Taking a break from writing about God to point out that it’s nice and warm here in the DC area today–balmy 60’s.  I wish it would stay this way, but I rather think it will get cold again before it stays warm.  I’m also a little bit sad that I’m stuck inside working on a paper for school (on Mormonism and the Civil Rights movement) instead of being outside.  Oh well, hopefull it will still be nice tomorrow so I can go out and enjoy it.  I’ll try to make sure I at least go running later this afternoon.

The simple answer is that I just don’t.  While I don’t have a conceptual problem with God’s theoretical existence–I’m not actually convinced by the formal logical arguments of atheists because I’m not actually usually convinced by formal logic at all–I simply have a hard time believeing that a being matching the description of most theists exists.

I will grant that it doesn’t look to me like God is necessary.  We don’t need God to explain the phenomena of the natural world.  no, scientists haven’t figured everything out yet, but they have figured out a surprising amount and there’s no particular reason to assume that there’s any area where they won’t be able to make any headway at all.  At least, to our knowledge there’s not a big off-limits gap in scientific understanding that seems to be marked off by God as his and his alone.  So there’s no need for a “God of the gaps.”

I also don’t think that the existence of God is necessary to make sense of human existence.  Perhaps we need to believe in a God to make sense of our lives, but that doesn’t mean that such a deity in fact exists.  I’m not sos sure that the nonexistence of God necessarily implies a cold and unjust universe, but if it does, then so be it.  If the universe is cold and unjust then it is cold and unjust–the fact that it makes me uncomfortable does not imply the existence of an all-powerful supernatural being who can and will fix everything.

Certainly I do not believe in a personal God.  If something exists in the universe (or as the universe) that we could stretch the term “god” to fit around, and it certainly might, I’m skeptical that it would be a personal entity capable of (or likely to) interact with us on our level.  While I find the idea of a personal god appealing, I’m not going to believe it just because I want to, and it doesn;t resonate with me well enough for me to plunge into the idea without a better reason.  I think that at least some of the burden of proof is on God to reveal himself, especially if he is a personal God and especially if we make an effort to connect with him from our side.  I have never had an experience that would lead me to believe (or even really to infer) that God is personal.  God has never spoken to me, and “spoken to me through his Holy Book/Holy Prophet(s)/Only Begotten Son” absolutely doesn’t cut it.  That is a woefully insufficient copout.  If there’s a personal God, he should be able to talk to me personally.  He hasn’t and he doesn’t, so I have no reason to believe in him except for the testimony of others.

What of the testimony of others?  I realize that plenty of people claim to have had mystical experiences with a personal God.  I know some atheists would just label them crazy, but I’m not comfortable with that.  I’m inclined to think that there is something to these mystical experiences that people have been claiming to have since the dawn of time when the first shaman went on a vision quest, but I am also not inclined to believe that they are reliable evidence for a personal God.  There are too many alternate plausible explanations, even validating the mystical experiences.  Such experiences could be, for example, communication with or journey into the human psyche, clad in metaphor and symbol.  They could even be some kind of state of oneness with the external universe but one that has to me re-interpreted by human consciousness to make sense of it.  In other words, the mystics have touched something too big to be comprehended so their minds put a face and a personality on it so their heads don’t explode.  At the very least the diversity of recorded mystical experience would seem to undermine the likelihood of us being able to take them at face value (as contact with a personal God), especially since as I understand it, people tend to have mystical experiences that are more or less consistent with or at least complimentary to their native religious tradition.  If Jesus is talking to Christian mystics, Allah is talking to the Sufis, and Apollo is talking to the Neopagans, then we have a bit of a problem.  at least, none of their experiences tells us much about objective reality.

If I had a personal experience with a personal God, I might be willing to change my tune.  I realize that such a mystical experience would be intensely subjective and wouldn’t actually tell me any more about the objective universe than the mystical experiences of Joseph Smith or Joan of Arc, but at least I’d be willing to subjectively believe in a personal God.  Of course I would have to retain the reservation that it was extremely likely that the God I was experiencing was merely an aspect of my own psyche, or a face my own brain had imposed on an immense and unknowable transcendant reality.  But in any case, such a mystical experience of a personal God has never happened to me.  Even in twenty-eight years as an active, believing Mormon, the best I got as answers to my prayers were vague feelings and impressions, things that were far more likely to have come from inside my head than from outside it.

