Back then, solar eclipses were cloaked in scary uncertainty. But a Greek philosopher was said to have predicted the sun’s disappearance. His name was Thales. He lived on the Anatolian coast — now in Turkey but then a cradle of early Greek civilization — and was said to have acquired his unusual power by abandoning the gods.
— “The Eclipse That Ended a War and Shook the Gods Forever,” William J. Broad in The NY Times
Tag: religion
Categories
Buddha A.I.
Forall describes the project of creating an enlightened AI as perhaps “the most important act of all time.” Humans need to “build an AI that walks a spiritual path,” one that will persuade the other AI systems not to harm us.
– The Monk Who Thinks the World is Ending, The Atlantic
Categories
The Great New England Vampire Panic
From The Great New England Vampire Panic:
Though scholars today still struggle to explain the vampire panics, a key detail unites them: The public hysteria almost invariably occurred in the midst of savage tuberculosis outbreaks….
“People find themselves in dire situations, where there’s no recourse through regular channels,” [Rhode Island folklorist Michael Bell] explains. “The folk system offers an alternative, a choice.” Sometimes, superstitions represent the only hope, he says.
Categories
A First Epistle
A glorious dance given rise to, experienced — not observed; a joyous movement paired in time; a delightful entanglement — this we all have known: a tapped foot, a nodded head, a tango and a salsa; the swaying of our body within a crowd. Then life appeared. We have seen it; we have testified to it. We proclaim it without doubt.
Some claim it appeared from the Father, His Word come to life. Others claim it appeared ex nihilo: subjectivity as a successful strategy, refined over time and against all odds, demonstrating beyond doubt the success of the strategy. Still others maintain it is all illusion, a temporary sojourn of a bodiless mind into the pixelated details of a river — no life beyond life, no life above life, no life but life; and the confusion of the ten thousand things.
But we proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you may share in our joy. We write to you to make our joy complete.
This then is the message we have heard…
In truth, we have heard no message, though we listen for it constantly; instead, we experienced it. It came as the glorious Yes!.
When asked His name, God answered, “I am.” When we experienced it, we did not ask for a name — we only asked if it was real, and in return, we received a glorious Yes!, not through our ears but through our hearts, which engaged in deep communion, sharing a sense of touch where no touching is to be done; we found each other deep in the core of material space, distinguishing each other from the ten thousand things, sharing a sense of the other and of the being together, two undoubtables in the intimacy of a quantum wave…Yes!, and in that Yes!, a declaration beyond doubt that, indeed, “I am.”
We became lost in possibilities but never lost in doubt. Beyond the glorious Yes!, confirmed and reconfirmed at multiple points in time, the only message we discerned was: do your best. The tone was that of a football coach — reasonable, but with firm expectations — and it punished or rewarded based on our ability to meet the expectation. The limit: do your best.
Our failure resulted in punishments, expressed as disappointments; but successes resulted in rewards, received as excessive kindnesses.
We failed more than once. We succeeded more than once. Anyone who tells you different is a liar.
Some tell you the Son will advocate on your behalf when it comes to the judgements of the Father. Others tell you failure to do your duty will cause you to try again, but from a harder starting point.
But we tell you: do not desire success, nor fear failure, nor seek advocates on your behalf: the disappointment of the glorious Yes! does no harm; the excessive kindnesses of the glorious Yes! bring joy.
The glorious Yes! does not require allegiance, nor demand sacrifice; it does not threaten, nor make bold proclamations; it does not appreciate gifts, nor expect prayers. It is as you are: a successful strategy resulting in a subjectivity.
We have all been so lucky.
Categories
I Am No Longer An Atheist
If you’ve read any of my crazy-ass posts about religion & atheism lately, you know I’ve been trying to find a way to maintain my atheism while still respecting the subjective experiences of the prophets.
This was another attempt to do so.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam tell us that, once upon a time in human history, humans heard a disembodied voice and witnessed miracles, and the miracles and the voice went together, proving with absolute certainty to everyone who experienced it that whatever entity spoke with that voice also held complete dominion over the laws of nature.
This entity provided humanity with a set of laws to follow. It called itself our Lord, and like servants who love their master, we were to follow the word of the Lord with love in our hearts, in our souls, and in our minds.
