I think I came across notice of this documentary on Pharyngula but I’m not sure. I found a copy and watched it, although, I have to say I was a bit nervous.

Have you ever seen a Chick tract?  I tend to be pretty careful about exposing myself to hate literature of any persuasion. Nevertheless, I did watch the documentary and was glad I did. It is a rather gentle exposure to the mad bad world of christians who hate and fear that which is not themselves.

If you want to get a better grip on this particular world, this is a good way in without having to swim in the pit of the particulars.

Having sort of dissed Pious Nietzsche earlier, I did want to say that my favourite chapter in the book was the one called “Paul’s Revenge.” I am not a Paul fan. Too much feminist religious philosophy for that ever to be the case. (Besides I like my hair and don’t see any need to hide it, and think that if it sets some dude off, then he has a problem not me, and if he makes it my problem, well, there are all kinds of ways to solve that, only some of which include non-violence.)

Having exposed some of my core concepts, let me tell you my favourite passage in the chapter. Benson says, “for Nietzsche, it (pity) is ultimately a disguised form of superiority: ‘To offer pity is as good as to offer contempt’. Precisely in the act of pitying, one places oneself above the one being pitied. thus, pity turns out to be a form of revenge, a way of retaliating against the other.”
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Here’s the sound of me putting a book down…

Yes that’s right. Silence.  I did not throw it. It did not hit the wall. Nevertheless, I will not be able to finish it.

Chapter 10 (the last chapter):

Nietzsche admits to being pious. Even though he calls himself a ‘godless anti-metaphysician’ (a phrase that truns out to be ironic precisely because Nietzsche is not godless), he still believes in truth, which has for millennia been equated with the divine.

That’s the passage that made me put the book down.
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I am sitting in my car at Main and 10th. Probably means nothing to you but it is a very busy intersection. I am parked, watching people and cars as they make their way past me.

It’s also dark, but since it is late November most of the shops have already hung their lights and so it’s a bit like having a seat at a light show. The coffee shop on the corner is particularly good. It has a big tree and ribbons of small white lights hanging in all the windows. When I went in a few minutes ago to get my hot chocolate, they have decorated the tables with small red tartan flannel tablecloths. It looks surprising nice – surprising because I don’t much like Christmas and most of the decorations that come with this time of the year are either horribly sentimental or give me the heeby-jeebies.

Despite not liking the holiday, I do like the attention to light in this uncomfortably dark time of year. Of course winter light festivals are a really old practice in human history, since light to a diurnal species is bound to become a symbol when that species becomes able to have symbols.

I’m not really going anywhere with this except to say that I am still thinking about the moth and its instincts – instincts that become problematic in an artificially lighted environment. I wonder what killing the dark does to those moths and humans who live their lives in cities where the real-dark rarely penetrates? Having taught in a variety of wilderness camps, one thing I do know is that people unused to the dark have trouble adjusting to the difference between day and night and that this seems to make them deeply afraid of the world around them — and that fear can cause them to do pretty silly things. I wonder how different that is from what the moth does?

I respect the dark and, depending on where I am, I actually relish it. Still, the lights call out to me and come the shortest day, burning a candle all night reminds me that as much as I may think of my self as something special given that I belong to one of the species (I presume that somewhere in the universe there is another) that can symbolize, what I symbolize makes me remember that I am still very much the human animal evolved in the caverns of deep history.

I’ve been reading Sherman Alexie lately. I started with his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and continued on with his War Dances.  I’ve read other things before, the first being Reservation Blues and of course I’ve seen Smoke Signals. I read his work, mostly enjoy it, sometimes love it, and recognize its value both in a literary and in a social sense, but I do have problems with it. I’m going to talk about those problems but first I want to introduce another book – apparently totally unrelated – which, actually, was the genesis of this post.

The book is about Nietzsche as is called Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. There is a review article about it here; the review is how I found out about the book by Bruce Ellis Benson. I have ordered it on the strength of the review but also because the notion of not being able to leave behind religious traditions is one I have seen first hand over and over and it was this part of the review that suddenly had me thinking of Alexie.

