Another walk in the park, another year: my companion is smaller, and considerably less mobile and articulate. Up the hill where the railroad tracks run we encounter a rabbit, a normal occurrence, except that this rabbit is dying. As we walk past its hiding place it explodes out of the underbrush with the usual headlong pelt, but its running is a horrible, listing, splay-limbed parody of a healthy rabbit’s gallop. A dozen feet from us it loses it completely and wipes out in a rolling tangle, back feet still pumping uselessly, a jerky scrawl that suggests profound neurological decay.
Rabies? I hoist Jonah up on my shoulders, a frequent instinctive response to things that alarm me on his behalf, and go to squat down and take a closer look.
Whatever afflicts it, this creature will not be posing a threat to anything. I don’t know what last burst of organized energy impelled its flight from us, because it seems all but paralyzed now, nothing but palsied tremors. It is prone, its body half twisted. An eye rolls up, apparently regarding me. My instinct is to kill it, put it out of its misery, but I can’t make the logistics work, with Jonah along, and admittedly I don’t really want to. I’ve never killed a rabbit, least of all with my bare hands, although I am acquainted with the theory. I killed a mouse once, at a greenhouse where I worked. Its pelvis had been crushed in a spring trap and the inclination of my more squeamish coworkers who had found it was to get it out of earshot and forget about it. No one objected to me taking responsibility for its final disposition. It is a terrible thing how the smallest of beings will fight for life, when there is no hope at all.
But there’s no fight in this thing and for all I know it will be most merciful to simply allow it solitude and peace. It’s impossible not to anthropomorphize these situations. It’s a moot point, anyway. I straighten up, adjust Jonah on my shoulders. And walk away, leaving the rabbit there, to die.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 20, 2008 11:47 AM... and here I will end the not quite complete reposting of the erstwhile Spirit of Salt blog. Pax vobiscum, babies
Monday, February 21, 2011
end history
I will post one more from the archives of the Spirit of Salt blog, I think... I was going to put the whole archive on, but the essays seem progressively less relevant or interesting to me as they process into the further past. Or maybe I'm just sick of it or maybe those mean more or less the same thing. Having erected this site purely to host "the store" it seems to be exerting some inexplicable force on me to fill it with text, but that impulse is on the wane at least for the moment. If I'm feeling compelled to dump some by the by textualizing in public that does not fit over at Freelala I guess I'll leave it here. Hopefully I have now developed sufficient resources online to contain my wretched addiction to generating strings of written verbiage. Though I tell you, the way I feel right now, it may all (aside from the fairly secret songblog) mire in stasis in whatever state I leave it in today for a good long while. But of course I've felt done with it all many's the time past. I mean, why write this? Who gives a fuck? And yet here I am. Enough, anyway, for now.
With a gun
What I first take to be a squirt gun turns out to be a relatively complicated spring-action pistol of the type that fires those 6mm plastic pellets which frequently irritate me due to their ubiquity as outdoor litter.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
A combination of multiple, overlapping head colds with unseasonably rotten weather (as much as rotten weather is ever unseasonable in Minnesota) has kept us out of the park for a long time. I spot the pistol, lying in the grass by the parking lot, while my three year old companion digs in the giant municipal woodchip piles with his little shovels and buckets, pretending to be some kind of construction equipment. The legally required blaze orange tip on the barrel reveals it as a toy, but it’s only when I pick it up I realize by the weight and mechanical detail that it is not merely a cheap molded plastic toy. Other than the tip it is remarkably realistic.
My intention is to grab and bin it to avoid my son seeing it, but I lose track of that for a moment while I examine its unexpected nature - long enough for him to take note.
“What is that, Daddy? Is it a train?”
I think I had an inkling, at least theoretically, of how precious the innocence of childhood was before I became a parent, but I didn’t guess how frequently sad it could be. Guns don’t yet exist in his world. The thing I’m holding is fascinating, and mechanical, so his first guess is the most fascinating, mechanical thing he knows.
“It’s not a train,” I say, stuffing it into my jacket pocket. “It’s nothing we want to play with.”
Like so many things, I know I’m standing on a line I’ll never hold. I played with gun toys as a child and I expect my son to in time. But then again, as I so often do, I tell myself, yes, yes… But he’s only three. And I want to hold on to his gun-free world, however unreal, for a while longer.
At home I look on the internet and determine it is a replica of a 9mm pistol manufactured by a company named Taurus. The fully deadly version costs around $500-700, depending on how you purchase it: new, the replica is worth $30 or 40.
Something held me back from chucking it in the trash. Native frugality, perhaps, the thing obviously has some value. Or perhaps a lingering remnant of my own days of playing with guns: at home I play with it a little, examining the drop-out magazine, testing the action, dry firing the spring catch. I’ve got no use for the thing, though. Maybe I’ll try selling it on eBay.*
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Mar 14, 2008 at 12:23 PM
*It took almost three years but I did finally unload it on eBay for a pittance. Toy guns of course now occupy a firm position in the child's happy fantasy world.
Sentiment
Heaven-and-Earth is not sentimental;
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
It treats all things as straw-dogs.
The sage is not sentimental;
He treats all his people as straw-dogs.
Between Heaven and Earth,
There seems to be a Bellows:
It is empty, and yet is is inexhaustible;
The more it works, the more comes out of it.
No amount of words can fathom it:
Better look for it within you.
Tao Teh Ching (J.C.H. Wu Translation)
I go to sleep in the daytime, muddle my mind with a fast procession of confused dreams. In the last of these I am doing something in the garage when I see a light out the side window. I go out and see a man I don’t recognize shining a flashlight through the window from over the chain fence between our lot and the neighbors’. I walk over to him through the snow on the hillside, asking if he is who I think he is. He smiles strangely but doesn’t say anything. I reach out and grasp his lapel lightly, asking who he is, what he is doing. But as soon as I touch him my vision is gone, and his jacket is like snow sifting through my fingers. I hear his breath, slightly labored, hissing in and out. But it is not his breath, it is mine, and my eyes fly open, awake all at once.
