Category Archives: fundamentalism

Wrestling with God

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One of my favorite contemporary novelists is Marilynne Robinson.  Housekeeping is my favorite of he novels and it has been made into a movie with the same name.  It was a wonderful movie and the novel is even better.   She has also written Gilead and in that novel she made the following observation:

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us. (my emphasis)

It is the “spaces between us” that intrigues me and compels me.   Human culture is the contrivance that unites us, it is the “veil we spin to hide the void” (Norman Brown) but spirituality is a quest to delve deeper, to penetrate that very necessary and essential fiction of our enculturation and dance, from time to time, with the emptiness.  I insist that it is in this “emptiness” that we find our Source.  Or, better stated it is in the wrestling with that emptiness, i.e. “wrestling with God” that we find our Source.  Technically, it is not even “human culture” that unites us, it is the emptiness.  Very Zen, huh?

Tebowing explained

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Have you heard of Tebow-ing?  Rabbi Joshua Hess (see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-joshua-hess) defines it as “kneeling to pray even though it has nothing to do with what is going on around you.”  And, of course, I make reference to the ceremonial prayer in the end zone that Quarterback Tim Tebow makes after scoring a touchdown.  I personally think other religious expressions should follow suit.  Perhaps we could see a brief communion service in the end zone, or perhaps a feigned circumcision, perhaps a few strokes of a Tai Chi ritual, or even the sacrifice of a goat.  Actually, I hope that eventually this non-sense will be forbidden and anytime piety overcomes the football hero and he forgets and trots out his ceremony, the referee would drop a flag, and instead of hand gestures to describe the offense, he would quickly kneel, and looking up to heaven as if in prayer would intone, “15 yard penalty on No. 15, Tebow-ing, penalty to be assessed on following kick off.”

Seriously, I’m glad that Tebow has the gift of faith and I hope this faith continues as he matures.  And as he matures, I hope he will realize that ostentatious displays of piety are just that—ostentation—“Hey, everyone look at me!  Not only did I score a touchdown, but I am pious.”  Now, I’m sure this is what going on.  I know.  Been there and done that…..well, I mean I have trotted out the ostentatious piety though certainly not after having scored a touchdown!  I conjecture that Tebow “wears” his faith right now.  In time to come it will become more personal and he will not have to trot it out when it is completely unrelated to the context.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali again

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The following posting is in reference to material from the blog posting of 11/3/1, “Paean to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.”

When Ali was five, her grandmother orchestrated a “female circumcision” on her, seizing the opportunity provided by Ali’s father’s imprisonment.  Her father had opposed the procedure.  First, it is interesting to note that her father opposed this procedure and was able to prevent it when in the household even though it was a cultural/religious mandate.  I’m curious how he could have done that but am pleased that he did.    Second, can you imagine the balls of that grandmother????   Wow!  In some perverted fashion, she was a version of a “women’s libber” in that she acted contrary to the specific wishes of Ali’s father, a man. (And, this compliment is intended to be wry.  I’m not approving of anything that beastly woman ever did.)   But, of course, she did this in subservience to a “higher truth” which was the unequivocal mandate of the Koran.  It must have been an interesting moral dilemma for her but “moral dilemmas” are more easily resolved if you have a command from On High that you are obeying.

BUT, can you imagine having swallowed any cultural mandate or decree of Holy Writ to the point that you would brutalize a five year old girl, your own granddaughter?   And the brutality was not only physical, but sexual!  What a warped sense of personal and sexual identity it would give any girl.  No wonder that women in cultures of that sort are so subservient.   I would hope that if “God” should ever weigh on me to commit any deed so offensive to basic common sense and contrary to any basic human decency, I would readily tell him to “Fuck off.”  But, or course we routinely read/hear/see in our media gross examples of human stupidity in blind obedience to “God” speaking to them.

I think that it would behoove each of us to just take a time-out anytime “The Spirit is upon me” or “God is speaking to me.”  If we have any thoughts of this sort, we should be given pause for in these communications often lies the portal to gross stupidity and even brutality.  But in that moment, the “old brain”, that reptilian brain…..dare I say “Sataaaan”….is clamouring in our brain and we have a tendency to “know” that we are receiving the truth.  But, even if so, what harm would it do to pause and perhaps get feedback.

And I do think that each of us can say on occasion that “God is speaking to me” or “The Spirit of God is upon me”—I don’t doubt this in the least.  BUT, does it do any harm to give pause and consider the message?  I wish God would impose an early-warning system in our neurological depths and that anytime He was about to speak to us, we would hear…and perhaps see….a “WARNING” message like we see on our car’s dashboard when the engine is overheating.The issue here is meta-cognition.  So often it is lacking.  So often it is turned off when cultural mandates, i.e. the Word of God, is involved.  And I think God is then insulted, that we feel we have to turn off our brain when he is “speaking” to us or even when he is speaking to us.  God is not stupid.  But we often are.

