Supreme Being

About: Supreme Being is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 192 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1615 citations.

The Role of Women in Religious Riots During the French Revolution

Abstract: AS THE PARADE FOR THE FESTIVAL of the Supreme Being was forming in Auxerre on 20 prairial an II (30 June 1794), one soldier turned to an old woman looking on and asked her why she wasn't joining in the festival. She responded, "Ce n'est pas le tien que j'adore; il est trop jeune; c'est le vieux. (It is not your god that I adore. He is too young. It is the old one.)"' Behind the simple statement of this old Auxerroise lay a wealth of unspoken beliefs and meanings. When the radical leaders of the French Revolution launched the dechristianization campaign of 1793-94 to close churches, to urge priests to abdicate, and to replace Catholicism with new revolutionary cults and with a secular political culture, many French men and women shared the reluctance of this old woman of Auxerre to set aside traditional Christian beliefs and practices. Particularly when the Thermidoreans relaxed some of the laws regarding public worship after the fall of Robespierre, Catholic villagers struggled through legal and illegal means to return to collective Catholic practice. Both men and women participated in the movement to resurrect Catholicism in the late 1790s. Together they pressured local officials to reopen churches and protect priests from arrest; together they created innovative forms of lay worship and danced on saints' days in open defiance of the law. However, there were differences in the roles and attitudes of Catholic men and women as they strove to regain the right to worship. Women were constantly in the forefront of the religious movement, especially as leaders of religious riots. And according to most testimony of the time, Catholic women seemed even more intent than their husbands on returning to public Catholic practice. Traditional prerevolutionary roles combined with the social and legal structures of France in the 1790s to bring about a gender-based dichotomy in the means of the religious revival. While Catholic men, as legal citizens, could use the petition, the vote, and the village assembly to put legal pressures on local and national authorities, women more often voiced their demands through di-

Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality

Abstract: In this controversial book, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills argues that God does not exist; and more provocatively, that God cannot exist as anything but an idea. Put concisely, God is a psychological creation signifying ultimate ideality. Mills argues that the idea or conception of God is the manifestation of humanity’s denial and response to natural deprivation; a self-relation to an internalized idealized object, the idealization of imagined value. After demonstrating the lack of any empirical evidence and the logical impossibility of God, Mills explains the psychological motivations underlying humanity’s need to invent a supreme being. In a highly nuanced analysis of unconscious processes informing the psychology of belief and institutionalized social ideology, he concludes that belief in God is the failure to accept our impending death and mourn natural absence for the delusion of divine presence. As an alternative to theistic faith, he offers a secular spirituality that emphasizes the quality of lived experience, the primacy of feeling and value inquiry, ethical self-consciousness, aesthetic and ecological sensibility, and authentic relationality toward self, other, and world as the pursuit of a beautiful soul in search of the numinous. Inventing God will be of interest to academics, scholars, lay audiences and students of religious studies, the humanities, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines. It will also appeal to psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and mental health professionals focusing on the integration of humanities and psychoanalysis.

Defining the Divine

Abstract: At first glance, it appeared to be a technical and dry decision about the operation of the Places of Worship Registration Act 1855, yet the Supreme Court judgment in R (on the Application of Hodkin) v Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages was actually one of the most significant decisions related to law and religion in 2013. The Justices of the Supreme Court held that a church within the Church of Scientology could be a ‘place of meeting for religious worship’ within section 2 of the 1855 Act. In so doing, the Supreme Court overruled one of the most well-known decisions in English religion law, R v Registrar General, ex parte Segerdal. In Segerdal, although the Court of Appeal had held that a chapel within the Church of Scientology could not be registered under the Act, the reasoning of their Lordships differed: Buckley LJ and Winn LJ focused on what they perceived to be the lack of ‘worship’, refusing to define the ‘chameleon word’ religion, while Lord Denning emphasised the phrase ‘religious worship’, holding that this required ‘reverence or veneration of God or a Supreme Being’ and that this was not met in the case of the Church of Scientology, which was ‘more a philosophy on the existence of man or of life than a religion’. All of these statements have been questioned by the bold Supreme Court judgment in Hodkin, which provides guidance on how the terms ‘religion’ and ‘religious worship’ are to be understood by English law in the twenty-first century.

Ezigbo Mmadu: An Anthropological Investigation into the Concept of a Good Person in Igbo Worldview

Abstract: This paper examines the concept of ‘ezigbo mmadu’ (good person) in Igbo worldview. The paper argues that ‘ezigbo mmadu’ is constructed in human relationships. It argues that the Igbo people’s understanding of ‘mmadu’ as the climax of the Supreme Being’s creativity and beauty situates the human person as a moral agent. Deviating from that ideal is an aberration that reduces the human person from the pinnacle that humankind has been placed. And so, for the Igbo ‘ezigbo mmadu’ captures and reflects those ideals necessary for group and inter-group relations.