I don’t expect this to go anywhere or make that much sense. I’ve considered before that I may be semi-intentionally hobbling myself with low expectations. But I don’t know. I let the regular impulses to stray into my thoughts on things metaphysical go unanswered a long time. And this is the reason: I know I don’t have the time to organize any of it to a coherent system. Even if I did I’m not at all sure I have the aptitude or the inclination to do so in any manner of lasting value.
But where was I. The spirit. The breath. It’s an interesting metaphor, breath, the little wind that inhabits us. And when it’s gone, we’re gone. Only the shell left behind, uninhabited. That’s a common enough sentiment but there’s actually a lot of metaphysical assumption in it.
I’ll tell you how I got started thinking about the idea of the spiritual. I was rereading Bertrand Russell’s seminal atheist essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” again recently. As a Christian I obviously disagree with Russell’s conclusion and many of his premises. But it is a good essay, and an important one, and I feel like anyone who accepts the name Christian would do well to explore it and come to some conclusions regarding how they feel about what it says. Perhaps I’ll get into my reactions to it some day, but in any event, I was particularly thinking about one of Russell’s assertions. He writes:
I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds.
I think I agree with this sentiment to some degree. I don’t think many people come to religious beliefs or faith by way of exploring the logical mechanics of it (though such explorations are a significant part of the process for some). I think people whose convictions are more than simply ingrained and unexamined indoctrination adopt religious beliefs because of experiences that I would characterize as spiritual.
And that’s where the question occurred to my mind: in the conception of materialism, do spiritual and emotional mean the same thing? Does the concept of the spiritual have any significance outside of a supernatural interpretation?
I have issues with the idea of the supernatural. It is a tricky, muddy concept. In one sense it seems intrinsically oxymoronic. If you are considering the totality of existence, is there anything that is not natural? But I’m not sure that isn’t just a rhetorical dodge. Certainly in the everyday context I recognize an everyday definition of the natural, and I do not seek (and in fact repudiate) “supernatural” explanations of things: psychic surgery, mediums, commonplace superstitions.
So I could be accused of inconsistency, if not hypocrisy, in defending the integrity of my “spiritual” convictions. I consider their basis to be different, but I can’t offer any proof of the difference: I recognize this as a matter of my personal, subjective experience. The opponents of faith sometimes call this sort of basis for belief an “argument from religious experience” and reject it on the basis that experiences are not facts, which I agree with - but of course, I am not really trying to make an argument. I’m just trying to understand, and perhaps find some common language that does a better job of explaining than conflating the merely emotional with the spiritual.
The temporary conclusion I came to, considering all this, was that I could accept Russell’s description of my state of faith or belief as an “emotional” one, at least for the sake of discussion, and that I would be prepared to justify participation in religion on that basis alone, at least until I make more progress on working out some thoughts about what exactly I think it is that characterizes the spiritual in language, something that I have been chewing on off an on.
So maybe I’ll talk about that later, possibly I will branch into a sort of essay I’ve been rolling around with the incredibly provocative title “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” Or maybe I will talk about my cats, since every time I wander into this sort of territory I feel completely out of my depth after about 3 sentences.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 4, 2009 at 10:05 PM
Monday, February 7, 2011
stop kidding myself, wasting my time
A depression in three parts.
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
I.
A comment on the last one sent me off on the research spiral, thirty, fifty, a hundred minutes seep into the background radiation as I let nested references do as they will in the age of the hyperlink. Let my brain steep in it, without really getting to any depth. And to think, people used to have to keep track of all this by keeping notes and stuff! In the final analysis it kind of bums me out: I was never, truth be told, a particularly gifted academic, and the internet has, if anything, further softened my discipline. It’s way too easy to fake it. In college I was prone to surprising flashes of synthetic intuition and a sort of intensely voluble verbal acumen that tended to get superlatives attached to my intellect. What I remember is a comment a professor who wrote tests too difficult to be graded by a teaching assistant left on one of my Physical Chemistry tests: “you got the hard ones but gave back points on the easy ones.”
The primary conclusion my meandering aside of research left me with was that I should probably stop messing around and try to slog through Arthur Koestler again (the two books I attempted and failed in my teens, The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine, seeming apropos). The internet, doing it’s thing again, also lets me know without my having asked that Koestler was likely a violent, misogynistic serial rapist, so I set out to write a little maudlin, fragmentary memoir instead. Res ipsa loquitur. All that from half a paragraph of John Crowley!
II.
I probably would never have come across Crowley on my own, tending towards the scientific than the fantastic end of the speculative spectrum (not that it’s fair to consign Crowley to such a genre restriction, or that such dichotomies are really meaningful, still, they put a little sticker on the spine, and it’s either a spaceship or a unicorn, you know, and since high school at least I mainly stuck with the spaceships). A girl introduced me to him, a woman I should say, and (somewhat alarmingly) I find I can’t recall with certainty which of two particular women it was. In my defense both of them gave me a certain amount of trouble within a pretty narrow time frame, but still. The list of women who have given me trouble is not a long one, and these two were not really alike at all. I try to imagine the remembered conversation about the book in question, Little, Big - either of their faces seem perfectly natural attached to it. Not that any of this is either here or there.