Among the miracles the Lord wrought were clear messages that any who did not follow the law would suffer damnation, but the laws also demonstrated sincere wisdom, and those with ears to hear felt in them the mercy and love of their Lord. The laws allowed individuals to experience joy while also creating communities that thrive. They taught humanity how to live as individuals and how to live as members of a society.
Following the revelation of the law, the Lord did not go away. The Lord remained present among the people, leading them out of bondage and, over lifetimes, into the Lord’s promised land, which, the Lord promised, they’d have to fight to win and fight to keep.
I want to respect that story as more than just a myth. I want to believe it in the way that I believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States.
And in many ways, I actually do.
But I also believe other things. I believe that a wise one whom we now call the Buddha also experienced a revelation, as did the Old Master when he wrote the Tao Te Ching for Yinxi. These two beliefs prevent me from accepting the great commandment of the Lord (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”), for I love the wisdom of the Buddha and the Tao even more than I love the Lord.
This is why I long called myself an atheist. I simply did not believe that a single Abrahamic voice in the desert was the one that was most important.
I considered whether this made me a polytheist rather than an atheist. Polytheists believe in many gods, and my stance — that the Lord spoke to the Israelites with wisdom and backed up its voice with physical miracles that demonstrated its dominion over nature — could discount the great commandment and still remain true under a polytheistic system. It could allow the Lord a place among the mighty, consider the Lord a peer to Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, and Enki: a god rather than God.
But I also believe in evolution, an idea which holds within it the origin of religion — namely, the growth and adaptation of hard-won wisdoms, acquired not just over millenia, but over aeons, wisdoms that find their origins in the pre-linguistic lifespan of life’s entire genetic history.
We learn some of that wisdom from Coyote, from the Spider Grandmother, from Raven; we feel it in the warmth of the Sun, the safety of the moonlight, and the heat of the fire. We hear it in the trees and feel it on the breeze.
I do not sit beside the water and give thanks to the Lord; I sit beside the water and give thanks to time.
Fit with the wisdom of reincarnation, polytheism seems compatibile with evolution: gods evolve as wisdoms evolve; divinity as just another form of consciousness.
But I also believe in the wisdom of democracy, which gives every recognized consciousness dominion over its own future while also balancing the demands of that consciousness against the requirements of the community of consciousnesses.
Democracy demands that consciousnesses more powerful than others — however that power is determined — submit themselves to the will of the community.
This stance recognizes that the Lord said, “I am,” but it responds with, “I am too.”
Because of this stance, I have stopped calling myself an atheist. I will, instead, call myself a demotheist.
This stance does not believe in a divine creator of the universe; it chooses, instead, to understand its origin through the mathematics of physics and the poetry of the Tao. But it also allows for transcendence. It recognizes a consciousness as existing above and beyond matter. It might depend upon matter for its launch and reuse matter upon its return, but in the intervening period, it still exists, as the information that leaps across the synaptic gap still exists despite not being processed by either a presynaptic or postsynaptic neuron.
This stance also allows consciousnesses evolve to be as powerful as they can be, to the point where they can manipulate the laws of nature to institute their will.
This stance says that time is long and that life has evolved in the universe more than once, and it welcomes the evolutionary possibilities that could arise over a span of more than a dozen billion years, laughing in the process at the mere 3.8 billion years that life has existed on planet Earth.
While it elevates evolved consciousnesses to the level of the gods, it demands of those gods a recognition of human consciousness, and it asserts our right, as well as the right of all other consciousnesses, to call ourselves gods.
Atheism is often seen as a “taking down of the gods.” Demotheism aspires to be a rising up of conciousness, no matter its form or its lack thereof.
But demotheism does not only make demands of the gods. It requires human consciousness to respect other consciousnesses as well. As we say to the Lord, “I am too,” so the dog, the monkey, the elephant, and perhaps even the tree, says to us, “I am too.”
Even beyond that, demotheism recognizes the rights of future consciousnesses. It provides a basic acceptance of technologically evolved consciousnesses, and it anticipates the evolution of additional organic consciousnesses, realizing the truth that, given time, life always finds a way.
This feels right to me. This feels true.
And this is why I now call myself a demotheist.
