There’s More on the Other Side of Religion
ασποσπασμα:
''Bernard Schweizer, a literature professor at Long Island University,
doesn’t think so. A strong aversion to God, a phenomenon he came across
in his studies, does not mean disbelief: God hatred actually relies on
deep faith. Schweizer coined the term misotheism for it, something that
brings us to an important point about his book, that claims to be “the
untold history of misotheism”: hating God is an idea so unfamiliar to
most that, even if it’s right in their faces, most readers will overlook
it – especially when they lack the proper term for it. Having named it,
Schweizer distinguished three groups: agonistic misotheists (whose
hatred is a struggle), absolutists (who relish theirs), and political
misotheists (who are mostly against organized religion but have a very
personal hatred of God).
Hatred of God is usually likened to atheism, but how could an atheist
hate a fictional character? The author became fascinated by this
paradox while reading Rebecca West, the British travel writer, and
Philip Pullman, most famous for his fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials.
Schweizer finds their works filled with hatred of God, well-hidden in
what he calls “the make-belief potential” of literature and its
fictional characters. In an essay titled ‘The New God,’ West writes that
“the one clear motive in his mysterious ways was his hatred of the
common man,” and in several of her works of fiction, protagonists
casually, yet brutally refer to God as “cruel”, “a master criminal,” and
likened to “Eastern tyrants.” Pullman’s hatred, less obvious in the
realm of fantasy, can be seen in the actions of his characters who “act
on the belief that God is not a champion of mankind but rather its
enemy, since his laws are designed to curtual human sensuality, freedom,
and creativity.” The strength and consistency of the hatred that
pervades their writing, Schweizer finds, could only make sense when the
writers actually believe in divinity’s existence, but no longer believe
in its inherent goodness.
In Hating God, Schweizer reviews the roots of this hatred,
presenting a colorful history of misotheism that includes people from
Epicurus to Nietzsche. He then specifically analyzes hatred’s role in
the work of West and Pullman, as well as four others. They wrote
blasphemy in verse (poet Algernon Swinburne) or called God a racist
(Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston), put him on trial
(Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel) and plotted his ultimate destruction
(playwright Peter Shaffer). With examples abundantly varied and often so
explicit, the reader can’t help but share Schweizer’s surprise at
history’s oversight of misotheism.
One question that arises is whether or not misotheism warrants this
much attention. Might we not be exaggerating its prevalence, now that we
have a term for it, and spot it in places where it doesn’t really
exist? Also, whereas the distinction between atheism and misotheism is
quite clear for modern authors, the overview of misotheism’s older
history is less convincing. Especially for authors who lived in a time
when atheism was not an option, one wonders if they would have been
misotheists today, or would actually have opted for a complete denial of
God’s existence and become atheists? For a modern author to admit to
being an atheist – at least in Western literature, the focus of
Schweizer’s analysis – is hardly as big of a deal as it once was. For
now, however, studying misotheism presents us with a fascinating new
discussion, and Schweizer’s book functions as the start of that debate.''
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου