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.

I’m always thinking about religion, faith, and belief. At the moment I’m a provisional atheist, but I’m not excited about being a permanent member of the club. I may ultimately feel like I have no choice, but if I do, I’d just as soon be some kind of believer.

Anyway, here are some of the ideas I’m tossing around in my head.

I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell and thinking about the interaction between myth and the human psyche. I wonder if Myth is the process by which human beings process the unprocessable. There’s something out ther,e bigger than all of us, and to attempt to define it scientifically would probably utterly fail. It has to be tackled holistically, using all the disciplines and arts and sciences and philosophies that humanity has at its disposa, and even then we miss it completely. So maybe Myth is the way we deal with it. We conceptualize it in a way that we can wrap our minds around. We use Myth as metaphor for the deeper reality that we otherwise are completely incapable of communicating.

If that is the case, then theology is probably a lost cause- at least if we think that theology is somehow going to lead us to an ultimate truth. Narrative, on the other hand, becomes extremely important.

If that is the case, then to do something with this transcendant reality, humans need ot negage it in a way that is meaningful for them. Thus, different societies and cultures have different myths and religions based on those myths based on what resonates with their culture. For me, the most resonant Myth would be Christianity. Seen that way, I could envision myself believing in God and following Jesus Christ, but with the reservation that I knew full well that it was just the best way I know of how to get at the Ultimate Mystery of Existence.

I simply cannot believe in God, face value, as described by any one religion. And I feel like simply entertaining some vague notion of transcendant reality is not sufficient for anything approaching spiritual fulfillment. So if I am to believe in something, I need to find a vehicle for that belief, and keeping in mind the ultimate flaws in any human conception of the sacred/divine/spiritual is how I would avoid the pitfalls of dogmatism and fundamentalism and furthermore be able to feel intellectually honest with myself.

I realize that this sounds a lot like the liberal Christianity that I normally dismiss without another thought. I don’t know what to do about that except to say that it just might be the best I can do. I also wonder if this doesn’t sound awfully like Neopagan theology, except that I’ve decided to believe in Jesus instead of, I don’t know, Zeus or something.

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind right now. I’m also trying to read Kierkegaard. From what I know about his approach, it sounds interesting and different, and maybe something I can get on board with. We’ll see.

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.

What then is consciousness? What is the “I,” the thing that is doing the observing when I think about my thoughts? Some people posit a soul. Ebon Muse proposes a construct along the lines of distributed intelligence. Scientists call it the “hard problem” of the study of consciousness.

If the consciousness, the watcher that is observing the mental processes and the metaphorical movie screen in your head, is a matter of distributed intelligence, then we can think as a unified consciousness the same way that swarms of bugs can act as a whole unit even though the decision-making isn’t happening at any one point in the swarm. Your brain is thus the hyper-complex neurological analogy to a swarm. Every mind is a hive mind.

If such a thing is possible on the small scale, then I find it entirely possible to imagine that it happens on the large scale, or even on the largest possible scale. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to think that the universe, the cosmos, has a kind of consciousness that is composed of distributed intelligence. It wouldn’t be a consciousness like ours- it would be so big and in such a different context that not only would it be so alien we could never interface with it, but the sheer difference in scale and the nature of consciousness means that it would be categorically impossible to wrap our minds around what it is.

Yes, we are part of it. Everything is part of it. If it exists, that is.

But if it isn’t conscious or intelligent in any way at all, it still exists. The cosmos unquestionably is. And to me it is equally unquestionable that separateness is not, in fact. Thus, the cosmos not only is, but it is us. We’re part of it when we rest in dreamless sleep, when your brain is not tricking you into believing that you’re separate from other things. We’re also part of it when we’re dead. Actually, we’re always part of it, but there are times when nothing is trying to trick us into believing that we aren’t, and that there’s a difference between me and you. But at those odd times, like when we meditate and lose track of our individual identities, our Self merges into the Whole.

What could be more fantastic?

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:

Ebon Musings has a wealth of absolutely fantastic essays on atheism.  I think they are definitely worth reading.  The author is reasonable (admitting the possibility of being wrong) and sensible, and I think his writing, taken as an aggregate, makes one of the strongest cases for atheism that I have encountered.

In particular, I have found the following to be illuminating and/or valuable:

One More Burning Bush, on the argument from divine hiddenness.  Also the Cosmic Shall Game.  These deal with the basic problem of “if God wants me to know him and worship him and be a specific religion, why does he macke it so freaking hard to figure out?”  That’s been a major issue for me that has ultimately led me to consider atheism.

The Argument From Locality, on the problem with the apparent non-universality of pretty much every religion, which is a concern I have expressed in the past on this blog.

The Theist’s Guide to Converting Atheists, which poses a host of possible events that would make an atheist change his mind.  They would certainly make things easier on me as a seeker.  The One True Religion is closely related.

The Ineffible Carrot and the Infnite Stick, about morality and atheism.

A Much Greater God, which is a powerful statement on what kind of God seems to really be consistent with the universe as we know it.  Pretty string Deist leanings.

Finally,  the good essay, Life of Wonder, and the absolutely fantastic piece on love called Spiritual Fire, Both are about life and love and how losing God doesn’t really mean losing the things that are really important.

The ideas in these essays dovetail almost completely with not only many of the thoughts and conclusions I have been having and coming to lately, but also to many of the core issues I have grappled with during my entire post-Mormon search for truth and for God.  Like I said, they are worth reading.

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.

After Hinduism and I (heart) Huckabees and thinking about there being no God, I’ve been wondering if everything is indeed everything else.

