Honest Doubt Part 3 - Idols

The program looked at idols - how from the earliest times religion has been "overturning" old views of God with new ones - from golden calves to invisible Gods, and ends with the idea that perhaps after we have thrown away all our idols we won't have anything left.

The program mentions how Judaism identified material images of God as somehow wrong - hence the pejorative term "idol" - instead wanting to work only with words and language. Simone Weil points out that the concept of a "chosen people" can be just as much an idol as some material image.

If by "idol" we mean making something transitory into something ultimate, something temporal into something eternal, then of course this can apply to concepts as much as material  - but isn't it a dream that we can define the ultimate? That we can put some ring around some important concept ? Even in science - where what we are describing is far from ultimate  - we are always making provisional theories that tentatively approximate to the truth, theories that we assume will in time be superseded in the future. How then can we believe we will be able to make simple claims about the nature of ultimate reality? Isn't this idea just another category mistake that we discussed earlier, to trying to make an interpretation into a fact ?

So if we see the "overthrowing" of each successive idol as a march towards the truth, it seems likely that we will be left with an empty space, or exhaustion or a random stopping at some point on the way. It seems much better to see each "idol" both as necessary but insufficient.

Society today, then is of course massively religious - it is full of idols. From football to fashion to music, film, TV stars - all aspects of popular culture - idols are everywhere. This is not a flippant remark - we live in a world of  polytheistic gods -just as in ancient polytheist cultures we are drawn to people/images who symbolise a particular skill, value or ideal. Football provides many of the benefits of religion - the horror genre similarly provides many of the feelings we used to get from (some types of) religion.

For some their moral ideal will be their expression of their religious spirit. The New Atheists identify Marxism/Stalinism and Fascism as types of religion because they are "irrational" - well so is most of modern culture. Find what is rational and scientific in football, popular music, film, TV, computer games etc. Religion is alive and well, it is all just semantics.

If we throw out our idols we will throw out the baby with the bathwater. The "ultimate" in wrapped up in all this "irrational" stuff - all the spells and magic and morality around us today is part of the journey we go on. We engage with it, we can reflect on it, we can be puzzled and enchanted by it, we can find love in it and fear - we're never going to just be the logical, empirical scientists the New Atheists (think they) want us to be.