Moral dithering and the insecurity of God

God didn’t want Adam and Eve to know, and to come upon the power of naming as a kind of knowing, not because he wanted to protect them from the Fall but because he needed to stave off their growth. God feared the possibility that humanity’s incipient dynamism might lead to some tapering off and reduction of the quality of his relationship with an aspect of his creation. God’s insecurity, not his beneficent and all pervasive love, underwrites the injunction and proscription against human becoming. And you thought the prelapsarian perfection was something other than a hotbed of interpretive intrigue and dialectical imposture?

Can calling God insecure, or attributing to divinity some unsavory characteristics, invite calamity? Are we totally removed from the notion that blasphemy might lead to a divine smiting, from retribution on high? We don’t seem to ask this question anymore, perhaps because it no longer is intelligible, which is a way of identifying a concept that cannot any longer be taken seriously. Maybe even testing the predicate (God exists, and is not indifferent, but also not above petty self regard for protecting the vision of the shape he wants his creation to take or opposed to recriminatory acts against the tribes and individual actors opposed by jiggery-pokery happenstance to the full flowering of that vision) lacks imaginative purchase, doesn’t warrant attention and energy and hand-wringing anxiety because we’re both too distracted to test the content of the predicate and too infatuated with our fatuous, vapid, low stakes modern 21st century lives to be bothered with its contemplated conditional consequent? Or because it’s trivial, and hopelessly arrogant, and more, to assume that we ought to spend time worrying about blasphemy when we should focus on mindfulness and balance and purpose, to the end of garnering higher returns on personal investments in whatever kind of spiraling spirituality we might muster? Do we want our musings on big questions to be reduced down to a salty roux of what is and is not efficient and “healthy,” to focus on what we get from the bargain we strike with the shadow of the shadow of what passes for the big questions? Are big questions deadening? Is it deadening to even assume that asking that is worth asking?