The Serpent's Wisdom

Religion Survey, from gramina

1. Do you believe in God?

I find I can't answer this question with a yes or no. Belief plays a remarkably small role in my religious life. As far as doctrine is concerned, I'm critical of just about any and all of it.

There's a lot I could say here, but I'll start by saying I don't know how to believe in something or someone when I don't know who or what they are. I have some thoughts on this, but I consider them essentially fiction.

I am, though, a person of faith. Faith, in my opinion, is intransitive, and transcends religion. I can recognize another person of faith no matter what beliefs or doctrine they profess.


2. Define God.

I'm fond of "that which never acts yet leaves nothing undone." I gathered many of my thoughts on this quite some time ago, and I'm surprised to find today that my thoughts on this question have not much changed in 8 years.

That said, I have had a few encounters or hints during meditation or dreaming that I experienced as a divine presence. Was it God? I don't know.


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I've been told that some of the things i write come across as attacks on people or things i have no desire to attack. My use of language may have become kind of specialized and i thought i've explained myself as i've gone along, but just to be sure people understand what i'm saying, i will clarify my usage of a few terms.

I've become very bitter and critical towards religion. When i say "religion," i am primarily talking about organized religion: membership movements (you clearly belong to the movement or clearly do not) which require adherence to a particular doctrine (usually kept in writings deemed sacred), defined and maintained by an incorporated edifice of some sort, which ordains an official clergy to perform official rites and rituals. Religious membership almost always requires professing firm belief in unprovable statements.

There's some wiggle room here on what constitutes a "religion," but i think that's good enough for you to see what i mean when i contrast it with "spirituality," "mysticism," and "esoterica."

"Mysticism," in my usage, is subjective examination of one's experiences. I think i use the word to refer to something much more broad than most people do.

"Esoterica," in my usage, is a specific form of mystical inquiry involving the pursuit of certain altered states of awareness.

Most of the time when i use the word "spirituality" my intended definition is very specific, and refers to a pattern of misappropriation whereby some kinds of radical and dissenting speech are turned into safe "religious" speech, cleansed of its political overtones so that it seems only to convey instruction about the supernatural.

So, in my frequent criticisms of religion and spirituality, i am not meaning to criticize anyone's experiences of the supernatural or the numinous. I am not in any way putting anyone down for having such experiences -- i've had them myself and i do not repudiate them. Instead what i am criticizing, is the way that these experiences are stolen and co-opted by organized religion in order to suit agendas of control and exploitation.

A while ago i wrote about an idea i had, that perhaps economic necessity shaped the moral code of the Tanakh (aka the Old Testament) -- that pastoral societies have a need for maximum reproductive output from each person... hence mandatory marriage, polygamy, prohibitions on homosexuality and masturbation, and so on. I was quite proud of this theory; if i do say so myself, it's brilliant.

I also now think it's wrong.

At the time that i came up with this theory, i was not inclined to consider the likelihood that the people who devised these laws and wrote these texts had an agenda and were participants in a factional struggle for control of their society. This is because whoever opposed them no longer speaks to us across the millenia; the opposing voices in this debate were not recorded for posterity.

This is why i am now a proponent of what i've been calling (for lack of a better term i'm aware of) "embedded theology": because when you deliberately overlook the political agenda behind "spiritual" texts, when you don't examine religion through the lens of human power dynamics, you miss too much, and much of the real historical significance of a piece of "scripture" is obscured.

What makes me inclined to re-examine my previous hypothesis was a series of realizations about the militaristic and authoritarian imperialism of the modern USA. And what's going on now is not in any way new or unique, because it resembles too closely what happened in the last century.

It began in the early 20th Century with efforts to prevent 'undesirables' from having children -- eugenics boards, forced sterilization, etc. The Nazis took many of their ideas about sterilization from eugenics measures which were already being enacted in the US and Canada and elsewhere. (And actually, American proposals to euthanize people with disabilities helped inspire the Final Solution.) Alongside with eugenics, women of "desireable" races were encouraged or pushed towards having as many children as possible.

