Áve

"O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell

Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. Amen."

With the Holy Spirit and Power
Your voice echoes in the Church
Now shaking
Now shivering
Flanked by aged pillars of flesh
Now rising
Now shrieking
The Host unmoving
All approving
Now tearing
Now rending
Your robes descending
"O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell"
Now burning
Now writhing
Our seats aflame
"O my Jesus"
"O my Jesus"
Save us from the fires of this ecstasy
"Forgive us our sins"
We cannot undo them
Save us from the fires of this ecstasy
ora pro nobis peccatoribus
now and at the hour of our death

Thoughts on love and Jesus

Those who say love should be "properly oriented" know little about love or its potential.  Augustine thought love should be oriented to the one unchangeable being, ie God, for all other things are subject to change and therefore lacking in perfection.  But he failed to realize that love demonstrates its true power in being directed at the changeable. 

"He demonstrated his love in this: that while we were still sinners..."

But love was betrayed by those later writers who made a mockery of this demonstration by having Jesus "ascend into the clouds" while his disciples stood gaping at love raised to the level of an abstraction.  His followers were left to love Love. 

From love to Love

Those who say love should be "properly oriented" know little of love or love's potential.  Augustine believed those things which are subject to change must lack in perfection and therefore love should be oriented to the one unchangeable being: God.  But he failed to realize that love demonstrates its true power in being directed at and sustaining the changeable:

"God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us."

But the love the thirteenth apostle spoke of (a love that in order to count for anything in death, had to first live) was betrayed by those later writers who made a mockery of this "demonstration" by having Jesus "ascend into the clouds" while his disciples stood gaping at love raised to the level of an abstraction.  The whole world was left to love Love.

The birth of natural religion

There are many different religious traditions, and they all hold their beliefs regarding the universe, human creatures, the meaning of life, etc., to be more or less correct.

Many of these religious traditions are quite ancient. Even though they presume to be divinely guided, the recipients of revelation, witnesses of miracles, etc., the only evidence they have is the testimony of others, passed on from generation to generation, and anecdotal stories that seem to support their assumptions. 

What if starting today you choose to set aside the old traditions about deities and spirits, and look at the world with these beliefs bracketed or unassumed? Would the gods or God make an appearance at all? Without your former presuppositions, would you find even a hint of the old gods in the world around you? 

This is a challenge to those who have received their beliefs from others.  What do you see if you use your own eyes?

Against the Christian nihilist

Against the accusation that non-believers are inconsistent by enjoying life rather than despair that their lives are meaningless without God or an afterlife.

Recently a friend challenged me thus: "Do you not act inconsistently, or not understand the full implications of  atheism, when you fail to appreciate the import of a life that has no meaning, that will cease to be forever, whose works will all come to naught?  It seems to me that atheists should be a much more despairing group of people."

This, as I have mentioned elsewhere, is a very religious understanding of atheism.  It already takes God as its starting point, a ground from which to make comparisons.  For believers in God atheism is a negative, a subtraction.  For non-believers it is no such thing, for there is nothing to subtract their perspective from.  One must already have the existence of a God in order for his non-existence to draw the meaning of life away.  For this reason one should be careful to see through the supposed argument to its root, what the interrogator is really saying: "I can't imagine life without God.  My life would have no meaning without God, therefore yours shouldn't either."  But this says little more than for this one, God has meaning.  I can accept the first part of this argument, but not the second.  I find it strange that a Christian would try to convince me life is meaningless because I do not believe in eternal life or a deity.  In essence they are trying to convince me my hermeneutic of death is mistaken and that a proper atheist interpretation would see death as a meaning-vacuum, or a meaning-destroyer, and thus my life should consistently reflect the implications of this meaninglessness, i.e. I should hold a nihilistic attitude toward life.  Fundamentally then we see the idea of God simultaneously sets up the possibility of a thoroughgoing nihilism.

Regarding death, even a cursory glance at the writings of antiquity reveals alternative views to the one held by my skeptical friend.  For example, Lucretius: "Do you not know that in real death there will be no second you, living to lament your death and standing by your corpse?"  From Seneca: "Life itself is neither a good nor an evil: life is where good or evil find a place, depending on how you make it for them."  And from Montaigne (in the guise of Nature): "Truly imagine how much less bearable for Man, and how much more painful, would be a life which lasted for ever rather than the life which I have given you.  If you did not have death you would curse me, for ever, for depriving you of it."

Why must I view death in the morose and nihilistic way my friend was convinced I should see it?  Why not rather "eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (St. Paul)?  What I know is that I live.  I have this life right before me.  My friend, however, does not have even this evidence in support of her beliefs and ideas.  If there is inconsistency, surely it lies with the notions of a God or eternal life, things that cannot be found anywhere in the world or nature, but merely as two of many ideas regarding supernatural matters. One might add, why are there not more Christians taking out full page ads in the paper, paying for multiple blocks of radio and television time, to warn people of eternal hell (no matter how the host of its cultured defenders would like to interpret it)?  Perhaps the charge of inconsistency could function here as a mirror into which my friend should gaze intently, and with care.

