SubscribeAugust 29th, 2011
Jung, matter and the problem with worship
Plate 64, opening the egg (rebirth of Izdubar)
(This post is the result of a question in the comment section of this post. Thanks for the question Cathy.)
On first sight what caught my eye was the worshipful pose, and then the egg – and I laughed. Then grimaced.
I relate to the egg as “the cosmic egg” and my imagery for that comes primarily from the Thoth tarot. I don’t subscribe to Crowley’s meanings but the basic iconography is very Western and deeply embedded in our collective psyches. So I relate to Jung’s egg as the great cosmic egg out of which reality pecks its way into the mundane.
Now I am a materialist, in the sense that I suppose matter to be what the world is made of. (The subatomic world is something else, and what ever its constitution, it comes together to create the material universe.) However, I do not consider matter to be dull, passive, inert and this erroneous conception underlies every Western magical/imaginative/philosophical tradition as far as I know. Science tells us that passive-matter is simply not so. Thinking such is a bit like assuming the womb is a passive place made solely to receive the active male seed.
Herein lies my problem with Jung and his re-born god Izdubar. If you read the story that goes with the picture, Jung (his imaginary self) has met up with Izdubar on the road and has inadvertently poisoned the god. This has lamed Izdubar and caused him to shatter his great axe. The poison that lames? Science.
Such a dreadful misunderstanding of the world as-it-is. I’m a poet, I get how important imagination is, how vital our stories and our capacity to read our narratives out into the world. And really Jung’s saving of Izdubar by convincing him that he is a fantasy is brilliant, but at the cost of Jung’s relationship to the corporeal? No.
The deal is that reason and feeling are irrevocably together. Imagination works because of the mind that we call “science.” And science works because of imagination. Try running a car on half an axle, that’s the result of valuing one over the other.
The picture, that worshipful pose? It’s the Jung-imaginary with his face pressed to the ground in awe of the mightiness of the newly healed god, but it is also the beginning of Jung’s descent into hell. He has used up all his creativity, his “higher” self in the healing of Izdubar and all that is left is…
Does it give you a clue that Jung has had to become a mother to give birth to a god?
What remains of human nature when the God has become mature and has seized all power? Everything incompetent, everything powerless, everything eternally vulgar, everything adverse and unfavorable, everything reluctant, diminishing, exterminating, everything absurd, everything that the unfathomable night of matter encloses in itself, that is the afterbirth of the God and his hellish and dreadfully deformed brother.
There you go. And hence my problem with worship. This is the kind of thinking it brings; it is an example of valuing imagination over and above science. Matter is nothing, nothing, nothing like what Jung postulates and motherhood is not a descent into hell.
In my world this Agni, this fire born of the cosmic egg has a different meaning since for me matter is creative, self-actualizing and motherhood is not about giving all one’s “juices” to the newly born.
I can only relate to the dude’s position as it would be for me – the sensitive skin of my cheek against the wool, the smell of years of history, the lanolin of a sheep’s life, the delicate creamy shell of the spent egg. I would have me eye up to the world and not hide my face.
And the idea of giving birth? And the afterbirth? One dies once the new generation is old enough to take over, at least that’s the way it normally goes. So yes becoming a parent is a step on the road to death, but then so is birth, eating, shitting, bathing. It’s hard work being a parent, but one can see the adult child as one’s replacement, or as an extension of one’s world. Most mothers I know tend toward the second option.
If this second option is what one chooses, then all that energy given to the new “god” does not divest Jung of his Agni, his life energy, it expands him to the god’s horizon. Such a creative act doesn’t leave behind the dross, it makes of the world something richer, larger, more complex. Like Na and Cl coming together, no dross, but born is the capacity for saltiness; a more complex world, not one with a irredeemable pile of garbage and a shiny new toy.
And what of the moment after this image was recorded? Where Jung goes to hell, I watch the fire-bird form, the phoenix feathers coalesce and start beating the air inside the room. I’d run to the doors and spread them wide and watch as the bird found current and lift into the blue. She’d speak to me as she rose, and from that I would create a poem. And later, when she comes back to visit, I get to hear about the things she’s seen and done, and she gets to hear of this earth, this one where I continue to thrive and grow.
Jung speaks of re-fashioning the gods. He says we have killed them but cannot be fully human without them. I agree only if we can say that the gods are those narrative aspects of our species that reach out through metaphor to shape the world in which we take our lives. In that sense we cannot kill the gods, because we will always reach out and find ourselves in the world. It is really only the death of worship that Jung fears, I think; the death of those forms of god that come with axes, require worship, and do not give back, nor value us equally as we value them.
