On Worshipping a God
SmokingCaterpillar November 25 2024 06:00:00 AM
As a boy, I was brought up as a Roman Catholic. And I have read portions of the Bible. As a boy, I attended endless services, confessions, communions etc. But there was one ritual that even after fifty years, I still find incredible.That's the kissing of a relic. A part of the saint in whose name the school I went to was was named.
So here's how it worked. Every year, on the feast day of that saint, the relic was brought up from wherever it was kept (I don't know to this day where that was) and installed into a monstrance.
Here's what that looks like when one is used to hold the eucharistic host, which is a wafer imbued with divine properties according to the church. The actual monstrance used in my experience would probably have been different, as I recall two trainee priests holding the monstrance between them so that . . .
Each boy would take the knee and kiss the relic as a sign of devotion.
To be fair, the relic was sealed in a red glass vial. Which made the contents difficult to discern. And it wasn't as gross as it could have been. The vial was wiped down with a linen cloth (snow white, of course. If there's one thing the catholic church is good at, it's snowy linen).
Each boy would take the knee and kiss the relic as a sign of devotion. Why do I suddenly think of virtue signalling?
But...
Since that time, there are a couple of questions that have come to my mind.
Firstly, how do we actually know that there is a piece of the saint in the glass vial? Allegedly, it was a fragment of his thigh bone. This is problematic. The provenance of the item, spanning centuries, isn't exactly a model of a chain of custody, is it? If the fragment of bone was analysed, we would possible find answers to these questions:
Is it human? We don't know that for sure, I guess. A piece of chicken beef or pork bone probably looks similar to human bone. I say probably, because I, like many people have never actually seen a human bone in real life.
Is it from the saint? Very difficult to be sure about this one, too.
And secondly here's the bigger problem that I have with it. What was this act of devotion supposed to achieve? Would god and the saint look favourably on me when I kissed the relic? And what would that mean for me? I just seems nonsensical to me that you would intercede with a god in order to get a special favour. That's the sort of thing I would associate with despots rather than gods.
So now we move on to the title of this essay.
Why do we worship gods at all?
To worship a god is irrational surely. Gods are only gods because we (humans) say so. It's a decision on our part to invent a god and the surrounding rituals in order to get to the final product. A religion. As far as I can see, religions are complete fictions . Created by men (in the 'vir' sense of the word) mainly for the benefit of men. Most religions, especially Judeo-Christian religions seem to treat women at best as second-class citizens and often with a great deal of patronising waffle. Christopher Hitchens said that it's fine for people to have religions as long as adherents don't force their beliefs onto others. He likened it to religious people having a set of toys representing their religion. By all means, he said, play with your toys. Just don't make me or my children play with them. Seems fair and rational to me.
At the heart of my issues with my relationship with a putative god is this. We should usually, whenever possible, attempt to deal with everything we can see in this universe in a rational manner. Surely it is irrational to worship a god and then expect nice things, sometimes completely against the normal workings of the universe that we observe to happen to us in return. Therefore a rational person does not worship any god.
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