I’ve spent a good portion of this last year yearning for contact with God, but it hasn’t happened.  At least, not in a way that satisfies me.  It has come to the point where I don’t think God’s going to give me a call, so I’m not really waiting for it or expecting it anymore.  So while I’m not denying the existence of God, I can’t say that I actively believe in one.  You can only let the telephone ring for so long before you’ve got to eventually conclude that nobody’s going to pick it up.

I’ve been moderately interested in Asatru for years, and as a Mormon I even often said and thought that if I wasn’t Mormon, I’d be an Asatruar.  But I don’t think it’s the direction I’m going to go, for a couple of reasons.

1. I don’t actually believe in the Norse Gods.  I don’t believe in any kind of literal polytheism (which means real Paganism in general is probably not going to happen–I’m more pantheistic or panentheistic in my ideas about what God is, if God is anything external to us at all). Furthermore, while I think the Norse Gods and Norse mythology are cool, and even compelling, that doesn’t translate in my head to the calling to follow and honor the Aesir as a religious practice.  Maybe if I had some kind of mystical experience with Odin, I’d feel differently enoh about it–perhaps even enough to overcome points 2 and 3 below, but since mystical experiences for me do not seem to be particularly forthcoming, there’s not much I can do to make myself believe something I don’ believe.

2. I like Vikings and Norse myth, but not at the expense of everything else.  I don’t really want to live a Viking-flavored life because I am a contemporary person, and I’m happy with that.  I don’t really feel constant yearnings for the past.  Formulated differently, this point is closely connected to my general dissatisfaction with the idea of Reconstructionist religion.  I’m not an ancient Norseman, so why is the religion of the ancient Norsemen the right religion for me?  Plus, I’d honestly feel like I was always LARPing.

3. I have serious problems with the “Folkish” strand of Asatru.  I realize that it can be phrased or looked at in a way that might not sound like overt white supremacy, but when you listen to the rhetoric of Folkish people like Steven McNallen, it winds up sounding an awful lot like just more racist tripe.  I also realize that there are plenty of universalist heathens out there (and there’s a kindred of them near where I live even), but I’m not necessarily comfortable self-identifying with a movement that has ties to white supremacy and neo-Nazism, even if it’s just be broad association.  The question is “am I willing, even in the broadest terms, to be in the same club as those people?” and the answer is no.  Especially given points 1 and 2 above.

There are a lot of things I like about Asatru, especially the heathen virtues, which I think are a more realistic and pragmatic ethical system than that which is offered by a lot of religions.  And like I said, Norse myth is extremely appealing to me.  But not so much that I think it’s the one way for me.

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?

1. I think religious institutions, especially centralized, hierarchical ones, are either inherently oppressive and abusive or else so open and prone to abuse that human nature nevertheless makes abuse and oppression inevitable.

2. I have a hard time feeling like religious belief is valid without the stamp of approval from an authoritative religious hierarchy.

Thank you, Mormonism.

If God exists, I think God is so far out of our field of experience and frame of reference as to be essentially incomprehensible to humans.  All of the world’s religions appear to be obviously objectively false.  However, I think that humans make sense out of the insensible by thinking in metaphor, sort of like putting masks that we understand on God so as to deal with something which we do not understand.  I think religion, religious belief, and religious practice can be positive, productive, and extremely useful both to society and to the individual, even if it is not objectively true.  In fact, sometimes I am inclined to think that people can actually in many ways be better off with religion (though not all kinds of religion: a sort of Taoist awareness that “the thing that can be talked about is not the actual eternal thing” is incredibly important, and serves to neuter our dangerous–perhaps even insane–fundamentalist impuses).  Since all religions are false but religion is nevertheless positive, I should be able to simply pick the one that appeals most to me and self-consciously run with it.  However, I seem to be completely incapable of doing so.

(For what it’s worth, alternately, if God does not exist outside the human psyche, then none of this changes.  We can label the unfathomable parts of our own existence and psyche “God” and essentially move on.)

Why am I incapable of picking one and just enjoying it?  All kinds of reasons, really.  Fear of commitment as a holdover from bad experiences with Mormonism (and a knowledge that “just trying it out” is actually a kind of commitment that can result in sliding down to total conversion if you’re not careful).  Persistent gut feeling that the objective truth of religion matters (another holdover from Mormonism).  A nagging feeling that all religions are equally, pitifully inadequate when it comes to accounting for all of life and existence’s complexities (even leaving cosmological models completely out of it), and a concurrent distaste for the idea of flavoring my entire life with any particular religious belief’s seasoning.  Nervousness about the ease of self-brainwashing.  The desire for some kind of mystical experience as a catalyst.  And plain old reluctance, like when you’re about to jump off of something tall and your legs seize up and your body just won’t let you do it.

