This is the Last Post Ever!

At this point, this blog has become mere randomness.  And although random thoughts can be fun, in such a scenario substantive progress is lost for any one topic.  My original intention was to keep a blog with which I could discuss the goings-on of my life and then what I have learned from them.  However, and much akin to the way I have never been able consistently to journal, I am unable to keep up a rigorous discipline of relating life occurrences to my latest mind-trips.  Of course there is a relationship, and an interesting one.  But it seems a useless waste of time to regurgitate the simple facts when they have already passed through my mind and generated more interesting meta-thoughts.  This has always been my problem.  I lack an appreciation for details (even though apparently as a Taurus I am supposed to be overly concerned with them… get it right, astrology!).  Although, when it comes to administrative tasks I’m all for a good spreadsheet, but precisely for the purpose of never having to waste precious cognitive resources on memorizing data.  To be entertained by trivia, talk to somebody else.  But I’ll discuss the impact of Foucault’s History of Sexuality on Quaker nonviolence any day of the good-god week.

And this is my conundrum.  Well, it was a conundrum until earlier this week when I decided that it’s time to retire thismomentshines.  It’s time that I direct my burgeoning writing skills into a useful and informative blog that might have some substantive impact on something (if only for me) overtime.  So I have created a new blog called RobustPeace.  It is the blog that most directly relates to what I foresee at least the next twenty years (if I live that long) of my life will be about—working to develop the intellectual resources for a less violent society.  Of course, I may discuss the same sorts of topics (sex, community, worship, religion, etc) but they will all be better written (hopefully) and more sophisticated.  Blog entries won’t emerge as often, they'll have lots of footnotes, and we’ll all (as in I will) be better off for it. 

P.S.

(permit me one last exposition)

I recently blogged about Quaker worship in which I polemically exclaimed that I’d rather be at the gym than sitting in silence.  I did this to begin a side project in which I’d like to start codifying a separate (but equal) discursive space for liberal Quakers.  I want to do this merely so that we can be proud of uncertainty, of our ambivalence.  I want to do this so that we can make headway in justifying our pride without reducing our faith to what was true for Quakers years ago, but is no longer right for us now.  It’s time that Liberal Quakers cease apologizing to less liberal Quakers about their supposed lack of robust religiosity.  It is time, instead, that liberal Quakers unapologetically announce to God and everybody that the testimonies are important not merely as results of discernment, but as regulative elements in a postmodern faith.  It is time that liberal Quakers claim uncertainty and mystery as the foundations of their religion, and it is time that we push back against other Friends who want everyone to believe that.  Believing that, is so twentieth century.  One can believe that, or one can believe in.  And although there are other distinctions that might get at the same idea, to what I point is especially elucidated if I utilize belief.  For example, one can believe that God exists.  Or one can believe in the existence of God.  To believe in the existence of God is really to indicate that the idea of God existing has some meaning for you.  It helps you get along in this world, and it helps you understand virtue.  Believing that God exists relates to God as a fact, as a thing of science.  But religion is not science.  Science and religion are two separate systems of thought.  There is reason why we learn about evolution in Biology classes, and about God in theology classes.  So, to me, it is pointless, for example, to claim that Jesus is Lord.  And I don’t mean to offend anyone when I say this, even though I acknowledge that I am, and but I don’t much care that I am.  Because, I’d much rather advise people to believe in the Lordship of Jesus—to hold lightly and not tightly the matter of his guidance in our lives, in his salvific sacrifice, and in the beauty which he represents in our hearts.  So for us Liberal Quakers, belief is important, but its importance should not be mistaken for attachment.  What matters is that we hold to mystery, to uncertainty and to the contingency of belief.  So.  It's true that we don’t know what does the leading when we are led, and we don’t know really what the best way to worship is.  And we are proud of our lack of knowing.  So, on the side, I will be blogging also with WordPress about liberal Quakerism.  That blog is called The Liberal Quaker.

