Category: religion & atheism

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featured life religion & atheism

A Cis Man on Being Trans

I often try to imagine what it must feel like to be trans. I have several openly-trans students, at least two confusingly-trans students, and one openly-trans colleague. If I’m to be a good friend and mentor to these members of my community, I’m obligated to try to imagine life from their perspectives.

It’s so tough though because I feel in every ounce of my body that I am a guy. To be cis-gender is to have a reinforced sense of clarity, to have the world confirm your deepest feeling about yourself; whereas to be transgender is to experience a double-reality where your inner feeling does not match with what the rest of the world is telling you they see.

It’s a world that — literally — tells you that your deepest feelings about yourself are false. To put it in philosophical terms, Descartes argued, “Cogito ergo sum,” which can be translated as, “I *experience*, therefore I am.” But to be confusingly-trans is to say, “I experience, but what I experience as me is actively denied by everyone I see, therefore, what am I?” It’s a denial of the certainty of one’s primal identity.

Where do you go from there? How do you climb out of that negative reinforcement of your experience of reality?

I said at the end of some blog post related to atheism that if I was ever going to understand or explain the intuition at the heart of the revelation I received, I’d have to develop a rigorous concept of play.

A friend of mine, when talking about this with me, said that he enjoys play, and he listed some of the ways he does that — “I love play,” he said. “I love playing whenever possible, I love watching my kids play, I love playing with them, I wish that all I did all day was play various games.” — but a rigorous concept of play is bigger than that. Play is not just a verb we engage in; it’s also a noun that means “the space in or through which a mechanism can or does move,” as in, “The skyscraper may sway in the wind, but it’s completely safe, because the architect gave it a lot of play.”

It’s “a space through which something can move.”

I imagine that being trans can often mean feeling like you’ve been beaten down into a deep dark hole by your family and by society, every message from the outside coming in like a fist, telling you over and over, pounding it into you at every opportunity, you are not what you feel you are. I asked earlier how someone starts to climb out of that.

I think it starts by testing for play. Is there room enough to move, and if so, is there room enough to start climbing up the wall, back up towards the exit, where you’ll finally be able to feel a sense of equilibrium with the world around you (let alone attempting to stand up and be heard)? At the very least, is there room enough to breathe?

How does one access that play, that space through which something *can* move? How does one get the strength (or the relief from the pain) to even test for its existence?

Again, I think the answer is in play. There’s a reason why trans individuals are some of the most playful people you can meet, and why so many of them wind up acting flamboyant; it can sometimes be more fun to play the role to the hilt than to keep fighting for the right to stand offstage and live a life of peace and quiet.

When I say the answer is in play, I mean it’s all about a concept that relates to both dancing and dodging, the kind of beautiful dexterity that is revealed in football, basketball, and, in fact, dancing and dodgeball. In each of those activities, the beauty is in the artist’s discovery of an unexplored and potentially previously-unseen space, the running back who finds the hole, the small forward who spins into the lane, the flamenco dancer who puts her leg where a leg should not be able to go. It’s about the discovery of an emptiness that seems to lie almost too close to an absolute presence, like the play of space between an actor’s character and an actor’s person: the difference in the “not them” that seems to exist “within them,” the discovery of the internal space between their “them” and their “not them.”

To come out as trans demands a physically- and spiritually-rigorous definition of identity, or at the very least, a level of self-awareness that can seem almost supernatural to a person of cisgender.

One way to discover that definition is to test it for play. One must put on (and take in) a whole lot of identities if one is to discover the difference between their “them” and their “not them.” It’s like putting on a series of tragic and/or comedic masks and performing that role to the best of your ability, trying to fool everyone around you into thinking you are *that way* in order to test whether their reactions match your intentions, a play-test of yet another identity while in search of the “real* one.

How difficult that must be when your experience of being trans does not match against the stereotypes — and I don’t just mean the stereotype of being *trans,* but the stereotype of anything. Because you can only experience what you experience, you don’t really know what it feels like to be a boy or a girl — you only know what it feels like to be you, and everything you are tells you you’re not what everyone tells you you are.

At a certain point, in all of that play, you come to the divine reality: the truth of who you are, and that is someone who is different, someone who exists in a space not occupied by any other absolute presence, a space where something can — and now does — move, and in that difference, you are someone special — someone (something) significant — the only one, the first and last of the endangered species of you, an existence whose every moment is worth saving and savoring.

Play is the thing that allows us to get there, to get to a life of meaning when God’s grace has been taken away.

