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?

 

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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?

 

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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.

 

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The Land of Fat and Glucose

April 6th, 2012   by   Andrew

Par of the series God: from Magic to Motivation

This is a follow-up to the post Faith and Food.

In the Bible, there is a kind of bumpy evolution to the ideas and images of Heaven and Hell.

In the beginning there is a walled garden paradise, then there is land of fruitful and established growth. Moses manages to get his community to a Promised Land, a land of milk and honey. At the time, a place that provided milk (fat) and honey (glucose) would seem ideal, even though you’d still have work to get them.

After Ezekiel has visions of fiery wheels and four-headed cherubs (and a foreign empire’s capitol), the ideal state starts to look like a walled city. People have the law written on their hearts; they have abandoned their idols and behave well. Evil is cast out, someone else’s problem.

By the end of the Old Testament, the ideal situation takes on the dressings of an entire Kingdom or empire. God is distant but will set things all straight and good in the end. The known world of the New Testament is much larger than the known world of the Old Testament. Heaven becomes more complex, more vague and otherworldly.

The idea of Hell has a similar history. Dante’s Inferno is portrayed as levels upon levels of horrible, eternal fates. In a sense, his levels can be used as a guide to the changes in the how we have portrayed the idea of the negative afterlife. The first grey, ashen level is a place of boredom for those that came before the time of Christ. They are not really punished or rewarded, just dead and lifeless (motivation-less?). It just kind of sucks to be them. The final level has Lucifer held fast symbolically by both fire and ice, fixed in a state of eternal anguish and unable to change his situation. He also has a terrible eating disorder.

In the present world, we have achieved each of the heavenly ideals, in a sense, and are now facing the consequences. Most of our population lives in cities and most of us do abide by the laws that keep our motivations orderly. Most of us have fat and glucose readily available, and salt too. Also, we are putting more and more time into non-work pursuits – imaginary and abstract worlds of stories and video games and pastimes that have little to do with reality (seriously, how far from reality is watching baseball or Survivor, anyway?). It might be said we are making our reality more and more unreal.

5% of us work in agriculture now. About 35% of us are now paid to think, and this number is growing (if you really think about this, it’s startling). Those left are paid to serve, or paid for labour.

So what has living in this land of fat and glucose done to us?

Well, it has meant we can enjoy all the riches of the entire world, and it has made us feel entitled to indulge. Cities have encultured within us an incredible level of trust and expectation. We have both access and excess. And we may have made an ideal reality that is unsustainable.

One of my favourite parts of the story of Moses is near the end, when this dynamic, charismatic leader looks upon the Promised Land and knows that he will not live long enough to enjoy the milk and honey it offers. It’s deliciously ironic, in that his work and effort and charisma create no fruit he will enjoy in the end. It’s purely for those that come after him.

Abandoning our ideals, like our idols, is a tough game to play. It sucks to lose something precious, whether its real or imaginary.

In response to the problems of living with too much fat and glucose, people have searched for alternatives. Some people actually want to invest more of their time and effort and money into products that have earned their trust. Some are escaping from the city. They are consciously choosing to turn away from the promises of easy living. It means more work and less trust in the invisible services around you. For some it means a better life, closer to the ideals that should be believed in.

Ideas on the afterlife almost always depend on the imagination. Ideas on the afterlife change from generation to generation now. Instead of leaping to something magical, maybe it’s time to look at the word again. The afterlife could be about just that – what there is after you have lived your life. Not what you get to enjoy, but what’s still going on without you.

Don’t worry about being left behind. That’s how this works. Like Moses, you will get left behind. And even if that sucks, the focus should be on what you leave behind. Otherwise, well, what kind of person are you?

Instead of painting Heaven and Hell as some kind of magical afterlife, I think we can re-imagine the words.

Heaven and Hell were never for you. Both Heaven and Hell will be the world you give to the generation that follows you.

What do you think?