Suck it Up and Love

I have come to see particularly why semi-extreme social conservatives lack any appreciation for gay marriage.  I have come to see this via an experience of my own, as I recently confronted a thought process involving polyamory.  I made my way into a consideration of this particular option for romance in my own life.  For a long while polyamory breached my awareness as a mere ideal, so ridiculous as to be a myth.  Then slowly, many of my closest friends began to engage in some form of polyamory, meaning most generally to have multiple serious sexual relationships at a time.  The book entitled The Ethical Slut entered my view, and then here I was, as open as I am, fearing that this new even more liberal position would haunt my own quixotic wits.  And so it has.

I was so inculcated into the idealized notion of finding the one that I felt viscerally anxious about the idea of there being an alternative to this goal.  The possibility that we might love multiple people in our lives, and in essentially fully realized romantic relationships with multiple people, gave me serious pause.  Even a lesser option, open relationships, gave me serious pause.  Open relationships are often also said to be a form of polyamory--where two people are primary lovers who sometimes additionally involve themselves in less serious sexual affairs.  Granted, I was not devastated, angered, or violent towards these new ideas about sex.  I merely felt in the pit of my sternum a profound weirdness, and profound fear.  What if this polyamory spreads and becomes popular?  How, then, would I find people who might want to love me monogamously?  For, although this idea was not in itself particularly threatening, it became extremely threatening to me if it meant my own way of life, my own strategies for getting meaning and purpose, would all disappear.  My thoughts then would leap, at these points, into other thoughts about how I might actually become violent to protect my own way of life.  So entrenched, so hot and bothered, was I!  If I weren't obviously more enlightened than Christian Evangelicals, I might have actually decided to judge polyamory and polyamorous people as crazy, to be avoided, and treated when caught.

But I am not these things because I believe in inclusiveness and in the right to happiness for all.  If there is one right that I believe ought to be granted to every individual it is this right.  So if there are individuals on this earth who think that polyamory is the best way for their own meaning and purpose, happiness, then how could I justify even only disagreeing with their right to follow their hearts?  If there is evil, doing so would be.  And if there are only a few people on this earth, if there is only me left who prefers monogamy, I bet that after a struggle I might get used to it myself.  But, see, I am actually very satisfied and happy where I am.  And so then, why and what motivation would I have to change unless I absolutely had to?  As the old saying goes, don't fix what ain't broke!  Back in the day, see, we weren't merely cruel capitalists.  In any case, it was at this point that I realized that it really wasn't a big deal, that life wouldn't be over, and that meaning and purpose would still be available to me.  And for now, I am finding the kind of monogamy that makes me happy.  It turns out there are actually quite a few people out there, in the big'ol' world, who still want what I want too.

Thus although I have come to see why semi-extreme social conservatives might be offended by gay marriage, or by homosexuality in general, I also see how it is possible for them to suck it up and love.

Why Worship?

My questioning falls on the purpose of worship.  Before I begin, though, I will admit that I have not taken but one class on theology, that I have not read much Quaker theology either and that my focus rests still primarily on the social science of Quakerism and of religion.  This said, there are some important insights to be had within the disciplines of the social sciences.  And of those, some fraction is represented below this short essay (see after the ellipses).

What are we really doing when we worship?  What actually happens during it?  Is worship actually necessary?  These are questions that run through my brain almost every time I sit down in a meeting room with the intention of being quiet alongside others who are also sitting quietly.  Apparently, sitting quietly must be fun if so many people do it!  (Not that many people do it).  But, as a student in Divinity School, even though I will have spent two short years (and at some point I'd like to write a diatribe on how useless this degree was for my real education except in whatever utility having a degree from Harvard will mean), I have encountered quite a lot of reflections on religious experience.  Most importantly, religious experience tends to be operationalized as: 1) a feeling of satisfaction and deep connection with others and an extreme degree of intimacy and vulnerability, 2) an extreme degree of emotional expression, and/or 3) an existential re-orientation that involves some kind of clear view of purpose and meaning (rarely achieved in every-day life).  Such reflections often lead to the phrase I posted in my FB status a few months back.  A friend once said, "Most of my religious experiences have not actually been in Church."  Thankfully, for Quakers, the Church was never meant to be the meeting house.  The Church is the religious and spiritual community.  So all our religious experiences have the potential to occur inside the Church, in so far as they occur within community.  If we think of "religious experience" in the way that I am doing (and I am open to others' views on this), and if we think of Church in the way that I am thinking, then there is really no need for meeting for worship per se.  

