sophiaserpentia (
sophiaserpentia) wrote2006-11-08 12:12 pm
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(no subject)
In conversation with
lady_babalon this morning, she was surprised to hear that, while i consider myself a godless atheist, i do not renounce my experience of communion with the goddess, the meaning of my dream of the green man, or many of my other mystical or esoteric experiences.
This is not an inconsistent position, and i'll explain why.
The trajectory of religion throughout human history is to co-opt and misappropriate peoples' mystical experiences, to essentially steal and mislabel them and claim them in support of various power agendas. We learn early on that mystical experiences are "encounters with the divine," and are taught to correlate our various experiences with the concepts that other people, and institutions, have about the divine, and further, with the political and social ramifications connected to those beliefs.
One who has a mystical experience is told to tie this experience to a massive edifice of ideology, and offer it in support to the authoritarian institutions which speak in religious terms.
Consequently, i don't know what the word "god" means. I don't know what "divine" means. Yes, i know the dictionary definitions, but i don't know what the words really mean. We don't know what god is made of, or what clearly distinguishes god from the rest of the universe. What makes god stand out against the rest of existence? I don't even begin to know what god is supposed to be.
So all i know about god is what people say about god. And almost all of these comments are driven by some sort of personal, political, or institutional agenda. The word is nothing but a psychological pressure point, a button which institutions press to make us bend to their will.
I don't believe in or have faith in gods, divinities, deities or spirits -- by which i mean, i don't give any weight to what other people say religiously. (ETA: well, let me temper that. I react to other peoples' description of their experiences and frequently see parallels to my own experiences therein. What i discount are proclamations of doctrine or over-arching interpretations.)
In rejecting what other people say about "god", i am not going to also reject my experiences. My experiences are all i have. The mystical experiences i have had were profound and transformed my life. But i do not offer them up for institutional or ideological sacrifice.
Unfortunately, the only vocabulary i have to describe these experiences is a religious vocabulary, which makes them all too easy for other people to co-opt and speak about, as if they knew what was going on in my head or in my part of the world.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
This is not an inconsistent position, and i'll explain why.
The trajectory of religion throughout human history is to co-opt and misappropriate peoples' mystical experiences, to essentially steal and mislabel them and claim them in support of various power agendas. We learn early on that mystical experiences are "encounters with the divine," and are taught to correlate our various experiences with the concepts that other people, and institutions, have about the divine, and further, with the political and social ramifications connected to those beliefs.
One who has a mystical experience is told to tie this experience to a massive edifice of ideology, and offer it in support to the authoritarian institutions which speak in religious terms.
Consequently, i don't know what the word "god" means. I don't know what "divine" means. Yes, i know the dictionary definitions, but i don't know what the words really mean. We don't know what god is made of, or what clearly distinguishes god from the rest of the universe. What makes god stand out against the rest of existence? I don't even begin to know what god is supposed to be.
So all i know about god is what people say about god. And almost all of these comments are driven by some sort of personal, political, or institutional agenda. The word is nothing but a psychological pressure point, a button which institutions press to make us bend to their will.
I don't believe in or have faith in gods, divinities, deities or spirits -- by which i mean, i don't give any weight to what other people say religiously. (ETA: well, let me temper that. I react to other peoples' description of their experiences and frequently see parallels to my own experiences therein. What i discount are proclamations of doctrine or over-arching interpretations.)
In rejecting what other people say about "god", i am not going to also reject my experiences. My experiences are all i have. The mystical experiences i have had were profound and transformed my life. But i do not offer them up for institutional or ideological sacrifice.
Unfortunately, the only vocabulary i have to describe these experiences is a religious vocabulary, which makes them all too easy for other people to co-opt and speak about, as if they knew what was going on in my head or in my part of the world.
no subject
Well put. I notice that there is a common assumption (possibly coused in part by good ol' Madelyn Murray O'Hair) that because I choose to label myself an atheist, I am therefore also a strict materialist, which I most emphatically am not. A disbelief in a Supreme Deity (or even a disbelief in any deities at all) doesn't automatically mean that one must disbelieve in telepathy, non-corporeal entities, magickal phenomena, or anything else. It just means that, in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, I don't attribute the existence or experience of such phenomena to some Divine Nobodaddy Authority, or to His or Her disloyal opposition. Stuff, basically, just *is* - and the sheer amount of stuff out there has obviously not all been discovered, catalogued, or analyzed.