Happy First Full Moon of Spring, and Easter, and End-of-Fasting, and good fertility to you all!

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. ~ George Orwell

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Trust in Prophecy

March 27th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

Is meaningful really just another word for predictable?

I’ve been distracted lately with an opportunity I can’t ignore. However, something else happened that I wanted to share. The question above is something I wrote in the margin of J. Peterson’s Maps of Meaning. In some passages, he seems to pretty much equate the two.

Four mature women stood in the street dividing up the houses and coordinating their campaign. When it was time for our house, the woman in a long beige coat approached our door. She had short sandy hair, fading from blonde to dignified grey. She was accompanied by another woman in a dark blue jacket. Her hair was longer, much more white, but still very sensible and refined.

When I answered the door they beamed warmly. The shorter, sandy haired one asked me if I knew what was in store for the future. She asked if I struggled with the tough questions of life and had found the answers. The other woman said nothing but looked dignified, thoughtful and confident.

I don’t mind talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses. I like observing the language they use and trying to guess at what parts are scripted from what parts aren’t. I usually try to return the beaming, welcoming, everything’s-gonna-be-all-right face to them and then translate for them their convictions of a magical God into personal, social and symbolic motivations. At the end I give them a business card and invite them to check out my websites. Fair trade?

Within a very short time, the sandy-haired woman had quoted for me, from her well-worn Bible, three underlined passages – one from the Psalms, one from Timothy, and then something from one of the Gospels. I noticed her hands were trembling lightly, so I tried to look all the more calm and reassuring for her.

When she was done, and still very much on script, I made a comment on the passage of time between the writing periods of the particular passages she quoted, and the further amount of time needed for the Bible to be put together and massaged into the narrative people read today. I was trying to lead the conversation towards how valuable it might be to study the motivations of the writers. It might make more sense to not trust the whole text as a whole text, but instead see if it says something valuable about how those writers were wrestling with things like imagery, meaning, social responsibilities and aesthetics. She cut me off to continue with her script.

“You know what makes me really know I can trust the Bible? The prophecies!”

She dived for another passage. I realized she didn’t come to my door to see the world differently. Confirmation and conviction got her here.

I’ve been reading Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. Taleb is fascinated by just how awful we are at prediction, and interestingly, just how fixated, addicted we can be about prediction. Much of Taleb’s writing has to do with yelling at established powers, screaming at them and then making fun of them. Much of his message is do not sanctify past measures, past models, past stories and past data. In many areas of our lives, especially the social aspects of our lives, it creates a bloated sense of false security. And when it is well past the time to abandon our idols, things like denial, hubris and vanity are almost all too “natural” reactions. (Yes, we can be predictable… sometimes. That’s not always good…)

When I looked at the two women on my front step, I didn’t see a threat to the world. I saw two women clinging to what they felt was a predictable anchor – a model-making text that tied past, present and future into something that could be decipherable and trusted. And if everyone could just see it their way, maybe the world would be more predictable.

I tried again, but we found an impasse. Her God was quite literally tied to the books in her hands and she wasn’t going further. She was not ready to abandon her idols. She suggested I read something from one of her group’s publications. I suggested she join the conversation on my website, or on several other available websites. She told me she does not have internet in her house.

Not to be disheartened, I gave her and her friend each a card, and said that if any of the younger people in their group is struggling with these questions, I’d be willing to talk to them and start them on some remarkable journeys of discovery. And the whole time, I gave them that calm, reassuring smile. Everything is going to be fine if you could be willing to say, “I don’t know” about a few things.

It’s no wonder that some folk get uncomfortable around scientific talk. I think a lot of it is undecipherable for them. They don’t have the training, the culture or the background for it. What can they trust?

At the same time, I think I can understand the atheistic desire for scientific understandings of things. We are junkies for predictability, remember.