Ὁ θάνατος οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς· τὸ γὰρ διαλυθὲν ἀναισθητεῖ· τὸ δ’ ἀναισθητοῦν οὐδὲν πρὸς ἡμᾶς

(Death is nothing to us.  For what has been dissolved feels nothing.  While what feels nothing is nothing to us.- Epicurus)

Aphorisms 2

5

 

Our basic starting point is the world. Previously we have been told our basic starting point is something other than this. The world is all we know. We are born, grow, and decline within it. By “world” one might think I mean the planet Earth. While it is true I shall never leave it, the planet itself would not be possible without those forces and spaces that exist outside it, act upon it, and situate it. For this reason our spiritual orientation should not be narrowly focussed on the Earth, but the COSMOS. By “focussed on” I do not mean in any way to seize upon something, but rather to open oneself up to possibility. 

 

6

 

Everything we need comes from the world. All sustenance, joys, meaning, truths, all revelations and visions, have always come from the world. If this were not so we would not know it. Even the gods must use the voice of Nature to speak: in visions perceived by brains, words, rumblings, lights, plants, fire, or even swirling tea leaves. All belong to Nature. Without the world we hear nothing.

 

7

To perceive we must direct ourselves to the world. The world speaks to us in a multitude of ways. Some ways of perceiving are direct while others are indirect. To see an oak tree is a more direct perception than to hear a description of it from a friend. But to hear of an oak tree from a friend is more direct than to learn of a general category such as “tree” from a textbook or lecture. The particular vision of a thing is always preferred to an abstraction.

 

8

 

Ninety-nine percent of religious doctrine is abstraction.

 

 

Aphorisms

1

When we start with the question, “Is there a God?” we already presume too much. It’s as if an answer has been given before the question was even asked. On what basis do we ask the question? Where did this idea come from: God? It was offered to us. It didn’t come from ourselves. It was ready-made. Have we not grown weary of believing, without reflection, in the ready-made? 

2

Kant opened his famous essay on the Enlightenment with these words: “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit” (Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity). He continues: “Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen” (Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another). The religious, on the other hand, think that accepting the ready-made on faith is one of the greatest virtues: “Lean not on your own understanding, but trust in God with all your heart” (Proverbs 3:5). Religion is the antithesis of the Enlightenment i.e. the antithesis of human emergence.

3

The basic starting point of any spiritual investigation is human experience. To be even more clear: the basic starting point is individual experience. Neither my friend’s experience, nor the experience of a man living in the wilderness two thousand years ago teaches me anything about the shape my own experience should take. They are never prescriptive. At best they offer demonstrations of various possibilities. Even here these possibilities are often marked by some previous imposition of religious structure (which is by nature a delimitation).

4

The vast majority of religious adherents never have profound spiritual experiences. They go to mosque, synagogue, church, or temple and rehearse the same ritualistic motions day after day, week after week. This monotonous rehearsal often makes up the greatest part of religious life. The multitude is content to allow the true spiritual experience be the special privilege of the religious founder, the religious genius. They think he or she is exceptional by nature when in fact the religious genius has an exceptional will.

 

 

On Religious Confidence

Meaning without God

As an atheist I've been asked how life can have ultimate meaning without God. This is quite a common question. For some of my nonfaith affiliated readers this will seem like a truly bizarre question. Does it suggest that people without faith lead meaningless lives, or at the very least, are simply fooling themselves about the things they find meaningful? The obvious answer is no, of course nonbelievers lead meaningful and fulfilling lives. Whether they're fooling themselves or not is really beside the point because you'd have to have a true ground of meaning outside the individual in order to compare.  The question secretly sneaks God back into the equation for that reason. The atheist believes we create and sustain our own meaning (or the cultural/social meaning we take as our own from our context or the contexts of others). This meaning is tested by experience and reason, shared and shaped by the vicissitudes of life and time.

If believers would take a moment to reflect they'd see they're in a similar situation. When they feel that God ultimately guarantees the meaning of life or whatever, they too are dealing with an idea (no less culturally/socially mediated in most cases). So when they say that God guarantees meaning, the hidden supplement (that indeed must remain hidden) is that the idea of God guarantees meaning. It must have this meaning because believers have no more access to this supposed ground than anyone else. Indeed they take it on faith. The difference between the believer and the unbeliever is that the believer insists his idea has the status of a real object-person whereas the unbeliever recognises her values for what they are, i.e idea(l)s, and may or may not choose to argue why such idea(l)s are reasonable considering X. The believer can also argue about the reasonableness of his position but he has already made the categorical error of confusing idea with object, potential with actual, when really he's in the same boat as the rest of us.

