God is no longer the one he was – the press.com

For someone who is invisible, there are surprisingly many clearly visible evidence and documents about him. We are talking about God. The Jewish Museum Vienna has gathered books, pictures, films and sculptures in the magnificent exhibition « G*tt. The big questions between heaven and earth » to document at least a tiny section of the gigantic material culture of the invisible. Seven simple questions such as: What is God called? Why God? Where does God live?

Why should you deal with these questions as a strictly believed unbeliever for whom God is an illusion? I have two reasons: I just had the Sonata No. 4 of when I received the invitation to the exhibition Alexander Skrjabin heard, tender on the edge of the silence played by Vladimir Ashkenazy. I was deeply moved, in a moment when everything about harmony and chord progression passes into pure magic and a strange feeling is created by something that is suddenly there, and at the same time it is certain that this is missing. Where does this feeling come from? In a world that believes or fears that she is enlightened thoroughly and that Transcendental thinks itself homelessly?

God is more popular today than ever

The second reason is that I believe that God is concerned, far beyond theology and belief in him. Despite or maybe because of all the re -goters – from La Mettrie over Nietzsche to Freud, from Diderot to Beckett and Camus – God is more popular than ever today. Diva is talking about divine diva, the gods in physics, even the hand of God are spoken worldwide. This does not mean Michelangelo, but a handball of the footballer Diego Maradonathat Argentina gave the world championship title in 1986. The relationship with God is relaxed. Nobody has been outraged by the basically blasphemy turn, and in a wink God is at least assumed to be active participation in the fraud. In short: God is popular, he is no longer the same, which he once was, but he is present in many places, even if religious experiences, the « delight » about the encounter with God, of which the Protestant theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher speaks, even if the « Oceanian feeling », which is 100 years after that thinks about Freud, today emigrated to other spheres of experience. The rumor of God’s death therefore seems to me to be very exaggerated.

Creator, legislator and judge

For me, thinking about God means thinking about the changes in the tasks and representations assigned to him. In the Jewish-Christian tradition, God is creator, legislator and judge. As a creator god, he is entitled to singularity, it is effect without cause. On the one hand, it is difficult to tangible as an invisible God and can still be experienced in many ways with the senses. It sometimes shows himself – as a storm, as a rainbow, as a column column during the day, as a column of fire at night. Two of my favorite objects in this exhibition shed light on the contradiction between visibility and invisibility on the one hand, between the specific individual and the abstract on the other.