A Brief Reflection on Idolatry
The surah The Cave in the Quran comes to
end with the story of Dhu ’l-Qarnayn and Gog
and Magog. Dhu ’l-Qarnayn is a prophet-king
who helps people and follows God’s commands in different ways. The last thing he does is to help the people
living between two valleys, whose language no one understands, to defend
themselves against an aggressive people, Gog and Magog, by building an iron
barrier between them. The Quran predicts
that the destruction of this barrier is the sign of the coming of the Hour of
Judgment:
“Their enemies could not scale the
barrier, nor could they pierce it, and he said, ‘This is a mercy from my Lord.
But when my Lord’s promise is fulfilled, He will raze this barrier to the ground: my Lord’s promise always
comes true. On that Day, We shall let them surge against each other like waves
and then the Trumpet will be blown and We shall gather them all together. We shall show Hell to the disbelievers, those whose eyes were blind to My
signs, those who were unable to hear. Did they think that they could take My
servants as masters instead of Me? We have prepared Hell as the disbelievers’
resting place.” (18:97-103)
For
the ears who can’t hear the “word” punishment as the effect of disbelief in
God, the message above and below, at the end of surah The Cave is difficult to bear.
Only those who have reflected long (and I am just a novice) can have a
clear understanding of monotheistic message.
Why did the God of monotheism insists that we shouldn’t worship any
imaginary god, goddesses, idols, or humans, or in turn, turn the God of
monotheism into a revengeful idol in religious bigotry? Where does the danger reside?
Turning Monotheistic God into an Idol
“Control of the heavens and earth belongs to God; God has power over everything. There truly are signs in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, for those with understanding, who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose– You are far above that!– so protect us from the torment of the Fire. Our Lord! You will truly humiliate those You commit to the Fire. The evildoers have no one to help them. Our Lord! We have heard someone calling us to faith–“Believe in your Lord”– and we have believed. Our Lord! Forgive us our sins, wipe out our bad deeds, and grant that we join the righteous when we die. Our Lord! Bestow upon us all that You have promised us through Your messengers– do not humiliate us on the Day of Resurrection– You never break Your promise.’ Their Lord has answered them: ‘I will not allow the deeds of any one of you to be lost, whether you are male or female, each is like the other [in rewards]. I will certainly wipe out the bad deeds of those who emigrated and were driven out of their homes, who suffered harm for My cause, who fought and were killed. I will certainly admit them to Gardens graced with flowing streams, as a reward from God: the best reward is with God.’” (3:189-195)
Let’s
start from the idolatry of seemingly monotheistic rigidification and
reification of God as a jealous possessive revengeful God, the one who punishes
whoever doesn’t bow down to God’s might.
The ramification of this idolatry is cruelty. But is God cruel? All the surhs in the Quran, except for one,
starts with “in the name of God, the most merciful, the giver of mercy”—and
mercy is the attribute of the chosen in the Quran, those who let go of eye for
eye and retribution and forgive:
“Who speaks better than someone who
calls people to God, does what is right, and says, ‘I am one of those devoted
to God’? Good and evil cannot be equal. [Prophet], repel evil with what is
better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but
only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great
righteousness, will attain to such goodness. If a prompting from Satan should
stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing.”
(41:33-36)
If we read the
Quran closely, we see that ethically God repeatedly prioritizes forgiveness to qesas (lex talianis, eye for eye):
“Far better and more lasting is what God will give
to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross
indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up
the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of
what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed.
Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts
things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who
do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being
wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and
transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing
torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest
things.” (42: 36-43)
The
point of monotheism is revelation.
Scriptures are not man-made guess work and assumptions, though with
divine grace, we should be able to recognize where they might be manipulated by
human whims, as God will help us to purify our hearts and our scriptures from
distortion. Because inside human heart
and intuition is a divine measure and scale that can distinguish the real from the
fake, and the divine from man-made. Not
strange then, that Judaism, Christianity, and Islamic scriptures were validated
by and cultivated billions. And each
scripture and prophet came to rectify some excesses and distortions in the previous
one. Mohammad said he was the last prophet, and after him we had so many false prophets but none of them last, because we
might lose our way for a while, but eventually we can discern fictitious from
authentic.