The article (”Was Nietzsche Pious” by Stephen N. Williams) says:
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Jeff Dunham tells some pretty dangerous jokes – ones based on religion, sex, politics – using the mouth of his puppets. And it works. This is really, really funny. Coming out of the bony mouth of Achmed the Terrorist, jokes about being a Jew, about being Catholic have the sting that make humor such a powerful tool in the reshaping of social and conceptual life. We can accept the reexamination of strongly held social beliefs from a puppet long enough to get a glimpse of another view, that of another possible world – one, in this case, where terrorists and other religious fanatics are not something to battle in the silent dark of a social nightmare, but rather something to battle in the light of the love of life and the enjoyment of each other. And while jokes like Achmed’s do sting, and you feel that it has taken you perilously close to that cliff of divisiveness, when Jeff then pulls us back, there is a shared surge of survival-joy that makes the adrenaline rush even more enjoyable.

What makes this all work is that he poking fun at terrorists – that thing that had been used to scare us into foreign and domestic policy submission for 8 very long years. The bit in the clip below about the 72 virgins is howlingly funny, but even more important it takes the terrifying unknown and reduces it to something that seems just silly and therefore manageable. This is one very important societal function of humor. Now, every time I see a picture of bin Laden, I know I am going to see Achmed the Terrorist’s bony little face flash up against this dude’s image in my imagination. That is a good thing.

I am definitely going to watch more of Jeff Dunham and his puppets.

From My[confined]Space via Pharyngula

The thing is that as absurd as it is to destroy someone’s life for hand dominance, many of our most profoundly important notions about what’s “true” are even sillier (and more venal).  It’s terrible, of course, because people suffer horribly from such disrespectful behaviour, but it is also profoundly entertaining. It’s one of the reasons I love reading history so much. It brings so much of this stuff to light.

It was a great idea to make a comic of it.

The purpose of Western esoteric tradition, writes Versluis, is “the restoration of paradise, which could also be expressed as the ending of objectification, or division into self and other.” For this to occur, a change of consciousness (or rather a transcendance of consciousness into awareness) is required. In the Western tradition, this change is codified in text providing both the means and the method of personal transformation. The word (lettter, number, glyph, what have you) is sacred because it is both the method of transformation and the desired outcome.
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I am Regina Waterhouse. And I have complete faith
that man will keep on going right to the end.

I am the queen here, but the people assure me,
gathered in the square, dust kicked up by their boots,
jacked by their power, that they know

what’s right and I am inclined to agree. All the women
here, crow clothes flapping in the hot wind, sing
free to be who they naturally are. And the men,
ordained by the river, to be more.

I am a Waterhouse and just a god here, but the people
assure me, gathered by their pillars and posts,

that eternity is theirs because I am here. And I –
I am assured — will maintain. And I expect I will,
right unto their end.

It can be exquisite, the idea of spiritual madness, the sensation of spiritual transcendence, but the more I read Simone Weil, the Jewish/Christian mystic the less I am sure about the “facts” of her madness (although I am certain of her experience of it) and the more I think of her life, and her death, as probably the most perfect example of possession by a story that I am ever likely to know.

The fierceness of her life, the tenacity, the arrogant humility of it, her abnegation of the self, all reach deep into the underlying assumptions about human nature coded into the Western god-story. Weil’s truly fine mind and her passionate intensity and spiritual fervor led to her death in 1943 from the long-term effects of “willful starvation,” its attendant malnutrition, bodily break down and loss of the capacity to heal. In a sense, probably without clear consciousness of the implications of her denial of her own corporeal state, Weil committed a slow kind of suicide, dying in her 34th year, dying, as it were, for her absolute absorption into the story of god that shapes the western mind.

She believed, essentially, that we are the space where god is not; that god retreated in order to create the space for its creations. That is, we are a god-void, an essential emptiness, while at the same time full of the things of the causal world. This dual state is felt to be intolerable, the void itself unbearable, yet, to fulfill our purpose—to empty ourselves and wait for god to fill us with grace—we must stop trying to fill the god-void with the human endeavor. We must endure what is unendurable. These things of causality, of the human world, to which we turn to ease the unbearable sensation of the void are what she considered the two greatest idols. These were “the self and the social.”

Born in Paris in 1909 Simone Weil was a young Jewish girl of good family during the years that broke Europe. Her parents were sophisticated, well educated, middle class French citizens. Her brother was three years older than she. He had a fair share of the family’s intellect and cultural curiosity; he favored mathematics and the wonders of the mystical East. Simone seems to have been, to some degree, following his lead. She naturally took to the ideas behind Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and in her life and writings she seems to have assessed both Judaism and Catholicism by some of the precepts she discovered in her study of the East, but it was perhaps her exposure to the First World War as her family followed her father to his various war-time postings (he was a doctor) that focused her metaphysical interests along the tracks of both society and the individual’s responsibility within and to the world of the human—and to the divine.

