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| Not Our Church, But Our Theology Is More Complex |
NOTE: It’s Sunday, so this seems a good time to check in with a past “Sunday” journal page.
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Currently hanging out at the church. The Beneficiary wanted me to come because of the meal that they’re coughing up. This is probably the first time I’ve set foot in the place in months.
I wouldn’t have believed that it was possible, but I feel I have less in common with these people than I did even then. They used to vaguely annoy me or, at best, amuse me. Now it’s not even that. I’d as well be sitting in a room full of department store mannequins. They are currently singing purportedly upbeat but somehow dirge-like songs about how terrible the world is and how glad they are to be worthy of enough of God’s attention for him to smooth the path after they’ve left it.
Death is, in fact, the payoff or, more exactly, after-death, which so far as I can tell is an eternal do-over but with all the cards face-up and the reels stuck on “Jackpot!”
How much can I have in common with people who have so completely abdicated from reality and responsibility for their own lives?
Nothing new here, nothing even exclusive to this particular fundamental branch of the One True Faith — I ain’t just picking on them. I know atheists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists whose religions leave the fundamentalists’ just standing in terms of nonsensical complexity.
It’s a human thing.
So my utter inability to understand any of it, beyond it having something to do with a general human terror of death and tendency to see patterns even where there aren’t any, has troubling implications in re my tribal affiliations.
Anyway, I suppose I must needs explain why I am here at all. Same reason I ever am — it makes her happy. Far and away more than enough to make up for this otherwise dead time. A good enough, and more than good enough, reason.
So, the whole thing today is around Thanksgiving. Evidentially we’re thanking a god who probably doesn’t exist for rescuing us from sin and punishment that he created for an IOU that can only be cashed in after we die.
Only humans could have invented something that lavishly baroque. Seriously, no self-respecting god would have anything to do with this level of weirdness.
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That summary sentence is so true I can't stop laughing.
ReplyDeleteSome of the people I associate with Burning Man on the one hand, and seekers such as my recent semi-ex-girlfriend on the other, are in their own ways following a hybrid spirituality built on the visions of Hindus, Buddhists, Native-Americans, night-sky gazers on psilocybin, etc etc. It's interesting when this set of constructions is what two otherwise completely different people have in common. I feel like we have been witnessing over the past century and especially over the past few decades and most especially over the past several years the development of what will be a new religion. Like all religions, it will be a hybrid of what people believed before. It will end up with its dogmatists, its fierce defenders and missionaries, and resemble all the others in some ways. But for right now it's pretty cool and brings sometimes-useful tools, ie perspectives that can make sense of the nonsensical, which can be useful without respect to objective truth.
The dogmatists are the problem though, innit?
DeleteIn my view (subject to modification as the real world warrants) religion is the nearly unavoidable distillate (or waste product, as you will) of the intersection of long evolved and ingrained tendencies to arrange the world into patterns, a probably accidentally-evolved capacity for introspection (an emergent property of the big-brain thing), and the essential chaos of the universe we live in.
And I mean "chaos" in the strictest mathematical/descriptive sense, not the common literary shortcut.
There is an unresolvable friction at the broad border of the essential chaos of the universe and the ingrained human insistence that everything make sense or at least make a pattern. Even this paragraph is probably an example of the sparks that happen.
But what certainly happens is that humans are literally incapable of bridging that gap between the chaos that exists and the patterns they see in it. The main way that humans have invented to manage that conflict are a variety of "Gods Of The Gaps" in which mystical hand-waving and "Because God Says So" fills in for the free-ranging panic that humans universally feel when they notice that the chaos does what it will regardless of what it seems like it ought to do.
Attempts to mollify, modify, control, and eventually finally give up control of the gods humans invent to explain the weirdness of the universe pretty much explains everything from crystal-gazers collecting dawn sunlight through their assholes to power their center chakras to fundies annoying poisonous reptiles and praying to a variety of saints and long-dead apocalyptic middle-eastern preachers to take charge of a world they just don't understand.
As I said, it's a human thing and, make no mistake, I'm as subject to it as any. Mine tends toward Vonnegut's "Bokononism" in which there is very little explanation why the universe works the way it does, but at the same time routinely invokes the mantra "Busy, Busy, Busy" whenever some near-zero-probability butterfly-effect connection between parts of the universe are spotted.
(Shrug) Works for me. And Bokononists don't have to blow out a perfectly nice Sunday worrying about it.