So, I thought I was going to be sent to Iraq with my National Guard unit this month.  Turns out it’s not happening.  If you have any experience with the military, you know how things can change at the last minute.  Anyway, I mentioned in an older post that I was reluctant to make any big decisions because of the upcoming mysterious, major life-changing event, and that’s what it was.  Now it isn’t happening.  So life goes on, and I no longer have an excuse for resting on my laurels.  But what do I do now?

We haven’t been going to church for awhile, and I have long stopped praying (since it started to seem mechanical and pointless).  Do I start again?  Do I give Christianity another go?  If so, what kind?  Back to Cedar Ridge?  Back to Grace Episcopal?  Just be a Christian on my own and don’t worry about church?  What does becoming a Christian even mean?  What does one do?  Becoming Mormon is a fairly regimented process: you take the missionary discussions, you read the Book of Mormon, you pray to know if it’s true (and get Your Testimony), you attend church meetings, you commit to live the Word of Wisdom and the Law of Chastity, you get baptized, you get confirmed, you get the priesthood, you go to the temple, you get callings, and you endure to the end.  It’s all extremely structured.  I know how to become Mormon.  But I don’t know how you become Christian.  At what point do you become Christian?  What’s the right motivation for becoming Christian?  What does “being Christian” look like?

Do I even want to be Christian?  Right now, the answer feels like no.  Especially since Christmas is over.

Do I start a candidate year with the Ancient Order of Druids in America?  Do I want to?  Do I really want Druidry as a belief system?  Is it all just New Age flakery?  Do I want my whole life to be Celtic-y?  Do I always want to be thinking about ancient times and yearning for the forest?  Not really.  After I’m done with law school we’re moving back to New York, where we’ll probably stay.  I like the woods and nature, but I also love the city.  I feel compelled to be environmentally conscious and take care of the earth, but I actually think in many ways urban living is the best way to do that (it’s certainly more sustainable than suburban living).

There are a lot of things about Druidry that I find very appealing, but do I want to color my whole life with that crayon?  The answer feels like no?

Do I abandon the journey and just get on with life without God and without religion?  I’ve been sailing for awhile and it doesn’t seem like Byzantium is anywhere in sight.  I’m kind of getting tired of looking for it.  My main roadblock is clear (I was nervous about making any hasty decisions with such a major punctuation mark on the horizon), so what do I do?  Hinduism?  The Qur’an?  What?

This one isn’t about Jesus at all, but as it’s kind of a continuation of my last post, and I’m feeling silly, well… hey, I don’t have to justify the names of my own blog posts to anyone.

Like I’ve said before, although I haven’t been blogging, I have been continuing to think things through and to engage in conversation with people about my standard topics of life, the universe, and everything.  In particular, I have had some interesting discussions with my brother (who comments here periodically under the nom de plume Racticas), who is a grad student in religious studies.  One of the idea sets we’ve been tossing around lately is Neopaganism.

When talking paganism, the issue of polytheism naturally comes up.  Polytheism is definitely an idea that has to be accomodated rather than assimilated, because as western people we come into the picture with a fairly heavy bias towards monotheism.  My Mormon background gets periodically accused of a polytheistic bent by some Evangelical critics, but even as an ex-Mormon, I don’t think the accusation is appropriate.  Although Mormonism posits a comparatively limited God, believes that the members of the Godhead (father, son, and holy ghost) are completely distinct in substance, and accepts the possibility (or even necessity) of the existence of other gods coequal to, subordinate to, or even superior to Our Heavenly Father, in practice Mormonism is still thoroughly monotheistic.  The existence of other gods is an academic possibility for Mormons, and the only god they deal with and the only god who has ultimate power over this world is God the Father.

I go into detail about the Mormon perspective because it’s my background and thus informs where I am now, and accusations to the contrary notwithstanding, my background, and thus my default position, is monotheistic.  And I bring all of this up in order to admit my preexisting bias when I then explain why I don’t believe in literal polytheism.

Which brings me to my point: I don’t believe in literal polytheism.  I have enough trouble accepting the existence of one personal god; the idea of many personal gods seems even less plausible.  As figures of myth, the gods and goddesses of ancient people seem much more plausible to me as either metaphors of the human condition or as metaphoric personifications of different aspects of the transcendent divine, i.e. Masks of God.  I simply do not believe, however, that there are a bunch of real literal distinct divine beings living on Mount Olympus or in Asgard or another dimension or a spiritual plane or something.  I just don’t buy it.

