God must cry
Someone asked me, “What’s the deal with your blog’s name?”
1. Most people assume religion is either sad or angry. When I read the Bible, especially the stories of Jesus, I see so much laughter there that most Christians seem to miss because they’ve got holy blinders on.
2. When I look at the world, I see too much beauty and creativity. If God did make it all, then he could’ve made it all boring and samey (tofu!) but chose to make it like this.
3. My favorite kind of humor is big man/little man stuff. God “must” is kind of a joke in itself, especially when we mean it.
But some days, for whatever reason, I’m not laughing. Today is one of those. I read a bit out of Hosea and Micah and it’s like looking in a mirror. We take so much, and turn it into so little.
I’m certain of nothing, but as sure as I am that God must laugh, that’s how sure I am that God must cry.
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WARNING!
This is a journal. As in, personal opinions. As in, NOT the official stance of anybody but me. As in, NOT my final answer on anything. As in read at your own risk, your mileage may vary.
** the universe evinces neither affect nor intellect **
You’re using middle eastern magical texts as if their introverted mythos and androcentric understanding of human nature weren’t too puerile to contribute to a planet-wide ethos. Neither nature nor humanity “say” anything about a superordinate, supernatural realm populated by divine law givers.
Nature is silent. There is no concept of truth in nature. (Indeed, there are no concepts in nature whatsoever.)
Nature is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Neither a source of comfort (natural theology) nor a source of despair (existentialism). Both rooted in the same mistaken presupposition that “meaning” can be found by searching the heavens for gods or quarrying humanity for a moral law.
Religions belong to cultures embedded in nature. And *cultures* are our distinctive human-all-too-human handiwork. Religions are obsolete, unnecessary cultural artifacts.
Any specific religion reenacts and institutionalizes a cultic myth. It gets spread through custom and imitation, financially supported by mores and law, and enforced by intimidation and violence.
Get away from xian mythology which (like the other big-4 monotheisms zoroastrianism, post-exilic judaism, and islam) posits a moralized universal order which never did exist.
All the *meaning* to be found there derives from imperial propaganda belonging to a time about 5,500 years ago when the very first violent yoking together of disparate cultures occurred in what is now Iraq.
You heirs of a dead Sumerian misogynistic fiction still believe in ‘his’ androcentric, moralized universe, now gone empty.
What nonsense. Limited in history. Ignorant of the past. And of a future which can recapture what was best in our own western artistic and scientific inheritance from Greece and Rome — joy in life itself, just as it is, despite its pain and brevity. That stance toward reality which Nietzsche called ‘dionysian.’
bipolar2
Comment by bipolar2 | July 24, 2008
I used to be as certain as you seem to be. Now I’m more comfortable with tension and ambiguity. To have it all figured out (again) would be a load off my mind, but I’ve been there, and it wasn’t much fun.
If I’m reading it correctly, Nietzsche believed the best way was a balance *between* Apollo and Dionysus.
Comment by revsmilez | July 24, 2008
** holy myth taken **
Freud wrote, “If we cannot see clearly, let us at least see clearly what is unclear.”
Certainty is a non-attainable goal in any branch of learning in which empirical evidence can be brought to bear on the truth of hypotheses. History is one such area.
Making certainty a necessary condition for knowledge leads to a seeming paradox that there can be no empirical knowledge. Does this mean, following Feyerabend, that “anything goes”? Of course not.
It simply won’t do to imagine that some sort of irremediable “ambiguity” overwhelms our ability to demonstrate that xianity is a human cultural artifact whose core mythos makes false claims about physical reality, time, and human nature.
Now if xian mythos errs when compared with scientific knowledge, does this induce some “tension”? I should think so. The sort of tension that drives school boards at the state level in Kansas and Florida to force instruction of xian myth as if it were on a par with empirical knowledge.
You see — I am not “certain” in the illegitimate sense in which you employ the word when referring to historical claims. Nor do I understand your conditions of “ambiguity” and “tension” to be anything other than pettifoggery and special pleading for doublethink about xian fideism and empirical truth.
As a note: Nietzsche was never a static thinker — his opinions in The Birth of Tragedy he took up again and again. What philosopher has ever been more relentless *against* himself? The single best expression of what became of the “dionysian” appears in Twilight of the Idols in section 59, entitled “Goethe.” Kaufmann’s discussion in Nietzsche (4th ed 1974) of the later philosophy needs to be consulted.
bipolar2
Comment by bipolar2 | July 26, 2008
I was sure I was right, and that others were wrong. I was sure it was my job to run around correcting people. Carrying my Bible, wearing Jesus slogans on my shirts and hats, seizing any opportunity to explain to the poor lost fools why they were wrong.
I discovered my conversations, weren’t. They were lectures where I set up straw men and knocked them down. When I finally started listening, I discovered that my atheist, agnostic, or Muslim friends weren’t willful idiots after all. Now, I try to learn from them.
Thanks for the note on Nietzsche. I’ll see if they’ve got Kaufman in our library.
Comment by revsmilez | July 27, 2008