The Serpent's Wisdom

A few weeks ago i finished reading Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper. This novel examines an interesting question, first posed about halfway through: what would be the effect on religion if we had a God who actually worked?

She means of course outside of cosmology, because of course either God has created/is creating the whole universe, or not. The question concerns the direct and clear involvement of God in our individual lives.

I wonder what people point to as evidence, to them, that God has been involved in their lives?

In my case, there have been hints of a presence which i've felt in moments of stillness. But i don't know whether this presence is God, or my own self reflected back at me, some kind of cosmic mind, or an illusion created by my brain responding in its limited way to qualia it doesn't know how to handle otherwise.

But from a certain practical perspective, my conceptual interpretations don't matter. It doesn't matter if the presence is God, or my self, or the cosmos, or a neurochemical chimera, because i react to it the same way regardless. What matters is that i feel the presence there and it affects me, it calms me and makes me feel connected to something larger than myself.

More "direct" evidence of God, gods, deities, divinities, spirits, fairies, ancestors, poltergeists? There's been none in my experience. People's experiences vary widely in this regard, though, and it does not disturb nor hearten me to hear of more concrete sorts of experiences with the numinous.

So here's part of what i think happens. The following is, of course, just a theory. But tell me if it resonates with you.

I have come to suspect that people who latch very strongly onto dogma and doctrine and scripture do so because they don't otherwise have a strong link to the divine. That is, the only glimpse they've had of any sort of divine presence is the glimpse they get by way of doctrine and scripture. I can't say this for certain, but it is something that i have come to suspect in many cases.

(Of course there must be exceptions; frankly i find it puzzling that i ever have to say that a general statement has exceptions, but i daren't leave out that disclaimer!)

But what i have found is that people with a sense of connection to the divine seem to find a way to see eye-to-eye, even if they disagree about many of the particulars. It's like they can sense and acknowledge this connection in one another, and they grok that talk about doctrine or scripture is just that -- it is talk about concepts, and does not usually "cut deeply" to the connection each has with the divine.

Suppose God was a part of our lives just as plainly and clearly -- and doubtlessly -- as our friends or coworkers or classmates. Suppose God heard our requests and perceived our needs and acted on them. Then there wouldn't be room for doubt the way there is now.

In that case, sacrifices and rituals and other observances or obeisance would be nothing more than a kindness; it wouldn't be sacred in the way we think of it, because it would not be "set aside;" if we were following a request or a demand from God it would be the same as if we did so for a friend or supervisor.

Moreover, we wouldn't pour over scripture and engage in endless niggling debate about doctrinal details, because God would be right there to answer the question. Any debating we did would not seem like "theology" or "philosophy," it would be imminently practical.

Could the social edifice and prominence of religious institution survive? I do not think it could... in a recognizable form at least. A good chunk of religious practice is an unending attempt to stave off bad things from happening, under the assumption that bad things happen because gods get angry and punish us. If God was right there with us to give us clear input on what to do and what not to do, there would be no need to speculate on what God finds morally objectionable. If bad things happened, we would know whether or not it came from God.

People who perceive some sort of connection to the divine tend to take religious edifices, and people who piously rely on religion, less seriously than they should. I think this is part of why the piously religious are occasionally able to grab power, especially in societies where large segments of the population are psychologically damaged by cannibalistic oppression and are spiritually stunted.

I am the High Supreme Poobah Popette Lama of the Church of Disbelief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and if you believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster does not exist then you belong to my religion!

The Most-Assuredly-Not-A-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-Deity hath spoken, yea, listen to his/her/its commandments:

1. Thou shalt not believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, nor that any Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe.

2. All adherents to the first commandment are forthwith required to tithe 10% of his or her income to the Church of Disbelief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I your non-pasta-divinity hath spoken.

I may have added a commandment or two of my own. But, er, anyways, welcome, all believers in this new religion!

This morning i had an idea for a new book project. It would actually be something of a companion to The Serpent's Wisdom, though would require several more years of research.

The working title would be something like As Above, So Below: The Politics of Mysticism, and the book would trace the role of economics, politics, and struggle against oppression in the formation of mystical practice and teaching. My rough idea is that in antiquity many mystical movements sprung up in response to the encroaching dehumanization of urban society, imperialism, and oppression; and that this commonality of experience can explain certain parallels between various movements. I want to examine the Jewish prophetic movement in this light, as well as the Cynics, the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Hermetists, the Kabbalists, the early Christians, and the early Buddhists, and probably others to be added as my research progresses.