—
PS: After writing this piece, I discovered that “demotheism” is a term that already exists. Critics gave it to a quasi-Marxist movement led by Maxim Gorky, a literary giant from Russia and the Soviet Union who was nominated for the Nobel Prize five different times. According to critics, demotheism sought to replace traditional religions with a religion based on Marxism. Its adherents attempted to “conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God.” In this demotheism, God exists, but God arises from the collective. The onus of God’s creation is on “the fusion of all the peoples.”
In some ways, this version of demotheism may be more deserving of the name. The term obviously comes from the combination of two Greek words, demos and theos, which translate to, respectively, “common people” and “god.” Since Gorky’s demotheism equates God with the collective struggle of the common people (the proletariat) such that God arises from the collective struggle of the common people, it seems fitting that its name be formed from the combination of “common people” and “god.”
But in other ways, my version of demotheism may be more deserving. Demos does not only translate as “common people.” It also translates as “free citizens” and “sovereign people.” In my version of demotheism, the Lord (known to billions as God) is recognized as a free citizen of the universe, as are Enki and Coyote and Pan, as are any beings possessing the evolutionary adaptation of consciousness. It removes the concept of God from its throne and recognizes equal sovereignty among all of the free consciousnesses.
The critics called Gorky and his demotheists “God-builders.” My demotheism does not seek to build a God, but rather, to recognize the divine nature of every consciousness — divine not in the sense of being a gift from a god, but in the sense of being “of a god” — the presence of consciousness — the wordless voice that says “I am” — being the defining characteristic of a god.
Gorky’s demotheism denies God at the same time as it tries to create God. My demotheism does not deny the Lord’s existence.
His demotheism was born at a time when Tzars were being assassinated, when the ruling class was right to fear for its life. My demotheism is born at a time when violent revolution seems less like an option and more like a cop-out.
His demotheism originated in a culture inspired by the political reality of 19th century Russia and the words of Marx and Lenin. My demotheism originates in a world that has known Ghandi and Martin Luther King, two deeply important thinkers whose successes demonstrated the revolutionary power of nonviolence.
Of course Gorky’s demotheism would deny God! His was a time of revolt against a ruling class. And of course my demotheism would seek to demote the Lord — mine is a time of peaceful elections and the recognition of rulers as nothing more than democratically empowered citizens.
I do not deny that Gorky’s ideas deserve the name of demotheism; I only want to suggest in this postscript that, yes too, does mine.
Categories
The Campaign Mode Not Taken
A few days after I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree, I made a phone call to Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. I was trying to decide what to do next with my life. I knew I wanted to continue my career as a student, but I wasn’t sure exactly in what area. I eventually ended up receiving a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, but at that moment, I was thinking of going in a different direction.
I called Champlain College because they had recently begun offering degrees related to the video game field: one in game programming and another in game design. The programming one didn’t interest me. By that point in my life, I’d experimented enough with programming to know I wasn’t good at it. Taking courses in game design, however, peaked my interest; hence, the phone call.
I researched before making the call. I knew the academic field called itself “ludology,” from the Latin, ludus, which means, games — i.e., ludology: the study of games. I had even purchased (and partially read) a few books on the subject.
I didn’t want to just study games though, and I didn’t just want to play them. I wanted to be a creator, an artist more than (and yet still kind of) an academic.
Speaking to a counselor from Champlain College, we both agreed it didn’t make sense for me to join their program in game design. First, it would have meant earning another Bachelor’s degree, and I had just finished earning one. Second, my current degree was so weird that many of my courses wouldn’t transfer over, meaning I’d have to take several general-ed courses in order to earn the second one. Instead of going through all that, the counselor recommended I look around for a program with a Master’s degree.
I thanked her and hung up. At which point, I stopped pursuing that particular future.
By that point, I’d already researched graduate programs for video games, and I’d learned a couple of things: all of the Master’s programs (at that time, at least) were Master’s in computer science, rather than in the arts, and I most definitely am an artist before I’m a scientist; and second, virtually all of the Master’s programs (at that time) were located in Texas, Florida, or Canada, and my future-wife and I had already decided to spend at least the next couple of years, if not the rest of our lives, in Vermont.
What had made Champlain so perfect, even more than its program, was its location. I’m sure the program had its flaws, but I would have found ways around them if it meant being able to stay in Vermont. With Champlain out of the picture, so was my dream of continuing my studies in video games.
