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God Comes in Flavors

God Comes in Flavors

Last updated on: October 11, 2014 at 5:50 pm by David Mason

God Comes in Flavors 2014-10-11T17:50:18-05:00 David Mason

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Pick your jar.

Let’s talk about condiments. It turns out that spicy pickles reveal a lot about religion.

In the New Yorker a decade ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote at some length about mustard, ketchup, and spaghetti sauce. According to Gladwell, back in the 1970’s, a fellow named Howard Moskowitz figured out that the way to break open the super-conservative spaghetti sauce market was not to identify better what everyone is looking for, collectively, but to identify the different things that clusters of people are looking for. The consequence is that nowadays you can eat a different sort of spaghetti sauce every day of the month, and without dirtying a single pot.

One conclusion that Gladwell draws from the multiplicity of spaghetti sauces phenomenon (known among philosophers as “the spulghiplicetti effect”) is that people don’t really know what they want. You ask a bunch of people what sort of spaghetti sauce they want, and they all offer some kind of idealized, conventional answer that implies that there’s one, perfect spaghetti sauce out there, a Platonic ideal, that actual spaghetti sauce only needs to realize in order to satisfy everyone, wholly, all of the time, and all from one, mass-produced jar.

And, on a scale of one to ten, all will say they are about six satisfied by the best approximation of that ideal sauce.

If you feed the same people some options, they do reveal preferences for this that and the other variation—revealing preferences of which they themselves may not have been aware—in statistical clusters, and to satisfaction levels that are more like seven, eight, and nine out of ten. The clustering of people around specialty variations undermines the notion of a singular, transcendent sauce to which everyone’s taste ought to be suited, and affirms, instead, that human satisfaction, human happiness, emerges as a function of variety.

It turns out, if you put chunky spaghetti sauce in front of someone who had expressed no particular preference, the person might very well say, “Yeah, that’s what I like. Give me more of that.”

Religious tradition often presents itself as a Platonic ideal, a whole, transcendent factuality, to which everyone’s preferences must—or will, anyway, unavoidably—conform. And religious people tend to bow to well-established tradition in the absence of having any clear notion of what they might want, instead. They might have a vague sense that they don’t find traditional, conventional notions of god, ritual, eternity, spirit, sanctity, and so forth, especially satisfying, but haven’t the wherewithal to go figuring out what’s missing. So, what’s here is good enough. Anyway, everyone else is buying it.

Until an option appears.

Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Nanak, and others, offered some tasty options to communities that had grown comfortable with the same old thing. And it turned out that there were significant numbers of consumers for these variations on traditional themes. Other heresies—from Arius to Ann Lee—were clearly for niche markets, but, nevertheless, found the statistical clusters that hadn’t realized what they were hankering for.

When Joseph Smith spoke the heresy “God is like us”, in 1844, traditional Christianity screamed bloody murder. And then shot Smith to death so that the screaming of bloody murder wouldn’t just be talk. But there were a bunch of people—a statistical cluster—who said, “Yeah, that’s what I like. Give me more of that.”

Sometimes, heresy is a chunky version.

Now, you might say, “That’s no way to do theology. God is not a response to opinion polls. There’s no use trying out ideas to see what people like.”

Well, for one thing, we needn’t make religion and god synonymous. Whatever god may be, religion is very much a thing we do right here in our bodies. So, it seems to me, our bodies ought to be able to tell us something of the extent to which they like religion, and that’s quite a different matter than asking our bodies to identify what god is.

Anyway, Gladwell and Moskowitz have argued that polling people, indeed, doesn’t work. People can’t tell you what they like. Only when they encounter something surprisingly delicious do they know what they’ve been missing. Don’t bother polling people. But there is a use to trying out ideas to see what people like.

The traditionally-conceived god who created us has chosen to hide from us, so that by the traditional god’s own design, we are free, completely free, inescapably free, to think whatever the hell we want about god. In a physical world that science shows functions perfectly well on its own, and in a human world that philosophy has shown can behave ethically on its own, we have nothing of god apart from the ideas we can fashion of god.

Unless we imagine that six on a ten-point happiness scale is the best that the idea of god can do, what heaven seems to have planned is not that we would all accept the idea of god. The divine design seems to have been to turn us loose to a smorgasbord of divine concepts, among which we might find eight, nine, perhaps even ten of ten happiness, or joy. Real, great joy.

God comes in flavors. And you may not know which one really hits the spot without trying a few.

God is one, god is many, god is black, white, blue, female, elephant-headed, ineffable, immanent, nothing, full-bodied, and chunky style.

Thank the god who wants our great joy for gods. One big idea of god might make most everyone sorta happy. But only multitudes of ideas of god that are specially formulated for clusters of tastes have the power to produce great joy in anyone.

Or we can all just eat soup and like it.

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