The Last Idols of God

June 28th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the conclusion to the series God: From Magic to Motivation

I want to use two illustrations in this post that I believe offer a way for God-centred religions to get unstuck and survive the current change in aesthetics, away from a language of magic to a language of personal responsibility. These two stories talk about what I call The Last Idols of God. They are both very old stories.

[Note: this is a fun rant and a personal working-out of ideas. Treat it as such.]

1. Authority

There is Muslim story about a man that found he could not believe in God. He confided in a religious teacher. The religious teacher was not troubled at all by what this man said. Instead, he asked the man about what personally motivated him.

“What is most important to you in this world? What is it that you live for?”

“My nephew!” said the man quickly. “He is so bright and curious. I want nothing evil to happen to him. I want to make sure he has the best life has to offer!”

“Go then and treat your nephew as you would your God,” said the teacher. “Do everything in your power to raise the child well. Be an example to him, and make the world a place that will give him everything he needs to live properly.”

The man went away feeling much better, adopting a new attitude towards his life.

This is my retelling. I have lost the original story (or any supposed ‘authoritative’ one). However, the religious teacher in the story was not in any way bothered by the man’s unbelief. It isn’t a threat to the teacher or to the teacher’s religion. It isn’t really a problem at all.

The religious teacher addresses what motivates the man instead of promoting some kind of magic to believe in. He asks the man to identify and explain the embodiment of his motivations. What he finds is that the man’s personal god, the embodiment of what has implications for his behaviour and attitude, is in someone other than himself, something that requires no magic or complicated belief!

At no point does the religious teacher say to treat the child as authoritative. It isn’t a matter of giving the child what the child wants. Instead, it’s a matter of accepting a responsibility.

Gods need no magic and need no authority.

Our personal motivations can still be important to us, but it is time that we stripped them of all authority over our behaviour. Instead of simply confirming our motivations, or letting them rule, we can be honest with ourselves by openly admitting to them and accepting responsibility for how they make us behave.

2. Agency

The boys are brought up to be in fear of the masks the men wear in their rituals. These are the gods. These are the personifications, the powers, that structure the society. The boy, when he gets to be more than his mother can handle, the men come in with their masks, or whatever their costume is, and they grab the kid. He thinks he’s being taken by the gods. Taken out to the men’s new ground, and he’s beaten up and everything else.

But in New Guinea, there is a wonderful event where the poor kid has to stand up and fight a man with a mask. He’s fighting the god. The man let’s the kid win, takes the mask off, puts it on the kid.

Now the mask is not there defeated, and simply said, “This is just myth.” The mask represents the power that is shaping the society and has shaped you, and now you are a representative of that power.

You’ve broken past the image as fact, and understand the image as metaphor. And you are to represent what the metaphor stands for. ~ Joseph Campbell

This ritual reveals how God (the mask) is a construction. It is not a thing that creates but instead a thing created by us. This does not mean it is not real. It does have implications for behaviour (the boys react two ways after all – with fear and with fight). However, it is not the mask that has agency.

This is a very emotional experience for the child, and a brilliant example of how to incorporate disillusionment into the regular culture of a community. Disillusionment is becoming a common and life-defining experience shared by individuals today. Instead of focusing on ‘confirmations‘, god-centred religions need to celebrate these moments of disillusionment. Otherwise, they will continue to lose followers because of the destruction of trust and attachment involved in these emotional experiences. Kids are going away in fear, fight, flight and disinterest. They are walking away from community involvement in apathy or angst.

From time to time, I’d imagine, the masks that were passed from generation to generation would have to be fixed, altered, or remade. The masks, being constructions and having no magical agency in today’s language, are not immune to revision. They need constant maintenance and updating. I think we’ve reached a point where the masks must either be completely transparent or remade by each generation. This means we must remove agency from the make-up the mask. Our motivations are powerful enough already; the last thing we need to give them is their own power to act.

The mask in the New Guinea ritual does not win, after all. It is the child that wrestles and overcomes fear that wins.

 

Call to Change

The religious have been duped by bad arguments about what makes a God, or a motivation, worthy of worship. To be worthy of worship, a God does not need to exist at all, in some material sense or rational argument. Existence alone could actually make it unworthy.

Only within the bounds of the human imagination, collectively and individually, can we actually construct a God (a cultural embodiment of the motivations that should rule over us) that is worthy and inspirational. There may still be problems with inconsistency or incoherence, but that is the nature of story. That is part of dealing with the flux of new information available. Life resides in the very act of addressing new information.

Only an unknown, unreal and fictitious god (or gods) can now fit this role. No other god can survive the common experience of disillusionment which god-centred religions must address.

