Post by megli on May 5, 2009 12:52:58 GMT -1
What Craig has written so eloquently has made me reflect on my own beliefs. Like many people here, I've endured a long (and not yet over) period of theological uncertainty lasting some years. But I've come to some conclusions which are valid for me.
Fundamentally important are the following, as far as I am concerned.
a) I'm not interested in believing impossible things or in the theological and textual-historical gymnastics involved in justifying those beliefs. Goodbye and thank you, religions of the book.
b) The only sound basis for religious speculation is a mixture of feeling (experience, intuition, instinct) and judgement (logic, sense, rationality, a sense of coherence.) But, because everyone is different, and because of our different brains we quite literally do not experience the same world, then my speculations are only valid for me and no other person.
c) I am prepared to live with irresoluble uncertainty, e.g. what happens after death. My own feeling is that you die and cease to exist; but I cannot rule out some form of reincarnation, or indeed, anything else.
d) Polytheism seems to me to be no less sensible than monotheism, and may have some practical and psychological advantages over it.
e) I am not at all sure what religion has to do with most of what we call 'morality'.
* * *
On some level I've always believed there is a great oneness behind all sensible things. But rather than seeing that oneness as a sublime creator, I see it more as a lowest common denominator. I certainly do not think it is personal, though I think we can know very little about it other than that it is there. It might be called the fullness, the pleroma, or the All. Issues of good and evil are utterly irrelevant at this level. It is 'the sense sublime/ of something far more deeply interfused', as Wordsworth said. How on earth people can find this 'sense' a personal deity keeping a tally of good and bad deeds is beyond me.
Secondly, I believe that we are conscious animals who have evolved infinitely slowly from water and stone. Most of our deepest feelings and characteristics have their roots in the instinctuality of wild animals, which is why we can sense a profound kinship with them: with them we share anger, desire, fear, tenderness, hunger, grief, longing for safety, and joyfulness.
But unlike many other animals, we are remarkable for our adaptability. Our chief adaptation is our unlimited versatility: humans can live at the equator or in the arctic, on mainly meat or no meat at all. We are not like koalas, unable to do anything but live up gum-trees, eat leaves, mate, and die. (Though I am sure the life of a koala, bushfires apart, is contented enough.) We can live anywhere--we can even venture into the terrifying wastes of space and walk on the moon. This versatility is linked to our huge advantages: big brains, language, self-consciousness. (People who know more evolutionary biology than me will have to fill the precise nature of this 'link' in--Lee?) But it also makes us profoundly restless creatures. We are all, like Odysseus in Homer, polutropos, beings 'of many twists', turning every which way, never quite feeling wholly settled or permanently satisfied.
So we make myths about our restless, equivocal state. We gained something, and we lost something, at some mysterious prehistoric date, some deep backward and abysm of time. Prometheus stole fire and gave us it; he taught us language and how to build houses and art and number. Zeus has never quite forgiven him, or us. Or, God placed us in Eden, where we ate of the forbidden fruit and came to know good and evil. Either way, we transgressed somehow; deep in us, there is an obscure and lingering guilt--for being animals and yet not being animals, for being so clever, so rootless and questing, for having the power of speech and symbol-making; and, ultimately, a shadowy guilt for being conscious at all. Neo-pagans, used to the biblical legend of the Fall, commonly deride it as an absurb imposition, especially if one is expected to believe it literally by a punitive and narrow-minded family or cultural background. But this misses the point: the idea is older than Judaeo-Christianity and is universal, a consequence of the evolutionary burst that turned us from apes into people: able to survive anywhere, surging outwards on our restless, inventive wits, we have no home. We are all exiles, and transgressors, Cain as well as Abel. It is facile for the Philip Carr-Gomms of this world to declare that there is no separation between humanity and nature; there may or may not be (after all, my tissues will dissolve into the earth as much as a badger's or a bird's) but clearly deep in the collective psyche there *is* a sense of separation, it exists, and it's not just the 'fault' of Christianity. It is ancient and hardwired into us, and needs to be examined in terms of evolutionary psychology, not new age platitudes.