Now, here is where my lack of theological knowledge shows most beautifully.  I am not at all certain about where the idea that, "God is still speaking," comes from.  So I will cite two people who do know: Ben Pink Dandelion and Peter Collins.  They, social scientist scholars of Quakerism and Quaker theology, write that liberal Quakerism comes with the following basic premises: 1) the primacy of experience, 2) the necessity for faith to be relevant to contemporary situations, 3) the requirement that Quakers be open to new forms of truth or, “new light,” 4) that new revelation has an automatic authority over older truth claims, and 5) that God’s truth is revealed gradually (Dandelion and Collins 2008:23).  Apparently, the ritual of meeting for worship helps to facilitate the life of these premises within Quaker community.  Yet as much as I like meeting for worship, I wonder sometimes whether we might find a better use of our time.  The basic three functions of meeting for worship are:  to affirm community by opening a space for vulnerability, to be in community such that these values can come to life, and to wait on God to show us new lights.  I'll work backwards.  

Focusing on the later function first, we are essentially inviting God to speak during meeting for worship.  We sit down, and then we wait on some deep wisdom to bubble up from our inner-most life-forces.  But, God is always speaking, is she not?  So, then, inviting God to speak would be much akin to inviting the mail man to please remember to bring the mail.  This is to say, if all we are doing when we worship is getting together to wait on God to speak, aren't we doing something unnecessary?  It seems like it would be more useful to get together and tell each other what God has already said to us.  Our new slogan would be: "What has God said to you in the past week?"  In this sense, we would still be meeting as a community, to affirm our aforementioned values, to connect and to love each other (getting back to the second function of meeting for worship I listed).  We would also have a more practical view of religion and spirituality—that it is unnecessary to create a space in which God can speak to us, because she is already speaking to us.  Much in the same way that we rejected the notion that God only speaks to us inside a certain building, it is also to be rejected that God only speaks to us inside the confines of a particular time-period.

Relating to the first function now, the idea that, in worship, there is space for vulnerability and intimacy is a fun idea!  But, community is not well served in this regard by meeting for worship.  Mostly, we sit quietly when we worship.  Community building, intimacy, requires relating in a way that is usually not prevalent in worship.  Nowadays, we have to create other spaces for community building.  We have to develop worship sharing groups, active committee-life, and other such small-group sessions.  In some cases, we develop whole bureaucracies just so we can have time to be in community.  This requires a lot of time and money.  We busy ourselves unnecessarily.  We have fallen prey to post-modern life—which is understandable sense (as I have suggested elsewhere) liberal Quakerism is the epitome of post-modern religion. 

Think back to my three operationalizations of religious experience.  Can you imagine any of those happening without closely knit community?  I suggest finally that religious experience itself requires as a necessary condition, close-knit, vulnerable, intimate community.  This fits well with the Quaker notion that religious experience happens always within the Church because the Church is just another word for the community.  I am merely “shepharding” this premise to its logical end.

Monthly Meetings can create worship-practice spaces, surely.  We all need practice being open to God’s messages in everyday life.  But Quaker community might need to be centered on spaces in which we share with each other what God has already given us.  This would allow us to get vulnerable and close.  It would also allow us to affirm our values, and to really dig deep into the idea that God is still speaking.  It would probably lead to more beauty, and many more said religious experiences.  It’s also cheaper.  Meetings for worship for business, then, can be a form of the "worship-practice session" in which we open ourselves intentionally to the life of the divine.  Are we not to be worshiping all the time?  Are we not to be praying all the time?  Are we not to be looking for God within every creak in the wood where we step?  As for me, I think I'll go to the gym on Sunday mornings.  I look forward to hearing God’s breath in the squeak of the treadmills.  

...

The following is an introduction for a literature review on which I premise my research into liberal Quakerism.

