In praise of idolatry

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I could base a legitimate religion on idol worship, it's not out of the question. Small local gods are approachable while being equally powerful with any of the big hitters. I have my grove, my well, my lares. The same Zaoshen keep families for centuries. It's hard to think how Islam, to pick an anti-idol religion, would offer insight in that setting, and none of those small local gods I cited ever killed anyone.

How can this local insight inform Islam, then? I'm not keen on saints and I like investment. These invested idols inhabit my space in a way the omnipresent can't.

And - I may be clumsy in my use of vocabulary here - I have never met an idol that could claim to be alive. The bafflement to me is that monotheists make that claim for their own deity. What is missing is a dictionary which embraces monotheism. We could define words in a way that doesn't offend English itself. What does alive mean? If we reject any meaningless word sequence like "ontologically active" or "spiritually present" we are left with the original definition uncorrupted. What do those phrases mean? Add to this the living personal Jesus they go on about as being alive.

What conscious entity has no physical existence? The concept is equally meaningless unless some religious expression can give it meaning. I have yet to hear or see it.

I suggest I have guiding principles emerging: Assertion doesn't make it so; and Without authority there can be no religion.

My physically-embodied local god has been the focus of many generations of dignified ancestral recognition. That patina is priceless and deserves to be sustained. Small local gods are the essence of culture. And though I may travel I know they continue where I started from. If I return they'll still be there. Unlike the pretence of religion, they have a perpetual existence. They depend on memory rather than conformance. Local small gods have to be approached, they have no coercive aspect. They simply exist. So add a new requirement: Any coercive religion is definitively untrue.

From that we can now construct a system incorporating those three insights together with deity. Because we have this word deity in the dictionary. And we have a list of things it clearly isn't. If it is incorporeal then it isn't conscious, it has no power and, as Neil Gaiman following many others notes, deity can only exist if it has worshippers.

From here perhaps we can independently uncover Frazer's pre-religious roots. We can definitely dispense with the intermediate layer between the beginning and today's all-pervasive monotheist power-game. Frazer described the shaman. The manipulator of magic in both its forms. And Frazer showed they both built upon an existing understanding of deity. The thieves are the shaman and then the priest.

The shaman might well inflate himself and try to scare people. The priest institutionalised that. I suggest both rely on gnostic secrets and powers which people can thrive without, since gnostic secrets and powers are lying trickery.

Though you still have the potential to end up at Summerisle, where the entire population embodies the knowledge. For a B-movie The Wicker Man has a lot of staying power. Christopher Lee can't be blamed for the number of appalling films he was in, but he definitely knew how to act. The occasional perfect role like Lord Summerisle made up for the rest. Summerisle is the Scottish equivalent of the Mayans.

In which case let me finally add a fourth claim. As Professor Joad would have appreciated: It all depends on what you mean by God.