That prostrate pose is so old, and so deeply wrong for us.
There is a place for awe of course. No artist could really think otherwise, but that is not worship. One can be in awe of Agni without falling on one’s face. One need not turn away from our tool-makers mind, our capacity for science. It does not poison us. What hurts is our refusal to let go of an old story, one that makes of the creative source of our universe a dark material evil.
One last thing about “children”: yes they can kill. We can create those things that will end us. Take the USSR’s “Tsar” bomb exploded during the cold war. Take Nobel’s invention of dynamite. All the death and pain that caused. Sometimes we have children over which we have no control and yes Agni can kill us once released. It is the nature of fire to warm and burn. So? We know this. Look at all the stories and all the religious and cultural investment we put into rules like honour thy mother and father. Probably wiser to say, honour thy children for they will become your farthest horizon. Or even better, honour material truth in all things, for it will be the home that protects and the fire that warms both parent and child.
The balanced mind, the one in which science and imagination are equally valued will be the tool by which one can come to heal when the “child” breaks the body or the known world and pushes us to an even more distant horizon. And this will come. Better to face it with both feet, both axle’s intact.
August 25th, 2011
seen today…
a zombie walking calmly along the street.
Once I recovered my mental equilibrium I thought to examine the evidence and found that
the entity seen was probably a human being dressed as a zombie since 1) he was not shuffling, 2) was walking calmly, 3) there was no evidence that he was eating brains, and 4) there were no dead littering the street in his wake.
Yeah for evidence! Now I can be pretty sure that the zombie apocalypse has not yet started.
And even better, I can now feel better about my mental acuity — because they are open to evidence, I have proved that my zombie beliefs are scientific. Fist bump!
August 21st, 2011
Christian public relations and the U.S. Constitution
Over on the Daily Beast there is an article by Christian media and public relations agent A. Larry Ross. The article is titled Christian Dominionism Is a Myth and is followed by this blurb:
The media paint Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry as frightening ‘Dominionists,’ but A. Larry Ross argues that this is a scare tactic with little basis in truth.
What would you expect the article to be about? Well it’s actually written to “identify the top 10 things the media get wrong about evangelicals and politics”. Annoying but livable.
Then he started in on his points. Oh boy. You can read it and decide what you think, so of the 10 I only want to mention my reaction to number 6. Here’s what Ross says:
6. Separation of Church and State
This often misapplied term, used most recently in reference to Perry’s privately funded prayer rally before he launched his presidential campaign, is never mentioned in the Constitution, which instead specifies against any “law respecting an establishment of religion.” In an effort to avoid another state church like the one in England, the Framers wanted to protect the church from the state, and religion from any government interference—not the reverse.
While it is true that the term “the separation of church and state” is not used in the Constitution for the United States (nor the single terms “church” or “separation”), it is implied.
Article VI – Debts, Supremacy, Oaths
All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
The term “religion” is used one other time in the document. The Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Let’s start with Article VI. What it says is that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that all judges ( which includes Senators, Representatives, Members of State Legislatures and all executive and judicial Officers) are bound by Oath to uphold the Constitution (and this is key) even if some other rule contradicts the Constitution (“any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding”).
Here’s the thing: Article VI doesn’t say religious conviction excepting. It says the Constitution is the supreme law. So, basically, if you can’t put the Constitution above your religious faith, should that faith be in conflict with the Constitution, and you act on that faith and contravene the Constitution you have broken your oath to the American people, to its history and to its avowed democratic purpose.
This is one reason why Bachmann’s “submission” problem is serious. Which will master her behaviour? Her faith or her oath to the Constitution? Well we know that already, so what I what I want to know is why she is even eligible for the position she does hold, let alone the one she apparently wants? She cannot accept that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land; she thinks her specific brand of church and its faith is more encompassing.
And that last bit of Article VI, that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States” – doesn’t that kind of work against the idea that the US is a Christian nation, at least politically or governmentally speaking?
Then there’s the first amendment: Congress can’t establish religion or prohibit it. That’s what it says. Yes the framers wanted to protect citizens’ exercise of the various flavors of religion from interference from a state mandated faith. I suspect the framers wanted to protect the various fractious faiths from each other by virtue of assuring that no one of those various brands of religiosity got into power, or became identified with the state.
American inter-faith dialog is not a happy history.
