FIDEISM: a Black Eye for God

    From experience we know we are of many minds, some that pursue the nobler purposes of consciousness and some that succumb to lesser ones. Institutions like individuals labor under the same multivalent proclivities. When human beings purport to represent God, God suffers from exposure to human pretensions.
    Time has a way of uncovering the pretenses and errors of personal and institutional representations. And when people and institutions fixate in their misrepresentations they lose credibility, and in the case of church, by implication so does their institutionalized god. Institutional arrogance and belief-fixation give God a black eye. The reaction of hyped rationalism might be expected.
    This damage to divine reputation happened big time with the unfolding of imperial church/state in Europe. With the corruption of the imperial princes of church and state, and their heavy-handed insistence on the public to trust their fixated faith propositions, the credibility of divine consciousness was eroded. The prince-successors in the Catholic Church, popes, cardinals, and bishops have yet to come clean with the history they've inherited. Divine credibility is still compromised by failures of institutional credibility.
    Reformation philosophers, e.g., Nietzsche, who saw through the princely-priestly pretense that implicated God adversely, vented their frustration against God, which was politically a little less risky. Their attack on God is really an attack on the fideism of imperial institutions, church and state; the attack exposes the falsity of faith fixations, fideism, and the institutions that created them and justified themselves in them. The problem is with the arrogance of faith fixation, not with God. Institutional, despotic wrong-headedness, bad faith, is uncovered in the arrogated usage of faith to alienate, control and exploit.
    The rationality of the Supreme Good as an endpoint of emulation and pursuit is still valid, notwithstanding Enlighenment's hyped rationalism. The evidence of validity is in the intelligent design of successfully evolved symbiosis. As beneficiaries of symbiosis, humankind now possesses the high intelligence of self-reflective consciousness, which comes to the moral conviction that intentional symbiotic outcomes should be pursued in preference to parasitic and pathologic ones.
    The ethical pursuit of the wellbeing of life is a divine pursuit that can in principle be objectified and identified as God; but it necessarily does not mean that divinity consciousness should suffer degradation from constraints of time-stopped objectification. Even as consciousness remains open to the correctives of experience so should human understandings of divinity. This is the point of evolutionary faith, of humility, universal morality-rationality and intentional intelligence.
    Television commercials for drugs, cars, etc, scream "Trust me!" Fideistic expectations are common ploys of the consumerist culture even as they are in public institutions, church, government, education, etc. All institutions, especially church and education, are morally implicated in the responsibilities of social-ethical consciousness even though they must negotiate the proclivities of their many minds. People and institutions alike are compelled by self-evident obligations to pursue the greater common good, The Summum Bonum, by another name, GOD.