Little, Big is the sort of book that strikes a discomfiting chord in me, full of muscular philosophical forays wrapped in a lot of intricately woven prose, alternately lyrical and mundane and enigmatic. It had the contradictory effect that I ended not wholly satisfied with the product (or perhaps my success at reading it) and yet wanting or wishing to create something like it, not to do it better, maybe just to be able to understand it, for once. I can scent all the connections teeming under the surface, that world I dream about but never really see. But I don’t quite make it. I recall having this impulse at least once before, reading Mark Helprin’s (who actually seems like kind of a dick, thanks again, internet) Winter’s Tale. Which inspired me, as I recall, to write a poor short story, though I couldn’t provide any details since I sent that to the fire, along with very many personal things, in a particular mood, over a series of days, in the summer of 1994.
Despite being Crowley’s most popular book, Little, Big is only intermittently in print, and Crowley relates glumly in a recent entry on his weblog that his “books don’t sell very well.” Ain’t that just the way.
III.
I pose myself this hypothetical: if you could choose only one, would you create the important work of art that deeply affected people’s lives, but which failed commercially, or would you produce something superficial, but which would in its success give you financial freedom?
In the darkness of my heart I suspect I would opt for the latter. I sometimes question (heresy of heresies) the true value of great works of art. Despite the fact that I am deeply drawn to them, but so what? What good do they really do? Everyday crap at least relieves the unrelenting monotony of the teeming masses. I’ve been thinking about it lately while listening to Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. We finally moved the stereo out of the basement the other day which triggered an interest in the boy to actually play music on the thing, as opposed to just playing with it and making Daddy nervous. He particularly likes the old 8-Track that a dead-technology-loving friend gave me as a gift a few years back: the tapes are big and easy to handle, Daddy doesn’t get uptight about him handling them the way he does with the CDs; it makes noises like CHUNK and CLACK while it’s working. He started playing Glass Houses, which I probably had not listened to in something approaching 20 years, but when we were kids brother, sister and I had it on LP and we played that thing to death. As soon as it started I realized I still basically knew it note for note, pretty much all the words.
We’d all like to think we’d opt for the higher choice, that we would take the principled stand if we had the misfortune to land in Dr. Milgram’s experimental box, that we would refuse to press the button when the screaming started, no matter how the men in white coats told us we had no choice in the realm where white coats ruled the day. But the statistics don’t lie and the statistics aren’t encouraging. I guess in that context making an inoffensive pop album is a minor crime. Of course the hypothetical question of great art versus commercial success is moot: I’m quite sure I lack the capacity to do either.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 7, 2009 at 1:26 AM
Is there such a thing as an Atheist?
I decided to soften the title down from my original concept, “There is No Such Thing as an Atheist.” It’s not my intention to be polemical, or I should perhaps say it is my intention to not be polemical.
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8, I said “perhaps” and one of my classmates asked me what that meant. I said “maybe.”
Anyway.
Here is the essay then: it depends on what you mean by God.
This is actually going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 8, 2009 1:01 AM
forking paths
Shortly after I start crying on my keyboard over Oscar Grant, to my great surprise, I decide that I will in fact have one small whiskey. I’ve had no taste for the poison since New Year’s Eve. The project leaves me with some time to kill and so here I am.
I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it. In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology. Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat. But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life. Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy. Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off. I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:
Oh I am tired of this place.
Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted. Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes. Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head. I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse. Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede. So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind. Weak, indolent. Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?
No sense to that either, good money after bad. What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype? Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?
It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM
I don’t cry very often and I’m bad at it. In fact I went six or seven years at one point without crying once, although it was pretty clear that this was a condition of pathology. Some time not too long after that particular dam broke I got some help, as they say, and these days I cry over normal and even mundane things like the death of a favorite cat. But it also pops up in strange, unexpected contexts from time to time, always associated with a reaction of empathy rather than sadness over my own life. Which latter thing definitely exists, but makes me depressed rather than weepy. Since I became a father I am particularly unable to tolerate the suffering of children, and in fact it was thinking about Oscar Grant’s four year old daughter that set me off. I wrote, somewhere out there in one of the online text-holes I haunt:
Oh I am tired of this place.
Earlier I was fighting ideations, not bad ones, exactly, but unwanted. Daydreams, I suppose, except it’s hard to call this daytime, but what do you call it when you are dreaming at night but not asleep? In any event I got sick of watching my brain spin out yarns, scenarios with no touchstone in reality, and lashed out at them with a little directed visualization, a technique I picked up from a somewhat lurid sci-fi novel by Philip José Farmer, which nevertheless works sometimes. Nothing like a placebo to cure something that’s all in your head. I project my mind’s eyes into my hands and fling them, double fisted, into coruscating fragments; let them glitter and disperse. Because I have not been so diligent about being compassionate towards myself a certain self-reproach lingers even while the thoughts themselves recede. So easily bored, so starved for novelty, I castigate my mind. Weak, indolent. Deprive you of a couple meals and you’d stop all the restless questing past the mundane quick enough, wouldn’t you?
No sense to that either, good money after bad. What it gets me started on again is wondering, what in the world is this I and what does it think it is dressing down? The can and a half of dog food in the bone box? Some Freudian construct, the ever popular id perhaps, or maybe an Archetype? Are any of the other questions about the set-up down here even meaningful with that one hanging out there, coiled in the nest of its own constructs?
