Letting gods Go: Naturalism and Secularism

Abstract

Many parents find it difficult to let their children go. In extreme cases, parental selves are so fused with their progeny that they cannot live without them under their roof, or at least under their control. Many children in late adolescence also find it difficult to let go of their parents and live on their own---a difficulty often faced again in the late senescence of the parents. Insofar as the gods are imaginatively triangulated within our religious families of origin, it is difficult to let them go as well. Some gods, like ancestor-ghosts and god, are conceptualized as progenitors. As we have seen, however, all supernatural agent conceptions are descendant from cognitive and coalitional mechanisms, the offspring and not the ancestors of humanity. The gods are born---and we have borne them. Once the identities of selves and groups become entangled with shared imaginative engagement with gods, bound up in ongoing attempts to rightly interpret their revelations and correctly practice their rituals, it is hard to imagine surviving without them.