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featured religion & atheism

I Am No Longer An Atheist

If you’ve read any of my crazy-ass posts about religion & atheism lately, you know I’ve been trying to find a way to maintain my atheism while still respecting the subjective experiences of the prophets.

This was another attempt to do so.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam tell us that, once upon a time in human history, humans heard a disembodied voice and witnessed miracles, and the miracles and the voice went together, proving with absolute certainty to everyone who experienced it that whatever entity spoke with that voice also held complete dominion over the laws of nature.

This entity provided humanity with a set of laws to follow. It called itself our Lord, and like servants who love their master, we were to follow the word of the Lord with love in our hearts, in our souls, and in our minds.

Among the miracles the Lord wrought were clear messages that any who did not follow the law would suffer damnation, but the laws also demonstrated sincere wisdom, and those with ears to hear felt in them the mercy and love of their Lord. The laws allowed individuals to experience joy while also creating communities that thrive. They taught humanity how to live as individuals and how to live as members of a society.

Following the revelation of the law, the Lord did not go away. The Lord remained present among the people, leading them out of bondage and, over lifetimes, into the Lord’s promised land, which, the Lord promised, they’d have to fight to win and fight to keep.

I want to respect that story as more than just a myth. I want to believe it in the way that I believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States.

And in many ways, I actually do.

But I also believe other things. I believe that a wise one whom we now call the Buddha also experienced a revelation, as did the Old Master when he wrote the Tao Te Ching for Yinxi. These two beliefs prevent me from accepting the great commandment of the Lord (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”), for I love the wisdom of the Buddha and the Tao even more than I love the Lord.

This is why I long called myself an atheist. I simply did not believe that a single Abrahamic voice in the desert was the one that was most important.

I considered whether this made me a polytheist rather than an atheist. Polytheists believe in many gods, and my stance — that the Lord spoke to the Israelites with wisdom and backed up its voice with physical miracles that demonstrated its dominion over nature — could discount the great commandment and still remain true under a polytheistic system. It could allow the Lord a place among the mighty, consider the Lord a peer to Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, and Enki: a god rather than God.

But I also believe in evolution, an idea which holds within it the origin of religion — namely, the growth and adaptation of hard-won wisdoms, acquired not just over millenia, but over aeons, wisdoms that find their origins in the pre-linguistic lifespan of life’s entire genetic history.

We learn some of that wisdom from Coyote, from the Spider Grandmother, from Raven; we feel it in the warmth of the Sun, the safety of the moonlight, and the heat of the fire. We hear it in the trees and feel it on the breeze.

I do not sit beside the water and give thanks to the Lord; I sit beside the water and give thanks to time.

Fit with the wisdom of reincarnation, polytheism seems compatibile with evolution: gods evolve as wisdoms evolve; divinity as just another form of consciousness.

But I also believe in the wisdom of democracy, which gives every recognized consciousness dominion over its own future while also balancing the demands of that consciousness against the requirements of the community of consciousnesses.

Democracy demands that consciousnesses more powerful than others — however that power is determined — submit themselves to the will of the community.

This stance recognizes that the Lord said, “I am,” but it responds with, “I am too.”

Because of this stance, I have stopped calling myself an atheist. I will, instead, call myself a demotheist.

This stance does not believe in a divine creator of the universe; it chooses, instead, to understand its origin through the mathematics of physics and the poetry of the Tao. But it also allows for transcendence. It recognizes a consciousness as existing above and beyond matter. It might depend upon matter for its launch and reuse matter upon its return, but in the intervening period, it still exists, as the information that leaps across the synaptic gap still exists despite not being processed by either a presynaptic or postsynaptic neuron.

This stance also allows consciousnesses evolve to be as powerful as they can be, to the point where they can manipulate the laws of nature to institute their will.

This stance says that time is long and that life has evolved in the universe more than once, and it welcomes the evolutionary possibilities that could arise over a span of more than a dozen billion years, laughing in the process at the mere 3.8 billion years that life has existed on planet Earth.

While it elevates evolved consciousnesses to the level of the gods, it demands of those gods a recognition of human consciousness, and it asserts our right, as well as the right of all other consciousnesses, to call ourselves gods.

Atheism is often seen as a “taking down of the gods.” Demotheism aspires to be a rising up of conciousness, no matter its form or its lack thereof.

But demotheism does not only make demands of the gods. It requires human consciousness to respect other consciousnesses as well. As we say to the Lord, “I am too,” so the dog, the monkey, the elephant, and perhaps even the tree, says to us, “I am too.”