Strict materialists seem to believe that all discoveries of phenomena ended with Newton or Einstein and anything that appears to be outside that realm of discovery is de facto hallucination or fraud. They give atheism a bad name, IMO. :)
no subject
Isaac Asimov and Bertrand Russell probably helped in this also.
no subject
no subject
The only way I can wrap my head around the concept is through Hermetic philosophy and the idea that nothing can exist inside of you which does not exist on the outside, and vise versa.
The universe is mental. Heh.
no subject
As one atheist neurotheologist put it, with regards to his own mystical experiences while meditating, they are proof that i have a brain.
If anything, i think the real truth is more fascinating than the idea that there "just is" divine presence. I think there is still a good chance that human minds are connected in various ways, and that consciousness is an inherent property of existence.
So i'll see your Hellenic philosophy and raise you one Neoplatonic "cosmic mind." :-p
no subject
Frankly there are two equally true things to be said about so-called reality:
1) Nothing is real, and everything is illusion. Therefore it doesn't matter.
2) Everything is real, and nothing is illusion. Therefore it doesn't matter.
:)
Doesn't matter.
M
no subject
So all i know about god is what people say about god. And almost all of these comments are driven by some sort of personal, political, or institutional agenda. The word is nothing but a psychological pressure point, a button which institutions press to make us bend to their will.
Couldn't we substitute a whole lot of concepts for god/divine in the above paragraphs?
no subject
Sure. I will probably radically doubt the other concepts, too.
no subject
this reminds me of Jung's stance in Psychology and Religion. for him, direct experience as you've described is true religion (i.e. relinking, maybe gnosis or yoga), while systems, books, orders and such (what are commonly called "religions") he defines as mere "dogmas". according to him, dogmatic systems are inimical to true religious experience.
no subject
A few years back, a bunch of sidewalk preachers were praying over this blind homeless guy in front of my table out on Hackson Square. I lit a stick of incense, as I always do at work. The blind guy, who supposedly could not smell, loudly proclaimed that he could smell something.
After a slap-stick circus of the group of Christians figuring our what the blind guy could smell, they figured out it was my incense. They brought out a video camera to document the "miracle".
They asked me to verify what had gone down on camera.
I smiled at the camera and said that the man claimed to not be able to smell, but I have no idea if that was correct or not. And since he smelled the incense I had lit, maybe he could smell because one of the deities on my table was responsible for his ability to smell. Or maybe the "miracle" was in the herbal action of the incense itself. Or maybe there is a palmetto bug in the garbage can over there who took pity on the guy and cured him. No way to know whether it was their Christian speaking in tongues, my lighting the incense, or the intervention of another deity which is the cause of the "miracle".
The Christians were most upset that I would not verify their perceptions.
no subject
IMO, the second you try to put words to those questions in anyway that excludes any meaning not contained in the applied words then you have created a distorted and limited image of anything that could fall under the concept of divine. God is (period). Which also means that god is not (period). 'Course I don't believe that anything which is "divine" instead of merely a piece or reflection of divinity can be broken apart from the whole of reality. And where I think what our culture regards as religious type thinking has gone wrong is that when the pieces have been seen they have been used to narrow things down instead of being looked at in a way that shows how one piece contains in it the essence of all.
no subject
no subject
Anyway, I deliberately avoid ever using the word "God", when I talk about mysticism and reality, just because the word has been abused so badly.
[I've been wanting to write a long post about this stuff in my journal, about how I'm a godless atheist, but I talk to fairies in the woods, and I don't believe that the consciousness can exist separate from the body &ndash maybe.]