![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agoodwinsmithI always find writing about a puzzle to be a good way to resolve/reconsider issues in it. Beware: this is personal-view inner-life convictions review.
Since Lorne's death I have been attending my parents's Christian affiliated place of worship. They were the only group of people I knew in town. Raised Christian in a loose C&E (Christmas and Easter) fashion; brief spell of committment ruined by idealism; searching; finding Wicca and a Wiccan spouse; following it in a loose S&Y (Samhain and Yule) fashion. I held a small non-faith memorial for Lorne, and there were Wiccan trappings which I doubt that anyone I didn't tell noticed.
The people of my parents's place of worship follow the teachings. They walk the walk. They have been very helpful and kind and welcoming to my parents, and to Lorne and I because of my parents. My reason for attending was loneliness and, if the place was going to be the wrong theology, it might as well be with people I trusted.
So, I took it as an opportunity to review my decision about Christianity. I read the scripture as we visited it. I searched online and read articles about various concepts[1], and I thought a lot.
The first issue for me is that I don't believe in a personal god. The whole issue of resolving why bad things happen to good people (or good things happen to bad people) disappears when you just consider the deity as a raw power. Not unsophisticated, but not human-scaled. A personal god would not create a world where everything eats everything else. The only thing in this world that doesn't eat something else to survive is some bacteria that survives on absorbing energy from transforming minerals (iron and magnesium in basalt, for instance). Even plants need the decay of once-living things. But for animate things with blood, every day is a horror show. I've been watching a quail pair this year. They made it through courting and mating and nesting. They ate separately until all the eggs hatched, and then they started taking their crew of eight chicks around to show them what to eat and how to run away. We are down to one parent and two chicks, and we haven't made it to the solstice yet, never mind next breeding season.
A deity that had a human sense of love wouldn't create a world where everything eats each other's babies.
So what is it, then? Is it ‘Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers,’ said Miss Flitworth. [Pratchett, Reaper Man.] Maybe?
I know Wicca uses the metaphor of the God and the Goddess as a way to address and humanize an unknowable power. I think metaphors are useful until one expects the power one has tried to shove in a human construct to behave humanly. It won't; it can't.
I think electricity is a good metaphor. It can be tamed to run a human cel phone and it can zap a person dead and it can spark a wildfire. It is an emergent property, and it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Deity is continuum life and death; death feeding life, life dissolving into death; helplessly cycling. I think deity and universe are faces of a coin. The universe is what deity does.
Can one worship such a thing? I dunno. I think gratitude is spontaneous and doesn't need a humanized target to be felt. Perhaps worship is tuning into the unified nature. However, I doubt that petitions are granted.
There is one thing about Christianity I value. If you have any dreams of going back to the old ways and perhaps worshipping Vesta/Hestia, or something even older, something that has perhaps thousands of years of human-powered peity behind it, it doesn't take long to discover that everything was a blood fest. Animals were sacrificed left and right, sometimes people were sacrificed. Sacrifice did not mean giving up chocolate. Sacrifice meant that something lost its life so you could satisfy the deity. Christianity says that Christ was the one true sacrifice, and that now that he has satisfied the deity, no other sacrifices are needed or wanted. I have been conditioned by a Christian upbringing: I don't want to sacrifice a white dove and dribble its blood all over the altar so that I can speak to the deity and ask it to change the universe in my favour.
So. My deity is not personal. My deity does some beautiful stuff and some terrible stuff. Love might be the answer, but I think it could also be gravity. The universe is what the deity does, and asking why something happened is futile - and human - which deity and universe are not.
I also don't believe in the continuation of the personality. The life force returns to the deity.[2] So, the thing which animated Lorne went back to the pool of animation, but the flavour that was identifiable as Lorne is dissolved.
[1] - fascinated by "epiousios". This is the word translated as "our 'daily' bread" in the Lord's prayer. This is the only time this word appears in any greek text anywhere, and the word "daily" is the traditional translation, but there were puzzles about it even in the way back. You'd wish that at least the prayer given by the sog would be straightforward, but even there, translation is approximate - and unresolvable.
[2] - If you read Christianity carefully you'll realize that it also believes that everything not of God is burned away before there is a return to God. Hallmark Heaven doesn't exist anywhere - except in human petitions.