It’s relevant, it’s still going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 9, 2009 at 1:31 AM
Have You Ever Been In Communicado
My computer is acting “funny” which isn’t very shocking since it is over seven years old - a veritable antique. I have been cheating the grim gods of obsolescence a couple years now, but I think my time might be at hand. If so my communications via computer may be very sketchy for a period of time - including email, blogging, and the various networks and social time sinks. You can leave a comment or send me an email about what you think about this but, you know, there’s a pretty good chance I won’t see it. Listen to a little light music while enjoying a brief vacation from my output. I can’t work without a computer so it won’t last long.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 11, 2009 at 2:40 AM
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 11, 2009 at 2:40 AM
Threading a needle with a needle
I probably use the word rhetoric wrong, at least when I am railing against it, and then again it is one of those words that I waver between thinking I’m secretly dumb or at least unsophisticated because I don’t really understand what it means or else that it actually doesn’t mean anything very clear, even more so than other words. Metaphysical and postmodern are other examples. Pop Quiz! If you are a strict naturalist are the words metaphysical and supernatural equivalent?
What I find objectionable is the preponderance of what I might characterize as “adversarial discourse” out there in the so-called public dialog. Specifically, discussion whose sole intent seems to be to attack a point of view and replace it with a supposedly superior one. Virtually all political punditry, a great deal of proselytizing religious and anti-religious discussion, far too much of all public writing and talking in general are of this character. It is an objection I feel pretty strongly but whenever I try to work out an alternative things quickly get very, very muddy: am I engaging in exactly what I’m protesting? You’re doing it wrong, you should do it like this instead. Or am I advocating a stance that disallows your being against anything? And can you really be for anything without being implicitly against whatever it is opposed to?
-=-
Is it merely a semantic point to ask whether there is such a thing as an atheist? If you take the term God as a mere abstraction meaning something like that which is the highest order above all other things, is the God of the strict naturalist physics? I’m not really charting new territory there, name-brand atheists like Dawkins tend to set out ground rules exempting these sorts of abstract conceptions of God from their philosophies. What’s my point, then?
-=-
My point is something hazy, and indistinct, that I circle and circle like a bird of appetite, and if that is the case am I destined to miss it, is it simply not my kind of prey? Should I return instead to the role of the adversary, stake out the errant and set forth to correct them? I can’t shake the conviction that the topic I am so muddling nevertheless has a path to it somewhere through intelligible exposition (as opposed to, say, koans, or whatever this fumble I just coughed up is…)
It is a clumsy bridge, but I still think it is going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM
What I find objectionable is the preponderance of what I might characterize as “adversarial discourse” out there in the so-called public dialog. Specifically, discussion whose sole intent seems to be to attack a point of view and replace it with a supposedly superior one. Virtually all political punditry, a great deal of proselytizing religious and anti-religious discussion, far too much of all public writing and talking in general are of this character. It is an objection I feel pretty strongly but whenever I try to work out an alternative things quickly get very, very muddy: am I engaging in exactly what I’m protesting? You’re doing it wrong, you should do it like this instead. Or am I advocating a stance that disallows your being against anything? And can you really be for anything without being implicitly against whatever it is opposed to?
-=-
Is it merely a semantic point to ask whether there is such a thing as an atheist? If you take the term God as a mere abstraction meaning something like that which is the highest order above all other things, is the God of the strict naturalist physics? I’m not really charting new territory there, name-brand atheists like Dawkins tend to set out ground rules exempting these sorts of abstract conceptions of God from their philosophies. What’s my point, then?
-=-
My point is something hazy, and indistinct, that I circle and circle like a bird of appetite, and if that is the case am I destined to miss it, is it simply not my kind of prey? Should I return instead to the role of the adversary, stake out the errant and set forth to correct them? I can’t shake the conviction that the topic I am so muddling nevertheless has a path to it somewhere through intelligible exposition (as opposed to, say, koans, or whatever this fumble I just coughed up is…)
It is a clumsy bridge, but I still think it is going somewhere.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 19, 2009 at 12:33 AM
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Like a dumb man who has had a dream
Joshu’s Dog
A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?’ Joshu answered: `Mu.’ [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning `No-thing’ or `Nay’]
Mumon’s comments: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriarch? This one word, Mu, is it.
This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?
If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore in your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.
Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but cannot tell it.
-=-
I. The Voice
My child irritates me beyond endurance while we are out and about, as his resistance to doing what I wish him to do becomes more frequent and obstinate on a schedule that would probably plot nicely on a graph, until I am pulling out the big guns in the car, like being put straight to bed when we get home, culminating in a protest, delivered from his booster seat in an angry imperious whine, that he just wants to have everything his own way.
The irony of course is that this is a phrase he unquestionably learned from me in a purely negative presentation: he has identified the condition but rejected my thesis on its impossibility. And without consideration or intent (in the worst possible state to conduct parenting, in other words) I am delivering a lecture to this four year old. I have slapped the stereo into silence and left the car in Park and I am holding forth, my voice descending almost immediately into a tone a long-ago ex-girlfriend used to call “The Voice,” half an octave lower than my conversational tone, dry and hectoring and professorial and vibrating with poorly suppressed anger. The topic of today’s lecture is the importance of learning, in this life, that you can’t always have things the way you want them to be, as exquisitely demonstrated by Daddy’s own life, illustrated with numerous, vivid examples. I wield this lash as the pressure mounts in my skull, until my child is cowed and dejected, responding in monosyllable, agreeing glumly to whatever rhetorical question I put to him. And I master myself, and force some sunshine that I do not feel at all into my voice, to indicate that this unfortunate lapse of several minutes is over, and we are going to move past it, start over, try again.
II. Permanent Vacation
I get hung up on weird ideas sometimes. After reading an absurd, pot-boiling political thriller (in which I discover a seemingly original plot I had independently conceived half a dozen years after the book in question was published had long ago become the basis of an international bestseller, not to mention a massive videogame franchise), I find myself dwelling unprofitably on the fictional cliché of a suitcase full of cash. You know what would solve a lot of my problems? I ask myself. A suitcase full of cash.