I don’t think this is a terrible or disrespectful way to look at religious commitment. People have dedicated themselves towards making the world a better place through adopting many kinds of stories. Instead of fixating on the inaccuracies of sacred texts, the incoherence of magical aesthetics or the probabilities grounding someone’s beliefs, we can instead focus on the consequences of the beliefs. How does a person’s beliefs, how does a person’s motivations, or how does a person’s God even, make them behave?

The last things we should give to our personal motivations is either some kind of sacred agency or some kind of supreme authority over how we collectively behave. These are the last idols of God (for now…).

The world itself wears no masks. We are the makers of masks. We are the ones that wear the masks.

God-dominated religions, if they wish to survive the continued rationalization and technologization of culture, need to abandon their last idols of God, particularly authority and agency.

What do you think?

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, ethics, irony, psychology, Religion | 18 Comments »

What’s the Argument for Compassion, Anyway?

May 24th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

I’ve been thinking about compassion. I affirmed Karen Armstrong’s international Charter for Compassion. Some people may have criticisms with Armstrong’s approach, saying she’s picking and choosing from religious traditions, ignoring the bad parts and trumping up the good ones as what religion should be all about. I don’t mind that so much. That’s what we do in every field of study – focus on what confirms or gives us what we want; drop the rest. If we want change in the world, then someone has to start somewhere. Armstrong started with the Golden Rule, and with compassion, and with religious traditions.

I see it as a kind of behavioural filter. If her charter acts as one more hoop that people of any and every religious or political stripe have to jump though, then it might at least help expose everyone’s true motivations. We’ll get a better picture of exactly who their gods are.

The charter says nothing about belief or magic. The charter is a declaration of aesthetics, however. It isn’t really an argument for compassion but rather a call to make compassion the prime motivator in people’s lives. We need something in place that will regulate how individuals behave, if we want to have an orderly world economy and a peaceful global community. Life is now international. Armstrong is trying to do something to change religion from within.

This got me thinking. What is the argument for compassion, anyway?

We don’t usually think of compassion as a thing to argue for. We just take it as a good thing. Everyone should be motivated by compassion, right? We assume the world should be run by compassion, even when the material world seems ambivalent about the whole thing.

The more I thought about this, the more I figured there wasn’t a compelling argument for compassion. There are reasons to value compassion, sure, but what is there to actually make you compassionate?

I thought of three things:

1. Emotional Commitment

2. Personal Investment

3. Predictability/Trust

Please add to the list.

This last one seems really important to me. People love predictability. But this means compassion is more a case for predictability than anything else.

The Golden Rule, the foundation of Armstrong’s Charter for Compassion, isn’t actually an argument for compassion. It’s an argument for predictability, even conformity.

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you. Don’t do onto others what you would not have done to you.

Be predictable. Follow the rules I follow. Want the same things the group wants. Be motivated by the same things everyone is motivated by. Do what you would expect of others. Even if you want others to challenge you, a good way to make that happen is to challenge them.

In a sense, the Golden Rule is general enough to work for any group that willingly consents to a group of predictable rules. It doesn’t have to be compassion. Greed could work the same way, if everyone conformed to it. Competitiveness could work the same way, if everyone agreed to it.

Armstrong believes a world motivated by compassion will create a just economy and a robust community.

Would you agree?

I need your help in this. I think I prefer a world motivated by compassion, but I don’t know an air-tight, leak-proof argument for that world.

Is there an argument for compassion that is compelling to you?

What do you think?

- – -

Some sources / neat links:

The soldier image was on openlounge.org. David wrote some lyrics on Compassion well worth reading. Please check it out and add your voice.

The website Doing Ethics – a neat, visual explanation of ethics in general terms (the link is geared towards health ethics, but the illustrations are still simple and clear. Here is the home page if you want to check the source, Robert Traer – he’s a process theology type of guy).

Ben Goertzel’s paper on universal ethics – descriptive more than prescriptive. Goertzel (wiki) has done some work with artificial intelligence. He’s fascinated by how the internet is changing things. He sees intelligence as the ability to detect patterns. The universe, according to Goertzel, shows signs of ‘continuous pattern-sympathy’ - as in tending to repeat the repeated, or the repeatable (… yes, redundancy is redundant…)

 

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, empathy, ethics, psychology | 5 Comments »

Sunday Vid – Nontheistic Gods

May 6th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Evid3nc3 has documented a deeply personal spiritual journey on youtube. He also has a blog site where the conversation can get pretty intense.