People are choosing their religions rather than remaining connected to their religions of origin (Chaves 1994:768; Hammond 1988; Cadge and Davidman 2006).  Differently from the past, “[people] can choose how and whether to be religious, including choosing how central religion will be in their lives…” writes Nancy T. Ammerman, “If religious identity ever was a given, it certainly is no longer,” (2003:207).   Likewise, persons are more progressively defining who they are by the many collectivities in which they belong—or think of themselves as belonging—rather than by membership in one collectivity alone (Jenkins 2004:114).  “I am American,” someone might say, but she might also say: “I am white,” or, “I am a singer,” or, “I am a Quaker.”  It is quite likely that each of these statements are associated to particular communities, respectively: one’s family of origin, one’s a cappella group, one’s community of Quakers or one’s Quaker youth group from High School, etc.  The ground upon which communities cohere is becoming more about the formation of “self” or of “subjectivity.”  The ground upon which religious communities cohere thereby yields no exception.  This is not to say that all communities everywhere, in every period in history, cohere and remain coherent due to common identity formation (if histories can even be said to have periods and communities can be said to have particular locations).  My argument applies only to the Western world, and only to this post-modern era in which we seem ambivalently to be fixed. 

Furseth and Repstad reference James Beckford (1992) in an attempt to define postmodernity (2006:78).  They characterize it, in part, as a refusal to allow instrumental-rational or positivist-utilitarian criteria to be the sole standards for worthwhile knowledge; they define postmodernity as a celebration of spontaneity, irony, playfulness, and fragmentation; and as a willingness, “to abandon the search for overarching or triumphalist myths, narratives or frameworks of knowledge,” (2006:78).  One could supplant some words and be able succinctly to describe the character of the liberal Quaker tradition with this same definition.  Collins and Dandelion’s articulation of Quakerism is strikingly similar to Beckford’s definition of postmodernity—in that both place primacy on experience, the currency of present discernment, and the availability of knowledge through many different sources (Dandelion and Collins 2008:23).  In its emphasis on a perpetual search for truth, Quakerism certainly retains vestiges of modernity merely in its seeming presumption that the ultimate truth is discoverable, as long as we keep looking.  Even so, Quakerism does not proclaim triumphalist truths, nor does it aim to discover one someday.  For Quakers, searching for truth should be very messily grounded in experience—in all its possible facets.  Hence, an emphasis on nonrational experience becomes necessarily clear.  Truth comes not merely through logic—not merely within the boundaries of reason (Kant 1999).  Truth comes through spiritual, mystical and emotional means as well. 

Because religious activity takes place in the body, involving emotions, as Meredith McGuire argues, it cannot be analyzed simply in terms of cognition and belief (2006:198).  I therefore approach the study of the liberal Quaker tradition in this way.  I argue that religious experience recounted as narrative is the primary mechanism through which liberal Quakers constitute their ephemeral truth claims.  In what may be a controversial analytical angle for other religious spheres, the religious sphere of liberal Quakerism actually calls for the sociology of narrative in which fragmented contemporary, Western identity is always experientially negotiated in process.  

Bibliography

Ammerman, Nancy T. 2003. “Religious Identities and Religious Institutions.” Pp. 207-224 in Handbook of the Sociology of Religion, edited by Dillon Michele. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Beckford, James. 1992. “Religion, modernity and post-modernity.” Pp. 11-27 in Religion: Contemporary Issues, edited by Bryan R. Wilson. London: Bellew.

Cadge, Wendy, and Lynn Davidman. 2006. “Ascription, Choice, and the Construction of Religious Identities in the Contemporary United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45(1):23-38.

Chaves, Mark. 1994. “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.” Social Forces 72(3):749-774.

Dandelion, Benjamin Pink, and Peter Collins, eds. 2008. The Quaker Condition: The Sociology of a Liberal Religion. Newcastle [England]: Cambridge Scholars.

Furseth, Inger, and Pal Repstad. 2006. An Introduction to the Sociology of Religion: Classical And Contemporary Perspectives. Ashgate Pub Co.

Hammond, Phillip H. 1988. “Religion and the Persistence of Identity.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 27(1):1-11.

Jenkins, Timothy. 2004. “Congregational Cultures and the Boundaries of Identity.” Pp. 113-123 in Congregational Studies in the UK. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing.

Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Kant: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings. Cambridge University Press.

McGuire, Meredith. 2006. “Embodied Practices: Negotiation and Resistance.” Pp. 187-200 in Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives, edited by Nancy T. Ammerman. Oxford University Press, USA.