It is an image that acquires a particular bitter barb as I read about vast amounts of physical American currency (representing Iraqi funds from various sources) - primarily $100 bills - flown into Iraq to grease the wheels of regime change - large volumes of which vanished untraceably in a vacuum of accountability, oversight or control. It is stupid - and greedy, and fundamentally contrary to my supposed Christian faith - but I find myself in odd moments dwelling on that lost Iraqi cash. A stack of one hundred bills, a little under half an inch tall, two side by side accounting no more space than one of my slender golden age science fiction paperbacks, $20,000.
I run my fingers along spines on the bookshelf, looking for something that isn’t there, mentally calculating, there is the end of consumer debt, there is the house paid for, there is a brand new house and a year’s vacation, there is the end of work for pay, vacation forever more. I lecture myself that this is greed, venality, that I’m perfectly aware that money doesn’t really solve problems or make you happy. Yes, yes, I answer glumly. I know.
III. Hot Iron Ball
The last dream that I remember that involved the literal presence of God happened 14 years ago now. I did not see God but I heard His voice. I was arguing, contending with him, as He told me that His cup was not for me. And it was no metaphor, this cup, no abstraction: it hung in the air before my eyes, a gorgeous golden chalice. I argued and fought and insisted until finally it tipped towards me and spilled its contents into my mouth.
And I knew instantly that I had made a terrible mistake, as molten chaos blazed a column straight through the center of me, as the torrent flowed and flowed, and I understood that the cup was boundless, unending.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 20, 2009 at 2:40 PM
A monk asked Joshu, a Chinese Zen master: `Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?’ Joshu answered: `Mu.’ [Mu is the negative symbol in Chinese, meaning `No-thing’ or `Nay’]
Mumon’s comments: To realize Zen one has to pass through the barrier of the patriarchs. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the patriarchs or if your thinking road is not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a patriarch? This one word, Mu, is it.
This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it you will see Joshu face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of patriarchs. Is this not a pleasant thing to do?
If you want to pass this barrier, you must work through every bone in your body, through every pore in your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night. Do not believe it is the common negative symbol meaning nothing. It is not nothingness, the opposite of existence. If you really want to pass this barrier, you should feel like drinking a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.
Then your previous lesser knowledge disappears. As a fruit ripening in season, your subjectivity and objectivity naturally become one. It is like a dumb man who has had a dream. He knows about it but cannot tell it.
-=-
I. The Voice
My child irritates me beyond endurance while we are out and about, as his resistance to doing what I wish him to do becomes more frequent and obstinate on a schedule that would probably plot nicely on a graph, until I am pulling out the big guns in the car, like being put straight to bed when we get home, culminating in a protest, delivered from his booster seat in an angry imperious whine, that he just wants to have everything his own way.
The irony of course is that this is a phrase he unquestionably learned from me in a purely negative presentation: he has identified the condition but rejected my thesis on its impossibility. And without consideration or intent (in the worst possible state to conduct parenting, in other words) I am delivering a lecture to this four year old. I have slapped the stereo into silence and left the car in Park and I am holding forth, my voice descending almost immediately into a tone a long-ago ex-girlfriend used to call “The Voice,” half an octave lower than my conversational tone, dry and hectoring and professorial and vibrating with poorly suppressed anger. The topic of today’s lecture is the importance of learning, in this life, that you can’t always have things the way you want them to be, as exquisitely demonstrated by Daddy’s own life, illustrated with numerous, vivid examples. I wield this lash as the pressure mounts in my skull, until my child is cowed and dejected, responding in monosyllable, agreeing glumly to whatever rhetorical question I put to him. And I master myself, and force some sunshine that I do not feel at all into my voice, to indicate that this unfortunate lapse of several minutes is over, and we are going to move past it, start over, try again.
II. Permanent Vacation
I get hung up on weird ideas sometimes. After reading an absurd, pot-boiling political thriller (in which I discover a seemingly original plot I had independently conceived half a dozen years after the book in question was published had long ago become the basis of an international bestseller, not to mention a massive videogame franchise), I find myself dwelling unprofitably on the fictional cliché of a suitcase full of cash. You know what would solve a lot of my problems? I ask myself. A suitcase full of cash.
It is an image that acquires a particular bitter barb as I read about vast amounts of physical American currency (representing Iraqi funds from various sources) - primarily $100 bills - flown into Iraq to grease the wheels of regime change - large volumes of which vanished untraceably in a vacuum of accountability, oversight or control. It is stupid - and greedy, and fundamentally contrary to my supposed Christian faith - but I find myself in odd moments dwelling on that lost Iraqi cash. A stack of one hundred bills, a little under half an inch tall, two side by side accounting no more space than one of my slender golden age science fiction paperbacks, $20,000.
I run my fingers along spines on the bookshelf, looking for something that isn’t there, mentally calculating, there is the end of consumer debt, there is the house paid for, there is a brand new house and a year’s vacation, there is the end of work for pay, vacation forever more. I lecture myself that this is greed, venality, that I’m perfectly aware that money doesn’t really solve problems or make you happy. Yes, yes, I answer glumly. I know.
III. Hot Iron Ball
The last dream that I remember that involved the literal presence of God happened 14 years ago now. I did not see God but I heard His voice. I was arguing, contending with him, as He told me that His cup was not for me. And it was no metaphor, this cup, no abstraction: it hung in the air before my eyes, a gorgeous golden chalice. I argued and fought and insisted until finally it tipped towards me and spilled its contents into my mouth.
And I knew instantly that I had made a terrible mistake, as molten chaos blazed a column straight through the center of me, as the torrent flowed and flowed, and I understood that the cup was boundless, unending.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 20, 2009 at 2:40 PM
Imagine there’s no Earth
And so I think I am just about done with preamble. This might be the point to note that, while I am happy to (for example) exploit the literature of Zen Buddhism or Taoism in the service of some particular narrative goal, I do not practice these systems of belief, nor do I claim any particular insight into them.