If you haven’t yet take the time, I would urge you to explore his videos.  He has put so much effort and time into his series hoping to connect in particular with Christians. Although he is no longer religious, he wanted to demonstrate his sincerity through the videos, and express just how deep his beliefs once were. His journey could be useful for others, too.

Since my main interest is in nontheistic gods, I thought I would use the chapter from Evid3nce’s story entitled Nontheistic Gods. 

Some Points:

On reading the story Jonathan Livingston Seagull (I particularly like some of his wording in his narration):

“… My mind mapped my own experiences and the entities in my own life to the stories’ symbols…”

“… The church [at the time] was still the only organization through which I felt I could dependably further my philosophical identity and the philosophical identities of other people, despite being an atheist…”

After examining Pantheism, Panentheism, Panpsychism and Deism:

“… I’d learned my lesson with Theism, and I did not cling to any of these hypotheses too strongly…”

 

(This particular video doesn’t directly address my personal interest in nontheistic gods – the psychological process of embodying personal (or social) motivations, then granting them authority or agency, and then wrestling with them. But, that’s the story I’m working on, and it isn’t Evid3nc3′s story.)

 

Inspired by the three quotes above, I have three questions for you readers. You don’t have to answer all three, but please play with them.

1. Have you ever read a story that you felt ‘mapped out’ your own personal experiences or situations symbolically in the way that Evid3nc3 describes? What was the story? Do you still feel the same way?

2. At the time, Evid3nc3 felt his personal identity was wrapped up in the group he was a part of. In a sense, they defined who he was, and he didn’t have any alternatives to go to. Is this still the case for de-converting members? Are there other places to go, groups to be a part of?

3. Evid3nc3 was able to explore ideas without adopting them as his truth. It sounds like he wants to sing, “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” Once the spell of a defining story is broken, do you think such a level of trust could ever be adopted again? And could the act of breaking the spell ever be a part of the stories we live by? (yes, I’m trying to link ideas to a past post)

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in art, Belief, Beyond Belief, god, psychology, purpose, Religion, story | 6 Comments »

Sunday TED – Frans De Waal Gets a Morality Lesson from Chimps

April 22nd, 2012   by   Andrew

Why do we reconcile after a fight?

Well, why would animals reconcile after a fight?

Frans de Waal has spent a lot of time with apes. He was fascinated with how some of the animals he studied were obsessed with power. Or, why the researchers that studied animals were obsessed with how animals were obsessed with power. The more he studied the animals (and the researchers), the more the story changed.

de Waal collects some fun footage of chimps and elephants displaying cooperative behaviour and synchronization. There is also some evidence of underlying motivations behind the animal behaviour.

de Waal suggests there are two ‘pillars’ of morality that can be studied more with respect to animals:

Reciprocity – fairness

Empathy – compassion

He also puts in a fun little dig at academics and philosophers that scoffed at his studies, unable to play with the idea that animals could have anything to tell us about such things.

I thought this was a neat example of how people, even in the academic and scientific community, deal with new information that challenges their perceptions of things.

What do you think? Should we pay more attention to the moral lessons and new information other animals can teach us?

- – -

There is a series of videos from a youtuber named Evid3nc3, that I want to include in my Sunday videos. However, I felt like keeping things a little more light and fun right now. Thanks again to the Wise Fool for letting me know about Evid3nc3 – definitely a video series worth thinking about.

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, education, Philosophy, psychology, Religion, Science, story | 6 Comments »

Santa, The Easter Bunny, Gods – Critical Thinking and Mythological Ritual

April 15th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

This is an unfinished post. It contains one of the most important videos I may have ever posted (part of a Joseph Campbell interview). I think I’m trying to say Santa and the Easter Bunny may be understood as attempts to correct some of the inconsistencies surrounding our use of ‘beliefs’ (whatever assistance ‘beliefs’ may have given to our rapid flourishing and this 10 000-year-old thought-experiment).

Dale McGowan of The Meming of Life  has a great story about how his youngest child figured out “the truth” about Santa. His youngest daughter loved Santa. But this winter, she got bit by the bug – she just had to know. She kept asking questions, kept testing and probing to see how certain inconsistent things weren’t adding up. Dale McGowan refers to it as reaching a tipping point between the desire to believe and the desire to know.

His response to his daughter’s momentary disappointment with reality was to praise her process of thinking and reinforce the feeling of pride for figuring things out for herself.

The tradition of Christmas may be a little different next year, but it looks like even his youngest daughter wants to still participate in the holiday fun. In McGowan’s words, “all the fun, all the family stuff, the presents, the yummy food, the lights and music and doing nice things for other people — we still get to have ALL of that. But now you know where it all really comes from.”