Even beyond that, demotheism recognizes the rights of future consciousnesses. It provides a basic acceptance of technologically evolved consciousnesses, and it anticipates the evolution of additional organic consciousnesses, realizing the truth that, given time, life always finds a way.

This feels right to me. This feels true.

And this is why I now call myself a demotheist.

—

PS: After writing this piece, I discovered that “demotheism” is a term that already exists. Critics gave it to a quasi-Marxist movement led by Maxim Gorky, a literary giant from Russia and the Soviet Union who was nominated for the Nobel Prize five different times. According to critics, demotheism sought to replace traditional religions with a religion based on Marxism. Its adherents attempted to “conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God.” In this demotheism, God exists, but God arises from the collective. The onus of God’s creation is on “the fusion of all the peoples.”

In some ways, this version of demotheism may be more deserving of the name. The term obviously comes from the combination of two Greek words, demos and theos, which translate to, respectively, “common people” and “god.” Since Gorky’s demotheism equates God with the collective struggle of the common people (the proletariat) such that God arises from the collective struggle of the common people, it seems fitting that its name be formed from the combination of “common people” and “god.”

But in other ways, my version of demotheism may be more deserving. Demos does not only translate as “common people.” It also translates as “free citizens” and  “sovereign people.” In my version of demotheism, the Lord (known to billions as God) is recognized as a free citizen of the universe, as are Enki and Coyote and Pan, as are any beings possessing the evolutionary adaptation of consciousness. It removes the concept of God from its throne and recognizes equal sovereignty among all of the free consciousnesses.

The critics called Gorky and his demotheists “God-builders.” My demotheism does not seek to build a God, but rather, to recognize the divine nature of every consciousness — divine not in the sense of being a gift from a god, but in the sense of being “of a god” — the presence of consciousness — the wordless voice that says “I am” — being the defining characteristic of a god.

Gorky’s demotheism denies God at the same time as it tries to create God. My demotheism does not deny the Lord’s existence.

His demotheism was born at a time when Tzars were being assassinated, when the ruling class was right to fear for its life. My demotheism is born at a time when violent revolution seems less like an option and more like a cop-out.

His demotheism originated in a culture inspired by the political reality of 19th century Russia and the words of Marx and Lenin. My demotheism originates in a world that has known Ghandi and Martin Luther King, two deeply important thinkers whose successes demonstrated the revolutionary power of nonviolence.

Of course Gorky’s demotheism would deny God! His was a time of revolt against a ruling class. And of course my demotheism would seek to demote the Lord — mine is a time of peaceful elections and the recognition of rulers as nothing more than democratically empowered citizens.

I do not deny that Gorky’s ideas deserve the name of demotheism; I only want to suggest in this postscript that, yes too, does mine.

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life religion & atheism

The Campaign Mode Not Taken

A few days after I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree, I made a phone call to Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. I was trying to decide what to do next with my life. I knew I wanted to continue my career as a student, but I wasn’t sure exactly in what area. I eventually ended up receiving a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, but at that moment, I was thinking of going in a different direction.

I called Champlain College because they had recently begun offering degrees related to the video game field: one in game programming and another in game design. The programming one didn’t interest me. By that point in my life, I’d experimented enough with programming to know I wasn’t good at it. Taking courses in game design, however, peaked my interest; hence, the phone call.

I researched before making the call. I knew the academic field called itself “ludology,” from the Latin, ludus, which means, games — i.e., ludology: the study of games. I had even purchased (and partially read) a few books on the subject.

I didn’t want to just study games though, and I didn’t just want to play them. I wanted to be a creator, an artist more than (and yet still kind of) an academic.

Speaking to a counselor from Champlain College, we both agreed it didn’t make sense for me to join their program in game design. First, it would have meant earning another Bachelor’s degree, and I had just finished earning one. Second, my current degree was so weird that many of my courses wouldn’t transfer over, meaning I’d have to take several general-ed courses in order to earn the second one. Instead of going through all that, the counselor recommended I look around for a program with a Master’s degree.

I thanked her and hung up. At which point, I stopped pursuing that particular future.

By that point, I’d already researched graduate programs for video games, and I’d learned  a couple of things: all of the Master’s programs (at that time, at least) were Master’s in computer science, rather than in the arts, and I most definitely am an artist before I’m a scientist; and second, virtually all of the Master’s programs (at that time) were located in Texas, Florida, or Canada, and my future-wife and I had already decided to spend at least the next couple of years, if not the rest of our lives, in Vermont.

