As a more general spiritual phenomenon, and mode of thought, god-thinking could be seen to be a way of thinking that groups and organizes massive movements of infinitely complex relations of reality, to attempt to make sense of profound and massive units of reality which can only be conceptualized in terms of abstract relations and how those relations are felt and experienced.
You see in religious ideologies and practices a mix of intense spiritual feeling and conviction and complexes of language and concept and image meant to share and harmonize and edify these largely unobservable phenomena, that nevertheless show up and can be observed indirectly in the mass relations of the animated subjects that harbor and experience them, which like a flag billowing in the wind, give the impression of the movement of something ineffable, and which takes a definite shape and character as it unfolds in the material world.
It is in a way an application of those old toolmaking tendencies of conceptualization, rationalization, and coordination in attempting to understand something far larger and infinitely more complex than mere circumnavigation and persistence in the material world.
Some historical mentions could help illustrate this. Part of the character of early Islam for example included a deep suspicion that those spiritual feelings and convictions could be shared through image at all, and that attempting to do so would only distract from and corrupt those things, thus lending part of the reason for the Arab antipathy towards iconography, a strain which continues on in Islamic thought today.
It was the Byzantine military which, after learning to fear the might of Arab forces, and after a slew of military disasters and defeats, were one of the major driving forces pushing for the ideology of iconoclasm in Byzantium throughout the 8th and 9th centuries AD, which sought to emulate Arab spiritual ideology out of the belief that "god" was showing preference to it. It was a way to comprehend the massive, complex, and incomprehensible processes of collapse in the 6th and 7th centuries and provide some sort of ideological motivation and coordination to survive them and deal with them.
What I like about these examples is how they show ideology and spiritual feeling interacting, a relation which helps to structure the very character of a given god-worshipping culture and society. As we've discussed, these characters take form in time and space in relation to existing states of affairs and change over time and in accordance with changes set in motion by them moving through the material world, and then these formations of complexes can come into contact with one another and influence one another.
As I mentioned before, the spiritual feeling and conviction that these conceptions and ideologies are built upon have to be participated in. One experiences a given god-form and attempts to conceptualize it and describe it to others feeling and experiencing something similar, either to inculcate that form in a greater level of purity or to collectively coordinate activities that are largely in agreement with the form. The ideology is legitimate if it agrees with what one is experiencing, or it could be the ideology helps to shape what one experiences as well, so long as there is still some agreement. Otherwise the ideology has to be propped up with manipulation, propaganda, social pressure, and even force where experiences don't accord or where individuals are turning away with their different experiences and convictions.
Again, the participation part of this is very important, and often the most overlooked. In analyzing an external god-form, it is tempting to believe one has risen above the form itself as an uninterested observer, whereas the very observation and analysis and aloofness is taking part within a form of its own. Indeed, this very conception and the discussion taking place here which I am engaging in are rooted in a certain form of consciousness, and so I'm participating in a greater emergent entity we can only be dimly aware of. One still acts in and is shaped by the particular region of time and space one takes up.
This is how so much of modern conventional discourse condescends to earlier iterations of worship, or else cynically panders to it, while at the same time attempting to force down everyone's throat a fervent worship of that machinelike complex of capital, wage labor, trade, market logic, material domination and expansion, concentrated energy production and consumption, and so on which has dominated the earth for the last couple of centuries, and which increasingly shows its exposed contours as it continues to break down upon reaching its expansionary limits.
One could see the emerging ecological consciousness and spirituality - and a whole multitude of other alternate vying ideologies emerging like sparks from the grinding plates - possibly taking a greater hold in the future, ever more so in proportion to the growing failures and catastrophes of the present system as it breaks down. We'll most likely get glimmers of illumination and enlightenment before the reconstituted power centers slurp it up into their own machinations, incorporating its truths to buttress their consolidation. But who knows? We are probably in for quite a bumpy and chaotic ride in the coming centuries.