To give an example of what i have in mind, i want to explore the notion that vegetarianism among the encratite Jewish/Christian sects may have been a form of protest against the monopoly on salted meat held by the Temple in Jerusalem. In the Tanakh we can read about several centuries of struggle between classes of priests, one of whom sought to establish in Jerusalem a nationwide monopoly on slaughtering sacrificial animals, and others who sought to establish temples in the countryside where sacrifice could be practiced -- these are called in the Tanakh ("Old Testament") the "high places." One king would tolerate the high places, the next would side with the Aaronide priests and abolish them.

(Along similar lines, there's some controversy over the work of a historian who claims that beef-eating and cow-sacrifice was widespread among the upper classes of ancient India. If this is the case -- i still have to examine the evidence -- then perhaps vegetarianism in India could be explained as a similar radical response. But this is even more speculative than the above.)

Another example of the interplay between mysticism and oppression which i've mentioned before is dystheism.

Yet another dimension is the competition, mentioned in the Tanakh, between the priests of Yahweh and the qedeshim, who were proponents of the cult of Asherah in the same region. This would be competition to establish what Pascal Boyer called a monopoly on religious services. Since the priests of Yahweh won, they were able to immortalize their version of the conflict in written history.

I want to also further explore a counter-notion that the development of religious doctrine and edifice is a cultural misappropriation of radical mysticism by the upper classes. Historically, radical movements are either successfully suppressed, or they grow widely enough that they begin to affect the shape of society. The privileged classes respond by adopting the imagery of the radical movement while sanitizing it of its socially-transformative elements -- thus creating a "religion" that deals only with "spiritual" matters.

In a comment to my post about Predator, I mentioned some of the inspiration behind this post. Here is another bit which led me to this idea.

Pascal Boyer, in Religion Explained, argues that one reason which gods, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors ("supernatural agents") are so important is that our brains treat them as predators.

When we see branches moving in a tree, or when we hear an unexpected sound behind us, we immediately infer that some agent is the cause of this salient event. We can do that without any specific description of what the agent actually is. ... Some inference systems in the mind are specialized in the detection of apparent animacy and agency in objects around us.

... According to psychologist Justin Barrett, this feature of our psychological functioning is fundamental to understanding concepts of gods and spirits, for two reasons. First, what happens in religion is not so much that people see "faces in the clouds" as "traces in the grass." That is, people do not so much visualize what supernatural agents must be like as detect traces of their presence.... ... Second, our agency-detection system tends to "jump to conclusions" -- that is, to give us the intuition that an agent is around -- in many contexts where other interpretations (the wind pushed the foliage, a branch just fell off a tree) are equally plausible. ...

For Barrett, there are important evolutionary reasons why we (as well as other animals) should have "hyperactive agent detection." Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives is minimal, if we can abandon these misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents when they are actually around could be very high. (pp. 144-146)

All well and good, but the limitation which Boyer sees in this is that we have plenty of "false positives" which do not linger as gods and spirits, but instead are dismissed as innocuous 'bumps in the night.' Boyer answers by explaining that predation-avoidance is only one of several systems in the mind which activate in the perceived presence of gods. To summarize the rest of this part of the argument very briefly:

Interacting with other human beings requires the ability to handle expediently a large amount of social information, and the human brain has several faculties which evolved to handle certain kinds of social information: information about certain people's reliability, the cues people use to indicate that they can be trusted, who has what relationships with whom, and so on. What people have been up to -- the kinds of thing that usually fill gossip. Boyer calls this strategic information, and adds that who knows what and who doesn't know what about what you've been up to is also strategic. But gods, spirits, and ancestors are person-like agents who have full access to strategic information. He illustrates by comparing two sets of sentences.

God knows the contents of every refrigerator in the world.
God perceives the state of every machine in operation.
God knows what every single insect in the world is up to. (p. 158)

These kinds of things are far less relevant to our attitudes towards gods than statements like

God knows whom you met yesterday.
God knows that you are lying.
God knows that I misbehaved. (p. 158)

Gods and spirits, then, are typically seen as person-like beings who know when you're awake, when you're sleeping, if you've been bad or good (so be good for goodness' sake!), and who, as predatory beings, have the capacity to punish ill-doers.