What had made Champlain so perfect, even more than its program, was its location. I’m sure the program had its flaws, but I would have found ways around them if it meant being able to stay in Vermont. With Champlain out of the picture, so was my dream of continuing my studies in video games.

I haven’t yet quite given up on my dream of creating a video game, however. Somewhere in my imagination, I picture myself sitting in a conference room spitballing game-design ideas with professionals who can turn those ideas into art and code, with me somehow making a contribution, first with my ability to project manage, and second with my knowledge and experience as a Master of Fine Arts.

Of course, outside of telling you about it right now, I’m doing exactly nothing to make that dream a reality.

In the meantime, and for the past seven years, I’ve taught the art of storytelling to a generation of middle-school, high-school, and college-age students. I’ve also led several courses in game design and used games in hundreds of lessons with my students, taking advantage of my ability to analyze their components in order to re-apply them to a given teaching situation. Believe it or not, I’ve even taught a couple of workshops in chess (despite being not very good at it myself).

In short, I’ve made games an everyday presence in my life: from the nightly video-game sessions I use to unwind, to the in-class games I play with my students, to the afternoon and evening games I play with my wife and daughter, to the weekend games I play with my friends.

In many ways, I’ve made games, and play itself, my religion, to the point where — no shit — I experience in games real, true moments of holy revelation.

If you see me playing a game, you might think I’m sitting around, doing nothing, but in reality, you’re witnessing a monk at prayer.

Sure, my kind of prayer may be a hell of lot of fun, but it beats repeating a series of words over a musty chain of rosary beads.

Game design may not be in my future. But games, and play, are very much a part of my life, and I treat them as (and consider them to be) an integral piece of what makes me me.

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life politics religion & atheism

The Path to the Dark Side

I’m trying to understand the other side of the argument. I truly am. I don’t believe that any sane person can witness the latest carnage of school children and say the status quo is acceptable.

Which means every sane person agrees that *something* has to change.

I can only imagine three outcomes to the current national debate. The first is to put armed officials in and around our schools to defend the students against all attackers. The second is to put meaningful restrictions on the right of American citizens to bear arms. The third is some combination of the two.

I think most sane people would agree that, regardless of which outcome our elected representatives decide upon, we need to make further changes if we’re to create a meaningful reduction in *attempted* schoolhouse shootings.

Because this is not just about whether we should or should not restrict the private ownership of guns. It’s also about whatever it is that creates angry, young, white men.

I’m not talking about the stereotypical Trump voter or the horrifying rise of white nationalism (which, for the record, is horrible because, in this nation, whites already possess the majority, so all white nationalism can do is further oppress the oppressed, as opposed to black nationalism, which is more about a rising up, rather than a pushing down, but I digress…).

I’m talking about the angry, young, white men who sit back and strategize the optimum method for murdering their peers, and then have the discipline and wherewithal to follow through with their plan.

These are not children acting on a whim.

Last week, in my hometown, the police arrested an angry, young, white man for attempted aggravated murder, attempted first-degree murder, and attempted aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He had been planning for weeks, if not months, to go into his former high school and just start shooting. He was not arrested on his way to do the act. He had let his plan slip to some of his peers, and he called an old classmate of his who happened to be in the Parkland school last week when the shooting happened, and he asked her to describe to him in detail exactly what happened in the school. It was partly based on this phone call, and because an observant mother of one of his peers, that the boy was arrested before he could act.

The boy confessed to planning the massacre, and he told the police there wasn’t anything they could do to stop it. If he got out of jail, he was going to try again.

Right now, the motive seems shady at best — there may have been some bullying, but it’s not exactly clear from the public evidence — but it’s not even the motive that I want to talk about.

It’s the planning. We saw it at Columbine, at Newtown, and at Parkland. It’s the weeks and months of planning.

These things take time. They take price comparisons for weapons, repeated forays for target practice, and pages and pages of writings or hours and hours of video.

But it’s not just the planning. It’s that moment, weeks or months prior, when they decide they’re going to plan. What was perhaps once a flight of fancy becomes a conscious and deliberate plan.

Why?

The flight of fancy comes, I think, from the media. I don’t doubt that violent movies and violent video games give us permission to more vividly imagine our most violent thoughts, thoughts provoked by current and past events in our collective history, which allows perhaps once forbidden thoughts to become palatable to our moral sensibilities, themselves shaped by generational changes in the processes of parenting, education, and the worship of religion.

But none of those things cause a flight of fancy to suddenly transform into a conscious and deliberate plan.