For this reason the question "How can you have ultimate meaning without God" is illegitimate. It's force is only felt by the one who has already made his idea a god.

My soul

When I was young I thought I had a soul
But what is a soul?
I used to think it was a spirit inside me
Descartes thought the pineal gland was its seat
I thought it was in my brain at least
If you lose your arm do you lose your soul?
(Of course not that's silly)
But if your brain is destroyed, what then?
Lights out
Then something happened
-God died-
Part of me died too
I thought it was my soul
When God dies the soul dies with God
Was I an automaton?
(A mechanical monkey)
How terrible I thought and I cried
"I'm like one of those crying statues
I'm like my dad's tractor losing oil from its seams
I'm a heartless tinman rusted from crying"
(That's a hint by the way)

I found my soul again
It wasn't at all what I thought it was
Can you believe it?
It was staring me right in the face
-It was my body-
What the hell?
The same guy who was the first to announce
-God died-
Also said this:

"I," you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith - your body and its great reason: that does not say "I", but does "I."

Ok ok if I switch "I" with "soul" what would I have:

"Soul," you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith - your body and its great reason: that does not say "soul", but does "soul."

Jesus Christ he's on to something!
"Your body... that does not say soul
But does soul!"
He who has ears to hear man
All this time "soul" had been a breath of stale air
I choked on it every time it left my lungs
I said it like a stuck record player:
Soul, soul, soul, soul, soul, soul, click
I said it so many times I mixed it up with my saying it
(Like: God, God, God, God, God, God, burp)
But my body was doing it
Oh was it ever doing it
I am it you see?
Why else would God resurrect a body?
(Ok so they had that part right)

These days I prefer to use "I" instead of "soul"
But they're really the same thing
They always have been actually
When I was young I was taught not to really like my body
"I" was a sinner
My body liked sin you see
(Did it ever)
This started all the confusion though
It created a fake wall between soul and body
(Soul, soul, soul, soul, soul, gag)
"It's got to be something different than my body!
I mean, look how many times I can say it
Bad body!  Go to your room
(With pleasure)
Soul you sit over there
Body you shut up and sit over there
Don't you dare look at soul like that you dirty body
(What, like an amputated limb?)"
What a lot of hooey!

It's built into us you see
When we're little kids our parents take us to learn stuff
Stuff they were taught when they were kids
We don't have a choice
We grow up thinking it's real
Words like "soul" refer to real things
(Well, as real as something that's invisible and can't be found anywhere)
Ok but they just confused things
I can forgive them for teaching me stuff they thought was real

I like the old way of saying things like:
"The boat went down and 30 souls were lost"
Or:
"S.O.S- Save Our Souls!"
(Nobody in Church has a sign with S.O.S on it)
Or:
"I went down to the kitchen and not a soul was there"
You see? 
"Soul" just means "person" or "body"
We've always known it probably
When we're not pretending it's something else

Dan Barker- On losing faith

On the one hand I was happy with the direction and fulfillment of my Christian life; on the other hand, my intellectual doubts were sprouting all over. Faith and reason began a war within me. And it kept escalating. I would cry out to God for answers, and none would come. Like the lonely heart who keeps waiting for the phone to ring, I kept trusting that God would someday come through. He never did.

The only proposed answer was faith, and I gradually grew to dislike the smell of that word. I finally realized that faith is a cop-out, a defeat—an admission that the truths of religion are unknowable through evidence and reason. It is only indemonstrable assertions that require the suspension of reason, and weak ideas that require faith. Biblical contradictions became more and more discrepant, and apologist arguments became more and more absurd. When I finally discarded faith, things
became more and more clear.

But don't imagine that this was an easy process. It was like tearing my whole frame of reality to pieces, ripping to shreds the fabric of meaning and hope, betraying the values of existence. It hurt badly. It was like spitting on my mother, or like throwing one of my children out a window. It was sacrilege. All of my bases for thinking and values had to be restructured. Adding to that inner conflict was the outer conflict of reputation. Did I really want to discard the respect I had so carefully built over so many years with so many important people? But even so, I couldn't be distracted from the questions that had come to the forefront. Finally, at the far end of my theological migration, I was forced to admit that there is no basis for believing that a god exists, except faith, and faith was not satisfactory to me.  I did not lose my faith—I gave it up purposely. The motivation that drove me into the ministry—to know and speak the truth—is the same that drove me out.

I lost faith in faith.

On mystical experience

"Everything I have written seems like straw."  Thomas Aquinas

After a mystical experience while saying mass on or around 6 December 1273.

Fred Phelps

Fred Phelps, dead at age 84.  You hated fags.  How queer.