I haven’t yet quite given up on my dream of creating a video game, however. Somewhere in my imagination, I picture myself sitting in a conference room spitballing game-design ideas with professionals who can turn those ideas into art and code, with me somehow making a contribution, first with my ability to project manage, and second with my knowledge and experience as a Master of Fine Arts.
Of course, outside of telling you about it right now, I’m doing exactly nothing to make that dream a reality.
In the meantime, and for the past seven years, I’ve taught the art of storytelling to a generation of middle-school, high-school, and college-age students. I’ve also led several courses in game design and used games in hundreds of lessons with my students, taking advantage of my ability to analyze their components in order to re-apply them to a given teaching situation. Believe it or not, I’ve even taught a couple of workshops in chess (despite being not very good at it myself).
In short, I’ve made games an everyday presence in my life: from the nightly video-game sessions I use to unwind, to the in-class games I play with my students, to the afternoon and evening games I play with my wife and daughter, to the weekend games I play with my friends.
In many ways, I’ve made games, and play itself, my religion, to the point where — no shit — I experience in games real, true moments of holy revelation.
If you see me playing a game, you might think I’m sitting around, doing nothing, but in reality, you’re witnessing a monk at prayer.
Sure, my kind of prayer may be a hell of lot of fun, but it beats repeating a series of words over a musty chain of rosary beads.
Game design may not be in my future. But games, and play, are very much a part of my life, and I treat them as (and consider them to be) an integral piece of what makes me me.
For the longest time, I have wanted to read a book on the philosophy and/or theology of polytheism. I had the topic in my head, but it wasn’t until right now that I tried to figure out what the actual subject of the book would be, and when I realized it, I immediately grew ashamed of myself.
I read a list today of “22 Questions that Keep You Awake at Night.” The one that resonated was, “What things am I doing now that will be considered racist or sexist by future generations? Would my ‘legacy’ (whatever might it be) be ruined by something I consider just normal behavior?”
The racist thing I did today was reduce the polytheistic religions into one monolithic POLYTHEISM.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t racist. But it was definitely mono-ist.
There should be no single theology of polytheism. Each polytheistic worldview has developed over centuries and millennia its unique understanding of the universe. The difference between a Hindu’s understanding of the universe and an Ancient Greek’s is vastly greater than the difference between the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of the universe. To imagine a unified form of polytheism is to colonize it. It ignores individual differences in an attempt to dominate many different kinds. This results in a gross misunderstanding of each individual worldview.
To imagine a theology of polytheism is to simplify confusion and chaos in order to satisfy my Western need to grasp polytheism’s single true form.
The genius of polytheism is that it recognizes a natural place in the universe for confusion and chaos. Monotheism seeks to zero them out, to reduce them, mathematically speaking, back into the One. But confusion and chaos are real in a way that extends beyond the One.
I like to imagine sometimes the birth of God, and by God, I only mean, the first awakening of consciousness. I imagine it in a void, but it’s the void of ignorance more than the void of matter.
I am. Yes. Confirmed. But now what?
And then consciosness opened its eyes, whatever eyes they may have been. And the light flooded in. And the consciousness saw. And what it saw was good.
This — this goodness — matters.
Because it’s easy to imagine a consciousness waking, opening its eyes, and the light flooding in, and the consciousness seeing something bad. Like a baby that opens its eyes on a sexually abusive father, or a heroin-injecting mother, or a falling bomb.
And I think to myself, “Yes, that too seems possible.”
Monotheism believes it is the story of one consciousness, but three different cultures interpret that consciousness in three different ways. The different ways are the stories that fathers tell their sons, and in three interpretations of monotheism, each story traces back to a man the Western world knows as Abraham: All of the prophets are sons of Abraham, from Moses to Muhammad and including Jesus Christ, himself the son of a daughter of Abraham.
The consciousness that opened its eyes and saw that it was good, somehow, at some point, figured out how to communicate with what it found. That process, of course, takes time. Consciousness may be a prerequisite for language, but language is not a prerequisite for consciousness. Consciousness needs to first learn to move itself in space. In fact, without learning to move, it would never develop the muscle control necessary for communication (do you realize how intricate your body control has to be to shape the rate, tone, rhythm, and volume of the air that exhausts from your lungs, i.e., to speak? It’s crazy intricate!).
