On awaking just before 4 and realizing that I was not going to be able to sleep again I got up and went to my desk. I started reading more of Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith. What a delight the book is.

Compared to some others I have read on the topic his command of both his material and his imagination makes reading it an act of mental nourishment – a bit like a huge fresh seafood salad after weeks of sausage with mac and cheese. I feel like my brain has had its palate refreshed.

More on the book later, but just a little sparkly I found.  In the introduction (“The European Religious Heritage”), during a discussion of the rise of Dissenting Protestantism there was a reference to “endless cycles of religious extremism” (nice!) and a list of

social and spiritual radicalism at Munster, anabaptism in Switzerland and the Low Countries, and Familism, Fifth Monarchism, Ranterism, Muggletonianism, and Quakerism in England.

Muggletonianism! I actually giggled. I have always admired J. K. Rowling’s apparent familiarity with little bits of European esoteric history (she does have a French and Classics degree after all). I actually giggled when Nicholas and Pernelle showed up in HP. Imagine introducing actually history into a kids book! I suspect the delvings of some readers into European magical history will show up in tomorrow’s scholarship, sort of like early StarTrek technological fantasies have showed up in today’s shoulder sling bags.

I had never come across Muggletonianism before. No idea if Rowling knew about them but, even if not (and the wikipedia article suggests not), the coincidence is delightful anyway.

This from the wikipedia article linked above:

The six principles of Muggletonianism have perhaps been best set out by George Williamson

• There is no God but the glorified Man Christ Jesus.
• There is no devil but the unclean Reason of men.
• Heaven is an infinite abode of light above and beyond the stars.
• The place of Hell will be this Earth when sun, moon and stars are extinguished.
• Angels are the only beings of Pure Reason.
• The Soul dies with the body and will be raised with it.

Is this what muggles believe? No magical ability perhaps, but magical thinking seems to obviate its need.

Anyway, this is what I do with sleeplessness when I don’t have to freak out about having to spend all day at work. I can (and will) take a nap later and continue my pursuit of restedness.

I was wandering around on the web the other day looking at stuff on that late 17th century mystical sect in Pennsylvania – Society of the women in the wilderness –  led by Kelpius and came across this paper by Jon Butler called “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, 1600-1760.” It was published in 1979 in The American Historical Review.  Essentially what it says is that historians have “always treated America’s earliest colonists as especially religious people” but that they weren’t, or at least not in the pious Christian way history tends to teach. Citizens had to be, more or less, brow beaten into the churches; people preferred their astrological almanacs and what Butler calls “noninstitutional religious practices.”

Butler talks about the relationship between Christianity and occult practices and how the literate English compatriots of the Puritans turned on a regular basis to mystical writings “in the cabala to complement both their Christianity and their astrology.”

While these practices came with immigrants to North America, and certainly occult practices were no stranger to the early Americas, the last portion of the paper seeks to begin an explanation as to why these practices declined in popularity.  He gives two reasons. The first is that the literary tastes in England changed and occult reading materials became harder to get. The second was that the churches were often also the governing authority and they pushed for legal and civic penalties for practices in contravention of their particular doctrine. I mean did you know that “on the eve of the American Revolution only about 15 percent of all of the colonists probably belonged to any church.”

Cool. Too bad it didn’t last.

Anyway, it turns out Butler went into it further and wrote a book called Awash in a Sea of Faith, Christianizing the American People published in 1992. I got it today, so I am looking forward to some happy reading.

I learned something new about my sometimes Jehovah Witness visitors that I suppose I would have suspected if I’d thought about it. All new religions have this habit of reading themselves back into history, it helps validate the belief set. Think about which desk is likely more valuable – a desk built 2 years ago or one built 200 years ago. One has stood the test of time, one is just used furniture.

I was working at home and there was a knock. When I answered there was a nicely dressed young woman in her 20s with a little girl of about 11. The elder had a colourful tract rolled up in her hand and after she introduced herself she asked me one of the supposed-to-be-caring questions about how I feel about something happening in the world today. I stopped her and asked “Are you a Jehovah Witness?” She looked a little annoyed that I’d interupted her pitch, but answered “yes.”

I was off. I told her that I found her way of life interesting but that I was an atheist and wasn’t going to be converted to which she replied that she found my beliefs interesting (fuel to the fire), to which I responded by starting to talk about society and its history of millenarian-type organizations and how there are people who start with a desire to believe there is one true answer to all human questions and how a person like that can read any fact and weave it out of existence through the power of narrative, etc etc. I mean I used to teach this stuff to college kids so I did go on a bit. (The tract never did get unrolled.)

I was being polite because of the little girl so all of this was said with a smile and several times I spoke to her directly to reassure her that her friend’s increasing tension wasn’t a sign of danger.

The young woman responded rather well to this deluge of erudition. She smiled through it all, at least until I got to the origins of the JW faith. Hooboy.  She believes that the JW’s formed during Jesus’s time. No kidding.

When she said that, I laughed and said “That is soooooooooo not true.” She got mad then. She said “Well I have read and researched our origins and I suspect you have not.” That last bit’s not actually true but, as she was in the process of taking the little girl’s hand and getting ready to make her hasty but dignified exit, I forbear from saying so.

That was fun.

Such a good idea.

I’m not a gamer mind, but there was this one word game that my kids had me play that required you to kill goats and other iconic creatures in order to be able to get new words. I liked the word-puzzle aspect of the game but every time I had to kill a goat…well, I don’t play it anymore.

At the time I thought about what kind of metaphorical creatures I would be willing to kill in order to play. The first one that popped into my head was the (then) president Mr. George Bush. That got my not-so-nice side cackling. Doubt a game like that would pass social muster because Mr Bush is in fact a real person, but this new idea of Penny Arcade’s – Wow! Is that going to raise a hullabaloo!

Can’t wait. Should be quite a ride; of which Dan Brown and Philip Pullman can only dream.

I’m so supportive, so appreciative of the effort, I’ll buy the game even if I almost certainly won’t want to play it. As I said, I’m not a gamer and those particular icons never had a life in my head so I don’t need to kill them. But for those of you who do need or want an extra rabbit hole to maximize your exit strategy’s efficacy, play on.

via Pharyngula

Now I’m in a bit of a bad mood, but I don’t think that is why I find this deeply amusing.

A little story: I was asked to catalog a small 1-room school house library so they could get back their accreditation from the state.
I knew that it was small enough that I could do it myself so I agreed without checking out the collection. When I got there, over their spring break, it was so appalling that I really had to laugh. Amongst other egregious errors, they had most science books cataloged as fiction (along with a copy of the Torah) but the Bible was in there as “non-fiction, history.” It was kind of nice putting things to rights but I know that once they had that bit of paper, it would all go back the way it was. Probably a good thing the kids didn’t learn much of anything for those years.

Thanks peardg for the link.

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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