Now that’s not to say that I think the gods and goddesses of myth (including Jesus and the Father) are useless things.  If there is a real transecndent divinity, I am inclined to think it impossible to deal with it directly in any kind of meaningful way.  Thus, we may need personifications and metaphors to be able to approach the divine in a way that our psyches can handle.  In other words, we may be putting the masks on God because otherwise God is so far outside of our experience and existence that the unmasked God would be meaningless, inaccessible, and incomprehensible to us.  I think of it like this: if a two-dimensional being existed, it could never comprehend us in our fullness as three-dimensional beings.  The best it could do would be to imagine a two-dimensional representation of us, but even then it could never be a complete representation.  Being two-dimensional the best it could do was approximate a certain aspect, slice, or facet (or simplified agglomeration of several aspects) of our three-dimensional reality.  If God exists at all outside our psyches, then so it is with God.

At its heart, this is what Christianity is all about–God become man so that man can relate to God.  Its the essence of Hinduism as well, where all things, the gods and goddesses especially, are merely aspects of Brahman.

Alternately, if “God” is just something in our heads, something embedded in the human psyche, then I still think that anthropomorphized representations of God or gods are the best way for us to make sense of it.  This is the Joseph Campbell route.  We make sense of existence primarily by metaphor and symbol, and that includes conceptualizing symbolic and metaphorical gods.

The moral of my story is that if I were to be a pagan of any stripe, I couldn’t be a strict, literal polytheist.  And even if I were to have a mystical encounter with a god or gods, I would still strongly suspect that I had merely put a mask on something otherwise completely transcendent and incomprehensible so that I could comprehend it, as opposed to thinking that whatever god I had encountered had a real, literal, separate and distinct existence of its own.  Unless it told me it did and struck me with lighning for being an unbeliever or something.  I have a pragmatic streak, as well: at my house, people who didn’t believe in Santa Claus didn’t get presents from him.

Sorry this post has been so long in coming.  I haven’t had much time to put together a long post that meaningfully addresses complex and abstract issues, and on top of that, I sunk into a period of total spiritual apathy that I might just now be coming out of.

As I indicated in the introductory post to this series, I feel like I am standing at a spiritual crossroads of sorts.  Two of the paths that I have been honestly considering in my journey towards Christ are Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

One of my concerns with Protestantism in general, and with Evangelical Protestantism in specific, is that I see a lack of authoritative-ness, both institutional and personal.  Particularly in the emergent conversation, clergymen don’t come across as trustworthy guides or wise counselors because they come across as regular people just trying to figure things out.  I’m not saying that I think clergy should have all the answers and not be on spiritual journeys of their own, but there’s a sense in which I want clergy to be something more than just another person at church, who happens to be able to give a good sermon.

So I think I am looking for a church with an ordained clergy, and a church with institutional weight.  At the very least, “having been around a long time” means having, as an institution, weathered all kinds of turmoil and change without being destroyed by it.  To me, an older church feels generally more trustworthy and reliable simply by virtue of its age, and the collected wisdom of generations that goes along with it.

What churches have that more than Catholicism and Orthodoxy?

Furthermore, I’m looking for a church that is genuinely sacramental, one that includes outward expressions of faith and repentance to accompany the inward changes that seem so elusive and ephemeral.  I also want sacraments that are something more than a clever symbol that can be changed at will.  Although I believe that sacraments are largely symbolic, I think that too much emphasis on their symbolic nature renders them weightless and inconsequential.

So far, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy seem to fit the bill most perfectly.

I’m also looking for a church where there’s a real sense of community, more than “hanging around for donuts and lemonade after church and chatting with the peopel you’re friends with.”  What impressed me so much the one time I went to an Eastern Orthodox (OCA) was that they actually all sat down together for a meal when liturgy was finished.  In both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, I think there is a sense of identity that is fundamental to community that I haven’t seen in most Protestantism.

Finally, perhaps because of tradition and institutional age and wisdom, it seems to me that Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been able to escape the twin evils of fundamentalism and theological liberalism that plague Protestantism so doggedly.

