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 »

Disillusionment, Adjustment, and Fish

June 28th, 2012   by   Andrew

I want say that I’m sorry I haven’t been getting out to many other people’s sites lately.

I miss the conversations, and the influence others have on me.

A couple of things have come up.

A new job.
A new house.

I was hoping to wrap up the series God: From Magic to Motivation. There are still a few posts I am hoping to get to, but I don’t know when I will get to them. I have very little skill when it comes to seeing into the future. Things like ‘personal writing time’ look terribly bleak.

Priorities invade.

Life invades.

I’m going to post a conclusion to the series I drafted up early on. It contains two short ‘stories’ that I think reveal how to deal with:

The disillusionment of religious beliefs, experienced by more and more people, and
The adjustments in motivations being experienced in workplaces, communities, hierarchies

We seem to be moving to a more connected and more inter-dependent, trusting world-community. How will that work?

This title sounded important to me:

The Last Idols of God

 

Maybe in a month’s time I will find my way back, finish the series, get to some other posts. Here are some titles I was working on:

WLC Confirms My God – It’s not what you think…

Is Being Rational a Virtue? – Looking at Rationalism as an Emotional-Aesthetic Commitment

Ultimate Complexity, Cultural Regeneration – is there such a thing as Ultimate Complexity? Can we survive a fragile world-culture?

Improvisation’s Lesson for Religionists and Overly-Materialistic Rational Academics

A New Ataraxia – Redefining what ‘Authority’ is, how it is treated, how it is used, Building Trust and Responsibility Despite Living in Uncertainty

 

I’d also like to work on a new series about how to actually read literature (and sacred texts), evaluate what’s being said without getting bogged down into too literal or too authoritative of a mindset.

I haven’t got all the workings figured out. I’m thinking a little about Northrop Frye, science fiction’s role in the new mythos, creativity as a team-driven exercise vs. an individualistic process,  and how we react towards new information.

My head’s a mess. Maybe one of these days I’ll organize my thoughts into something coherent…

Salut, mes amis, et merci pour tous les poissons!

À bientôt!

 

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Beyond Belief, dragons, ethics, god, myth, Philosophy, psychology, purpose, Religion, Science | Comments Off

Empathy to the Deserving – Sunday Vid, Sort Of…

June 25th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

I’m not going to embed or link to video today. This post is about a video, though.

I want to say something about the bus monitor Karen Klein and what’s happened because of a video made on a school bus. It says something about our empathy, what triggers our empathy, and what doesn’t trigger our empathy.

You might know the story. A grandmotherly bus monitor was singled out by a few thirteen-year boys. She was taunted, made fun of, and brought to tears. It was all captured on video, and put on Youtube.

People reacted.

Outrage. Emotional pain. Feelings of powerlessness.

A man in Canada, after seeing the video, thought this bus monitor deserved a vacation. Who deserves treatment like that anyway? Something should be done to make things right.

From that idea came the initiative to go further. Hey, this is 2012. There is enough of us connected, and emotionally attached to the situation. Certainly we actually can do something about it.

He started collecting donations.

He couldn’t change the fact that the thirteen-year-old boys had done something really stupid. He couldn’t change the torment the bus monitor went through or the public display that she had become. But with some help from other like-minded people, he could change things. He could at least get enough money together to give her the vacation she deserved after having to go through that.

Of the millions of viewers, a small percentage seemed to be willing to participate in his vision. And from those viewers that wanted to do something, contributions have poured in (continue to pour in?). Apparently the guy that set up the vacation account has collected enough to send maybe more than 120 bus monitors on the vacations they may very well deserve (if my math is off, please correct me).

If the job of bus monitor is really about enduring abuse similar to what was on the video, then certainly more than just this one bus monitor deserves a nice vacation. I mean, she can’t be the only one that has gone through this kind of abuse.

Sometimes a vacation break can put things into perspective, remind us of what’s important.

Apparently the boys have been reprimanded. One has written what I think is a sincere apology to her. The others may be following that example by now.

The parents of the boys probably feel terrible. It’s not like they wanted the world to look on their children in this way.

Thirteen-year-old boys can be really annoying. We’ve been trying for thousands upon thousands of years to turn thirteen-year-old boys into non-idiots – functioning, positive members of society. We have made up initiation rites, tribal dances, hunting parties, high school, all in the attempt to get them to smarten up.

They keep finding chances to be idiots.

Maybe it’s part of the hierarchy they find themselves in. If they feel empowered by treating others this way, then why would they even consider behaving any differently? What possible motivation could they have to change, when they seem to be enjoying themselves so much at the time, bringing discomfort to someone else?

Thirteen-year-old boys probably know how it feels to be bullied as well as any one of us.

A lot of internet video is watched alone. Our technological lifestyle has turned us into audiences of one. We are millions strong, all doing the same thing, isolated. the video of Karen Klein never really changes focus. She is almost always in middle of the shot, targeted, isolated. And in our audiences of one, when we see that experience on video, we feel it as much as watch it.