The revelation of God consists of one major point: don’t create an idol for
yourself out of anything, any object, any other creature, imaginary or real,
but only worship the ineffable invisible God.
Why this insistence? We needed
thousands of years of wars and genocides to understand this message. When the wall of identity disconnected us
from mercy and we lost our way from penetrating the hearts to religious wars
and bigotry, when we were trapped in the idolatry of zealous identity to undo
faith through faith, we resorted to what ought to be the last as the first, to
hostility and a system of exclusion and wars without due process. This was the idolatry of distortion of scriptures
themselves, undoing a faith through the faith.
As
I said before, this is the idolatry of reducing monotheistic God to a
revengeful God. But God could punish and
destroy Adam and Satan in a blink of eye after they disobeyed. Why did God not do that? Why did God give us respite and thousands of
years of scriptures and growth to teach us to understand our internal connection
to God? After all, if God is merely
forcefully punishing us for our insubordination, what is the purpose of
creation?
“He created the heavens and earth
for a true purpose; He wraps the night around the day and the day around the
night; He has subjected the sun and moon to run their courses for an appointed
time; He is truly the Mighty, the Forgiving.” (39:5)
God
has a purpose and it is clear if we just think straight and, on the one hand, let
go of the false assumption that we are purposeless and accidental bubbles who,
self-contradictorily, are self-grounding ground [bubble] of our existence. And on the other, reflect on the fact that
all religions of the Book tell us that God brought us to the earth to “test” us—indeed
to “teach” us, otherwise God’s omniscience already knows the outcome of the
test. Understanding this point helps us
to overcome religious bigotry and intolerance and irreverent hostility in the
name of religion: a non-idolized God is forgiving and a teacher. When we turn the ineffable and invisible God
of wisdom and mercy into a tyrant, we turn monotheistic God into an idol. God has created us for a reason and despite
our weakness and shortsightedness, God sees the sparkle of growth and divinity
that God sowed in us, and asked Satan (Iblis) to bow down to it. God teaches us to cultivate this seed in us:
“It was not without purpose that We
created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. That may be what
the disbelievers assume– how they will suffer from the Fire!– but would We treat those who believe and do good
deeds and those who spread corruption on earth as equal? Would We treat those
who are aware of God and those who recklessly break all bounds in the same way?
This is a blessed Scripture which We sent down to you [Muhammad], for people to
think about its messages, and for those with understanding to take heed.”
(38:27-29)
The
logic of punishment and heaven and hell is this losing the chance of growth and
awakening from the barren idolatry of images and following our unbridled desires in
worshipping false gods and goddesses, or on the contrary, connecting to the
source of our existence and bringing fruits of unity in our soul, body, and
heart, in our thoughts, words, and deeds and pray for unity-with/belonging-to God,
to the invisible horizon of all of events, the source of peace and power:
“[People], do you not see how God
has made what is in the heavens and on the earth useful to you, and has
lavished His blessings on you both outwardly and inwardly? Yet some people
argue about God, without knowledge or guidance or an illuminating scripture.
When they are told, ‘Follow what God has sent down,’ they say: ‘We shall follow
what we saw our forefathers following.’ What! Even if Satan is calling them to the
suffering
of the Blazing Flame? Whoever directs himself [his face] wholly to God and does good work has grasped the surest handhold, for
the outcome of everything is with God. As for those who refuse to do this, do
not let their refusal sadden you [Prophet]– they will return to Us and We shall
tell them what they have done: God knows all that hearts contain.” (31: 20-23)
The
Idolatry of Worshipping Images and Humans
The
other variation of idolatry is the idolatry of fictitious whims of gods and
goddesses without any valid scriptural pathos, ethos, and logos, unbridled and
hedonistic, with an empty veneer of sentimentality and “love”—this
nature-shaman or goddess worship has been in the air for the whole history of
human beings up to now. Then the
idolatry of worshiping saints and prophets, or kings and the powerful, the
plutocrats and bourgeoisie, commodity fetishism and principle of pleasure,
honor, nation, or wealth took hold on us.
