March 2008

March 13

[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.

March 30

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.

January 2008

Here's an old one while I'm busy. Just two more after this one. Then what will I do for a quick fix?

January 9, 2008

I've just finished Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials" trilogy. There has been a lot of talk about the books and the movie they've already made of the first one. I was attracted to it when I first saw the trailer; it looked like a fun fantasy. I had no idea what the story was. Then came the talk about banning the books, or reserving them for adults only (he wrote them for teens, tho he can't have been aiming for much younger than 14). A school district in a nearby city pulled them from their library for a time. I think they put them back. But the Archbishop for this region said he thought they ought to be required reading.

When our friend (whose books I first started reading, as she was visiting) first told me some of the story, she only told me the most simple levels of the story. And I suppose that is the level at which many readers will read them. I assumed from her description that the trouble was over the fact that in the world he's created – or one of them – the humans all have daemons. Now, he's doing something far different here than Davies or anyone else I know of has done with the concept, but in fact it so resonates with what I myself was just writing and thinking about. Pullman's daemons are not "other." They are a part of us, a physical manifestation of our spirit. We find out later in the story that humans have three parts – body, spirit and soul. In Lyra's, the heroine's world, spirits take animal form, usually opposite sex, so they are also kind of our anima/animus.

So, since the folks in the film all speak with British accents, they pronounce the word more like "demon" (according to my friend), and the idea that every human has a sort of guardian demon, rathen than a guardian angel, and that demon's aren't all bad – too much for the "Christian" public to handle. Plus the church is portrayed in a negative light, tho not too terribly so in the first book. Or is it?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I thought the hullabaloo was about daemons, and it may have been, so far. If and when they make the rest of the movies, there'll be some serious banning and book burning going on. Why? First, let me say I think the books are extraordinarily well done. A truly fascinating, plausible, intriguing, thought-provoking story with characters so finely drawn I feel I really love them. And it has complicated physics, philosophy and theology, and it is written such that teens can understand it. And it is ballsy as hell. Literally.

The central argument of the books is that God, if he exists, has done terrible things to us, and must be destroyed. All of history has been a battle between wisdom and stupidity, with God using his power and the power of his church (es) to keep people stupid. God is petty, mean, envious, and cruel. He must be overthrown. Lyra's father assembles an army from many worlds for the second battle for heaven. As it turns out, God turned things over to Metatron long ago, and God himself is a frail, befuddled ancient of days, who falls apart into atoms as soon as he's exposed to air.

So what was god? Was he the creator of the heaven and eath, etc.? Not at all.

January 10

The world(s) were created, came into being, in an unexplained way. Probably thru the big bang or a similar process, and life began in the way modern evolution describes. But Pullman posits an element that in some worlds is called Dust, some Shadows, and in ours, Dark Matter. It is conscious. And where consciousness arises, or minds capable of it, Dust is attracted – created even. I'm still not completely sure which comes first. Anyway, long before there were humans in our universe, there were beings made of pure Spirit, or consciousness, or something. Angels. Made of something quite different from us, in that they have no real bodies, tho they do have forms, and as the Bible faithfully records, they were able to take the form of humans later and come and mate/have sex with human women.

One of the earliest angels, and smartest, was able to convince the later angels that he had created them – a bald faced lie – and therefore had authority over them. He claimed credit for having created everything – not just the angels but the universe and all that was in it. One of the other early-born/come-into being angels knew that for the lie it was, and she gathered a force around her who rebelled against the self-proclaimed Authority. Of course they lost, but they were not destroyed, and they've been fighting an underground, guerilla war for Wisdom and freedom ever since, against Stupidity and Authority/control. Since the Authority, God, won, he can place his people in all the positions of power, and thus all rulers (secular and religious) ultimately are on the side of Stupidity. Even if they are engaged in research, it is with one eye closed and one hand tied behind them, because they can't really search for the truth, seeing as how all their power rests on a lie.

The books, therefore, are deeply heretical. To any and all religions. They teach children to doubt whether there is a god, to wonder, if there is, if he might be a bad guy, and they encourage children to mistrust all agents of all churches and governments. And there are homosexual angels, good witches, and the idea that Eve's Fall is the greatest boon to all humankind. A wonderful trilogy! I think all teens should read it.

Not because I want them all to be little atheists, but because they should all have at least one time in their lives where they are given an opportunity to seriously question their faith. They ought to have some tools, some complexity, with which to do that.

In the meantime, I read Connie Willis' Passages, about near-death experiences, and it also spurred some new thinking. Right now I'm reading Annie Proulx's Postcard's. But I have got to get to work.