So why don’t I just become Catholic or Orthodox?  I have a couple of reasons.   First, my understanding of and belief in Jesus Christ is actually fairly Protestant.  Becoming Catholic or Orthodox would essentially involve rethinking and re-imagining everything I already believe, and I’m not sure I want to do that.  It’s not that I’m complacent or scared to re-think, but that my Protestant understanding of Jesus is intimately tied up in my decision to believe in Jesus in the first place.  adopting a totally new view of atonement and salvation would mean a complete rethinking of Christianity, and I’m not sure I want to do that.

Second, both churches have doctrines that are often troubling and in my opinion wrong: Catholicism has  it worst here, with things like the ban on contraception, the celibate priesthood, and transubstantiation.  But Orthodoxy doesn’t necessarily escape doctrinal scrutiny either.  Their beliefs and doctrines may be verifiably the oldest traditional Christian beliefs, but that doesn’t mean I agree with them.

At the same time, I have been wondering lately if submission isn’t actually an important component of Christian faith.  While there are unreasonable extremes, I wonder if it might actually be spiritually healthy to submit to authority and be teachable, and allow your opinions to conform to something greater.

If I’m just looking for the church that teaches exatctly what I believe, I might never be challenged and forced to grow.  I’m not sure.

My other problem, more one with Orthodoxy than Catholicism, is that they are in many ways very alien.  AI grew up Mormon, which claims all kinds of unique distinctiveness but in reality it has deep (and to me, obvious) roots in the frontier Protestantism of the early 19th century, so Protestantism is more culturally consonant for me.  Becoming Catholic or Orthodox would be almost as jarring as becoming Hindu.

Again, maybe that’s actually good- maybe encountering Christ shouldn’t be about being comfortable but instead should be about following him, even if it means following him into strange places.

I have a lot to think about.

Oh, and on a practical note- Orthodox liturgy is long, and you have to stand up the whole time.  I guess you get to sit down in Greek Orthodoxy, but it seems so much more of an ethnically rooted church, and, well, I’m not Greek.

There are things that I do affirmatively believe and am sure of, and things that I outright deny. In between the two is a broad spectrum of belief. Somewhere in that spectrum is the fact that I strongly doubt the existence of God, at least in the traditional personal sense), enough to where I’m comfortable saying that I do not believe in him.

Also somewhere in between the two are things that I might believe. Things that I could believe, but that I’m not really willing to commit to.

I started this post a long time ago, and never finished it.  I might believe that there is something out there that I could call God- some sort of sentience or superconsciousness to the universe, sort of Spinoza-esque, or Pantheistic like Brahman.  I could imagine that there’s something like that, and if I believed it I could be a Quaker or something, but I don’t affirmatively believe it because I don’t feel like I have a reason to, other than wishful thinking, and I don’t see what difference it makes.  The universe is awesome and majestic, whether it has a consciousness or not.

Just because I have decided that I am an atheist doesn’t mean I believe in nothing.  It doesn’t mean I am a fanatical devotee of the temple of Science, or that I am some kind of Nihilist.

Atheism isn’t a set of beliefs.  It’s not a positive affirmation of anything. All “atheism” says is that I don’t believe in God.  But I do believe in other things.

I believe in a fundamental unity of the universe, that separateness is an illusion.  Physically, we’re all made of the same stuff anyway, and there’s a cycle as we rotate mater into, through, and ultimately out of our bodies.  Our atoms don’t have our names written on them.  The illusion of separateness may have its advantages, but in the end it is an illusion.  Furthermore, if mind and body are really the same thing, then our consciousness is really just a part of everything else the same way our body is.  And if there really is some kind of mind-body dualism, then mind is still part of everything else either by virtue of being connected to body in some way, or in the sense that the mind/soul is all the same as all other mind/soul the same way body is.

I believe in dicsovery, in learning, and true progress.  I believe in the importance of figuring out as much as we can about the world and about ourselves, through all of the fantastic means we have at our hands.

I believe that there is a lot more out there than we can even imagine, that our models of the universe, useful though they may be, don’t come near to explaining everything in an exhausive sense.  I believe in mystery, and in the unknown.  I believe that “there are more things in heaven and earth… than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy.”

I believe in treating other people the way I would like to be treated.  I believe in empathy and compassion.  Even without God, these are the things that make us human and give value to the human experience.  I believe that human beings are important, not because some arbitrary supreme being says so on a whim, but because we have incredible potential.