That being said, here are a few more stories.
I.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I took a walk with a young woman of my acquaintance, whom I met through a Lutheran students association I served a leadership position with during my Senior year. Although I’m not sure how much relevance it has, I was taken with her, though I was in a serious relationship then and so this wasn’t an issue at the time of this story. Much later I would write her a letter that would make me feel foolish, but only a little. We are still friends.
I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but she asked me, essentially, if I really believed in this bible stuff. Again, I don’t recall the specifics too well, but I reckon we are talking, you know, virgin birth, walking on the water, raised from the dead. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know whether that was really important. She said she thought that was a cop out.
I don’t think the answer I gave was, actually, a cop out. I just didn’t know how to explain what were at the time still nebulous directions my practice of faith was leading me to. I’m not sure I do today. But I mean to find out.
II.
One of my friends is an atheist - a lot of my friends are atheists, actually, but this particular one occasionally tosses a pointed question on the topic of my faith my way. He asked me one day what I really thought about the Bible, and I told him that I believed the Bible was a collection of stories. To which he responded, “so, you see it as something like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” I answered “inasmuch as Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a collection of stories.”
I see my first answer as fair and accurate, as far as it goes, which is not very far. My second response, it has to be said, was a bit of a cop out.
III.
As my son Jonah’s inputs become more diverse he has begun to spring questions that I’m not expecting, or at least, not yet. A few mornings ago he asked me whether superheroes were real. I suppose I could have given him a “yes Virginia” sort of answer but I just gave him a flat no. There are no superheroes, just people.
Later the same day he asked me whether God was a real person, to which I gave him a much more complicated answer - complicated beyond his scope, I suspect. But I tried, very hard, for it not to be a cop out. I could have given a simple yes on that one, I suppose, and it would have been, from my perspective, an honest answer, but also somewhat misleading of my beliefs, and equivocating like that is not really how I’m operating with him. Or trying, anyway. But he gave me that look which suggested he suspected I was handing him some grown-up runaround B.S. I find myself wondering how long it will be before this sort of upbringing gets him into trouble in Sunday School, which is doubtless where the seed of the question of God’s real personhood was planted.
In the course of my discussion I touched on God as the origin of all created things.
Jonah said “I don’t really think God made everything.” I was struck by how decisively he stated this so I asked him to elaborate. “Well,” he replied, “I think that buildings were made by workmen!”
Hmm.
I’ll lay this out straight: to some people, Jonah’s two questions are essentially the same. They aren’t to me, which is why I gave him different answers. I believe in God, and not in the sense that God is math, or trees. But would I describe God as a “real person”? That’s a good question, a real poser. Answering that one is going to be complicated.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 26, 2009 at 1:27 AM
That being said, here are a few more stories.
I.
Many years ago, when I was in college, I took a walk with a young woman of my acquaintance, whom I met through a Lutheran students association I served a leadership position with during my Senior year. Although I’m not sure how much relevance it has, I was taken with her, though I was in a serious relationship then and so this wasn’t an issue at the time of this story. Much later I would write her a letter that would make me feel foolish, but only a little. We are still friends.
I don’t remember exactly how she put it, but she asked me, essentially, if I really believed in this bible stuff. Again, I don’t recall the specifics too well, but I reckon we are talking, you know, virgin birth, walking on the water, raised from the dead. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know whether that was really important. She said she thought that was a cop out.
I don’t think the answer I gave was, actually, a cop out. I just didn’t know how to explain what were at the time still nebulous directions my practice of faith was leading me to. I’m not sure I do today. But I mean to find out.
II.
One of my friends is an atheist - a lot of my friends are atheists, actually, but this particular one occasionally tosses a pointed question on the topic of my faith my way. He asked me one day what I really thought about the Bible, and I told him that I believed the Bible was a collection of stories. To which he responded, “so, you see it as something like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” I answered “inasmuch as Grimm’s Fairy Tales is a collection of stories.”
I see my first answer as fair and accurate, as far as it goes, which is not very far. My second response, it has to be said, was a bit of a cop out.
III.
As my son Jonah’s inputs become more diverse he has begun to spring questions that I’m not expecting, or at least, not yet. A few mornings ago he asked me whether superheroes were real. I suppose I could have given him a “yes Virginia” sort of answer but I just gave him a flat no. There are no superheroes, just people.
Later the same day he asked me whether God was a real person, to which I gave him a much more complicated answer - complicated beyond his scope, I suspect. But I tried, very hard, for it not to be a cop out. I could have given a simple yes on that one, I suppose, and it would have been, from my perspective, an honest answer, but also somewhat misleading of my beliefs, and equivocating like that is not really how I’m operating with him. Or trying, anyway. But he gave me that look which suggested he suspected I was handing him some grown-up runaround B.S. I find myself wondering how long it will be before this sort of upbringing gets him into trouble in Sunday School, which is doubtless where the seed of the question of God’s real personhood was planted.
In the course of my discussion I touched on God as the origin of all created things.
Jonah said “I don’t really think God made everything.” I was struck by how decisively he stated this so I asked him to elaborate. “Well,” he replied, “I think that buildings were made by workmen!”
Hmm.
I’ll lay this out straight: to some people, Jonah’s two questions are essentially the same. They aren’t to me, which is why I gave him different answers. I believe in God, and not in the sense that God is math, or trees. But would I describe God as a “real person”? That’s a good question, a real poser. Answering that one is going to be complicated.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jan 26, 2009 at 1:27 AM
Reductio Ad
17 “And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues;
18 “they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:17-18
That is very near the end and the final words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels.