The quest for religious freedom is often stated as a motivating factor in the colonization of North America, but its exact nature is often misunderstood. Our concept of religious freedom today means that people of all faiths Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, or any other, including those who lack faith, should be free to follow their own religious inclinations without interference from others and especially not from the government. During a time of colonization England and the rest of Europe were in the throes of monumental religious controversies. The religious tension was more than just Catholic and Protestant; Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and others all had their own particular forms of worship and systems of belief. People who came to America in the 17th and 18th centuries were not seeking land of religious freedom for all so much as a land where they could practice their own form of religion free of interference from rival denominations.
The whole point of the first amendment was to guarantee individual liberty of religious expression (as well as speech) in the face of a tendency to religious conformism. Yet government cannot be totally separated from religious expression because governing bodies are called on to judge the behaviours of individuals who act in accordance to their religious beliefs but in doing so contravene public law. In those cases the public law must be judged of higher import. Otherwise men “marrying” 8 year-old girls must be allowed as acceptable for any male acting on “god’s command.”
So contrary to Ross, it is about the separation of church from state, and the Constitution framers did not intend to protect the “church” but rather individuals’ right to hold whatever faith (or none at all presumably) they (as individuals) chose. The Constitution and the First Amendment protects the individual’s right to practice some particular faith of his or her own choosing and it protects the State from ideological/religious take-over. What the Constitution does not protect is the institution of the Church. And that, I suspect, is the crux of Ross’ real objection.
August 19th, 2011
humor at Evangelical expense
Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve so leads the NPR article.
But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”…
Venema says there is no way we can be traced back to a single couple. He says with the mapping of the human genome, it’s clear that modern humans emerged from other primates as a large population — long before the Genesis time frame of a few thousand years ago. And given the genetic variation of people today, he says scientists can’t get that population size below 10,000 people at any time in our evolutionary history.
…
And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it’s time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.
“Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost,” Schneider says. “So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings.”
Wow! I mean, grin.
The article goes on to describe the problem this creates.
“Without Adam, the work of Christ makes no sense whatsoever in Paul’s description of the Gospel, which is the classic description of the Gospel we have in the New Testament,” Mohler says.
Uh yup. One or two people have made this point recently. Really, Evangelicals make is sooooooooo easy.
This debate over a historical Adam and Eve is not just another heady squabble. It’s ripping apart the evangelical intelligentsia.
Should Perry get caught in the middle! Oh but he’d have to be one of the intelligentsia. So that isn’t going to happen. Darn.
A nice bit of wisdom here:
“When you ignore science, you end up with egg on your face,” Giberson says. “The Catholic Church has had an awful lot of egg on its face for centuries because of Galileo. And Protestants would do very well to look at that and to learn from it.”
It would be nice if that happens before one of the wacky Repubs gets any more power than they already have (hey debt ceiling!).
“This stuff is unavoidable,” says Dan Harlow at Calvin College. “Evangelicals have to either face up to it or they have to stick their head in the sand. And if they do that, they will lose whatever intellectual currency or respectability they have.”
“If so, that’s simply the price we’ll have to pay,” says Southern Baptist seminary’s Albert Mohler. “The moment you say ‘We have to abandon this theology in order to have the respect of the world,’ you end up with neither biblical orthodoxy nor the respect of the world.”
Mohler and others say if other Protestants want to accommodate science, fine. But they shouldn’t be surprised if their faith unravels.
Mohler seems to have forgotten that exactly the same argument was made as a reason to suppress the heretical idea that the sun did not revolve around the earth, and that despite the idea that Christianity was under dire threat, he still managed to get born into a rabidly Christian family and community. I mean he even works for a Baptist seminary so I guess all those dire Catholic predictions were wrong. I bet these ones will be too.
August 15th, 2011
gads, this is terrifying
A Christian Plot for Domination?
Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry aren’t just devout—both have deep ties to a fringe fundamentalist movement known as Dominionism, which says Christians should rule the world.
With Tim Pawlenty out of the presidential race, it is now fairly clear that the GOP candidate will either be Mitt Romney or someone who makes George W. Bush look like Tom Paine. Of the three most plausible candidates for the Republican nomination, two are deeply associated with a theocratic strain of Christian fundamentalism known as Dominionism. If you want to understand Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, understanding Dominionism isn’t optional.
Put simply, Dominionism means that Christians have a God-given right to rule all earthly institutions. Originating among some of America’s most radical theocrats, it’s long had an influence on religious-right education and political organizing. But because it seems so outré, getting ordinary people to take it seriously can be difficult. Most writers, myself included, who explore it have been called paranoid. In a contemptuous 2006 First Things review of several books, including Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy, and my own Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, conservative columnist Ross Douthat wrote, “the fear of theocracy has become a defining panic of the Bush era.”