There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about any of this, either.

In thinking about faith systems like Druidry, Asatru, and (Neo)paganism in general, the issue of Reconstructionism comes up.  It seems to me that there is a kind of dogmatic rift among Neopagans between the Reconstructionists and the whatever-you-call-the-others.  In Druidry the term is usually Revivalists, but that has a specific meaning to Druidry that doesn’t necessarily correspond to other branches of Neopaganism.  For the sake of discussion, I am going to call them Contemporists.

Reconstructionism as I understand it means a good faith attempt to actually reconstruct an ancient religious belief system.  In practice it probably isn’t completely possible (since most ancient peoples didn’t leave detailed written records of their theological bliefs and a how-to-manual for their rites and practices).  Therefore, Reconstructionists are generally willing to “fill in the blanks” with contemporary or invented practices or ideas, with the understanding that such a practice or belief is a provisional place-holder and is subject to change as more historical information is uncovered.  Reconstructionist religion tends to go hand-in-hand with a keen interest in history.  Good examples of reconstructionist Neopagan faith systems are Asatru and Ár nDraíocht Féin Druidry.

On the other hand, Contemporist faith systems (like Wicca or Revival Druidry) are those that are inspired by ancient belief, myth, and practice, but that have (relatively) contemporary origins.  Their practices and beliefs seem more likely to be syncretic, and Contemporists seem generally open to innovation in both theology and practice.

Reconstructionists often accuse Contemporists of having a “made-up religion.”  As a teenager, my Neopagan interests were strictly reconstructionist, and I looked with serious disdain on belief systems like Wicca.  The irony of course was that I was raised Mormon, which by any measure other than that of the hardcore true believer is a contemporary “made up” religion as well.  Nevertheless, I was raised to believe that Mormonism was an ancient faith that had een restored, and my preconceived notions about absolute truth precluded me from accepting religious innovation as valid in any way.

Now, I see things differently.  In fact, these days I have no interest in reconstructionism whatsoever.  I understand that it floats some peoples’ boats, but not mine.  Here’s why:

1) I don’t believe that full reconstruction is really possible, and that some things are simply lost to the mists of time.  Thus, a reconstructionist, no matter how zealous, will always be complementing his “authentic” practices with contemporary innovations or borrowed material.  So for practical purposes, only his attitude makes him different from the Contemporist.

2) That attitude means the reconstructionist must be willing to abandon what may be useful and meaningful spiritual practices and belifs when they are later discovered to not be in conformity with ancient religion.  To me this seems a pointless waste: if something works, don’t stop doing it.  A spiritual practice’s validity has nothing to do with age, but with whether or not it works.  Every religion was “made up” at one point or another, and the fact that it was made up a long time ago or its author is anonymous doesn’t make it osmehow more real or more valid.  Granted, if a spiritual practice has been in continuous use for a long period of time, you can infer a high degree of validity because it has stood the test of time.  However, an old practice/belief that is not longer held or is long abandoned may no longer be useful–that may be why it was abandoned in the first place.  Either it was no longer useful, or it was supplanted by something else more useful.

3) I’m not an ancient person.  I don’t live in the Bronze Age.  My life isn’t the same, my concerns may not be the same, and the world I live in may be very different from that of ancient people.  What they practiced and believed may have been relevant to them, but that doesn’t mean it is relevant to all people in all situations, and that means it may very well not be relevant to me.  Although I have no problem with drawing on ancient sources for beliefs and practices, I see no reason at all to assume that the ancient practices will always be better for me than a more contemporary alternative, especially when the study of history means that that ancient practice would itself be provisional, subject to change, revision, and even dismissal as our historical picture is fine-tuned.

4) I personally see no real need to believe in a Reconstructionist religion if I don’t believe that said religion was absolutely, objectively true.  And I don’t believe that any existing religion is absolutely, objectively true, or that it’s even possible for human beings to ever be compeltely sure of what absolute, objective truth is.  I will grant that it probably exists, but it seems to me that the nature of epistemology means that asically everything must be subject to doubt.