She would have been only five when the war began and as a teen would have been exposed to the after-effects of the social and mental devastation that the First World War wrought amongst the people. The fact that the space between the wars could hardly be called kind to the Jews deeply affected Simone and her family both physically as well as mentally. In fact, in the last few years of her life, her parents, increasingly concerned for their joint welfare, decided to leave Europe, having already been driven from Paris to Marseille by the German invasion in June of 1940. Her parents planned to go to the United States. Simone was deeply patriotic but with little sense of how much her body would tolerate: she had organized protest marches for the workers in the Auvergne (1932); she worked in various French metal factories on the line (1932-1933), jobs physically difficult and demanding, ending her stint when she was too weak and ill to continue; she fought with the communists in Spain (1936) where she was scalded with boiling water, ending her time as a freedom fighter; Simone, who had gone to work as a field hand in rural France (1941) where she acquired pleurisy because she would not take comfort when she could.

Simone was reluctant to leave Europe but her parents would not escape without her, and she was really quite physically weak by this time (illness and migraines had been life-long companions), and so she left France with her parents in early 1942. Making their way through Casablanca to New York, the parents settled in the United States. Simone could not. She left for England in late 1942 and here she stopped. She worked for the French cause from its headquarters in London. She wrote reports for them and she wrote what was to be her final book, The Need for Roots there. All of her personal work, including what would become Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God and Oppression and Liberty were published posthumously. She died in the late summer of 1943, in a sanatorium in Kent, of the combined effects of exhaustion, repeated illness, malnutrition and general self neglect.

The concept of self-destruction was what she called decreation. For her, god created humans (and the world presumably) so that we could empty ourselves out and return, selfless, to that perfect emptiness which is god. In his introduction to Gravity and Grace Thibon, interpreting Weil’s thoughts, says that “so long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. ‘Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.’ And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous.” The self and the social: the very things which created the human being that was Weil, allowed language to be born in the social space between her and the world which she fought to save, was for her, in the grips of this story, poison. She felt that as long as she was not a perfect vacuum that she got in the way of god’s grace—and turning to any comfort, whether this was food or the idea of a helpful, friendly god, debased spiritual energy, getting in the way of god.

Simone’s obsession was god, not church, nor really social welfare, not politics, nor the state of society. She sought in everything she did to empty herself to receive grace. She disliked the Jewish religious history, disliked the Roman Catholic Church and certainly disliked what she called the Great Beast of social control. She disliked both of the religious systems because of their behavior, their actions over history, and not because of what they had to say about the nature of god and human. She attended Mass; she sought god vigorously all through her adulthood. In 1938 she had a mystical experience in a church in which “Christ came down and possessed her.” But she was not a Christian; she refused baptism.

She was a mystic, caught in a time of broken and breaking people and her story of what her experiences and life means reflect that social contingency. She was obsessed by god and she was a woman of her time. She believed that “duty is given us in order to kill the self” but she also believed that

It is not surprising then that she did not fear death, or even that she seemed to court it. “To die does not commit one to anything, if one can say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie…at present I have the impression that I am lying, whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie.” She could see, I suspect, that the self and the social world were stories but to her that meant that they were lies. This is because her god-story tells her that there is only one perfect truth, and her meticulous and fervent mind realized that this perfect truth was alien to everything it meant to be a living human being. The only way out of this quandary, without giving up the god-story, is to give up what it means to be human. This is why I say that the story possessed her and why I say god obsessed her. She sought truth; she could feel in her mysticism, the resonant emptiness underlying life but her interpretation—her storying—of that emptiness followed the guidelines of the god-story of the Western world. In other words, she felt she had to make a choice between the truth of her living experience and the truth of the story. She could not hold both truths and learn how to walk life inside the contraction, because she could not tolerate the idea that the god-story was in fact a story.

She said: “To love truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.” So she died at the age of 34. Death is sometimes easier than living. Committing to the idea of life, it is perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by someone who has grown into the world shaped by this particular brand of god-story.