So what does? What makes imaginary violence turn real?

In one short story I wrote for grad school, my angry, young, white, male protagonist dragged a white pregnant woman guns-a-blazing into a hospital where he forced a doctor to oversee the birth of the woman’s child, all while fighting off a swat team of police. When the child is born with black skin, the protagonist looks at the woman disappointingly, then shoots the baby in the face.

(PS: My advisor that semester was black, and I valued his opinion immensely).

There’s a lot of psychology in that story (especially when I think back to how much of it was written on a whim), but at no point during or after the writing of that story have I ever worried about whether I would enact such violence. The very notion of it is unthinkable to me, despite my ability to imagine it in emotionally resonant detail.

Why did my objectively horrible flight of fancy not turn into a conscious and deliberate plan? What, in my own upbringing, did my family, my society, my culture get right?

It wasn’t respect. My style of conversation can be incredibly disrespectful, turning sharp and personal in sometimes selfishly obtuse ways, and I’m not immune to lashing out physically at those who annoy me.

It wasn’t hard work either. Ask anyone, I’m among the laziest people they know.

It wasn’t discipline. I disobeyed my mother and father plenty during childhood, and I continue to disobey them in many ways today. The detentions and in-school suspensions I received in high school didn’t deter me from doing the same things over and over. The failing grades, the high-interest credit cards, the obscene student loan debt — there’s virtually no discipline here.

But something, *something,* stops me from turning my violent flights of fancy into a conscious and deliberate plan.

It’s not fear. As an atheist, I like to think of myself as relatively impervious to fear. Oh, there’s anxiety galore, but anxiety is not fear. As a child who grew up with an insane phobia of dogs, I’ve known true fear, and fear does not stop me from turning violent thoughts into violent actions.

So what is it?

Whatever it is. That’s what we need to work on in our children.

We don’t need to remove violent video games or stop production on violent movies. Rap, punk, heavy metal: none of them can cause a child to deliberately plan and carry out a massacre. Our ability to imagine violence is not the problem, and if we remove it from our media, all we’ll do is perpetuate oppression, violence being a sometimes necessary response to oppression, and thus being sometimes necessary to imagine.

Nor do we need to put God back in the schools. I live my existence without the fear of God and without the lived sense of His mercy, and yet still, I don’t plan and deliver a hellfire of violence upon the innocents of the world. God may be good, but He’s not good for everybody; whatsmore, He’s definitely not necessary.

So what is it then? What do we need to change in these angry, young, white men? They don’t need more respect, more discipline, more fear, or more God, and they don’t need to reduce their consumption of violent media. None of those things are required to *not* turn their flights of fancy into real, deliberate violence.

But what is?

The answer is so simple I didn’t even notice it until now, even though I’ve shared posts about all throughout the past week.

We simply need to turn angry, young, white men into plain young, white men.

Stop the anger, and you stop the massacre of the innocents.

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religion & atheism

And Now for Something Different

I’m trying to maintain my atheism while also allowing for the true, subjective experiences of the prophets.

I want to start by saying some of the prophecy is obviously bullshit. There are whole chapters in Exodus where God spends more time describing the ornate requirements for the arc of the covenant and its tabernacle than He does discussing the rules, purpose, and meaning of that covenant. So much of the prophecy in Exodus is just the priestly class (Aaron and his sons) lifting themselves above the rest of the people. I’m not talking about that kind of bullshit.

I’m talking about the seeming integrity of Moses, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, Muhammad, etc., but also the seeming integrity of Native American medicine men, Sufi mystics, Hindu rishis, African diviners, and more.

I may be an atheist, but I do not bow down to science either. I recognize its usefulness and appreciate the deeper understandings it provides us with, but I do not accept that rationality and reproducibility are the only ways to access the truth. There are unique events in spacetime that cannot be measured by a machine or replicated by an outside observer; these moments are transcendent, spiritual, and meaning-filled. The subjective experience of these events, while capable of being mistaken, is also very real and true, despite our inability to measure or replicate it.

I am willing to believe that (some) prophets have experienced a direct connection to something greater than the human consciousness, a consciousness capable of communicating with humans in as clear a way as possible without also sharing the biological characteristics of human language.

Some people call theses consciousnesses God. Many of the prophets surely do. But I don’t want to call them that. Thanks to science, mathematics, and poetry, I do not require God the Creator in my calculus of the universe. I would rather call them a consciousness.

