God Is a Trauma: Vicarious Religion and Soul-Making Mogenson, Greg

Description

This book, despite its title, is not a theology book. It is not a book about God as God. As identifying the two words “God” and “trauma,” I wish to focus attention on the religious dimension of the psychology of those two overwhelming events we describe as traumatic…. Whether a divine being really exists or not, the psychological fact remains that we tend to experience traumatic events as if they were in some sense divine. Just as God has been described as transcendent and unknowable, a trauma is an event which transcends our capacity to experience it. Compared to the finite nature of the traumatized soul, the traumatic event since infinite, all-powerful, and wholly other. Again we cannot say that traumatic events literally possess these properties, but only that the traumatized soul propitiates them as if they did. —from book’s Introduction