The combination of Taleb’s rants and the two gracious women at my front step got me wondering. Will atheists, when sufficiently tired of saying, “Just be rational!” (or read: just be consistent, or predictable), put more efforts into education than argument? When regular people get it that science is a prediction mechanism that eats and regenerates its own models, more people might want to take part. And if everyone just saw things your way, maybe then the world would be more predictable (… ahem…excuse me… something’s caught in my throat…)

Problem? Well yes, education takes a hell of a lot more effort than argument and anger. But at least with anger, you know you care about something.

If the idea of a supernatural God is just too preposterous, too unappealing to atheists, then some sort of aesthetically pleasing social mechanism should be developed to predictably, reliably inspire and foster social responsibility.

I have no idea what it would look like, but  I’d like to be part of something like that. It could be the most important work and accomplishment ever dreamed up.

If atheists want to really provoke people, maybe they should start going door-to-door, spreading invitations to whatever meaningful gatherings they think people should be taking part in. Alternatively, you can just leave people alone to sit and stare at their screens at home. Maybe that kind of culture will make a meaningful, predictable world too.

What do you think?

How should you go about changing your world into what it should be?

 

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Karen Armstrong’s Elusive, Stubborn Meme

March 7th, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the series God: From Magic to Motivation

…the indiscretion of serious art, literature and music, which queries the last privacies of our existence. It is an invasion or an annunciation, which breaks into the small house of our cautionary being and commands us, “Change your life!” After such a summons, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before. ~ George Steiner, paraphrased by Karen Armstrong

At the beginning of this series I mentioned I was taking some advice and reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. I’m glad I did. I got a lot out of it. I was a little disappointed with her ending. I think she could have been more imaginative. However, I want to limit this post to three points that stood out for me. They relate to the transition of God from a magical thing to an abstract idea that embodies our motivations.

1. In practically each of the three main monotheistic religions, you can find a line of thinkers repeating the refrain, “God is Nothing.” It may never have been the dominant or major voice, but it was a persistent and repetitive one. Highly respected writers, rigorous teachers and responsible community leaders all struggled with the issue of understanding the deity at the supposed centre of their traditions. And they steadfastly concluded that God was Nothing, or God didn’t exist in our usual sense, or that God was incomprehensible, meaning it was impossible to cling to a thought or description or premise of what God was like.

These individuals may have been wrestling with a limitation of the vocabulary and knowledge available at the time. It’s still significant, and I think useful, to the those within religious traditions but are having problems or doubts. There is a rich history of intelligent people within faith communities that come to terms with a God that is “not real” in the more literal sense. Instead, they found a tradition designed to help, symbolically, socially, with the responsibility of managing and examining the motivations of the self.

2. In each of the monotheistic traditions, some form of mysticism dominated at one point in their histories, except for one. Practices like Kabbalah became prominent in the Jewish religion for a period. Sufism held major sway in parts of Islam for long stretches of time, although it has now declined. Even in the Eastern Church (eg: Greek Orthodox), it was encouraged to understand God as an incomprehensible paradox always. But not in the West. Mysticism never gained a popular status in the Western Church.

In the West, mystery was not an option for theology. It was almost repugnant. Even today, mysteries are something to be solved, fixed, nailed down with clarity. It is a weakness or threat to even think of living with the unknown or incoherent. Things like the problem of evil weren’t that big of a deal in traditions that accepted good and evil in their deity, but the Western Church has scrambled to write entire libraries of justifications. This may have helped the advance of ‘the west’, motivated to develop certainty, predictability and power. But also, when conflicts between dogma and new scientific information made change necessary, the Western Church had no accessible mystic tradition for its followers. People in the west have had nothing viable to turn to in negotiating the change (monasteries and nunneries? Progressive interpretations? Come on). Instead, it was outsourced. Forms of Buddhism and Yoga were westernized, popularized and adopted. Why? They certainly work better than the nothing available to turn to.