Now, however, we have the most theocratic Republican field in American history, and suddenly, the concept of Dominionism is reaching mainstream audiences. Writing about Bachmann in The New Yorker this month, Ryan Lizza spent several paragraphs explaining how the premise fit into the Minnesota congresswoman’s intellectual and theological development. And a recent Texas Observer cover story on Rick Perry examined his relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation, a Dominionist variant of Pentecostalism that coalesced about a decade ago. “[W]hat makes the New Apostolic Reformation movement so potent is its growing fascination with infiltrating politics and government,” wrote Forrest Wilder. Its members “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.”
Imagine a modern society in which Exodus 22:18 is taken literally. Do you think Perry and Bachmann are already planning burning days? Do you think they’ll use the ashes for fertilizer in the reconstructed Garden of Eden? Will those who survive be required to make Hajj to its gates yearly?
August 11th, 2011
mean and venal people, can they be vaccinated against?
Two things came to my attention today that got crazy-glued in my head and I thought I’d share.
The first is a clip is a short little video sent to me from someone at My Fellow American and the second from the Rachel Maddow show, a segment about Rick Perry and his prayer convention dominion buddies.
My only comment about this one about American people who happen to be Muslim is that I hope it isn’t too subtle. The nasty voice over is obnoxious, strident and horrifyingly familiar (reminiscent of Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann or …). The juxtaposition of the voice over with the images of Muslim Americans as firefighters, nurses, teachers, etc is good but I do wonder how many times that will be missed. I mean if a person can’t read a birth certificate accurately then what makes you think this isn’t going to fly right over his or her head?
This next one – watch at 5:09 to 5:26.
Rick Perry listens to this Wagner dude; it appears as if he’s one of Perry’s soldiers in his Army of God. We want his paranoia and literalism influencing national politics? I bet he watches that show Supernatural and believes in its literal truth. It’s actually kind of funny.
Here’s what C. Peter Wagner says: “And that’s an invitation for the sun goddess to continue to demonize the whole nation. Since the night that the present emperor slept with the sun goddess the stock market in Japan has gone down. Never come up since.”
Yep. For real.
What links these things in my head? Well religion I suppose. Wagner hates Catholics, Muslims, people who offer Shinto prayers I guess. I expect he hates lots of people. He and the voice on the myfellowamerican video are metaphorically identical. It is this that the world is really fighting. I really do think that Wagner’s organization, The New Apostolic Reformation, is, if a person, as mad as a hatter – a hatter that wants its forefinger on the thermo-nuclear-all-out-bring-on-the-apocalypse button.
In some ways the Republican/tea party mindset that has become so public is a good thing. I expect that in America’s heart (and not only in America‘s heart), these people with little empathy, a lot of fear, and a horrendously non-empirical “knowledge” base, have always been there in more numbers than most of us care to admit to, even to ourselves. The apparent rise of the crazies has multiple causes of course, but I suspect this is a rise in visibility and not really a rise in real numbers. If we survive people like these ones who make up The New Apostolic Reformation then either we do something to minimize their threat, or we will face this again at some point in our future. Like mold, bacteria or the Great Awakenings, they die back and resurge if just left alone. We need a vaccination.
August 9th, 2011
more on Charles Taylor / the golden past
So I did run out and pick up a copy of Charles Taylor’s Malaise of Modernity from the library. I’m reading it now but I just wanted to share with you a single paragraph from the book and my response to it.
He’s been outlining the modern sources of worry. The first is individualism. He says that “people used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a cosmic order, a “great chain of Being,” in which humans figured in their proper place along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures.” This sense of being has been replaced by a sense of individual freedom “to be ourselves.” The “worry” part is related to a Taylor’s sense of loss of purpose that goes along with the loss of our place in the chain of Being. (My worry would have been around the definition of “our proper place.”)
The second issue is the “primacy of instrumental reason.” Here is the paragraph in question:
No doubt sweeping away the old orders has immensely widened the scope of instrumental reason. Once society no longer has a sacred structure, once social arrangements and modes of action are no longer grounded in the order of things or the will of God, they are in a sense up for grabs. They can be redesigned with their consequences for the happiness and wellbeing of individuals as our goal. The yardstick that henceforth applies is that of instrumental reason. Similarly, once the creatures that surround us lose the significance that accrued to their place in the chain of being, they are open to being treated as raw materials or instruments for our projects.
