Just read an article on Islamic feminism that a Bill Harris forwarded to me. Good piece in that it was disruptive asking questions that the standard paradigm is resisting.

If you read the piece you get a sense of where our secular society is at. In this post-theistic secular bubble “God” hasn’t really gone away, it has become an idea, a powerful idea that shapes things.

The piece was good in that it tracks the development of ideas in academia and culture and talks about their consequences. It talks about the rise and fall of idea regimes such as feminism as liberation to sexual pleasure and then this Islamic woman’s push back on it. Lots of angularity which is what I like in a piece.

It struck me, however, how powerful yet impotent ideas themselves are. Ideas are on one hand incredibly powerful. They take possession of cultures and through cultures people and their lives. They create wars, stop wars, move economies, bring life and death to millions, yet as exposed by this piece they are flimsy, wispy things that appear and disappear.

Good writers and scientists can show how ideas are not always masters but servants, incarnating deeper structural, biological and psychological mechanisms. We believe things because chemicals in our blood or relationships in our lives demand us to believe them. Ideas have interesting relationships with belief.

If “God”, however, in the secular world is reduced to an idea, then “God” has all of the weaknesses of ideas. “God” then is subject to belief and made small by the lack of it. Such a “God” is not after all much of a god. What is left is us, subject to ideas yet not fully subject as ideas are themselves subjects to the market forces of belief.

If “God” is simply an idea, we have no God or even gods.