THE MATERIAL GOD Confessions of a sinner It may be in your interest to rich, happy and famous. It may be within your power to acquire the trappings of personal achievement and prosperity. It is permissible to seek the realisation of potential that you can be all that you can be. All this is understandable. What I don’t understand is this tendency to cloth God in capitalist materialist gab. The apostles of the theology abundance are out to convert us all to the glorious new world of endless prosperity and unrestrained consumerism. They come in all disguises and colours. The mainstream church, the independent church and the sect, the new age adept and the oriental guru and the traditionalist all proclaim the new gospel in appropriate idiom. It is the age of self aggrandizement clothed in spiritual rhetoric. The new religious has its code words and rituals of display. The main codes words are “blessings” “believe” and “manifestation”. There are whole industries vying for the errant multitudes who daily commit the sin of not being millionaires, the sin of being sick or the unconscionable sin of having any kind of personal problem. It seems God is working overtime these day bestowing or promising blessings and manifestations of material wealth on the converted and faithful. You just have to believe and be patient. And pay the purveyors of the new salvation on time and on demand. The perennial eschatology has been transmuted into an eternal heaven on earth. Such things as carrying capacity, limitations on resources and social power arrangements are the vitriol of the unconverted barbarians and the hot air of the unenlightened. Just believe and pay. All shall, in due cause, be revealed in material splendour. God has been appropriated to the agenda of vanity, reckless behaviour and muddled thinking. My grandfather used to say that god is a forest. We used to laugh at his use of imagery. The old man would explain that the idea of God and religion is a forest where anything can be conveniently hidden. One can use God or religion to explain, justify or impose anything. And it seems now religion and the spiritual community slips and slides all over the place in an attempt “to be relevant” and keep up with the Jones. The latter are represented by science, technology, globalisation and other competitors for the hearts, minds and purses of the tormented multitudes. There is, on one side, the political elite, with their corporate and scientific enablers. On other hand are the purveyors of salvation who also use the services of the corporate-scientific axis of mercenaries and enablers. This is the Uniate of the privileged to which the faithful are encouraged to aspire. It is this Uniate of privilege which ensures that no one truly owns their life and destiny. They work in concert to squeeze the life out of people. It is ironic but entirely predictable that individuals and communities have less ownership of their own lives in the age of technological and scientific miracles. The task of the material God and its hordes of apostles is to keep the rest of humanity in the global open gulag. It may be in your interest to rich, happy and famous. I am just not certain it is in the interest of humanity to discount everything else in the process. Come to think about it, it may well be not in the interest of God to cloth crass materialist rituals in spiritual idioms. But then, it’s a forest out there! Rome is burning and the people are praying- for material prosperity. ©JK
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 16:03:12 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015