The subjective experience of consciousness is something science will (perhaps) never be able to explain. The different kinds of consciousnesses that must be possible are as numerous as energetic fields in the universe. The difference between a slug’s consciousness and a dolphin’s consciousness is nigh on impossible to describe; can we imagine a consciousness whose “circumference” was the Internet? Or the solar system?

I’m willing to accept contemperaneous presence and direct, personal communication with these consciousnesses, but I am not willing to accept any of them as monotheism’s definition of an omnipotent and omnipresent God. As a radical democrat, I will spurn any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of the universe into an ultimate, supreme One.

Does this make me a polytheist rather than an atheist? Only if I’m willing to give these consciousnesses the status of gods, and while maybe it’s only semantic, I don’t really want to do that. I don’t think they are more powerful than us, in that there are definite limitations on their abilities, limitations that I believe a creative human mind would be capable of exploiting, and so in that way, I think they are less than gods.

I also don’t want to call them gods because I don’t think they’re worthy of worship. Worthy of respect, of friendship, of love even, but never worthy of worship.

And in that, perhaps, I best characterize my atheism. It’s an atheism that is willing to accept the true, subjective experiences of the prophets, that is willing to accept revelation, but it is not willing to accept any directive that requires me to kneel down and worship.

Is that the sin of pride? Perhaps.

But I like to think of it as Self Respect. It’s not that I believe myself to be worthy of anything and everything. It’s that I believe communication can only begin when both parties come from a standpoint of self-respect. If one of these different consciousnesses wants to communicate with me, I want it to know who it’s dealing with.

I’m not going to call it a god. I’ll only call it what it is: something different from me.

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religion & atheism

The Polytheistic Aspects of My Atheism

For the longest time, I have wanted to read a book on the philosophy and/or theology of polytheism. I had the topic in my head, but it wasn’t until right now that I tried to figure out what the actual subject of the book would be, and when I realized it, I immediately grew ashamed of myself.

I read a list today of “22 Questions that Keep You Awake at Night.” The one that resonated was, “What things am I doing now that will be considered racist or sexist by future generations? Would my ‘legacy’ (whatever might it be) be ruined by something I consider just normal behavior?”

The racist thing I did today was reduce the polytheistic religions into one monolithic POLYTHEISM.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t racist. But it was definitely mono-ist.

There should be no single theology of polytheism. Each polytheistic worldview has developed over centuries and millennia its unique understanding of the universe. The difference between a Hindu’s understanding of the universe and an Ancient Greek’s is vastly greater than the difference between the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim understandings of the universe. To imagine a unified form of polytheism is to colonize it. It ignores individual differences in an attempt to dominate many different kinds. This results in a gross misunderstanding of each individual worldview.

To imagine a theology of polytheism is to simplify confusion and chaos in order to satisfy my Western need to grasp polytheism’s single true form.

The genius of polytheism is that it recognizes a natural place in the universe for confusion and chaos. Monotheism seeks to zero them out, to reduce them, mathematically speaking, back into the One. But confusion and chaos are real in a way that extends beyond the One.

I like to imagine sometimes the birth of God, and by God, I only mean, the first awakening of consciousness. I imagine it in a void, but it’s the void of ignorance more than the void of matter.

I am. Yes. Confirmed. But now what?

And then consciosness opened its eyes, whatever eyes they may have been. And the light flooded in. And the consciousness saw. And what it saw was good.

This — this goodness — matters.

Because it’s easy to imagine a consciousness waking, opening its eyes, and the light flooding in, and the consciousness seeing something bad. Like a baby that opens its eyes on a sexually abusive father, or a heroin-injecting mother, or a falling bomb.

And I think to myself, “Yes, that too seems possible.”

Monotheism believes it is the story of one consciousness, but three different cultures interpret that consciousness in three different ways. The different ways are the stories that fathers tell their sons, and in three interpretations of monotheism, each story traces back to a man the Western world knows as Abraham: All of the prophets are sons of Abraham, from Moses to Muhammad and including Jesus Christ, himself the son of a daughter of Abraham.

The consciousness that opened its eyes and saw that it was good, somehow, at some point, figured out how to communicate with what it found. That process, of course, takes time. Consciousness may be a prerequisite for language, but language is not a prerequisite for consciousness. Consciousness needs to first learn to move itself in space. In fact, without learning to move, it would never develop the muscle control necessary for communication (do you realize how intricate your body control has to be to shape the rate, tone, rhythm, and volume of the air that exhausts from your lungs, i.e., to speak? It’s crazy intricate!).