I believe in being happy, both on an individual and a collective level.  I believe that the pursuit of happiness, again balancing the individual’s happiness against humanity’s happiness, will take us great places.

I believe in making the world better- I believe in taking care of each other and taking care of the world we live in and leaving the place better for the next generation than it was left for us.   Because humanity is wonderful, and the earth is our home.

I believe that love is the most wonderful thing that there is.

That’s all I can think of right now.  I’m sure there is more.

In his article, A Ghost in the Machine, Ebon Muse discusses the superior parietal lobe. I’m not a neurobiologist and I don’t necessarily know anything about the brain, but Ebon Muse cites sources, and I have no reason to not believe what he says about what this part of the brain does.

Essentially, it’s the part of the brain that tells us where we are. It gives us a sense of location, which means it also gives us a sense of separateness, of being distinct from other things. When the superior parietal lobe’s functions are impaired or otherwise disabled, a person loses a sense of their own physical limits, i.e., where self ends and not-self begins. This can be accompanied by feelings of oneness with the universe or even religious and mystical experiences.

The more I think about this, the more it blows me away. Ebon Muse uses the function of the superior parietal lobe as evidence against mind-body dualism, but to me, this knowledge validates Maya.

Separateness is an illusion. In reality everything is the same as everything else- it’s all connected in one big system and the boundaries that we perceive are merely cognitive conveniences that enable us to simultaneously have consciousness and perform vital physical functions. The superior parietal lobe’s function is to produce a mental construct of physical (and mental/spiritual) distinctness. In other words, without the superior parietal lobe convincing us that we were separate individuals, we wouldn’t think we were. So the truth, before it’s chewed up by our brain and formed into a picture that we can comprehend, is that separateness is a myth. Everything is really the same.

Like I said, this is huge to me. I already believed in Maya, because it seemed like the most reasonable thing in the world when I read about it in books on Hinduism. I mean, we’re all made of the same basic atoms as everything else is, and the atoms that compose us don’t stay with us; they’ve not got our names written on them or anything. Our own bodies take in new matter and replace the old matter. If matter is really all just three different kinds of subatomic particles, how can I really say where “I” stop and “everything else” stops. Our mind tells us that we are finite and have borders, but our minds tell us lots of things that are not so.

Our very empirical experience of the world is not direct- it’s sensed indirectly by remote sensory organs, coded into nerve impulses which are sent to the brain, and then the brain sorts through it and composes a perceptive impression which it feeds to the consciousness. Along the way, mistakes get corrected, gaps get filled in, and all kinds of mental processes color and shade this sensory information. What I think I’m seeing is not necessarily the objects I think I’m seeing, or even the photons that bounce off them or the raw data that gets sent to the brain. It’s a processed mental construct. What we think we see is not necessarily what we see.

How is the sense of separateness different, particularly if it is only maintained by nervous activity in the superior parietal lobe? Without that, we would have no sense of independent existence, and to me that means that the sense of separateness is actually the artificial construct.

In other words, Maya is the product of our superior parietal lobe lying to the rest of the brain. It’s a functional, useful lie, to be sure, but it’s a lie. The real truth is that all is one, that everything is everything else, including you and me.

Om, the sacred syllable, the sound uttered by Brahman at the creation of the universe. Put another way, it’s the sound of the Big Bang, the eruption of everything we know into being. It gives me chills, just thinking about it. Om is the intersection of science and religion, of physics and metaphysics.

The silence before and after the syllable is as potent as the syllable itself. This is the kind of thing that is of eternal import. This is the kind of thing that I can believe.  The Bible’s simply got nothing on Om.

The rain is on the roof
Hurry high butterfly
As clouds roll past my head
I know why the skys all cry
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

The Earth turns slowly round
Far away the distant sound
Is with us everyday
Can you hear what it say
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

The rain is on the roof
Hurry high butterfly
As clouds roll past my head
I know why the skys all cry
OM, OM, Heaven, OM

-The Moody Blues

I like the Devanagari script best, but the Tibetan Aum is nice, too:

In my last post, I talked about the argument from evil, and I came up with one possibility that would allow god to exist despite the argument’s relatively solid logic: Immoral God. As Adam (the Ebon Muse) pointed out, such a situation would be pretty horrible. However, there would be nothing we could do about it. An Immoral God would be probably be untrustworthy, so there would be no reason to expect that serving him would result in any kind of reward. Therefore, one could reasonably act in any fashion one chose. Sure, Immoral God may damn you for it, but Immoral God might have damned you anyway.