By allowing our children to participate in the Santa myth and find their own way out of it through skeptical inquiry, we give them a priceless opportunity to see a mass cultural illusion first from the inside, then from the outside.

Joseph Campbell explains a similar but more confrontational ritual that came about partly from our long years of mythological consciousness:

The young person becomes a responsible member of the community by facing up to the greatest fear and the possibility of loss, and then adopting the constructed masks themselves.

My niece has figured out “the truth” about the Easter Bunny. She is reluctant to say anything out loud, but this year she was insistent about asking her mom if she could “help with the eggs.” Her desire is not to run to her younger brother and tell him. He is still quite young and would not likely understand. Instead, she wants to take part in the ritual, but with the added responsibility and duties of the adults.

Something often shared amongst ministers is the serious joke: “No one should get through seminary believing in God.” It’s a comment about how the simple, or in Campbell’s words, infantile understanding of the world can’t survive direct and bare exposure to the frightening reality and complexity of “the truth.” And in fighting with that Mask of God in that academic environment, they are supposedly becoming worthy of the masks themselves, responsible enough to wear a constructed mask and bring their congregations to that wrestling match with God.

Here’s my question – kids come to understand “the truth” about Santa and the Easter Bunny realtively early. Often enough the reaction is to adopt or participate in the adult’s side of the ritual. And often enough, the family tradition adapts to fit the new situation, the now-shared information. Entrance to seminary or college usually takes place in the late teens or in full adulthood. But isn’t it really the same ritual, just dressed up in a different aesthetic?

And if that’s the case, then what does this mean for “belief”?

The most important thing in all these traditions seems to be the moment the mask comes off. Could this ritual not be adopted once again? Or is it?

What do you think?

Final word from Dale McGowan this time:

“I wouldn’t have mythed it for the world.”

 

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in art, Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, dragons, god, myth, psychology, Religion, story | 4 Comments »

A Deliberate Yoking of the Mind

April 4th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

The revived interest in Karma, the notion that one’s destiny is determined by one’s own actions, made people unwilling to blame the gods for the irresponsible behavior of human beings.

The gods were no longer very important in India. Henceforth, they would be superseded by the religious teacher, who would be considered higher than the gods. It was a remarkable assertion of the value of humanity and the desire to take control of destiny: it would be the great religious insight of the subcontinent. The new religions of Hinduism and Buddhism did not deny the existence of the gods, nor did they forbid the people to worship them. In their view, such repression and denial would be damaging. Instead, Hindus and Buddhists sought new ways to transcend the gods, to go beyond them.

The Buddha believed implicitly in the existence of the gods since they were a part of his cultural baggage, but he did not believe them to be much use to mankind. They too were caught up in the realm of pain and flux; they had not helped him to achieve enlightenment; they were involved in the cycle of rebirth like all other beings and eventually they would disappear… Instead of relying on a god, therefore, the Buddha urged his disciples to save themselves. ~ Karen Armstrong, A History of God

Armstrong was speaking of a time approximately 2500 years ago. However, the words of the first two paragraphs seem to fit today’s situation. North America has gone shopping, growing more and more discontent with both the gods and with irresponsible human behavior.

Religious teachers or leaders in the west have superseded a god ever since Jesus, himself serving as a model (an other sons of gods, of course). Something like 1/2 of religious Americans are not in the same denomination or religion as their parents. When dissatisfied by the messenger (or minister), it is common practice to either find another preacher that fits better (or tell the minister to move on).

Armstrong’s insight is quite important –  humanity’s desire to take control of destiny, to control ourselves, is alive and well, though our motivations are still quite mixed. People desiring success or entertainment can choose a megachurch messenger and the prosperity gospel, or a wellness coach and celebrity talk show host. People desiring to relinquish all matters of good and evil over to an authority can join the Catholics. Eastern traditions have planted themselves on the fertile soil of western spiritual dissatisfaction.

These shopping options perpetuate the usual market of spiritual ideas, but they might also generate a measure individual responsibility. Can we find a better control over our destinies through a grocery store selection of spirituality? I’m tempted to make a connection here to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. At the threshold of taking up the journey, a mentor appears to help the hero. This stage in the process is so institutionalized and ‘encultured’ in us that we have a virtual catalogue of mentors to choose from, complete with branding, aesthetics and end goals. But as usual, it’s the hero that has to make the choice, take up the journey.

The future of religions, like the past, might benefit from exercises which help in the deliberate yoking of the mind to something beyond private motivations, regardless of what cultural trappings or dressings are used.

What do you think?

Are we progressing spiritually by focusing on the teachers rather than the gods?

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, god, psychology, Religion | 4 Comments »

    Next Page »