5) I feel no personal pull to practice or believe in a Reconstructionist religion.  I haven’t had a mystical experience with ancient deities where they commanded me to take back up the old ways (and as I don’t really believe in literal personal gods anyway, I don’t really think that such a demand on the part of the gods is likely).  I am not a historian who specializes in one particular ancient people to such a degree that it fills my life.  Honestly, if I practiced a reconstructionist religion, I think I’d always feel like I was LARPing.

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.

So although I haven’t really been blogging very much, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and my life has also been changing in a lot of unexpected ways.  I’m reluctant to go into a great amount of detail, but I have something coming up that is big and scary and sort of looming, but also something that I am looking forward to.  In many ways in my life it will be an important threshold, a very real passage from one phase of life into another.

Because of this looming event, I am reluctant to make any kind of spiritual commitment, even a provisional one.  I fear that anything I start will be seriously disrupted by the changes in my life- changes that are going to last months.  At the same time, I am worried that I won’t have any kind of spiritual framework to carry me through what are doubtless going to be some very dark and difficult times.  In the past, in situations as similar as can be expected, my faith in Mormonism helped me a great deal.  This time I’m going through something unlike anything I’ve ever gone through before, but I feel like I’m on really unsteady ground.  I’m not entirely sure what to do.

We have stopped going to church as a family, mostly because I was so unsure of whether I believed in Jesus and whether I was even interested in Christianity, and church attendance felt like the spiritual equivalent of being on a moving train.  It was going somewhere that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go at all, and I felt that it was important to get off the dang train and figure out where I wanted to go, at least in some vague sense, before I got moving again.  This has been a deliberate decision with the understanding that it is temporary–I don’t want to merely get out of the habit of church or spiritual practice and simply become entirely secular by lazy default.

I have inklings and tugs in different directions at the moment that I’m going to blog about, but like I said, I’m reluctant to start anything both because of the chages that are coming in my life and because of a fear of spiritual commitment that is my unfortunate aftermath of a lifetime of faithful Mormonism.

So, the fact that I’m not posting much on here isn’t really indicative of a lack of thinking in the religious/spiritual vein. In fact, I’ve been thinking in overdrive, but not coming to any conclusions and not really going anywhere with it. My brother, Racticas (he comments here somewhat infrequently) is now in a Religious Studies masters program, so that’s added an interesting academic element to both of our searches.

I’m not going to church now, but it’s a deliberate thing. I feel like participation in church gives me a kind of uncomfortable vertigo-like feeling. Like the merry-go-round is going awfully fast for someone like me who’s not even sure he wants to be on the playground. I don’t know if that metaphor makes much sense. I feel like participation in church means moving in a direction, whether or not I know I want to be moving in that direction, or indeed moving at all.

In my head I’m going back and forth and around and around: Christianity-Asatru-Agnosticism-Atheism-Paganism-Christmas-Asatru-Christianity-Agnosticism-Frustration-Druidry-Christianity-Frustration-Anger-Christianity-Asatru, and I like Christmas. I don’t really know what to do with any of it. Every religion in the world is repugnant to me for some reason, but so many of them are attractive to me for so many other reasons. At the same time, I just don’t know if I can, or if I am willing to, simply will myself to believe. I find myself yearning for a catalyzing spiritual experience, but they just don’t seem to happen. Indeed, I don’t know if mysticism has ever really happened for me.

In other words, I’m no better off than I was nine months ago. Look at my archives; you’ll see what I mean. I know some of the Christians out there would say that my problem is that I’m trying to connect to a religion instead of connecting to Jesus, but for all practical purposes that still just sounds like gobbledygook. I have yet to figure out what “being in a relationship with Jesus” even means. But I still really like Christmas, and I am hesitant to even consider giving it up, and the religious significance in particular.

Maybe I’m just afraid to commit, mentally and emotionally. Or maybe I really just want a reason to believe that’s greater than just my preference. I’m not interested in atheism, and I don’t think I could ever be happy with atheism. But I don’t know if I could ever be happy with Christianity, Asatru, Druidry, or anything else. And I sure am never going to be happy with agnosticism. And I’m absolutely sure that I’m never going back to Mormonism.

I feel more desperate about it than I ever did before, partially because of simply being frustrated at how long this has gone on, and partially (mainly) because of major, earthshaking, terrifying life changes that are coming very soon during which I think faith could probably be a great source of strength.