Contrast this with praying to Goddess the Mother.
I have a degree in what I will call Comparative Religion. It’s not surprising to me that the new chaplain–I think it is–at the Harvard Divinity School is an atheist. When I was at Chicago one of the professors, Paul Griffiths–one of the smartest men I have ever met–delivered a sermon titled something like “Should we abolish the Divinity School? And he was completely serious. His story is interesting, but I won’t tell it here.
We were taught to analyze–to break down into its constituent parts, as a sort of cultural anatomy–religion: sociologically, anthropologically and of course psychoanalytically, with Freud, but not Jung, continuing to be a popular tool.
Durkheim taught one thing, Freud another, Levi-Strauss another, but all of them tended to view religion in any terms but those in which the people themselves did. They viewed religion (Levi-Strauss possible excepted, since I just don’t remember much about him) as illusion. As a fantasy. It was a collective hallucination, brought on by social and individual emotional needs which it served to meet.
Here is what I will suggest: clearly, emotional and social factors affect what we see and feel. There is no need to deny this. That does not however then logically mean there is no referent to “God”. It simply means we are projecting onto something subtle but real our own hopes and fears; and, of course, that the IDEA of God can and has been used by people who may have been, and who may as well have been, atheists, for purposes of power and influence and everything else that goes with them.
In our own lives, though, think about it: who gives you nearly everything you need, physically and emotionally, for at least the first 5 years of your life? Who is the giver and taker, the primary emotional reality which occupies most moments of most days? The mother, obviously.
And as one of those sex writers commented (it was Erica Jong or Anais Nin), we all live in the womb of a mother. We call come from a woman. All of us. No exceptions. We were in there. Inside a woman.
We pray to God the Father since, in male dominated culture, men make the decisions. You are beseeching a King on your knees, with both hope and fear, and not a loving mother who is happy to feed you. Is that not an interesting thing to observe?
I think the commentators who view, particularly, most of the Old Testament as the attribution to God of very human traits, are on solid ground. Most of it says more about the writers than any really real force out there. But some of it is still beautiful and useful. It’s not either/or.