I’m really glad to know we live in a world where people can connect so immediately, and more importantly initiate action to make things right. Even if only a small fraction of all the people that saw the video did actually overcome the bystander effect, at least someone is trying to help someone. Giving Karen a vacation doesn’t solve the problem, but it shows that some people are willing to reach out, put some small effort into changing things.

But before we get too emotional about this, something more has to be said.

I think we need to ask ourselves why some cruelty has to be seen before we react to it.

Karen is one of us that had a bad experience. Her story is only different in that it was shared – it was caught on video and put on display for the world.

If we only react empathetically to the victims we actually see, then we are only really changing the smallest fraction of the victims of the world.

If we’re going to be emotional and rational about this, then we should think about the people we don’t see.

Our lives are becoming more and more public. We take our cues from our heroes. Modern day celebrities bare all for us, and act as examples. Their lives are incredibly public, out there for everyone to watch. We demand to know everything we can about them.

And we now reflect that, in our status updates, facebook timelines, personal youtube channels, and in the number of details we tick into the record about our loved ones, friends and family.

It has been projected that facebook may reach a billion people soon in 2012. Imagine being technically able to ‘friend’ a billion people. That’s a lot of attachment.

I think there may come a point in time when the pain of every victim of our idiocy is going to be on display.

Some of us seem to react to these things more that others, particularly when we’re emotionally triggered. Some of us even share in the struggle of the experience, and want to make things right.

Are we ready to share all of this with the world?

 

- – -

Aside – I meant to change the background in the image, put the youtube icon there instead. Unfortunately, when it comes to time-management, I’m a life-tard.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in art, Behaviour, Beyond Belief, education, empathy, ethics, psychology, story | Comments Off

Hierarchy in the City – Continued

June 10th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

A local minister I know called me a “religious sniper” some time ago. He was referring to my style of picking off religious topics from the vantage point of my website  - never really know where I am or where the fire is coming from, or what the target may be.

His comment was meant in light-hearted jest, I believe. Although I appreciate it and take it as a compliment, I don’t think I have the accuracy or precision to be a sniper. Snipers do tend to play a part in urban warfare, but that’s not how I see things right now. War is not a solution. It’s a marketing strategy.

And war is getting really old and making things really fragile. City life depends on trust, enormous amounts of trust. Our entire foundation can still be upturned by a few confident authorities with silver tongues, or individuals motivated by the merest whims.

I think of myself more as waving a shotgun around, hoping I might hit the broad side of some ancient barn. I’m worried about those mischievous, ephemeral spirits of the night, and I’m intent on, metaphorically, keeping them away from my daughter’s bedroom.

However, I’ve come to realize that either choice of weaponry, sniper rifle or shotgun, is actually pretty poor. I have my criticisms of religion but I have to realize that whatever its faults, it’s part of the world’s inheritance right now. It is a part of the house we live in. It may not be the foundation of the house that’s the problem. The problem is (almost always) people’s motivations, or the things that people think should be worshipped.

My intention was never to bring down the pyramid anyway, and any kind of personal firearm would only jeopardize the safety of the people within the building. Regardless of what you shoot at it, a pyramid continues. A pyramid isn’t that fragile and not so easy to deconstruct. Time fears the pyramids more than any god.

Here’s the lesson I’ve been thinking about when it comes to pyramids. It comes in part from Uxmal in Mexico. The lesson is about constructive persistence.

Uxmal is a city of the ancient Maya. The name can be translated as “Built-three-times”. The most dominant architectural part of the city is The House of the Magician, a temple at the top of a pyramid, the newest built on top of the old. The leader of the city built on what he had inherited, just as the last leader did. The leaders come and go. The pyramid lingers.

One intriguing feature of many of the Mayan pyramids is that even though each generation of builders wanted to add something, the older temples often enough remained visible and accessible. The builders rarely destroyed the old pyramid; they built around them and on top of them to make the structure bigger, often with a wider base and higher top.

When we reach new heights, we don’t destroy the old pyramids we’re standing on. We build bigger ones on top.

It doesn’t mean the new temple has to look like the old one, or that it even does the same job as the old one. But the past won’t go away just because someone finds a flaw in the engineering. Those old pyramids of power made it through the past despite being inconsistent, fragile, downright wrong in some places, or in bad need of repair.

We can borrow from all the cultures and aesthetics of the world now, but by doing so we are confirming the pyramids of the past and building on old foundations, making the whole thing more complicated. Whatever steps it takes to build the new and better pyramids, we’ll need to take into account all the new information that is available too.

New pyramids can’t be built from magic, but they can’t be built by firing bullets at them either.

If our future is to remain in the city, then our personal motivations have to be laid bare all the more.  The things that have implications for our behaviour will make such strange bedfellows. We can’t let the ancient motivations rule us with authority anymore. The view from those old temples is too low, too limited. Our motivations demand an even higher point of view.