We had wars for nationalistic chauvinism, capitalism by our scientism
and technological advance, or creating heaven on the earth in the name of
dialectical materialism of Marxism. I
was one of them. When I had the chance
to ponder the meaning of a life and death under the worshipping of “matter” and
“human consciousness and sciences”—an oxymoron—nauseatingly I woke up from my
slumber. A world of contingency. To be a bubble of accidental interaction of
particles. Taking human
self-consciousness as the groundless ground of self-worshipping autonomous self,
like ouroboros. What a nihilistic horror!
This is the punishment for those who forget the poverty of their
existence and dependent origination in God.
Like a canceric cell, I was rebellious to establish heaven on earth in
the delusion of absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency. Humanity had to come on its knees to
understand the need, the existential necessity and poverty, to worship
God.
Similar
to religions, Western Enlightenment, is a double sword. When religion loses its balance and turns
into fanaticism and fundamentalism, it acts against its principles. By the excess in which evil takes over the
gaze that sees evil all around itself, the good turns into evil. Western Enlightenment as well had a wonderful
lesson for humanity: look at yourself and the world with an open eye and trust
your reason to make sense of the world.
Religious bigotry and excess pushed Western Enlightenment to the other
extreme and the effect has been the emergence of idolatry of scientism and worshipping
of “autonomous subject”—a strange meaningless metaphysical take, as if our
reasoning per se can ground
itself.
This
has been the dream of twentieth century philosophy and sciences. Around the midst of century to our time,
philosophy gave up the dream of grounding logic in mathematics, or mathematics
in logic, or to make language strictly logical or to solve all metaphysical
questions by logical positivism or by elucidation of language. On the contrary, philosophies such as
Heidegger’s phenomenology basically problematized the whole Western tradition
of philosophy and its subjectivism and reductionist attitude—its Cartesian
assumption that “intellect” or “thinking” is prior to “being”. Postmodernism pushed this direction to its
excessive point and in rejecting autonomous subject and the centrality of
consciousness and “I”, declared the death of subject and reduced human self
into “discourses” of knowledge or savoir, the text, or relations of power and
class wars.
Now
we are living in the last phase of idolatry of scientism and different golden calves
of sociobiology and psychological and biological evolutionary theory and the
worshiping of “genes”: the key to all human puzzles! This is the time of “self-creation” of
technological advance, genetic engineering, cloning, and microchips. Heidegger had predicted this stage as "Enframing ['Gestell'] means the gathering together of
that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal
the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that
way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which
is itself nothing technological." ("Question Concerning
Technology") In another word, our scientism and technological advance at
the disposal of idolatry of worshipping human sciences turned humans into
robots, objectified animals and forests into “resources”, and took us to mass
extinction through the instrumentalization of the world. The sciences that potentially could save us
now are destroying us because of our idolatry.
Now the Quran’s consistent message that we ought not to worship anything
but God makes a lot of sense. In another
article on divine punishment, I wrote:
“Through disconnection of the ethical from God and
the heaven, we fall into variations of hedonism and humanism, at best. Our
modern ears can’t substitute anything else for the contingency of our lives. If
there is only this world and no necessary divine Law governs our lives, if we
are the result of random selections and genes, then survival is the only clue
to ethics, now egotistic, then altruistic, no matter what, the telos
(aim=purpose) and the kernel of this ethical behavior is pleasure or
Nietzsche’s will-to-power at the disposal of survival or again in a circular
way at the disposal of Nietzsche’s will-to-power.