Custer Died for Your Sins in Vain

Vine Deloria Jr. reports on an idea reputed among most American Indians that Col. Custer's blood sacrifice was simply the price the United States paid for its radical eradication of millions of people, once we up and decided to be a country.  In a sense, however, Custer may merely have died in vain.  He fell pray to the same death-dealing system to which fell Vine Deloria Jr. and every single of his American Indian Ancestors from the past few centuries.  The only difference between Deloria and Custer is that the earlier realized it and the latter did not.    Deloria writes: 

"Consider also the fascination of America's military leaders with the body count.  It is not enough to kill people, bodies must be counted and statistics compiled to show how the harvest is going.  Several years ago every effort was made to keep the ratio of enemy killed to American fatalities at a certain portion [referring to the Vietnam War].  Yes, violence is American's sweetheart...  But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won.  Victory, yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict.  Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies."  (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 256) 

The reason why the United States resolves almost all of its conflicts violently, simply, is that it can't help it.  We make purpose out of violence using a production of meaning that emerges out of warfare (and the metaphors resulting from it).  Our culture is premised on victory, on winning, through commitment to ends that involve life-sacrifice.  This is true going back to Rome.  

I do not mean to imply that Native American culture is somehow purer.  American Indians certainly fought each other--this we all recognized.  But the Western discourse of rationality stems directly from the violent conceptions upon which we justify our entire existence.  In rational discourse, per Richard Rorty, we love intersubjective agreement, we love gaining mastery over a recalcitrant set of data, we love winning arguments, and we love synthesizing little theories into big theories (Rorty 2007: 35).  The love of Truth, he claims, is really a love for these things.  Thus Rorty's operationalization of Truth reveals an important point--rationality necessitates that we all think the same thing, and that the process of reaching sameness is born out in a fight.  Somebody wins, and once he has won (for it is usually a man or a woman acting like a man) he has to find some other new fight, some new struggle, or his meaning and purpose is lost.  Deloria continues:  "The United States operates on incredibly stupid premises.  It always fails to understand the nature of the world and so does not develop policies that can hold the allegiance of people.  It then alienates everyone who does not automatically love it," (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 256).  Yet, the United States is simply acting in the way that its discourse necessitates.  We must get everyone on our side, to fit in with our ideologies, lest our stance lose out and we all become Chinese.  Somehow, we forgot that it's possible for the Chinese to be Chinese whilst the United States remains "Uhmurrica."

Vine Deloria Jr. presents an alternative to our violent-rational-egalitarianism in his concept of tribalism. Tribalism is a form of anarchy in that it rejects clearly-drawn, economically based laws, instead opting to rely on structured personal-emotional relationships.  Although I would ostensibly depart from some Native American customs, Vine Deloria Jr.'s particular indictment of Western culture pays clear homage to a liberal critique of hyper-individualism emergent via capitalism and contemporary corporatocracy.

Capitalism is a beautiful theory, in theory, and in practice, it is death dealing.  However, capitalism has facilitated the emergence of corporations, which, argues Deloria, are a contemporary Western version of tribes--those which do all the same things that tribes did for American Indians before Columbus hit a rock in the Caribbean and anointed it with Catholicism and disease.  Deloria writes:  "...corporate life since the last world war has structured itself along the lines taken a couple of centuries earlier by Indian existence.  Totems have been replaced by trade marks, powwows replaced by advertising slogans.  As in the tribe, so in the corporation the "chief" reigns supreme," (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 228).  It is difficult to find evidence for the emergence of these pseudo-tribes in corporate structure.  However, the suggestion that the United States might, in some areas of its cultural persistence, posses tribal tendencies, likely carries seeds for further (more cogent) imagination.  

Deloria also suggests that tribes present interesting alternatives in their distinctive ability to define a bounded community unrelated to Western rationality.  Here, in the tribe, the organization of community manages human interaction utilizing emotional-interpersonal elements on a small scale.  There are customs based on cultural conceptions of environment and of social relations, which for American Indians involve certain sorts of rituals, traditional-hierarchical power structures, and prestige formation based on wisdom and generosity rather than on money and capital (Deloria 1988 [1969]: 231-234).  It is feasible to envision a kind of different tribe based on Western equity, consensus-based decision making, and differentiated work structures.  Power structures could easily form in the altered tribe around the liberal Quaker model of service leadership where decisions are not reached via win/lose debate, but via collaboration and story-telling.  