On a physical level, we’re all atoms, all made out of the same three particles or so.  Furthermore, I don’t have any specific claim on the particles that currently compose my body.  I’m constantly losing and regenerating this stuff.  I think I’ve heard that the body regenerates itself every seven years, and I don’t know if that’s really true or not, but certainly the body does regenerate itself, taking in material from outside to recompose cells and organs along pre-set self-perpetuating patterns.  but it means that I’m made up of parts of all kinds of things, and as I respirate, sweat, lose skin cells, and… expel waste, parts of me are pushed out into the environment where they are recycled and recombined on a molecular level into all kinds of other things.

I’m really just a part of a much larger system.  On a physical level, my separateness seems apparent, but it’s a trick.  A mental oversimplification.  On a physical level, everything is really the same as everything else.

What about consciousness?  If existence is merely physical, then consciousness is only a pattern of neurons firing and chemical reactions in my brain, and there is no mind-body dualism, which means that there really is no essential, fundamental division between things.  Between me and everything else.

But we know so little about consciousness, and we know even less about spirit (like, whether it even exists).  If mind and spirit are different from body, is it not possible that they would follow the pattern of physical existence?  That they would flow in and out of everything in the same cycle of assimilation, regeneration, and expulsion?  It doesn’t seem like my consciousness does that, but it also doesn;t seem like my body is made of the same protons, neutrons, and electrons that everything else is made of.

Maya is what the Hindus call it, the illusion of separateness.  Are mind ans spirit indeed even truly separate from body, or is there some kind of exchange that we can’t even perceive?  We know that mind and body, if they are separate, influence each other.  Psychosomatic illness, for example.  Or mental states that are dependent on physical effects like fatigue, drugs, or chemical imbalance.

Are things separate, or is everything really the same? Is everything really everything else?  Perhaps that unity or lack-of-separateness is what I would call “God.”  Very pantheistic, I guess.  I don’t know.  I don’t know anything, really.

For a few days I’ve been thinking about the possibility that there is no God.  For my whole life, I have assumed there was one, but I’ve never experienced him or had any kind of spiritual relationship with him.  So I have no personal basis for claiming that I know or even suspect that there is a deity.  I mean, I’d like there to be one, but that’s not really enough for me.  I’m too skeptical to be satisfied with believing based solely on the desire to believe (sorry, Alma- it’s just not going to happen).

What if there is no God?  What then?  Is there morality without God?  Of course there is.  Morality, to me, is instinctive and universal.  True morality at least.  Every religion teaches respect and kindness towards fellow humans- we don’t need a god to tell us that.  The things that aren’t universal, like whether God forbids the eating of pork or beef, are in my opinion clearly manmade morality.  Arbitrary garbage that has to do with human institutions, not with what’s really right or wrong.

What’s “morally wrong” with coffee?  Nothing; the very idea is preposteroous to everyone but Mormons.  But to them, it’s a moral issue because they believe God commanded it.  This is the kind of thing that I gleefully abandon.  We need God to tell us to not drink coffee, to not eat pork, and to adhere to specific religious observances.  We don’t need God to tell us to not be jerks.  We know to not be jerks on our own, and we manage to do it regardless, even when we’re told to not do it by “God.”

Anyway, I digress.  I don’t feel like  I need God to have morality, and anyway, that’s beside the point.  If there’s no God there’s no God regardless of whether we “need” him for something or not.

So if there is no God, what is there?  I don’t believe that the science we have describes everything, and I don’t believe that the material is all that is.  Maybe that’s ignorant and superstitious of me, but it’s who I am.  Does that mean I believe in spirit, or in mind that is separate from body?  I’m not sure.  Does it mean I believe in magic? Unfortunately, no.  As cool as magic would be, I don’t think it exists (unless you define it so broadly that it can’t help but exist, and then you’re not saying anything useful).  Likewise, in believing that there is something more than the material, I suppose I could formulate what I do believe in and call it “God,” but that would actually only confuse and mislead, since I would be talking about something that is a far cry from what most people mean when they use the term.

I’m not so sure I believe in a distinct divine being  with consciousness and personalty.  I certainly don’t believe in a God with a physical form (of flesh and bone or otherwise).  The thing is, the more I think about it, the more I think I may be comfortable with the idea of no God.  Not because it gives me license to do whatever I want or anything, because like I said, I still believe in morality.

I certainly do not have all the answers, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else does, either, no matter how adamantly they claim to have them.  I believe in mystery.  I believe in the unexplained, and perhaps in the unexplainable.  I believe that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.  But I don’t know if I believe in God.

These posts are kind of rapid-fire, I know, but these are things I have been thinking about for a couple of days, and writing about them lets me take a break from writing my final exam appellate brief for my Legal Research and Writing class.

I have been trying to make peace with the idea of not being any religion.  Really, I would prefer to have a religion, all ready-made and off the shelf, with generations of theology to explore, and a sense of purpose and identity all wrapped up into one.  The problem is, I’m too skeptical absent soem kind of mystical impetus.  I just don;t believe that any of these religions out there are really true, or even true enough for me to be willing to commit.

I’m not turning my back on anything (in particular I am not turning my back on Christianity and openly rejecting/denouncing it), but by the same token, I may be at the point where I have to admit that my journay is not taking medown any one fo the well-trod paths.  at least for now.

I believe in the divine, mind you.  I believe there’s something out there, and sometimes I’m blown away by it, by the majesty and the grandeur of the big things and the little things that are actually the biggest things.  I feel it in the way my wife smiles, in the way the wind feels on my skin.  I feel it in sex, in poetry, and in music.   I feel it in the quiet spaces, and in the thunderstorms.  I feel it in churches, and I feel it in nature.  In life, in people, in the universe, and in your eyes.  I don’t know how to explain it better than that.

I am a believer.  For now, that simple declaration may need to be enough.