Thirdly, onto the gods. I have no idea what gods are or if they exist externally from us in a literal sense. (I am not at all sure what 'exist' actually means. One surely cannot argue that Maponos exists in the way that the cup I'm drinking from exists.) If the gods whom I experience were nothing but delusions of my mind, or of the collective mind, then I would never be able to tell, and neither would anyone else. Ultimately I feel that the pagan who says that his gods speak to him should be given exactly the same respect and lack thereof as we give to the Christian who says that Jesus speaks to her. Personally I think it is reasonable to expect my inner world not to be destructively invaded by others without express invitation, but I also do not expect to have it pandered to unduly. As H. L. Mencken said (to quote Dawkins) 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful or his children smart.'
The current fashion in the pagan world for hard polytheism needs to get to grips with the facts of the history of religions. We may feel that Ana or Oshun or Brigit or Minerva or the spirit of the Mawddach speaks to us and is existent as a being external to ourselves. That is fine, no one can prove us wrong, and our belief has a reasonable claim to be treated with standard good manners. But, we must acknowledge that throughout history numerous men and women have felt just as keenly that Christ, or Allah, or Kali, or St Francis, or St Therese of Liseux, or the Virgin Mary, or the archangel Gabriel, or Ahura Mazda, or the Boddhisattva Avalokiteshwara have spoken to them, and are existent as beings external to themselves. Many people from all religious traditions recognise and feel--profoundly, deeply, and with sincerity--that the personal beings that they reverence exist and communicate with them. And these conceptions are often totally incompatible with those of others.
So for me, any theory of divinity has to acknowledge this squarely. One common solution, which many Hindu thinkers like Ramakrishna have liked, is to explain that the Formless One, the ultimate divinity, takes different forms according to different worshippers' expectations and levels of spiritual development. (If you rebel against this idea instinctively, and want to insist that Brigit or Mochon or Arawn is as much an individual as you are, and not in any way a kind of pantomime mask worn by the solicitous, infinitely wise Uberdeity, then ask yourself--how could I tell?!) A less pleasant idea is, alas, the more common one in today's world: that one's personal conviction is the correct one, and that all others are illusion, or demonic misguidance.
To phrase the problem more simply: all gods, including the Trinity, Jahweh and Allah, in the opinion of every different people, at every point in history, have appeared to their own worshippers to have behaved as if they existed.
As a consequence, there is nothing particularly special or out of the ordinary about insisting that one has personal experiences of the gods: many if not most religious people have felt so throughout human history, and the mere fact of it simply proves nothing at all about the nature or existence of divine beings, one way or the other.
* * *
I think, for me, the only possible solution is to acknowledge the role our own selves have in god-making. The restless versatility and ability to make symbols that I referred to earlier as our evolutionary inheritance means that our minds are full of self-generating images whch come unbidden. We don't see the world as it is: we see it charged with the infinitely subtle web of our own imaginal consciousness imposed on it. We look at the world through the stained glass of our own selves, both conscious and unconscious; the world appears to us as though we were wearing magic goggles filtering our sight and other senses. We cannot know whether the googles are dulling and clouding what is outside, and that if we took them off, then, as Blake said 'Everything would appear as it is, infinite', or if, in St Paul's words, we should then see 'face to face' a world filled with gods. In contrast, we might just as well find that the images of gods and divinities that feel so real to us--that are real to us--were like CGI projections created by the magic eyeglasses of our organic brains.
But what seems certain is that the images themselves exist, and that they seem on some deep level to be shared between human beings. (This is Jung's idea of archetypes in the collective unconscious, of course.) Humans seem adept at making symbolic images of their own instincts and drives, and then for clothing them in ever more rich clusters of other symbols, like a woman who carves a rough statue out of wood and then ornaments it with with jewels and beads. For example, all humans feel the urge to protect their own loved ones and possessions: that is a profound instinct, and the psyche may clothe that instinct in symbolic shapes of great vividness and power. I cannot say whether Teutatis or Thor or Father Mars or Shango exist, and if they do, how they might relate to each other. All humans expereince the instinctive urge for love and desire kindled by beauty: again, I can't say whether Aphrodite or Ishtar or Venus or Oshun exist. But the instincts clearly exist, wound in our genes and our animal bodies, in the gurgling of our glands and the slosh of our hormones; and it cannot be denied that we are meaning-seeking animals who are predisposed to symbolic and metaphorical thinking. In that sense, it is undoubtedly true that 'everything is full of gods' as Thales said, panta plera theon.