Merry Christmas, or What's in a Greeting?

It seems Christmas has become thoroughly.. multicultural. The debate over whether one should say "happy holidays" or not should finally come to an end. One should have no more difficulty saying "Merry Christmas" than Happy Thursday or Merry Wednesday, though hopefully with a greater twinkle in the eye.

A friendly detractor may say, yes but hasn't Christmas always been multicultural?  To this I must agree, but add that it was multicultural in a different kind of way.  Christmas has always been multicultural precisely because Christians have always been multicultural.  The multiculturalism I speak of today is different.  Now not only Christians celebrate Christmas, but non-Christians too, and these in far greater numbers than ever before.  It has led to the now common sighting of the little white and red signs in front of people's houses or on their cars which say "Keep Christ in Christmas".  There would be no need to make such declarations unless already Christmas was seen as existing outside the circle of Christianity.  How odd this is considering "Christ" is already in Christmas, literally forming part of the word.  

This marks a transition I have perhaps not so subtly referred to above when I use the greetings "Happy Thursday" and "Merry Wednesday".  For some time now these words have lost their religious connotations for us, except for a very few pagans perhaps.   Wednesday of course was named for the Norse god Odin or the Saxon Wodan, the All-Father.  Thursday was named for one of his sons, the god of thunder Thor:  Wodan's-day and Thor's-day respectively.  We may greet one another quite cheerfully with a "happy Thursday" and think nothing of it.  There are many cultural/religious artifacts that we use in this way.  So the term "Christmas" has slipped toward this usage, demonstrated by the insistence of Christians that we keep the "Christ" in Christmas, as a kind of resistance to the transition that is already taking place. 

The insistence in so many schools that we refrain from saying "Merry Christmas" or have Christmas concerts is a sign therefore of a number of things.  First, interestingly it is a sign that schools are colluding with Christians to keep Christmas a religious holiday (and thus not a celebration appropriate for all their students), this despite the availability of a number of Christmas symbols that are capable of carrying both religious and secular meaning almost entirely in either direction.  Think of Santa Claus, the Christmas tree, gift-giving... all of these can be thought of in terms completely unrelated to the Advent of Christ, and in fact are thought of this way by many many people.  Following this point, schools themselves therefore restrict our freedom to define Christmas in whatever way we choose, already naming for us the meaning of Christmas (i.e. it has religious meaning).  This is similar to arguing that Santa Claus can only be white or Canadian etc., failing to take into account the symbolic givenness of the season and the signs of its presence.  Christmas, unchained from a specific cultural interpretation, becomes not devoid of meaning, but free in its openness to us.  Instead of shying away from its celebration in schools, now may be the time to ask each beautiful little child what it means to them and their families.  It is precisely in that chorus of small voices that we might hear the melody and meaning of Christmas emerge. 

The Prophet Dead, He the Wretch

 Rest in peace Harold Camping.  You deluded old man.  You instigator of broken lives and hope.  Your guilty conscience will bother you no more...

Marion on silence before God

"Moreover, not keeping silent concerning God can be taken in several ways: (a) First, obviously, it can be taken in the sense of pious chattering, or supposedly such, since it often joins rampant heresy with invalidity; we simply mention this for the record."

Ha ha!  I'm still laughing...

Derrida on Negative Theology

"Negative theology-> to record the referential transcendence of language: to say God, such as he is, beyond his images, beyond this idol that being still can be, beyond what is said, seen, or known of him; to respond to the true name of God, to the name to which God corresponds beyond the name that we know him by or hear.  It is to this end that the negative procedure refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributes.  It does so in the name of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice."

Sauf le nom

Sam Harris contra Theism

(He doesn't demolish it.. but he puts a dent in it with the help of some older critiques)
Update: We're down to 6.6 million under the age of 5 deaths per year now, or 18,000 deaths a day UNICEF/WHO.

The question

"The question whether we believe, and as believers truly know God, and know God truly, is far too radical and shattering for us to be able to direct it seriously to ourselves." 

Karl Barth, CD 2.1

On God

The starting point of our theological investigation is not whether there is a definitive proof for the existence of God (there can be no such empirical proof), but allowing that God exists, what can be definitively said about such a being.  We find, apart from the formal and thoroughly socialized subjective fantasies and wishful thinking of a great many people, that there isn't a hell of a lot.  We find the god of the churches almost undeniably does not exist.  This has been realized in the West for almost 300 years, and this by theologians themselves!  Where it hasn't been realized one continues to find the most powerful illusion at work, propagated by laypeople and theological upstarts, pastors and other parasitical people of "good intention" (at least initially), not to mention a programme of systemic indoctrination in the form of emotive collective music, sermons, and what amounts to religious self-help literature.

The strongest "proof" this God doesn't exist: He hasn't saved the Christians from Christianity.