Since Lorne's death I have been attending my parents's Christian affiliated place of worship. They were the only group of people I knew in town. Raised Christian in a loose C&E (Christmas and Easter) fashion; brief spell of committment ruined by idealism; searching; finding Wicca and a Wiccan spouse; following it in a loose S&Y (Samhain and Yule) fashion. I held a small non-faith memorial for Lorne, and there were Wiccan trappings which I doubt that anyone I didn't tell noticed.
The people of my parents's place of worship follow the teachings. They walk the walk. They have been very helpful and kind and welcoming to my parents, and to Lorne and I because of my parents. My reason for attending was loneliness and, if the place was going to be the wrong theology, it might as well be with people I trusted.
So, I took it as an opportunity to review my decision about Christianity. I read the scripture as we visited it. I searched online and read articles about various concepts[1], and I thought a lot.
The first issue for me is that I don't believe in a personal god. The whole issue of resolving why bad things happen to good people (or good things happen to bad people) disappears when you just consider the deity as a raw power. Not unsophisticated, but not human-scaled. A personal god would not create a world where everything eats everything else. The only thing in this world that doesn't eat something else to survive is some bacteria that survives on absorbing energy from transforming minerals (iron and magnesium in basalt, for instance). Even plants need the decay of once-living things. But for animate things with blood, every day is a horror show. I've been watching a quail pair this year. They made it through courting and mating and nesting. They ate separately until all the eggs hatched, and then they started taking their crew of eight chicks around to show them what to eat and how to run away. We are down to one parent and two chicks, and we haven't made it to the solstice yet, never mind next breeding season.
A deity that had a human sense of love wouldn't create a world where everything eats each other's babies.
So what is it, then? Is it ‘Probably some great white crackling thing. Like an electric storm in trousers,’ said Miss Flitworth. [Pratchett, Reaper Man.] Maybe?
I know Wicca uses the metaphor of the God and the Goddess as a way to address and humanize an unknowable power. I think metaphors are useful until one expects the power one has tried to shove in a human construct to behave humanly. It won't; it can't.
I think electricity is a good metaphor. It can be tamed to run a human cel phone and it can zap a person dead and it can spark a wildfire. It is an emergent property, and it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Deity is continuum life and death; death feeding life, life dissolving into death; helplessly cycling. I think deity and universe are faces of a coin. The universe is what deity does.
Can one worship such a thing? I dunno. I think gratitude is spontaneous and doesn't need a humanized target to be felt. Perhaps worship is tuning into the unified nature. However, I doubt that petitions are granted.
There is one thing about Christianity I value. If you have any dreams of going back to the old ways and perhaps worshipping Vesta/Hestia, or something even older, something that has perhaps thousands of years of human-powered peity behind it, it doesn't take long to discover that everything was a blood fest. Animals were sacrificed left and right, sometimes people were sacrificed. Sacrifice did not mean giving up chocolate. Sacrifice meant that something lost its life so you could satisfy the deity. Christianity says that Christ was the one true sacrifice, and that now that he has satisfied the deity, no other sacrifices are needed or wanted. I have been conditioned by a Christian upbringing: I don't want to sacrifice a white dove and dribble its blood all over the altar so that I can speak to the deity and ask it to change the universe in my favour.
So. My deity is not personal. My deity does some beautiful stuff and some terrible stuff. Love might be the answer, but I think it could also be gravity. The universe is what the deity does, and asking why something happened is futile - and human - which deity and universe are not.
I also don't believe in the continuation of the personality. The life force returns to the deity.[2] So, the thing which animated Lorne went back to the pool of animation, but the flavour that was identifiable as Lorne is dissolved.
[1] - fascinated by "epiousios". This is the word translated as "our 'daily' bread" in the Lord's prayer. This is the only time this word appears in any greek text anywhere, and the word "daily" is the traditional translation, but there were puzzles about it even in the way back. You'd wish that at least the prayer given by the sog would be straightforward, but even there, translation is approximate - and unresolvable.
[2] - If you read Christianity carefully you'll realize that it also believes that everything not of God is burned away before there is a return to God. Hallmark Heaven doesn't exist anywhere - except in human petitions.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-13 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-10-26 08:32 pm (UTC)The universe is what deity does.
That's a lovely summation, and quite similar to the theology Lauren Olamina creates in Butler's Parable books.