To acknowledge that this is the case seems to me to be a livable set of foundations for religious speculation. It doesn't require me to believe in impossible or unlikely things, and it fits with the findings of modern biology and psychology. But it's only a foundation: all it says is that on the most basic level, certain types of god recurr in many different cultures, and look very much as though the way they appear in our minds represents the clothing of our numerous instinctual drives and experiences in symbolic form. These drives may be very primal: to mate, to defend oneself, to be born, to separate from parents, to break out, to seek safety, to procreate, to eat, to hunt. Others are more sophisticated: to make art, to feel at home, and beyond that, even the mysterious urges to be redeemed, to lose one's identity in something greater than oneself, to die.
Separately existent gods are not excluded by this way of thinking. For all I know, there could have been ancient divine beings present as life on earth evolved, who saw fit to give emerging humanity a share in themselves which we experience as the drives or instincts. Or there might be a large but limited number of 'real', separate, individual gods who exist both outside us as conscious superbeings and inside us as our instincts and urges, who are nevertheless graciously pleased to let our human imagination give them a variety of local habitations and names, extending, as it were, their portfolios--or perhaps they are simply unable to or uninterested in stopping us doing so. I personally just can't take seriously the idea that all humanity's various gods of war or goddesses of love or gods of craftmanship are all entirely different individuals, and hang around their personal particular people like a set of divine cheerleaders, each backing their own team. Rather, I see the gods as manifestations of universal phenomena of which humanity is also part. This is one reason why I can't really get worked up about any variety of neo-pagan reconstructionism. I worry that on some level it boils down to a spiritualised identity-politics of rather literal kind.
So--apologies for a long piece here--to me, at least, it seems that we may say with some confidence that whatever else the gods may be (note the wiggle-room), they are also projected ideals of human striving, paradigms of existence. Polytheism seems to me more sensible, more humane, more 'real' that monotheism, ultimately because it tells the greater truth about human nature, in its surging, clamorous variety and daimonic contradiction. Everything is full of gods because we are full of gods; our symbol-making brains allow us to connect our experience of the world in a web of meaning and metaphor, which is at once personal and also drawn from our deepest layers of biological heritage. The sea, the moon, menstruation, and motherhood all exist: human intelligent embodied consciousness allows us to link them and form a goddess. Whether any such goddess exists separately of our consciousnesses is unknowable. Nevertheless, honouring such a deity, and the countless others that humanity has perceived, gives a measure of healthy respect for vastness, a sense of beauty and particularity that fosters living deeply and well.
Fundamentally important are the following, as far as I am concerned.
a) I'm not interested in believing impossible things or in the theological and textual-historical gymnastics involved in justifying those beliefs. Goodbye and thank you, religions of the book.
b) The only sound basis for religious speculation is a mixture of feeling (experience, intuition, instinct) and judgement (logic, sense, rationality, a sense of coherence.) But, because everyone is different, and because of our different brains we quite literally do not experience the same world, then my speculations are only valid for me and no other person.
c) I am prepared to live with irresoluble uncertainty, e.g. what happens after death. My own feeling is that you die and cease to exist; but I cannot rule out some form of reincarnation, or indeed, anything else.
d) Polytheism seems to me to be no less sensible than monotheism, and may have some practical and psychological advantages over it.
e) I am not at all sure what religion has to do with most of what we call 'morality'.
* * *
On some level I've always believed there is a great oneness behind all sensible things. But rather than seeing that oneness as a sublime creator, I see it more as a lowest common denominator. I certainly do not think it is personal, though I think we can know very little about it other than that it is there. It might be called the fullness, the pleroma, or the All. Issues of good and evil are utterly irrelevant at this level. It is 'the sense sublime/ of something far more deeply interfused', as Wordsworth said. How on earth people can find this 'sense' a personal deity keeping a tally of good and bad deeds is beyond me.
Secondly, I believe that we are conscious animals who have evolved infinitely slowly from water and stone. Most of our deepest feelings and characteristics have their roots in the instinctuality of wild animals, which is why we can sense a profound kinship with them: with them we share anger, desire, fear, tenderness, hunger, grief, longing for safety, and joyfulness.
But unlike many other animals, we are remarkable for our adaptability. Our chief adaptation is our unlimited versatility: humans can live at the equator or in the arctic, on mainly meat or no meat at all. We are not like koalas, unable to do anything but live up gum-trees, eat leaves, mate, and die. (Though I am sure the life of a koala, bushfires apart, is contented enough.) We can live anywhere--we can even venture into the terrifying wastes of space and walk on the moon. This versatility is linked to our huge advantages: big brains, language, self-consciousness. (People who know more evolutionary biology than me will have to fill the precise nature of this 'link' in--Lee?) But it also makes us profoundly restless creatures. We are all, like Odysseus in Homer, polutropos, beings 'of many twists', turning every which way, never quite feeling wholly settled or permanently satisfied.