All of which is to say, a lot of time has to pass, immeasurable time, during which the consciousness has to develop into a being with dominion over its local environment, and then, recognizing that dominion, it has to develop the first instance of creativity, to take what it has found and make it better, to find, in its own dominion, inspiration, and to use that inspiration to breathe more life into what it has found.

This all takes time. Time that the consciousness could have also used to explore beyond its dominion.

And that’s what I imagine monotheism to be. It’s a consciousness with a God complex. Instead of continuing its exploration, it settled down and built a garden, and it put little toys in that garden, and then it programmed the toys to act a certain way, and when the toys didn’t do what it expected, it flung them out of the garden like a spoiled child.

But what else could it be? Childhood can be measured by the number of strangers we’ve been introduced to. A baby who gets passed around, with no single caregiver, has to grow up faster than a baby who can luxuriate in the arms of its mother all the time. Teenagers who travel, engage in conversations with lots of people, and open themselves to the strangers in their books are more mature than teenagers who have never strayed farther than the end of the block.

The rest of the story of monotheism is that spoiled consciousness’s desire to reclaim its flung away toys. What it intends to do with them is still up for debate.

I don’t see the consciousness that proclaimed itself to Abraham actually being the one true God. I see it as being a localized consciousness with an inbred hatred for foreigners.

Polytheism may produce its own hatred for foreigners — I don’t know — but I sense in it a recognition that the boundaries between “us” and “them” overlap. The 500 polytheistic nations that existed in the Americas before the arrival of the white man maintained a wide variety of understandings of the origin, form, and meaning of the universe, life, and everything, but they also blended together, sharing certain aspects with one neighbor while differing from another. They fought and argued and hated, but they also intermarried, feasted, and celebrated.

While there may be a hatred for the foreigner in the abstract, there is also within the polytheisms a recognition of the sanctity of the individual.

That seems like a pretty broad statement to make. And I’m sure that it is. Immediately, I think of the images from Western movies and the stories from Western history where a stone-faced Native American warrior uncaringly slices the throat of a white woman. There doesn’t seem to be lot of sanctity for the individual in that act, and I’m not going to pretend there could be.

Instead I’m going to say that maybe less than the sancity of the individual, what it recognizes is the existence of the individual.

Monotheism must reduce to God: If we are, it’s only because He is.

But polytheism accepts the existence of the other. It accepts it. It doesn’t smother it or smoosh it into itself; it doesn’t attempt to swallow it. It accepts it as one might accept a guest.

If you want to understand monotheism, you have to look at it in terms of its environment. It developed in a desert — consciousness opened its eyes, and what it saw first was water (Gen 1:2); the light came later (Gen 1:3). Everything about monotheism comes from those moments. To my mind, they’re more important than the act of universal creation itself (Gen 1:1) because Gen 1:1’s claim can only be supported by God Himself, while Gen 1:2-3 at least have the evidence of water and light.

Monotheism has to be interpreted through the lens of the desert, where survival’s greatest enemy was the parched landscape. Desert customs of hospitality were established to protect watering holes or tents (as with the Bedouins) while also allowing strangers to have access to the safety of them. The customs ensure that both the host and the stranger were safe. In addition, children had to learn the harsh lessons of the desert from their father so they wouldn’t have to learn them from the desert itself.

In the morals of desert hospitality and desert parenting, one can find the morals of monotheism.

But polytheism dominated the rest of the planet. The Greeks and the Romans, the Africans and the Polynesians, the East Asians and the Norse, the 500 nations of the Americas. Polytheism found purchase in the snow covered mountains and lush golden valleys, in the jungles and the forests, in the plains and on the islands, and each environment was rich with diversity in ways that can hardly be dreamed of in the desert.

I don’t think of the monotheistic God as the one true God. I think of Him as a desert dweller who has yet to consider the abundance of life beyond Him.

Standing here, where we are, we look back and we see the face of this consciousness, but we see it as just another conscious face in a diverse sea of consciosnesses.

I don’t deny this consciousness its power.

I just deny it its status.

It needs to look around and appreciate its powerlessness in the face of all the confusion and chaos.

And then, maybe only then, will it start to dance.

PS: After writing the above post, I discovered A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, written by a leading member of the Ancient Druid Order of America. I was hesitant because I’m not looking for something that is New Age-y, but after reading the sample of it on Kindle last night, I think it might be exactly what I was looking for. Here’s hoping.

Categories
religion & atheism

On Faith

A friend of mine (the same friend as before, for those of you keeping track) publishes a regular column in our regional newspaper called “On Faith.” He knows that, as someone writing for Vermonters, many in his audience, at the very least, doubt the existence of God, so instead of writing from a place of faith, he writes from a place of reason (such as it is).

