“Where is God? … I tell you – we have killed him, you and I! We are all his murderers! … What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving now? Where are we moving?” – Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882.

One of the “achievements” of the Scientific Revolution was what came to be called “the death of God.” As science provided more and more substantive answers to questions of the highest order, people abandoned belief in God and an unprecedented wave of secularization swept the West.

But, as we were destined to discover, theistic belief rests not only on external functional needs such as answers about the nature of the world, but also on human psychological and perceptual needs.

The belief that there is a single God who guides what happens in reality provided generations with mental solace and fulfilled the human need to believe that there is something beyond the graspable – that reality has agency over itself. The division Christianity created—where God is good and evil is the responsibility of a being called “the Devil”—answered the question “Why is there good and evil in the world?” and allowed people to adopt comforting idealisms of pure good against pure evil.

To humanity’s misfortune, the replacement for “pure good” did not tarry, and the states of Europe replaced God with a new deity – the State. Masses seeking something to believe in found refuge in new secular religions – the fascist, Nazi, and Stalinist movements. The result we have already mentioned.

But with secularization and the “death of God” came the “death of the Devil,” and the secularization of what had been perceived as metaphysical forces of darkness. Just as “the Holy Spirit” was replaced by pure rationality (and, effectively, by man), and religion was replaces by nationalism, so “the Devil” was replaced by the belief that when malign processes occur that we cannot explain – it is a hidden conspiracy, a shadow government lurking in the wings. This is essentially a secularization of religious narratives about the war of light against darkness and about otherworldly entities dictating events beyond our control. In Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, it was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and after the war movements arose convinced that a global shadow government runs everything behind the scenes and seeks their harm.

These movements gained popularity among both extremes we are discussing: on the right, “the elite” is demonic; among hippies and New-Agers it is “the system.”
When Matan Hakimi asks why this “doesn’t lead the evening newscasts” – that “the system” or........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)