So we make myths about our restless, equivocal state. We gained something, and we lost something, at some mysterious prehistoric date, some deep backward and abysm of time. Prometheus stole fire and gave us it; he taught us language and how to build houses and art and number. Zeus has never quite forgiven him, or us. Or, God placed us in Eden, where we ate of the forbidden fruit and came to know good and evil. Either way, we transgressed somehow; deep in us, there is an obscure and lingering guilt--for being animals and yet not being animals, for being so clever, so rootless and questing, for having the power of speech and symbol-making; and, ultimately, a shadowy guilt for being conscious at all. Neo-pagans, used to the biblical legend of the Fall, commonly deride it as an absurb imposition, especially if one is expected to believe it literally by a punitive and narrow-minded family or cultural background. But this misses the point: the idea is older than Judaeo-Christianity and is universal, a consequence of the evolutionary burst that turned us from apes into people: able to survive anywhere, surging outwards on our restless, inventive wits, we have no home. We are all exiles, and transgressors, Cain as well as Abel. It is facile for the Philip Carr-Gomms of this world to declare that there is no separation between humanity and nature; there may or may not be (after all, my tissues will dissolve into the earth as much as a badger's or a bird's) but clearly deep in the collective psyche there *is* a sense of separation, it exists, and it's not just the 'fault' of Christianity. It is ancient and hardwired into us, and needs to be examined in terms of evolutionary psychology, not new age platitudes.
Thirdly, onto the gods. I have no idea what gods are or if they exist externally from us in a literal sense. (I am not at all sure what 'exist' actually means. One surely cannot argue that Maponos exists in the way that the cup I'm drinking from exists.) If the gods whom I experience were nothing but delusions of my mind, or of the collective mind, then I would never be able to tell, and neither would anyone else. Ultimately I feel that the pagan who says that his gods speak to him should be given exactly the same respect and lack thereof as we give to the Christian who says that Jesus speaks to her. Personally I think it is reasonable to expect my inner world not to be destructively invaded by others without express invitation, but I also do not expect to have it pandered to unduly. As H. L. Mencken said (to quote Dawkins) 'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful or his children smart.'
The current fashion in the pagan world for hard polytheism needs to get to grips with the facts of the history of religions. We may feel that Ana or Oshun or Brigit or Minerva or the spirit of the Mawddach speaks to us and is existent as a being external to ourselves. That is fine, no one can prove us wrong, and our belief has a reasonable claim to be treated with standard good manners. But, we must acknowledge that throughout history numerous men and women have felt just as keenly that Christ, or Allah, or Kali, or St Francis, or St Therese of Liseux, or the Virgin Mary, or the archangel Gabriel, or Ahura Mazda, or the Boddhisattva Avalokiteshwara have spoken to them, and are existent as beings external to themselves. Many people from all religious traditions recognise and feel--profoundly, deeply, and with sincerity--that the personal beings that they reverence exist and communicate with them. And these conceptions are often totally incompatible with those of others.
So for me, any theory of divinity has to acknowledge this squarely. One common solution, which many Hindu thinkers like Ramakrishna have liked, is to explain that the Formless One, the ultimate divinity, takes different forms according to different worshippers' expectations and levels of spiritual development. (If you rebel against this idea instinctively, and want to insist that Brigit or Mochon or Arawn is as much an individual as you are, and not in any way a kind of pantomime mask worn by the solicitous, infinitely wise Uberdeity, then ask yourself--how could I tell?!) A less pleasant idea is, alas, the more common one in today's world: that one's personal conviction is the correct one, and that all others are illusion, or demonic misguidance.
To phrase the problem more simply: all gods, including the Trinity, Jahweh and Allah, in the opinion of every different people, at every point in history, have appeared to their own worshippers to have behaved as if they existed.
As a consequence, there is nothing particularly special or out of the ordinary about insisting that one has personal experiences of the gods: many if not most religious people have felt so throughout human history, and the mere fact of it simply proves nothing at all about the nature or existence of divine beings, one way or the other.