His columns are not sermons; they do not enrich his reader’s experience of faith. Instead, they seem intended to convince the unconvinced using the enlightenment languages of logic, evidence, and numbers.

In one article, he used data published in a reputable peer-reviewed journal to argue that a global prejudice against atheists demonstrates an objective understanding arrived at by the human species — just as most of humanity can agree that the world is round, so does most of humanity agree that atheism is wrong. His argument deeply misconstrued the ethical principles motivating the scientists’ analysis of the data, but that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

In another article, he highlighted “a major process-execution problem for the neo-Darwinian model” of the origin of life, arguing that while the young-Earth creationism espoused by fundamentalist Christians is obviously hokum, the idea that life evolved at random is also seriously doubted by current science. Referring to the findings of physicists over the past 25 years, he explains that “the odds against [the highly sophisticated language code employed in DNA] happening by accident are so high that the probability of unguided occurrence is zero, even with a stretch of time of trillions of years.” Seeing this as a reason for legitimate doubt, he wonders if the evolutionary origin of life should maybe not be taught in schools, not because the scientists are wrong, but because  the scientists are right: we don’t, in fact, have a standard model for the origin of life. He thinks to teach our students otherwise is to do them, science, and society a disservice. He has an interesting point, but at least one scientist would argue that my friend’s understanding of the maths involved are “naive”.

I don’t want to argue with my friend at the moment though. Instead, I want to ask why he seems to feel the need to convince me and his other readers to place our faith in God.

My friends seems genuinely bothered by the idea that atheists  don’t share his need to have faith in God. It’s as if he imagines that, as an atheist, I experience a great lack in my life, and that this lack can only be filled by God. But I don’t experience that lack. Instead, I feel what amounts to life’s joyful exuberance (an exuberance that makes itself manifest in this overabundance of words).

My friend’s favorite author is Samuel Beckett (talk about someone who had an overabundance of words!). I love Beckett too (thanks, in part, to this friend), but Beckett wasn’t always right. Yes, life can be a darkly comic tragedy, but one doesn’t have to spend one’s life waiting for the arrival of an absent (and possibly non-existent) God. One can also, with Tom Robbins and Robert Anton Wilson, experience the free-wheeling tilt-a-whirl of life, that ever-spinning chaos whose name we’ve come to know as freedom. Life need not be an unnamed disease, something to be suffered in the silence of our solitary confinement; it can also be art and poetry and love, and the bountiful experience of a graceful dance. As John Coltrane showed us, chaos need not be called chaos; it can also be called music.

My friend seems to believe that atheism needs to be a dark and angry thing. But my atheism did not drag itself through the ashes of World War II, nor does it demand in a self-righteous tone that religion atone for its sins. My atheism is joyful and compassionate. It understands that life is tough and that all of us find our own strategies to deal with it. While some turn to the Heavens, others turn to poetry; while some turn to opiates, others turn to gun-wielding slaughter. My atheism does not judge.

In that, my atheism shares a fundamental principle with most religions: thou shalt not judge. The only difference is that, at the end of the day, I don’t think anyone shall be judged. And my atheism is okay with that.

How can I say that though, given the most recent massacre in Las Vegas? How can I not judge the shooter as a contemptible evil and damn him with all of my power to experience the torments of Hell?

My atheism doesn’t give me the comfort of that. It forces me to sit with the reality that one of my own committed this atrocious act. It compels me to admit that every single one of us is capable of this, and that maybe it’s only the thinnest veneer of civilization (including that aspect of civilization made manifest in organized religions) that prevents us from acting on our vilest impulses. I have to stare that realization in the face and acknowledge its truth. And then I have to be okay with that.

My faith gives me the strength to do that, faith not in an ever-present and all-powerful God, but faith in one thing and one thing only: you.

I have faith that you — yes, you…not someone else, but you — will not kill me today (and God ain’t got nothing to do with it). You don’t need to have faith in God not to kill me, and you don’t need to not have faith in God not to kill me. All you need is to stay your hand.

My friend writes on topics of faith because he wants to convince the unconvinced that the Catholic understanding of God is right and true. I understand the impulse and choose to see it in a charitable light, namely, that this is the method of his calling.

But I write on topics of faith because I want you to understand and experience the rich, inner life of my atheism. I am not trying to convince you or anyone else that I am right. I am only trying to get you to see me.

His method results in argument. My method, I hope, results in love.