So this is where I begin. 

Bibliography

Deloria, Jr. Vine. 1988. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Univ of Oklahoma Pr (Trd).

Hedges, Chris. 2003. War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Anchor.

Rorty, Richard. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol.4. 1st ed. Cambridge University Press.

To Be Vanilla: Part Two

There is no such thing as sex without connection.  Anyone who makes any claim any differently than this basic fact is cruel.  They are cruel because their lies do not merely reflect upon their own incompetence, but because such untruth ends up damaging millions of youth who think sex comes at no cost.  Here am I bracketing, with utter distinction, any mention of the possibility of Sexually Transmitted Infections or pregnancy.  I am referring instead, although no more importantly, to the emotional toll wrought by sex had meaninglessly.

You are waiting, in horny anticipation, for example, like the quickening strum of an angry guitar, for that person to come over and stroke your temptation.  But once they’ve got it in hand, and the loudest note has been played, the longest chord been slowly strummed, you are left with mere remnants of intimacy.  And one has intimacy like one tastes, sees, knows, finds, feels.  There is no forcing such things.  You cannot force love, nor can you force the tingling sensation throughout neck and tongue of your favorite, favorite food.  You are left in a stinging, somber, awkward avoidance, waiting instead for this strange interlocutor to as quickly as he can get out from under the sheets (and preferably into out. of. sight.).  There is no situation like this, which does not in some way end sans regret.

Sex, had without a mutual acknowledgement and enjoyment of connection, determined largely by its end—whether in a long lasting (multi-layered) transgression or in the shortly-led satisfaction of an overly differentiated need—is the epitome of longing.  It ends and begins in temptation—of what (which is easily gotten) only gets us as far as the sky, whilst leaving the stars in full view. 

I have known this feeling, and as a sacrifice to less adventurous and well-meaning people, I offer this advice.  That there is not merely nothing worse than sex without connection—there is no sex without connection.  Sex without connection is not sex; it is bodily distraction and useless. 

Often we have meaningless sex because we are attempting to fill a void—so the sex, in actuality, has an ulterior meaning.  But the sex, with the attached ulteriority, lacks the ultimate meaning we seek.  Our emptiness is not adequately vitiated with sex whose purpose is simply to fill this void.  Instead sex must have (what would seem at first) misdirected purpose.  To fill the void, sex must not be meant to fill the void.  It must be meant for some other purpose.  In fact, there is really only one other purpose for which sex must be meant in order to be the one that indirectly eliminates this feeling of emptiness (fills the void).  That type of sex is so onerous as to require that one should have completely forgotten about one’s emptiness and care merely about the sex and whatever it brings.  To address emptiness, sex must lose itself in forgetting about the void in such a way as to relate absolutely no concern to filling it in the first place. 

I remember when we made out.  You and I.   On the rock that kept us inches from the wet, of the creek.  We walked around town, and we got candy together.  I had a boner the whole time.  Holding your hand was like holding love in my palm.  I had no concern for whatever it meant, or for whatever it would bring me.  As much as I thought it would be stupid to forget about the future—what this relationship meant and what it would become—I forgot about everything.  As much as I thought I would never forget my emptiness and forget that it existed even, I completely forgot.  And now you have been gone for some time.  But one remembers these things for sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51RSnpSQho

So, perhaps simply to be contrary, I will re-assert my vanilla-hood.  I am staking my flag, my wafer-shaped rag, I am a skinny white ***.  You are not the only person who can have fun.  In fact my fun is much more fun.  So back off: this is not boring, nor is this actually all that “normal” or “regular.”  There are few who’d dare to admit they only like connected, sensual, rhythmic, equal, passionate, immense, loving, intimate sex.  Well I contend that this is the only kind of sex. 