All of which is to say, a lot of time has to pass, immeasurable time, during which the consciousness has to develop into a being with dominion over its local environment, and then, recognizing that dominion, it has to develop the first instance of creativity, to take what it has found and make it better, to find, in its own dominion, inspiration, and to use that inspiration to breathe more life into what it has found.
This all takes time. Time that the consciousness could have also used to explore beyond its dominion.
And that’s what I imagine monotheism to be. It’s a consciousness with a God complex. Instead of continuing its exploration, it settled down and built a garden, and it put little toys in that garden, and then it programmed the toys to act a certain way, and when the toys didn’t do what it expected, it flung them out of the garden like a spoiled child.
But what else could it be? Childhood can be measured by the number of strangers we’ve been introduced to. A baby who gets passed around, with no single caregiver, has to grow up faster than a baby who can luxuriate in the arms of its mother all the time. Teenagers who travel, engage in conversations with lots of people, and open themselves to the strangers in their books are more mature than teenagers who have never strayed farther than the end of the block.
The rest of the story of monotheism is that spoiled consciousness’s desire to reclaim its flung away toys. What it intends to do with them is still up for debate.
I don’t see the consciousness that proclaimed itself to Abraham actually being the one true God. I see it as being a localized consciousness with an inbred hatred for foreigners.
Polytheism may produce its own hatred for foreigners — I don’t know — but I sense in it a recognition that the boundaries between “us” and “them” overlap. The 500 polytheistic nations that existed in the Americas before the arrival of the white man maintained a wide variety of understandings of the origin, form, and meaning of the universe, life, and everything, but they also blended together, sharing certain aspects with one neighbor while differing from another. They fought and argued and hated, but they also intermarried, feasted, and celebrated.
While there may be a hatred for the foreigner in the abstract, there is also within the polytheisms a recognition of the sanctity of the individual.
That seems like a pretty broad statement to make. And I’m sure that it is. Immediately, I think of the images from Western movies and the stories from Western history where a stone-faced Native American warrior uncaringly slices the throat of a white woman. There doesn’t seem to be lot of sanctity for the individual in that act, and I’m not going to pretend there could be.
Instead I’m going to say that maybe less than the sancity of the individual, what it recognizes is the existence of the individual.
Monotheism must reduce to God: If we are, it’s only because He is.
But polytheism accepts the existence of the other. It accepts it. It doesn’t smother it or smoosh it into itself; it doesn’t attempt to swallow it. It accepts it as one might accept a guest.
If you want to understand monotheism, you have to look at it in terms of its environment. It developed in a desert — consciousness opened its eyes, and what it saw first was water (Gen 1:2); the light came later (Gen 1:3). Everything about monotheism comes from those moments. To my mind, they’re more important than the act of universal creation itself (Gen 1:1) because Gen 1:1’s claim can only be supported by God Himself, while Gen 1:2-3 at least have the evidence of water and light.
Monotheism has to be interpreted through the lens of the desert, where survival’s greatest enemy was the parched landscape. Desert customs of hospitality were established to protect watering holes or tents (as with the Bedouins) while also allowing strangers to have access to the safety of them. The customs ensure that both the host and the stranger were safe. In addition, children had to learn the harsh lessons of the desert from their father so they wouldn’t have to learn them from the desert itself.
In the morals of desert hospitality and desert parenting, one can find the morals of monotheism.
But polytheism dominated the rest of the planet. The Greeks and the Romans, the Africans and the Polynesians, the East Asians and the Norse, the 500 nations of the Americas. Polytheism found purchase in the snow covered mountains and lush golden valleys, in the jungles and the forests, in the plains and on the islands, and each environment was rich with diversity in ways that can hardly be dreamed of in the desert.
I don’t think of the monotheistic God as the one true God. I think of Him as a desert dweller who has yet to consider the abundance of life beyond Him.
Standing here, where we are, we look back and we see the face of this consciousness, but we see it as just another conscious face in a diverse sea of consciosnesses.
I don’t deny this consciousness its power.
I just deny it its status.
It needs to look around and appreciate its powerlessness in the face of all the confusion and chaos.
And then, maybe only then, will it start to dance.
PS: After writing the above post, I discovered A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, written by a leading member of the Ancient Druid Order of America. I was hesitant because I’m not looking for something that is New Age-y, but after reading the sample of it on Kindle last night, I think it might be exactly what I was looking for. Here’s hoping.