CARING and EQUITABLE mother-like deity, embracing all of her children in a Panoptikon-state full of CCTVs, hotlines and impersonal robotic assistants ready to ease the burdens of adulthood and allow its citizens to regress into a state of child-like wholeness and dependency. None shalt want, all shalt be equally pacified.

There are two antagonistic spirits ever at work. One is the archaic earthly spirit, associated with the Earth Mother. It searches to establish dominion according to the matriarchal creed. The other is the spirit of worldly transcendence, representing the path of God; the emancipation of the individual from worldly delusion and obsessiveness. It is associated with the ‘principium individuationis’, which attempts to differ between things, thus generating understanding, willpower and directionality. The dark spirit, working toward unconscious wholeness, relates to the combined canon of postmodern relativism in all its forms; internationalism, multiculturalism, gender theory, etc. The current “ideology of sameness” answers to a purpose of retaining pre-adolescent wholeness, an unmindful childish worldview where opposites have only begun to form. Pre-adolescent kids enjoy a form of primary wholeness, which is shattered when they enter the adult world of opposites.

‘Thanatos’ by M. Winther

Life is suffering; impersonal caring makes you weak and unable to take on the burdens of adulthood. If you are not content with ‘half measures, tepidity and slackness’ (as Jung put it), this deified caring technocracy will only add insult to injury. Religion is not about that. God is supreme beauty, efficiency, creative drive and resourcefulness. He is judgement and virtuosity. ‘He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.’