I close with Goethe who in Faust noted, “They call is Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Paean to Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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I would like to recommend two books by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (about her rejection of Islam and flight to Holland to avoid an arranged marriage) and Nomad (about her move to the U.S., under threat of death from the Muslim community).  These two books are biographical as they recount her experience of the oppression of women in her native Muslim culture and the identity crisis she experienced as she moved to the West and began to verbalize and write re the tyranny of Islam, especially with regard to women.

Ali was born in Somaliland in 1969.  Her father was a political dissident and while he was jailed because of his political activism her grandmother seized the opportunity to defy Ali’s father wishes and have Ali “circumcised” when she was age 5.  She portrays this brutal practice as only a reflection of the brutal tyranny of the Muslim faith as a whole, a religion which desperately seeks to cling to traditional, tribal culture even as modernity closes in on them.  (I think she recognizes that Islam in the West is often less tyrannical but she argues that the tyranny is inherent in the faith itself, Western version or Middle-eastern version.)

I would like to share a few excerpts from Nomad:   “All my life I have been a nomad.  I have wandered, rootless.  Every place I have settle in, I have been forced to flee; every certainty I have been taught, I have cast aside….Every change of country threw me unprepared into whole new languages and sharply different habits of mind.  Each time, I made a child’s fornlorn, often vain attempts to adapt.”  She described her dilemma when she was in the West as “teetering between the clear ideals of the Enlightenmend…and my submission to the equally clear dictates of Allah that I feared to disobey.”  She described the temption to cave-in, to surrender to her cultural introjections, noting, “I suffered many moments of weakness when I too entertained the idea of giving up my needs and sacrificing my personal happiness for the peace of mind of my parents, siblings, and clan.”  And she summarized the problems of Islam as deriving from the belief that, “Muhammed is considered infallible…and all (the Koran’s) commands must be obeyed without question.  This makes Muslim’s vulnerable to indoctrination in a way that followers of other faiths are not.”

I deeply admire the courage Ali has had to step forth, at the risk of her own life. to pursue self-expression and self-dignity.  It takes nerves of steel to observe personally how deadly indoctrination is and dare to question the basic assumptions of one’s culture.  We can attempt a journey of this sort much more easily than she can as we usually…though not always…can do so without the threat of harm.  Our only risk is a lot of anxiety, perhaps a tad of depression, and guilt from no longer subscribing to the tribal god/s.

A couple of footnotes here:  a)  She rejected the arranged marriage by fleeing to Holland and there she began to get a Western education.  She even became a member of the Dutch Parliament for a few years before death threats forced her to resign and flee the country.  2)  Though Ali is a flaming liberal with regard to her native country, when she moved to the U.S. she quickly obtained employment at the American Enterprise Institute, a very conservative think-tank.  She noted in Nomad…I think…that she had some ambivalence about this decision but decided to take what was the best offer that she had.

 

 

Knee-deep in relativism

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I am knee-deep in relativism, a term that was roundly denounced from the pulpit in my youth, and a term that is still roundly denounced from conservative-Christian pulpits.  And I still fill a tinge of guilt for having departed so far from the fold.  But only a tinge!

I also feel very strongly that relativism, like any notion, carried to its extreme becomes absurd.   Aristotle is credited with saying, “Moderation in all things.”  I am really an extreme relativist but somehow, by the Grace of God, I realize this perspective is not for all and that it can be problematic for anyone, including myself.  I believe that the beliefs that we hold say less about what is “real” and more about how our mind operates.

Let me give an example of this aforementioned Grace at work in my heart and life.  When I pray I step away from the ether in which I dwell intellectually/spiritually and simply pray along the vein of, “My father, which art in heaven….”  In prayer there is no need to be complex and to engage in sophistry.  I simply pray to God.

Let me apply this to moral codes, say the Ten Commandments.  Though I think moral codes a relative, I don’t believe we should ever espouse to dispense with them.  Without moral codes…and the much-related guilt…we can’t function as a social body.  I do think there needs to come a time in one’s spiritual/emotional life where he/she goes beyond the “letter of the law” and recognizes as did Paul, that “all things are lawful.”  But that does not mean one should let his/her impulses run amok.

Let’s take one fundamental human impulse and fundamental component of any moral code, summarized in the Ten Commandments as, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”  I really think that at some point in adulthood one needs to exercise good judgment, or as we say, “make good decisions” in sexuality and do so not merely be clinging tenaciously to a biblical prohibition.  If, at that time, this biblical prohibition is the only thing keeping our sexuality under control, then there is a personal issue that needs to be addressed.

