Submission, God and Society

I was thinking about God and his role in human history. I often hear things like "submitting to God's will". The idea of who should rule might be the biggest killer in human history. Often times we take our democratically elected government for granted. Perhaps in the middle ages, before more advanced political processes were created, the question of who should rule was probably a bigger problem for people of that day.

Perhaps it was fear that attracted the masses to the idea of God. To the idea of a righteous, all powerful, all knowing ruler of the universe that, around the time of the middle ages in Christian dominated western Europe, was largely seen as an agent and promoter of good. Aristotle mentioned several forms of government, and their perverse counterparts. One form was monarchy and its counter part, the tyranny. Aristotle argued that having one just ruler was a good form of government.

With this thought about Aristotle in mind we can now tie this back to submitting to God's will. God being the just ruler. The people who lived during the middle ages in Europe probably had to deal with a more lawless existence and the idea of having an infinitely just and good ruler was probably music to their ears.

We all wonder if God is real, and why the idea of God is so widespread and fundamentally believed in almost all cultures across the world. One of my friends opened my mind to the possibility of God as a way to control the masses. I believe the idea of God has been used for this end, but there is more to the puzzle. Maybe we all need to know that there is a reason to do the selfless thing, but these ideas of submitting to Gods will might be a method of dealing with the fact that we came from lawless animals, and in the middle ages, a group of horsemen could have ransacked the village you lived in and destroyed everything you loved. Submission is a classic way to placate your stronger enemy. Through submission we are subject to the will of another. In the middle ages, submission was common. The serf was bound to the land. The smaller kingdom was often forced into submission by the larger one. And the greatest kingdoms were submissive to the Pope, who in turn submitted to God. Submission was a means of survival. In this world everyone submitted to something.

Today we are submissive to our government. The structure of submission is cyclical (or we would like to think). The people answer to the government, but the government answers to the people.

Perhaps it is this cyclical structure that has played a role in the increasing secularity of our society.