* * *
I think, for me, the only possible solution is to acknowledge the role our own selves have in god-making. The restless versatility and ability to make symbols that I referred to earlier as our evolutionary inheritance means that our minds are full of self-generating images whch come unbidden. We don't see the world as it is: we see it charged with the infinitely subtle web of our own imaginal consciousness imposed on it. We look at the world through the stained glass of our own selves, both conscious and unconscious; the world appears to us as though we were wearing magic goggles filtering our sight and other senses. We cannot know whether the googles are dulling and clouding what is outside, and that if we took them off, then, as Blake said 'Everything would appear as it is, infinite', or if, in St Paul's words, we should then see 'face to face' a world filled with gods. In contrast, we might just as well find that the images of gods and divinities that feel so real to us--that are real to us--were like CGI projections created by the magic eyeglasses of our organic brains.
But what seems certain is that the images themselves exist, and that they seem on some deep level to be shared between human beings. (This is Jung's idea of archetypes in the collective unconscious, of course.) Humans seem adept at making symbolic images of their own instincts and drives, and then for clothing them in ever more rich clusters of other symbols, like a woman who carves a rough statue out of wood and then ornaments it with with jewels and beads. For example, all humans feel the urge to protect their own loved ones and possessions: that is a profound instinct, and the psyche may clothe that instinct in symbolic shapes of great vividness and power. I cannot say whether Teutatis or Thor or Father Mars or Shango exist, and if they do, how they might relate to each other. All humans expereince the instinctive urge for love and desire kindled by beauty: again, I can't say whether Aphrodite or Ishtar or Venus or Oshun exist. But the instincts clearly exist, wound in our genes and our animal bodies, in the gurgling of our glands and the slosh of our hormones; and it cannot be denied that we are meaning-seeking animals who are predisposed to symbolic and metaphorical thinking. In that sense, it is undoubtedly true that 'everything is full of gods' as Thales said, panta plera theon.
To acknowledge that this is the case seems to me to be a livable set of foundations for religious speculation. It doesn't require me to believe in impossible or unlikely things, and it fits with the findings of modern biology and psychology. But it's only a foundation: all it says is that on the most basic level, certain types of god recurr in many different cultures, and look very much as though the way they appear in our minds represents the clothing of our numerous instinctual drives and experiences in symbolic form. These drives may be very primal: to mate, to defend oneself, to be born, to separate from parents, to break out, to seek safety, to procreate, to eat, to hunt. Others are more sophisticated: to make art, to feel at home, and beyond that, even the mysterious urges to be redeemed, to lose one's identity in something greater than oneself, to die.
Separately existent gods are not excluded by this way of thinking. For all I know, there could have been ancient divine beings present as life on earth evolved, who saw fit to give emerging humanity a share in themselves which we experience as the drives or instincts. Or there might be a large but limited number of 'real', separate, individual gods who exist both outside us as conscious superbeings and inside us as our instincts and urges, who are nevertheless graciously pleased to let our human imagination give them a variety of local habitations and names, extending, as it were, their portfolios--or perhaps they are simply unable to or uninterested in stopping us doing so. I personally just can't take seriously the idea that all humanity's various gods of war or goddesses of love or gods of craftmanship are all entirely different individuals, and hang around their personal particular people like a set of divine cheerleaders, each backing their own team. Rather, I see the gods as manifestations of universal phenomena of which humanity is also part. This is one reason why I can't really get worked up about any variety of neo-pagan reconstructionism. I worry that on some level it boils down to a spiritualised identity-politics of rather literal kind.
So--apologies for a long piece here--to me, at least, it seems that we may say with some confidence that whatever else the gods may be (note the wiggle-room), they are also projected ideals of human striving, paradigms of existence. Polytheism seems to me more sensible, more humane, more 'real' that monotheism, ultimately because it tells the greater truth about human nature, in its surging, clamorous variety and daimonic contradiction. Everything is full of gods because we are full of gods; our symbol-making brains allow us to connect our experience of the world in a web of meaning and metaphor, which is at once personal and also drawn from our deepest layers of biological heritage. The sea, the moon, menstruation, and motherhood all exist: human intelligent embodied consciousness allows us to link them and form a goddess. Whether any such goddess exists separately of our consciousnesses is unknowable. Nevertheless, honouring such a deity, and the countless others that humanity has perceived, gives a measure of healthy respect for vastness, a sense of beauty and particularity that fosters living deeply and well.