And I think moral codes have value for the modern world, even in a liberal society such as ours where sexual mores are in flux.  For example, I think the simple prohibition, “Thou shalt not commit adultery” should give anyone, even in our culture, pause from time to time and make him/her wonder, “Now why did they come up with this notion back then?  Why was it important then to put limits on the sexual impulse?  Does this have any relevance to me and the modern world?”  (And I realize there are some valid anthropological/sociological answers to this question.)  And many will answer their query with, “Well, no it has nothing to do with me in this modern world.”  But I still think it was, and is valid, to ask the question.  It reflects self-awareness and I fear our culture often lacks this quality.

There must be limits.  There must be “moderation in all things.”

 

Richard Rohr on ideologogy

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Following up on yesterday’s post, and on a recent post on ideology, I offer you the daily-posting of Richard Rohr:

We are all powerless, not only those physically addicted to a substance. Alcoholics simply have their powerlessness visible for all to see. The rest of us disguise it in different ways and overcompensate for our more hidden and subtle addictions and attachments, especially our addiction to our way of thinking.

We all take our own pattern of thinking as normative, logical, and surely true, even when it does not fully compute. We keep doing the same thing over and over again, even if it is not working for us. That is the self-destructive nature of all addiction, and of the mind in particular. We think we are our thinking, and we even take that thinking as utterly “true,” which removes us at least two steps from reality itself.

Addiction to our mind is subtle but its reach is incredible.  We then find ourselves failing to adhere to the wisdom of Buddha, who said, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”  The “word” is not the “thing.”  Words are but pointers.  We don’t own “the Truth”.  But, this does not leaving me doubting the presence of Truth in this void, doubting only grasp of it.  Or, as said yesterday and so frequently, “We see though a glass darkly” or “we hold this treasure in earthen vessels.”

Humility, finitude, limits

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A passionate concern of mine is that we don’t see reality, we only “see through a glass darkly” at best.  One might even say that I am obsessed with this notion as I have found it a valuable insight in my life and believe that it could be relevant to others.  This insight has an humbling impact on me, helping me to realize that when I discourse, or “hold forth” as in this blog, I am not presenting Truth but merely my own perception of “truth.”  If suddenly, the world discovered me and understood this perspective and said, “Aha, this is It!”, then civilization as we know it would immediately collapse.  For this is a perception that is not valid for everyone and certainly not valid for the billions and billions of people who keep this “dog and pony show” afloat with their “less enlightened” outlook on life.

I’ve quoted Anais Nin before, “”We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”  And so what we see in the world, what we say about the world, says a whole lot about us.  Our version of reality is just that, “our version.”  Just yesterday in Huffington Post, I discovered Gangaji who noted: 

People who live their lives unaware that they are telling themselves a story consider their thoughts to be descriptions of reality. If someone else has a conflicting description, that person is considered just to be wrong. It is a leap into maturity to realize that our descriptions of reality are our versions of reality. Certainly there is nothing wrong about a version of reality, but the recognition that it is a version, rather than reality itself, is humbling to our version of ourselves!

And so it all comes down to humility.  Can I find the Grace of God which will allow me to humbly accept that I am a finite being, with a finite grasp on the world, and therefore be a bit more open-minded about those who see the world differently?  T. S. Eliot declared, “The only wisdom we can hope to find is the wisdom of humility.”  And then he added, “And humility is endless.”

 

Einstein and spirituality

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I deeply admire the spirituality of Einstein though I think he called it his “religious sentiment.”  He shows that it is possible to appreciate science, to believe deeply in the scientific exploration of our world, and still maintain faith.  In the quote below he describes the “delusional systems” that we are all susceptible to and the prison that they constitute.  He encourages us to broaden our world, to realize that we are all in this game together, even those that are vastly different from us:

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Ideology run amok

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A mind run amok is dangerous.  If life is reduced to reason, life is impoverished.  There is more to life than ideas.  There is more to ideas than ideas.  Ideas without that “more” are very limiting.  I guess I’m talking about ideologues here.  And they are scary as hell.  These people…in many cultures… will kill if you don’t believe their ideas.

Goethe had this in mind when he noted, “They call it reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being beastial.”  And, Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. “

Christian pathos

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This church sign near Dequeen, Arkansas is really funny.  That was my first intent in posting it.  However, it is really sad.  The people in this little country church are suffering and use of this image in front of their church illustrates this poignantly.  There is so much anguish in the world and faith is designed to help alleviate this anguish.  But for those stuck in a morass of self-loathing and self-hatred it is easy to succumb to the gory details of the crucifixion.  It makes me think of that horrible Mel Gibson film, “The Passion of Christ” from a few years back.

(The caption at the bottom of the pix is hard to read.  It reads, “This bloods for you.”  Also not clear in the pix is the streams of blood on Jesus’ face.)