3. Despite all the serious efforts of academics and even mystics, the average follower’s beliefs have still centered around either concrete, anthropomorphic and self-empowering versions of God, or very vague, self-confirming, therapeutic versions of God. Armstrong often returns to her central theme that an idea or form of god has to work, it has to be effective, if people are going to adopt it and hold to it. If it does nothing for people, that’s when it is discarded. The cerebral probing or accuracy of the idea of god has never really been the interest of the regular community. The adaptive nature of the idea of god means it is still doing the same stubborn job it has always done – compelling people to act in certain ways (or justifying people’s actions).

The intellectual arguments between theists and atheists can be entertaining (rarely, if lucky!), but if  atheists really want to get believers to change, it might make more sense to offer a spectrum of social advantages that compete with the social advantages tied to religious communities. A religious community offers social engagement, business networks, symbolic therapy, motivational speaking and solidarity. It might all be based on something wrong, but as the saying goes, it’s better than nothing. In today’s consumer market, people will shop around, and they just might drop their version of god if they can be a part of something better.

Or, maybe these things are available in the secular world now. If they are, what’s the cost and are they effective at getting people to change their lives?

What do you think?

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1.  The “God is Nothing” tradition stretches from antiquity to today, but this post is already long enough. If you would like a list of names, I can get you started.

2. She says more about this strange exception of Western Christianity in Chapters 6 and 7.

3. Whether or not people should make god into bigger versions of themselves and their motivations, people do this predictably. Maybe we should ask why it is so persistent when there are other, better options. Why don’t people abandon such obviously flawed behaviour? <sarcasm>Correct thinking has always meant better living for individuals…</sarcasm>

 

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Implications, Relationships, Symbolism

March 1st, 2012   by   Andrew

Part of the Series God: From Magic to Motivation

 

Many moons ago I put up a post on the Effectiveness of Prayer? It prompted a conversation where a believer-friend of mine expressed some amazement at how atheists he worked with seemed just as concerned about morality as the Christians he worked with. As he put it, “I find that fascinating and more than a little bit puzzling.” (note – Disqus is still not playing nice. The comments are there, but not always showing under the post for some reason. I’m working on it…)

I got running with a line of thought. I quoted for him Jordan Peterson’s description of the function of a god:

God’s very being has to have implication for actions, for motivation, and for how we feel about things. Otherwise, He’s no God.

For a deep believer, I think this is almost intuitively understood, goes without saying. But at the same time, I think non-believers are finding things in their lives to put in that place through the process of recognizing others as important parts of  our selves.

I got substituting a few things in place of God to suggest where atheist morality is coming from (I’m going to add a few more things to flush out the idea):

My spouse’s very being has to have implications for actions, for motivation, and for how I feel about things. Otherwise, they’re not my spouse.

My children’s very being has to have implications for actions, for motivation, and for how I feel about things. Otherwise, they’re not my children.

My community’s very being has to have implications for actions, for motivation, and for how I feel about things. Otherwise, it’s not my community.

My world’s very being has to have implications for actions, for motivation, and for how I feel about things. Otherwise, it’s not my world.

In Christianity (and to some extent, Judaism as well), the mythological symbolism of God got flipped. Instead of God being Father, God became Son. Imagery, as reminders of what we were to be motivated by, came from vulnerable things – baby, young pregnant woman, lamb, dove, etc.

As an aside, my home province of Ontario initiated a new holiday a few years ago – Family Day. We now have government-coordinated holy days for Father, Mother and for Family.

Our planet Earth is often portrayed as a Mother. Ideas like the Gaia hypothesis borrow imagery from ancient mythology to tap into the poetic zeal and richness.

The success of Christianity has a lesson on the value of upending our institutionalized, symbolic imagery. Maybe our association between the planet and our mother isn’t the best imagery anymore. Our role has changed and how we see ourselves has changed. Maybe instead, we could symbolically see it as our daughter.

After all:

My daughter’s very being has to have implications for actions, for motivation, and for how I feel about things. Otherwise, what kind of parent would I be?

What do you think?


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