And hoo boy, it packs in the crazy: you’ve got seeds of Pentecostal serpent handling, Charismatic glossolalia, Roman Catholic Exorcism, televangelist faith healers and more all rolled up in about fifty words. Words, again, within the context of the verse, delivered by the resurrected Son of God: the very incarnation of God among men, the Word by Whom all things were created, and Who, immediately after speaking them, is received up into heaven to take His seat at the right hand of God.
There is a pretty fair chance you could, as I do, regularly attend a mainstream Protestant church all your life and never hear a substantive discussion of this passage, Christ’s final injunctions to his believers before ascending into heaven (as reported by Mark), and it’s commendation of the serpent-handling, poison-drinking, tongues-speaking, demon-exorcising, faith-healing ministry of Christ’s disciples, these signs, these proofs of faith.
Dig around a little and you will find it plenty discussed, though: discussed by the proselytizing atheists, the opponents of faith, further evidence of the inanity of scripture and the hypocrisy of believers. I’d certainly grant that they’ve got Occam’s Razor on their side. How to sort out these kinds of problematic (for polite, reasonable, church-going Lutherans and the like) prescriptions in scripture? It’s all bunk: doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Actually, simply ignoring it isn’t such a bad option. God is, after all, unsearchable, His paths beyond tracing out, that great inexhaustible Get Out of Jail Free card for every apparent irrationality of practicing a poly-millennial faith tradition in the 21st Century.
But as I keep stumbling over, the impulse among Christians to invoke mundane evidence in support of things spiritual remains strong. Just today I listened to a pastor of my church go off on a tangent about the scientific research of intercessory prayer and its effects on healing, not an uncommon claim. I am not a theologian and never will be. Inasmuch as I am anything, in terms of organized epistemologies of knowledge, I am a scientist. It is grating and intolerable to listen to science invoked in ignorance, presented as a sort of bland evidence of the miraculous, and of course not a word will be spoken about the broad and well traversed controversies surrounding these studies, or the counter-studies and meta-analysis which roundly denied that results of any significance had come out of them. The bean counters of faith, the God in the gappers, will continue to selectively pull out these worldly endorsements of the orthodoxy, and package them for people like my minister to read in some venue far and gone from the practices of science, a nice sermon illustration to remind us that it isn’t so crazy to believe.
When I say intolerable, I mean just that: I cannot knowingly tolerate the presence of this sort of psuedo-rationality in my conceptions of my beliefs any longer. There’s no room for me between the stark schism of scripture, taken as a literal narrative of history, from discernable reality of the here and now, and the watered-down sham artifice of modern orthodoxy, with its God of the iffy statistical bump in the double blind trial. If scripture is somehow going to keep working for me it is going to have to be in a pattern quite separate and radical. But there’s plenty more to say about the way these things generally seem to be seen these days first, so I’ll keep digging into that for a while, yet.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 8, 2009 at 11:38 PM
18 “they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Mark 16:17-18
That is very near the end and the final words attributed to Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Mark, the shortest of the four canonical Gospels.
And hoo boy, it packs in the crazy: you’ve got seeds of Pentecostal serpent handling, Charismatic glossolalia, Roman Catholic Exorcism, televangelist faith healers and more all rolled up in about fifty words. Words, again, within the context of the verse, delivered by the resurrected Son of God: the very incarnation of God among men, the Word by Whom all things were created, and Who, immediately after speaking them, is received up into heaven to take His seat at the right hand of God.
There is a pretty fair chance you could, as I do, regularly attend a mainstream Protestant church all your life and never hear a substantive discussion of this passage, Christ’s final injunctions to his believers before ascending into heaven (as reported by Mark), and it’s commendation of the serpent-handling, poison-drinking, tongues-speaking, demon-exorcising, faith-healing ministry of Christ’s disciples, these signs, these proofs of faith.
Dig around a little and you will find it plenty discussed, though: discussed by the proselytizing atheists, the opponents of faith, further evidence of the inanity of scripture and the hypocrisy of believers. I’d certainly grant that they’ve got Occam’s Razor on their side. How to sort out these kinds of problematic (for polite, reasonable, church-going Lutherans and the like) prescriptions in scripture? It’s all bunk: doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Actually, simply ignoring it isn’t such a bad option. God is, after all, unsearchable, His paths beyond tracing out, that great inexhaustible Get Out of Jail Free card for every apparent irrationality of practicing a poly-millennial faith tradition in the 21st Century.
But as I keep stumbling over, the impulse among Christians to invoke mundane evidence in support of things spiritual remains strong. Just today I listened to a pastor of my church go off on a tangent about the scientific research of intercessory prayer and its effects on healing, not an uncommon claim. I am not a theologian and never will be. Inasmuch as I am anything, in terms of organized epistemologies of knowledge, I am a scientist. It is grating and intolerable to listen to science invoked in ignorance, presented as a sort of bland evidence of the miraculous, and of course not a word will be spoken about the broad and well traversed controversies surrounding these studies, or the counter-studies and meta-analysis which roundly denied that results of any significance had come out of them. The bean counters of faith, the God in the gappers, will continue to selectively pull out these worldly endorsements of the orthodoxy, and package them for people like my minister to read in some venue far and gone from the practices of science, a nice sermon illustration to remind us that it isn’t so crazy to believe.