The moral premise is, in my opinion, the easiest way for God to wriggle out of the Argument’s headlock. Omnipotence and Omniscience have tautological definitions. Morality does not. Adam proposed a fairly conventional definition of morality, the desire to end unnecessary suffering, but such a definition is not necessarily a given. Even then, the fact that the moral premise posits that God is perfectly moral makes it even trickier. Applying a standard of perfection to a quality that is abstract and ill-defined? Not as clear-cut as simply saying “omnipotent.” Not that Adam’s definition is ill, but that a person could certainly advance alternate and equally valid definitions for morality without even wading into the quagmire of moral relativism.

With all of that in mind, I have thought of several possibilities for the kind of God that would survive the scrutiny of the argument from evil:

Immoral God: I talked about this one in my last post.

Amoral God: perhaps God exists, and is omniscient and omnipotent, but for some reason is indifferent to good and evil, suffering and pleasure. Perhaps God has a plan for humanity, and good an evil, important though they seem to us, are merely incidentals. I don’t necessarily know what this would mean. Maybe it’s just a matter of perspective: from where God is sitting, all this stuff we’re fussing over is basically irrelevant, and once we get to where he is, it will be irrelevant to us, too.

Nevertheless-Moral God: perhaps there is a definition of morality that closely overlaps with the “desires to end suffering” that is still very good and holy but nevertheless allows for suffering to exist. I don’t know what this moral definition would be, but I guess it could exist. Then, the only reason that the argument from evil is evidence against God is the fact that the moral premise is close, but nevertheless incorrectly defined. This is, I think, the God that most believers picture when they hear the argument from evil and choose to nevertheless believe in God.

Othermoral God: perhaps God is morally perfect, but the definition for “moral perfection” is really quite different than the definition that the argument from evil takes as a premise. Surely there are many possible othermoralities, but one that immediuately comes to mind is one in which wisdom gained by experience is the highest form of “good.” Thus, suffering and pleasure are two sides to the same coin and must both be experienced in different measures. Yes, some people have an overmeasure of one or the other, but if they are both value-neutral, then that doesn’t matter. Morality is aligned on a wisdom-ignorance axis instead of a good-evil axis. Or something else, I don’t know. I think Hinduism looks more like this, actually. But again, it’s just one possible example of an othermorality. Some othermoralities might run up against the same problems in the argument from evil, though. If God is interested in order versus chaos, for example, and he is omnipotent and omniscient, then why does he not simply impose order?

Tautologically-Moral God: Perhaps god is morally perfect by definition, because his actions set the standards for what is moral and what is not. This is probably unsatisfactory for many people, because it leaves open a wide possibility for capricious and arbotrary behavios on God’s part which can then be labeled moral because God’s actions actually define morality. This may be hard to swallow, given the suffering in the world, but if it happens to be the case, then we’ve got little to say in the matter. I also think that many theists believe in this God, whether they realize it or not. If morality is defined by God’s will, then God can be as arbitrary and capricious as he feels like, and whatever he does will still be moral.

Just some thoughts, really. I suppose the whole thing could stand to be thought through and fleshed out a little better.

These days I have been thinking about consciousness quite a bit. I don’t know that I am at the point where I have soemthing to report, but I did read an excellent article by Steven Pinker on the topic, from Time magazine.

So there’s a lot about Hinduism that I really like.  I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita, and I find it to be fairly awesome.  While I’m not interested in Hindu culture, there is much about it’s philosophy and cosmology that ring true to me (or perhaps I should say about it’s philosophies and cosmologies).

Hindu gods?  An interesting bunch, but there’s room to simply see them as symbolic or representational of greater truths.  And Hinduism isn’t as culturally alien as some world religions, because there’s a linguistic and perhaps otherwise anthropological connection between the North Indians (Aryan/Sanskrit group) and Europeans, of which I am one.

I have no big conclusions right now, but I intend to continue to look into Hunduism and think about it.  I don’t know if I would ever say “I am a Hindu,” but I think there’s a lot of solid philosophy there, ripe for the pickin’.