[Ok – now this is getting silly. I am blogging about my journal, which here is an entry about the blog I created to record my journals!]
1994 is really hard to release without commentary. It is just so clear to me now that I wanted to be a Christian, wanted Christianity to be true, largely to please my parents and make them love and accept me – which is not to say they didn't already love me.
But it didn't take long at all for the questions to arise, for me to become uncomfortable. I persisted for a couple more years – in a very serious way – because I was determined to make it work. I gave it the fairest shot I was capable of giving. And what came out of it for me was again more guilt. More pain. More inability to measure up. Where others are able to find forgiveness, I just keep finding condemnation. Standards set impossibly high. Each of my rounds with Christianity is flavored with anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear of being excluded, left behind, and rejected.
Part of that is my own personal pathology. Since my father is (was) a minister, my ideas about the Christian God will forever be entangled in my impressions, conceptions and emotions about my Dad. As others have argued before me and about gods in general, my picture of Yahweh is one big Rorschach test. Clearly I have long had issues of desperately wanting to please my father but never being able to. A great fear of being rejected by him, being unloved. An uncertainty about how my actions will be interpreted, but deep anxiety that they my intentions will always be misread. And those fears are writ onto my image of god.
But I don't think all of these feelings and ideas are personal, or ideosyncratic, I think they are a result of this kind of theology. If you posit a heaven and hell, for example, or any system of eternal rewards and punishments based on a single life – to which no one can know the outcome until they are dead, you are going to create anxiety in people.
I have written a lot in my life about the difficulty in reconciling the Yahweh of the Old Testament with the Loving Abba Jesus mentions. Well, the presence of the one ought to produce a little confusion in anyone who's paying attention. There are just too many places where Jesus himself says things that can only be interpreted as exclusionary. So you have to decide that a) he didn't really say them, b) he didn't really mean them, or c) he's preaching something different than you thought he was.
In some ways I hate this dredging up, because I really am tired of arguing with Christianity. Why can't it just go away? I mean, out of my head. I don't want to have to keep explaining why I don't practice that faith. But that's the key argument for doing this. Put it all out there on the blog – warts and all, and then my family and closest friends will know how I think and why I think that way and I will never have to explain it again.
We may have some cool discussions, and maybe even some arguments or debates, and that would be wonderful and welcome. Certainly, if anyone has the stamina to wade through the whole thing, there is no way anyone can claim I haven't thought about my position.
I haven't mentioned I'm reading Wicked, which is wonderful. Concealed as a fairytale about the backstory of Oz' Wicked Witch of the West, it's really a treatise on the nature of evil. He explores the struggle to explain and deal with evil among followers of folk religion/superstition, pagan worship of elemental and creator gods and forces, organized religion and its bureaucracies and ties to the state (and thus its interest in maintaing the status quo), and secular humanism, with its potential for revolution or democracy or anarchy; moral relativism.
Super good. He's just had a character say that evil always precedes good in folk tales. Is that true? "There once was an evil witch . . . " Or a cruel giant, an ogre, etc. Peasants and earlier, didn't care where evil came from, he argues. They just assumed its existence. Is this true universally? In Europe? In agricultural societies?
It is at first an appealing argument. One wants to accept it at face value. But the Mbuti? Do they have stories of "evil beings?" I don't know. Surely they must. How else to explain the urge to be stingy that comes over people? For them the Forest is Mother and Father, source of Life and all good things. But evil things might live in the forest. I just don't know.
The !Kung have evil beings in the myths. Or they have beings that behave evilly. Hyena, for example. Of course, Hyena is only following his nature, just as Rabbit is only following his. It isn't necessarily considered "evil" by them, the way we would consider it, any more than the scorpion is evil for stinging. So I'm doubting this hypothesis that evil always precedes good, universally. As we've defined it. Which actually is what another of Maguire's characters says, "It is at the very least a matter of definitions" p.231.
One thing I wonder about – in societies with religions like Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., where the philosophy is non-dualist, or monistic, is it only the monks and priests and ascetics who really get that? While the masses go right on believing in devils, witches, demons and ogres? It seems the latter is more true, because look at the rich and fascinating body of evil (and good) deities, heroes, spirits, legends and magical creatures throughout Asia. Or do people kind of believe both things simultaneously, even though they contradict each other? As Holland et al quote somebody (and I cited in my dissertation but can't remember right now who said it originally) – one of the key hallmarks of human thinking is our ability to believe two or more mutually contradictory things.
This reminds me that I need to write more, soon, about the new stuff I've been learning about how brains work, which is not in a linear, analog kind of way. All our ideas about us being like computers are basically wrong. What I began to see awhile ago, about thinking metaphorically, is actually true. Means a lot of our thinking is non-linguistic, which has serious implications for how I conceptualize and how I teach about the development of language, cognition and emotion. Oops – almost to Detroit so I'll have to expand this later.
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