There is just so much wrong with this but really all of it stems from the golden-age fallacy. That last sentence, for example. The laws surrounding the protection of animals are present in this instrumental modernity. In Taylor’s golden past they didn’t exist; bear baiting was considered a fun entertainment. How many morally based vegetarians existed in Taylor’s golden West? How many today in this instrumental world? Come on dude.
This secular rise Taylor is so worried about goes along with the rise in things like social safety nets. Public education, public health clinics, childhood inoculations, unemployment programs, welfare provisions: just look at what used to happen to unwed mothers in Catholic countries if you want an education in how well this “order of things” functioned for those on its margins. And those human things like guilt, shame and desperation that kept the order intact? And slavery—enabled in some places because that order of things decided that those people of a different color had no souls (like other animals) and so could be treated as owned objects. I would have thought this the very definition of instrumental reason and so I think there is great doubt about the rise of instrumental reason in modernity.
Anyway, if the whole thesis of Taylor’s malaise is going to be based on this faulty assumption then his argument is going to drown in the Slough of Ridiculous.
July 29th, 2011
evidence of a Christian American?
“Due to the inability of the Congress to work together, the good of the people across the globe are being compromised by the self interest of our political leaders,” said Rev. Dr. J. Herbert Nelson, Director of Public Witness, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “Too many Congresspersons of all parties are trapped in a space where commitment to the common good is diminished for the sake of personal gain and the seduction of power. In this process, the American people and others all over the world are left to suffer. Faith leaders cannot stand idly by and watch while the mandate of the gospel to love our neighbors is violated in the halls of Congress.”
Heh! Listen up you dudes spouting Christian values in the US Congress. Mean any of it?
via Eideard
“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency! (E. Dickinson)
The society that resulted from the European invasion of the Americas seems prone to periods of alternating despair and certainty. The periods of certainty result in territorial and cultural expansion; despair results in upsurges of religiosity and (mental and social) isolationism. The first comes with that awful taste of American-style surety of superiority, that rather hubristic idea that we are the vanguard of human civilization. The second comes when that state crashes – as it inevitably does – against the facts, and falls like a mirror shattered in rage and fear.
My question is how to navigate a society that refuses an even keel?
I was brought to this query by an article on the Daily Beast about religious and anti-religious films written by Marlow Stern.
From superchurch satire ‘Salvation Boulevard’ to the atheist film ‘The Ledge’ and Sundance fave ‘Higher Ground,’ an abnormal number of movies this summer rail against evangelicalism. Marlow Stern speaks with filmmakers and experts from both sides of the debate, including Vera Farmiga of ‘Higher Ground’ and Kirk Cameron of ‘Fireproof.’
Wrestling with it, I found myself thinking about the cycles of religious evangelicism in the US often talked about as the Great Awakenings. (If you’re interested in the topic you might try Jon Butler’s Awash in a Sea of Faith.) It also led me to think about Emily Dickinson and her experience of her community’s salvation.
There is a rather fine short article about E.D. and the complex nature of her faith.
In Dickinson’s teen years, a wave of religious revivals moved through New England. One by one, her friends and family members made the public profession of belief in Christ that was necessary to become a full member of the church. Although she agonized over her relationship to God, Dickinson ultimately did not join the church–not out of defiance but in order to remain true to herself: “I feel that the world holds a predominant place in my affections. I do not feel that I could give up all for Christ, were I called to die” (L13). By the time the First Congregational Church moved to a site near the Homestead on Main Street in 1868, Emily Dickinson had stopped attending services altogether.
Dickinson’s attitude toward spiritual matters was more complex than her poem “Some keep the Sabbath going to church / I keep it staying at home” (Fr236) implies. While her poems are saturated with the language, ritual, and expectation of traditional religious experience, her tone varies tremendously. Some poems affirm the need for faith: “Faith – is the Pierless Bridge / Supporting what We see / Unto the Scene that We do not – ” (Fr978). Irreverence underlies other aspects of her work: “The Bible is an antique Volume – / Written by faded Men / At the suggestion of Holy Spectres -” (Fr1577). At times Dickinson’s poetry expresses outright anger with an absent God:
Of Course – I prayed -
And did God care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird – had stamped her foot -
And cried “Give Me” -
(Fr581)
That’s, I think, the way to handle this current shattered mirror and consequent upswing of despairing faith. The fact that the mirror is broken does not mean what you glimpsed there is no longer true. As best as one can, question, refuse the comfort of simple faith and its feelings of release, refuse the assumptions involved in giving over to the “Gentlemen who see”. Keep formulating alternative responses, but never settle for one; always question, always ask for worldly evidence, for the bird’s perspective on your beliefs.