We might
manage to develop the seemingly best practical reason and live long. What we
lose is the meaning of life. Life as such has no universal meaning for any
modernist and postmodernist, from Chomsky to Foucault. This loss of meaning, no
matter how well and long we live registers itself in our body and soul. This is
a common-sense clue: our body is extremely receptive to the world, biosphere,
rays of light, drops of water, and intractable rays and particles. A major
difference between us, human beings, and other living beings is that we
“think”, and what we think, the way we think, the way we perceive our existence
in the world, the way we act based on seeing ourselves contingent (accidental)
or essential, it all affect our psychosomatic disposition in minute details. If
I see myself as merely a natural animal and a contingent bubble in the
universe, the internal and external arrangement of my cells and the actions
emanating from them--which are mutually cause and effect of my
self-interpretation—will be qualitatively different from a person who believes
one’s ethical comportment is related to the spiritual realm and God. In this
context, “punishment” follows the law of karma. For God, punishment is not
retribution and revenge, but the effect of our own actions. And as the Quran repeatedly asserts, through our
own belief and good actions we can repel evil and reverse the law of karma.”
In the penultimate
paragraph in the surah The Cave, God
says:
“Say
[Prophet], ‘Shall we [This ‘we’ presumably refers to the Prophet and his
community of believers.] tell you who has the most to lose by their actions, whose efforts in this world are misguided,
even when they think they are doing good work? It is those who disbelieve in
their Lord’s messages and deny that they will meet Him.’ Their deeds come to
nothing: on the Day of Resurrection We shall give them no weight. Their recompense
for having disbelieved and made fun of My messages and My messengers will be
Hell. But those who believe and do good deeds will be given the Gardens of Paradise.
There
they will remain, never wishing to leave.” (18:97-108)
I
end this reflection with my thesis on idolatry in Hinduism, Taoism,
Confucianism, and Buddhism, and leave its elaboration to another reflection.
In
Hinduism, we have verses in Vedas and Upanishads that are revelatory; however,
distortion and excess turned this revelation into having 33 gods or 330 million
gods all manifestation of one Godhead. This
variation of idolatry, even if in its philosophical dimension it holds to
non-duality of God and the universe and the self--which is itself fallacious--ends up to the same confusion and
suffering as other variations of idolatry.
The quest is to stay in the zone of God’s revelation, not human
conjectures. According to revelations, we
belong to the imageless, invisible, ineffable creative awareness who transcends
the limits of thoughts, as God is the originator of the universe, living
beings, and consciousness, not identical to any one of them. There is no becoming and being in God. Our human vocabulary of essence and existence
can’t fathom it. Nor is it the inertia
of Dao or dark matter or dark energy or impersonal and unaware origin of
universe. God converses with us through
scriptures and guides us. God is the
creator and the teacher.
Taking
the Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu as gods or worshipping them is another version
of idolatry. It is famous that Buddhism,
Taoism, and Confucianism don’t believe in the creative God. However, none of them in their original sense
declared to be a god or have any access to anything beyond phenomenal world,
except for Lao Tzu who in poetic words talks about an impersonal source of all
beings as Dao. Lao Tzu and Confucius
relate their ethical practices to Tien or Heaven but never elaborate clearly
what Tien is.
Buddha never declares there is no creative God. He was silent about the source of life. He admitted that his philosophy is a
meditative-spiritual technique to overcome suffering.
In Zen Keys,
Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste
their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a
metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples
toward practical efforts. Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity
of the world, the Buddha said, "Whether the world is finite or infinite,
limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same."
Another time he said, "Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the
doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want
the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he
shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have
been answered, the man might die first." Life is so short. It must not be
spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to
the truth.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow
My
thesis about Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha is that they were sages whose
ethical practices were inspired by divine wisdom but they were not prophets and
never could exceed phenomenal world in their explanation of the world. What makes so much sense to us in Lao Tzu,
Confucius, and Buddha is their acute observation and interpretation of the
phenomenal world and their ethical connection to the divine. But it is utterly misleading if we forget that
phenomenal world is only the tip of iceberg.
The world of revelation reveals worlds beyond our observation and perception
and tell us the truth about the universe, ourselves, our ethical comport, and
connects us to our origin, that which we can’t grasp by our own wits.
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