God is an anarchist

God is an anarchist and not a monarchist, as in Catholicism, a bourgeois republican, as in Protestantism, a dictator who blesses the successful and punishes deviants while governing entirely by edicts to be obeyed without question as in evangelical Protestantism, a charismatic dictator leading an insurgent empire, as in Islam, or a parliamentary monarchist, as in Rabbinical Judaism. He creates worlds, and reveals truths about them, but starting with nothing, so these worlds emerge from a chaos. Ultimately, worlds and world-orders are contingent and fabricated. The usual idea of God supposes that he is absolute ruler of a world that he created, already perfected, like a commodity, and gives commands which can only express the order he had already in mind. This is nonsensical, and not the Biblical or Jewish idea at all. Further, each created world and person being unique and uniquely an 'image', images that give birth to other images, in ways that ultimately can only be ascribed to chance, as things move, waver, err, and morph unpredictably, such that God himself can only play dice with what is there. Thus the true political cosmos is anarchy, no-rule. No world is total enough to justly include the potentialities, good and bad, of the persons ruled in it by the ruling ones. Therefore no person should command another.

If, as with small children, they sometimes must, this must be temporary and a recognizable useful fiction. Most people’s religion is a child’s magic. They want to trust what is given and hope to God it works. They are sure there must be a ruling power that is comfortably assuring, so that when bad things happen, they are not really bad because a narrative logic assures a return in time on the suffering invested. This agentive power rules perfectly and makes no mistakes. But the story of everything is accidental variations and so lots of mistakes. Things happen rightly and happily often enough that the world goes on.

Absolute power corrupted God absolutely. Perhaps he shouldn’t have been accorded any; does he need it, or do we? Or do we misunderstand power as command instead of loving attention and creativity?

The great plague of our civilization is authoritarianism in all its guises. This stems not just from the obstinate will of those who are determined to get what they want, but also from the mastery that is assumed to get things done, when there is a separation between who desires that things to be done and who does them; the separation of mind and body reflects such hierarchies of persons. The God who is a greater Pharaoh is a notion nearly as lousy and stupid as the endless declarations of ‘atheists’ that, such being the quality of God, there must be nonesuch. Yes, of course, and so what.