 For Now, 

Zachary 

The Reason for Revelations

In my own fanciful imagination, I am caught off guard by reality.  At times my own mannerisms, gestures and thoughts have shocked--awed me in a distinct realization that I am not who I think I am.  The image I posses of myself--what I see in my mind mirror, as opposed to a real mirror, is different if not diametrically opposed.  If I were downloaded into the matrix, my visible change wouldn't be mere regress into a sleek '90's-era black overcoat, stemless shades, and bleached, preening hair.  I'd look something more akin to, well something else.  All I know is that when I look at myself in the mirror, I often times retort: "That is really me?"

And the distinct estrangement I sense when I observe my external demeanor, extends often further into what I sense about me, but that which I cannot see.  And the multitudinous layers of self-hood that I portray in any given moment, with any given set of interlocutors, has left me, especially acutely today, with the simple yearning to connect on a level that perhaps extends beyond self-presentation or on a level the sinks below it.  Whether my "deepest self" (if it exists at all) is a higher state or an underpinning one, I face it everyday.  I face it like the sun faces the unending universe, reaching with each step in time even further into nothingness.  You, dear friend, are my nothingness.  For if I were to break open your rib-cage and dig for eternity one micro-inch after another, would I have ever discovered your deepest self?  And would our deepest selves ever find each other?

In the mix of color, sleepiness, and drowsy sex-talk over wine or whiskey, haven't we already been here a thousand times before?  And don't we, each time, wish that something would happen (like maybe the world ending or a heart-attack)?  When we come back around, and we finally viscerally understand what the mundane means, don't we secretly wish we could stop here, in this moment, forever?  And finally be done.

God Sauce: a dialogue

My hope is that we can create a dialogue around God, Jesus, and belief.  Please join me by posting your responses to this blog post on your own blogs or as comments to this blog entry. 


How about we stop for a moment and really think hard about what it means to "believe."

For example, if I am to say that I believe that Jesus Christ is my Lord, from the outset, I might be doing a few things: 

1) Am I making it seem like I still live in the Middle Ages?  But the only two kinds of "Lord" that exist today are King Pins and Apartment Owners.  I don't buy illegal substances from Jesus nor do I pay rent to Jesus Christ.  So, that way of thinking of Jesus Christ as Lord just don't flow.  Although, I do get a kick out of imagining a bearded, tattooed Jew in Birkenstocks smoking cigarettes, while preaching abiding love to tax collectors and prostitutes. 

2) Am I making it seem like I'll do work for Jesus Christ, as long as he, in turn, protects me?  Although the structure of Feudalism no longer holds sway on this Earth, perhaps its function does?  Feudal Lords used to pledge to protect their surfs (and peasants) in exchange for manual labor.  So perhaps I could say that I do the work of Christ (his manual labor) and in exchange he protects me from things?  But here I encounter a rational problem, and a problem of suffering to boot.  How could a man who has no tangible existence—not one that I can grasp using my five senses—protect me from the material things I do sense?  And, then, wouldn’t I have never been called a f*g, nor beaten up, nor stolen from, nor had my heart broken, etc?  Wouldn’t I have been able to avoid suffering?  People might say that these material benefits only come when I do the work of Christ—perhaps I wasn’t Saintly enough.  I do curse, and I do possess a more liberal understanding of sexuality than my Evangelical friends would like me to have, I don’t give money to everyone who asks, I don’t do every possible good thing one could do.  So maybe I just don’t do enough of Christ’s work to reap the material benefits.  Or maybe by, “protect,” he doesn’t mean, “keep from suffering.”  Maybe he only means particular things—but, then, which particular things? And how would I know which they are, if they’ve never happened to me?  Much akin to Republicans who keep arguing that even with President Obama’s stimulus package, the economy has worsened; I (and they) have no counterfactual.  Obama would argue that the economy is not as bad as it could have been, and so might Jesus argue that my life is not as bad as it could have been.  Indeed, but isn’t that simply a matter of the good choices I’ve made?  After all, I am the one who decided to go to private high school, which is how I likely got into a better college and a better grad school.  So then, perhaps those good choices were guided by Jesus… but how can I tell that Jesus has communicated with me?  How do I determine whether the thoughts I came up with to make the decisions I made were not merely in my mind, but were also a product of Jesus Christ’s guidance?  And how do I tell that life would be worse, and not better, or the same?  It seems, calling Jesus Christ my Lord, is complicated.  