One thing that does help me sleep easier at night is the thought that pyramids were often enough built as tombs. Pyramids, like cities, are places where gods go to die.

If the whole world is to embrace one big culture, and if everyone is adding to one big pyramid, it might be big enough to lay to rest the most sanctified of our motivations.

[I'll let you have fun with what that might be.]

What do you think?

 

- – -

Some Sources:

Uxmal – Wikipedia

Pyramid of the Magician – Wikipedia. A short retelling of the myth on how the pyramid was built (coincidentally, it has some striking similarities to the myth of Horus, and other hero tales)

Some great photos of Uxmal Ruins

History of Religious Criticism – from rationalevolution.net, a thorough, sometimes thick, outline that starts with the Protestant Reformation and ending with a neat graphic of the 50 most non-religious countries in the world today.

 

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in art, Beyond Belief, ethics, god, irony, myth, psychology, story | Comments Off

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 »

Who Gets to Define?

April 26th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Atheists shouldn’t even use that word. They don’t know what it really means!*

The word atheist has meant a lot of things through history. To list a few:

A person ungrateful for being ‘created’
A non-Catholic
A non-Orthodox
A person with an idea of God that wasn’t going to survive an impending change in power
A person with an aesthetic that does not include magic

Now it is used for a movement. I mention this word movement because I have heard Christianity, in some of its loosest definitions, referred to as a social movement. The badge of atheism is now to be worn with pride and anger. It has become a symbol of the desire for change. The atheists are motivated to make reality into how they think it should be. And I dare say maybe even righteously so. They have rallied around the word and defined it for themselves.

In part, the movement has been modelled after the LBGT movement (or so the story goes). The gay label was practically a social death sentence. Unfortunately, in some situations, it was a literal one. Better to hide in shame in the closet and let the majority have their way.

But at some moment the people of the LBGT movement collectively couldn’t handle that burden of being defined by someone else anymore. Coming out was recast, redefined. Instead of having a light exposing your shameful hidden secret, coming out became a matter of proudly stepping into the light. The desire to participate in the world as an identified person was more powerful than the shame of hiding in a shadowed cave.

February is Black History Month in the US. I meant to publish this post in February. Keeping to a chronological timeline in my writing drafts is not my strong point. I’ll blame being a Canadian – supposedly we’re always behind the US on trends…

There was a time in North American history when it was quite commonplace for a black male to respond to the call, “Boy!” It became a kind of leash or a lash upon a group of people, a way of keeping them in their place. Eventually, they got tired of it, and got tired of carrying around that identity put on them by someone else.

I was once told the slang use of man came about from the desire to change this identity. They were men, not boys, and saw each other as men. It was a way of taking control of their identity, and refusing to be defined by someone else. There are other words that white folk once used, but black culture has appropriated them for their own.

The use of the word man in slang was adopted and adapted and mangled so much that even a cartoon boy like Bart Simpson has made it part of one of his own catch-phrases. For example, he might say to his friend Millhouse,  ”Don’t have a cow, man.”

I use this line from Bart because it has become so far removed from any literal interpretation, any original sense of the words involved. In a way, he made it all his own.

So, who gets to define?

There is almost never a what that makes a definition. Definitions depend on who, not on what. They depend on use more often than matter.

I use these examples to suggest an underlying pattern – the minority often takes the power of definition away from the majority in order to create a desired identity, construct who they are. In doing this, they can either become part of a more complicated population, or they can also segregate. Whenever a minority defines itself, the majority either becomes more fragile because of it, or becomes less fragile. A lot of it depends on how the majority faces up to the new information available and how they face the impending change in power.

Of course, this is an oversimplified history for each of these examples. There can be an incredible amount of struggle and confusion when this power to identify or define people passes from one group to another. It can mean a dramatic re-evaluation of reality for some people.

I’ve been thinking about my use of the word God. I deliberately use it in ways that are valid but some people might find things confusing or overly abstract or unhelpful. I do this because I don’t think the word and what we refer to is immune to the pattern of changes in definitions. And, I don’t think the past definitions or the people that defined it need to be given any authority on the word. It’s my word when I use it.

If one of the loosest definitions of a god is something that at bottom must have implication for your behaviour and how you see things, then the most righteous attitude a person can adopt is letting others find their own identities. Let them define themselves, let them find how they will participate in and add to the world. After all, it’s likely that when you deal with someone else, they will have implications for your behaviour and how you see things. They may just redefine something about you.

Namaste.**

- – -

* Not really a specific quote, but just a sentiment I’ve heard a few times. I couldn’t find a satisfying quote to start this post and so just went with this.

** I had a bizarre meeting with a spiritual lawyer recently. I didn’t even know such a thing existed!

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Beyond Belief, ethics, myth, psychology, Religion, story | 4 Comments »

    Next Page »