When I say intolerable, I mean just that: I cannot knowingly tolerate the presence of this sort of psuedo-rationality in my conceptions of my beliefs any longer. There’s no room for me between the stark schism of scripture, taken as a literal narrative of history, from discernable reality of the here and now, and the watered-down sham artifice of modern orthodoxy, with its God of the iffy statistical bump in the double blind trial. If scripture is somehow going to keep working for me it is going to have to be in a pattern quite separate and radical. But there’s plenty more to say about the way these things generally seem to be seen these days first, so I’ll keep digging into that for a while, yet.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 8, 2009 at 11:38 PM
Heretic or Apostate
It started as something of a joke, but the question of whether I am an apostate or merely a heretic becomes an increasingly more pointed one in my mind. Just a few short years ago I might still have entertained the possibility that I was merely a schismatic but I really don’t know if that one will fly, anymore. I no longer have any definite opinion on whether Jesus Christ literally existed as a human entity in history, let alone any issues of virgin birth or resurrection. Certainly I don’t particularly believe in the veracity of any of the histories of the Old Testament, the literal existence of the Patriarchs, ancient miracles, and so forth. It appears to me that, despite vast expanses of uncharted territories, the whole of existence presents a seamless naturalistic face, that all phenomena will reduce to consistent complexes of material events that require no spiritual, metaphysical, or supernatural component to be included in their explanation.
This is not the same as saying I do not believe in the spiritual, the metaphysical, or the supernatural. But it’s hell and gone from orthodox Christianity.
It raises the question of what I’m really about, for example, when I’m reciting the Apostles Creed in church. I think of a story related by Dave Sim, perennially controversial self-published comics pioneer, regarding his attempts to attend a conventional Christian church, before he fully developed his peculiar personal theology based on taking Judaism, Christianity and Islam seriously simultaneously and fundamentally became a church unto himself. But before all this, he describes trying to adhere to the principles of biblical truth as he saw them, while simultaneously participating in worship in good faith: he describes reciting the Nicene Creed. “Always scanning ahead a couple of lines: I allow myself to recite this next part. The two lines after that I won’t allow myself to say….”
I really don’t want to go down that kind of road (needless to say the road I’m going down is utterly divergent from Sim’s in almost every respect aside from the fact that it seems increasingly divergent with orthodox Christianity). I really don’t want to end up with my own singular synthesized theology in a church of one. But I can’t deny that the sorts of feints I sometimes make in my mind at justifying my participation in mainstream Christian worship with the way I see things frequently smack of rank sophistry to me.
It’s not that I’m on my way to becoming an atheist, or even an agnostic (although a certain degree of agnosticism seems to me to be inherent in merely considering oneself to be infinitely limited in comparison to God). I guess you never really know your future but it seems to me that I’ve gone about as far down the path of skepticism as there is to go: my spiritual experiences remain, they remain what they are, and I have yet to come upon any rational justification for not taking them seriously. But beyond that, religion, scripture for that matter, all seem very constructed to me. Or perhaps, rather, it seems impossible to prise out just exactly what it is in the Scriptures and in religious tradition and practice that actually resonates (and seems inextricably bound up with) my personal spiritual experiences - from what is constructed of the usual human toolbox of language, tradition, tribalism, confusion, greed, lust, power-huger, reason, conservatism, imagination and poetry…
Whatever else, the two things - religion and my spirituality, and not just religion but specifically Christianity - are inextricably bound for me. Beyond that native connection, no particular orthodoxy holds sway. Leaving me with the question of what I am to make of that connection - and how I am supposed to deal with the many aspects of the Christian religious hegemony that I just can’t uphold…
Which was what I intended to be talking about this installment. I also intended to wrap this up at leas an hour ago. Good intentions.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 10, 2009 at 1:20 AM
This is not the same as saying I do not believe in the spiritual, the metaphysical, or the supernatural. But it’s hell and gone from orthodox Christianity.
It raises the question of what I’m really about, for example, when I’m reciting the Apostles Creed in church. I think of a story related by Dave Sim, perennially controversial self-published comics pioneer, regarding his attempts to attend a conventional Christian church, before he fully developed his peculiar personal theology based on taking Judaism, Christianity and Islam seriously simultaneously and fundamentally became a church unto himself. But before all this, he describes trying to adhere to the principles of biblical truth as he saw them, while simultaneously participating in worship in good faith: he describes reciting the Nicene Creed. “Always scanning ahead a couple of lines: I allow myself to recite this next part. The two lines after that I won’t allow myself to say….”
I really don’t want to go down that kind of road (needless to say the road I’m going down is utterly divergent from Sim’s in almost every respect aside from the fact that it seems increasingly divergent with orthodox Christianity). I really don’t want to end up with my own singular synthesized theology in a church of one. But I can’t deny that the sorts of feints I sometimes make in my mind at justifying my participation in mainstream Christian worship with the way I see things frequently smack of rank sophistry to me.
It’s not that I’m on my way to becoming an atheist, or even an agnostic (although a certain degree of agnosticism seems to me to be inherent in merely considering oneself to be infinitely limited in comparison to God). I guess you never really know your future but it seems to me that I’ve gone about as far down the path of skepticism as there is to go: my spiritual experiences remain, they remain what they are, and I have yet to come upon any rational justification for not taking them seriously. But beyond that, religion, scripture for that matter, all seem very constructed to me. Or perhaps, rather, it seems impossible to prise out just exactly what it is in the Scriptures and in religious tradition and practice that actually resonates (and seems inextricably bound up with) my personal spiritual experiences - from what is constructed of the usual human toolbox of language, tradition, tribalism, confusion, greed, lust, power-huger, reason, conservatism, imagination and poetry…
Whatever else, the two things - religion and my spirituality, and not just religion but specifically Christianity - are inextricably bound for me. Beyond that native connection, no particular orthodoxy holds sway. Leaving me with the question of what I am to make of that connection - and how I am supposed to deal with the many aspects of the Christian religious hegemony that I just can’t uphold…
Which was what I intended to be talking about this installment. I also intended to wrap this up at leas an hour ago. Good intentions.
originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Feb 10, 2009 at 1:20 AM
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