3) When I embed these abstract ideas, like “Jesus Christ,” and, “Lord,” into a discussion, I am either forgoing logic altogether in a stance of Faith, or constructing my own logic within a context of Faith.  The latter is what theology attempts to do, and which I would prefer to avoid doing.  (So, then, would somebody tell me why I am getting a Masters in Theological Studies?)  Faith does possess its own logic, a non-rational logic, and makes sense given its divergent axioms.  These axioms, however, make little sense in the context of science, of materialism, and of rationality.  Thus it is pointless to waste time attempting to justify something according to a logic, which has its foundation in faulty axioms.  Jesus cannot be my Lord, not if I accept the laws of physics (which are not made up, but discovered through a rigorous application of the scientific method).  But bless those who seem to make a living writing and studying theology!  Someone’s gotta do it—just not me.   

4) So then, to say that Jesus Christ is my Lord, is called a belief.  It can’t be scientifically demonstrated that Jesus is my Lord—it’s just what I believe.  I believe outside scientific systems of thought.  We simply separate questions of religion from the realm of science—we call them two different systems of thinking, two different structures of culture, and then we move on.  Or do we?

5) Making a claim that “Jesus Christ is my Lord” could be, simply, mystical.  Perhaps we are all talking about the same sort of experience to which I refer when I say that Jesus Christ is my Lord.  And so it is merely a matter of cultural framing, one born of the interplay between science (or rationality) and religion, which has informed the growth of the Western world sense the pre-industrial period.  See The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, by Ernst Cassirer.

Thus, what I have over-simplistically demonstrated is that, culture frames the way we think about experience, and it even constructs for us how we experience experience.  I don’t think it would be far-fetched, even to imagine that ways of relating to thoughts (like meditation) change brain-patterns, the organization of our synapses.  See this article from NPR and this from the Harvard Gazette.  And for more technical articles see this website off of Harvard University’s main webpage.

Belief itself is an artifact of Western culture.  To believe in something suggests doubt, because it brings its own counterfactual.  When I believe, I believe because there is a possibility that what I believe could be un-believed.  That it is 100 degrees outside with high humidity, is a matter of fact, which doesn’t involve belief.  Would not it seem a little strange if I were to say that I believe that it is 100 degrees outside, in the same sense that I would say that I believe in God?  Similarly, if I were to say that it is way too hot and way too humid outside right now, someone might counter me and say: “Well then you should experience Miami humidity; then this weather would be nothing.”  It might make more sense for me to say that I believe this humidity is too high.  I would be referring to the same experience of humidity.  Yet I would be painting it, with words and thoughts, in a different shade of green (a putrid chartreuse).

What if we were, instead, to define religion as a culturally-bound iteration of the same mystical experiences we all have had.  Experiences of one-ness, of deep connection, deep gratitude, deep humility…  Have you ever experienced that experience of witnessing another being (human or not) and noticing with great awe how it seems to move of its own accord, how it has its own beauty, and its own relevance that is altogether separate from your own?  And what else is there to do, in the utter appreciation we feel, than to call this witnessing a sacred event.  At the least, it is an event altogether separate from our everyday states of experiencing.  And could not we call this God, or mystical appreciation, or seeing the oneness in another, etc?  Some might be dissatisfied with the reduction inherent in this way of understanding the intersection between religion and rationality.  Probably atheists and evangelicals alike would be dissatisfied with this reduction, for different reasons.  Perhaps I am merely constructing another useless theology (and quite unsophisticatedly at that).  But there is something to be said for these bouts of knowing, which if cultivated, can span much (if not all) of our experience.  What cultural frames would emerge if we were to focus our attention on these experiences, calling them what they are?  Likely, a myriad of different ones.  Likely, we’d get exactly what we have.  But if we could accept that, in the end, we are all talking about the same thing with different words and different thought patterns and differently arranged synapsis, we might get along much more easily. 

Right now, I’m asking people to think a little more deeply, and to really see if, differences in thought given, we might actually have been living in the very same temperature and the very same humidity—the difference being that I’m from Philly and you’re from Miami.  What if belief were just a social position, a moment in time, a thing that directs us, rather than a notion reified into existence?  I invite conversation around this question.