There’s no way out of the pain of course, no real way to avoid what the mirror reflected. We all have assumptions and we cannot simply leave them all behind, but we can refuse comfort in order to allow questioning. Dickinson remained someone who spoke of gods and the afterlife. That was the basis of her entire world, but her stubborn hold on the world allowed her to remain brilliant, unconventional, a poet.
I mean, who do we remember now? Not those who took hold of the comfort, but those who refused it. There is a reason for that. Not that being remembered is the end-all of desire, but it does point to a lively spot in human awareness, a place where mental sleep has not yet claimed its toll.
This period of upcoming history will be difficult I suspect. No huge wave of desire for comfort, for sleep ever comes without a violent hand for the alarm clocks and a sleeping drug for the awkward pain of living. There will be Emilys of this time, and that voice will be a record of dissent against the coming/ongoing “revival”. I don’t envy her life though, just as I don’t envy Emily’s. So alone, our Amherst Emily must have been with no one who could think as she could, no one who could stand with her in the pain of continual appraisal, constant questioning. So in advance of your life and death, our dearest future unknown Emily, kudos.
In an earlier post I was telling you about the argumentative warning bells that Why God Won’t Go Away set off.
When you come across a passage that unsettles your faith in an author’s veracity or capacity to think past his or her personal biases, one can do two basic things. One can put the book down or one can keep reading, however warily.
I chose the second option because I wanted to get to their information on the neurological position with respect to myth making in humans. Then I hit another of those icky-think places. There were a number but here’s one.
The authors are talking about the Neanderthal people and the finds that have been made where some Neanderthal dead appear to have been buried with grave goods and positioned in such a way as to suggest symbolic thought.
Evidence of Neanderthal mortuary rituals has been discovered at Paleolithic grave sites scattered across Europe and Asia, and while anthropologists know very little about the specifics of Neanderthal myth, these early humans had clearly devised a system of belief that assured them that in some sense, death could be survived.
Jeez Lousie, it so does not. Let’s take this apart just a bit. There is evidence from a number of Neanderthal burials (and other sites) that suggest symbolic thought as well as suggests some intent behind burial that we would describe as ritualistic. But what is true is that we know nothing really of the specifics. In fact, without the assumption that their symbolic system is basically the same as ours, we cannot say anything about what the apparent ritual means. I mean if I make a small pile of stones and a Taliban man makes a similar pile, you think we necessarily did it for the same reason? And the Taliban dude and I are of the same species and same era. Fuck man, what a dumb-shit, patently false set of assumptions and “logical” connections.
It turns out that this book is an extension of The Transmitter to God: The Limbic System, the Soul, and Spirituality by Rhawn Joseph. Here is what a customer had to say about this book.
Joseph’s book contains abundant promise and abundant disappointment. Its bookends–the start and finish–provide provide reasonable interpretations of data from neurological and fossil research. The center, unfortunately, merely affords a bully pulpit for the author’s unsubstantiated rants about religious literature, especially the Koran and the Bible. This juxtaposition of authority and speculation is paralleled by displays of scholarly writing (e.g., citing sources for stated views) at the outset and junior high writing (e.g., missing citations and bizarre interpretations of religious writ) in the middle. Joseph is to be commended for his imagination, but misrepresents his book as a scholarly contribution.
A huh. Yep. Yessiree. You could say the same thing about Why God Won’t Go Away.
Anyway, based on the slim evidence of possible Neanderthal ritual burials and the massive assumption of their cognitive and cultural similarity to us, the authors of Why God say:
The Neanderthals, it seems, had also come to believe that their world was not chaotic, but was instead governed by powerful orderly forces that they could come to know. They believed they could appeal to these forces through proper practices and, to some extent, control them. We know this because Neanderthal shrines have been found in high mountain caves where bear skulls had been ritualistically stacked in pyramids and small crude altars still show the charred evidence of animal sacrifices carried out as long ago as two hundred thousand years.
Can you believe they think of themselves as scientists at all? I know fantasy writers with less vivid imaginations.
Finally, the evidence they cite to support these two paragraphs? Joseph’s The Transmitter to God. That’s like Glen Beck citing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to prove his impartial stance with regard to Judaism.
So the book goes back to the library unfinished. This is why I pre-read most books before I buy them. I’ll just have to try and find a better source for the information I want.