I cite this historical stuff not for hyperbole, but because i think most Americans are not aware of how deeply embedded these barbaric principles and practices are in our recent history, and to illustrate how potentially damaging the ideologies now being espoused by the American right-wing really are.

John Gibson of Fox News really tipped his hand when he told white women that they were neglecting their duty to have babies:

Do your duty. Make more babies. ...

Now, in this country, European ancestry people, white people, are having kids at the rate that does sustain the population. It grows a bit. That compares to Europe where the birth rate is in the negative zone. They are not having enough babies to sustain their population. Consequently, they are inviting in more and more immigrants every year to take care of things and those immigrants are having way more babies than the native population, hence Eurabia.

Why aren't they having babies? Because babies get in the way of a prosperous and comfortable modern life. ...

To put it bluntly, we need more babies. Forget about that zero population growth stuff that my poor generation was misled on. Why is this important? Because civilizations need population to survive. So far, we are doing our part here in America but Hispanics can't carry the whole load. The rest of you, get busy. Make babies, or put another way -- a slogan for our times: "procreation not recreation."

from Gibson: "Make more babies"

Behind this, we see exposed the nexus where sexism, racism, and homophobia swirl together into a single whole: a war over the nation's population. It doesn't matter to these reactionaries that America's population is still growing, it matters who that population consists of. And only someone hopelessly naive would think that this faction is not going to become more brazen and brutal in the coming decades.

Put this next to proposals to prevent the children of undocumented immigrants from having automatic US citizenship, and Pat Buchanan's crusade against Mexican immigration, and one part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe the US should have fewer non-white children.

Combine this with the new classification of all women of childbearing age as "pre-pregnant," efforts to deliberately make it harder for mothers to hold down a job, the ageless and ongoing efforts to stem abortion rights and make it more difficult for women to have access to any form of contraception, and another part of the pattern comes into focus: they believe white women should be forced to have more children.

A third part of this pattern comes into play with the right's program of mandatory heterosexual marriage, designed more than anything else to keep gay and lesbian people in the closet so they will reproduce, which is punctuated by the 'unintended' consequences of punishing unmarried cohabiting straight couples as well. The message, increasingly, is, "marry or else."

The babies you have better not be disabled, either. The right-wing, following ancient and historical precedent, is not too keen on protecting the self-sufficiency of people with disabilities, either. And the gateway to the Final Solution was the Tiergartenstrasse 4 project.

It was this comprehensive perspective on the modern "baby wars" that led me to re-consider my interpretation of ancient moral codes on reproduction. Efforts to encourage the upper class race to reproduce may prove to be a signature pattern of militaristic and expansionistic regimes.

Sometimes i'm just absolutely stunned by the depths to which hatred of women can sink. And i'm dismayed when i see how often the primary excuse is "defending our religious traditions."

Maybe it's the peace, love, and compassion speaking, but no principle is worth defending if it creates injustice.

Lawmakers from a coalition of six Islamic groups threatened on Tuesday to vacate their parliamentary seats if Pakistan's government changes a rape law criticized by human rights activists.

... Under the current law, approved by a former military dictator in 1979, prosecuting a rape case requires testimony from four witnesses, making punishment almost impossible because such attacks are rarely public. A woman who claims she was raped but fails to prove her case can be convicted of adultery, punishable by death.

Maulana Fazalur Rahman, a leader of the Islamic coalition, said Tuesday that lawmakers in his group would vacate their seats in the National Assembly if the government tries to get the assembly's approval to change the law.

"We will render every sacrifice for the protection of the Shariah (traditional Islamic) laws," he said at a news conference.

However, the ruling Pakistan Muslim Party — which has a majority in the assembly — has praised Musharraf for taking steps to amend the law and end the four-witness requirement.

from Rape law rankles some Pakistan lawmakers

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

Does it take faith to disbelieve that breaking a mirror is bad luck? What about not believing that a black cat crossing your path is bad luck?

If not, how is this different from the same question applied to God?

If yes, what distinguishes a "valid" superstition like the ones listed above from "invalid" ones like the Flying Spaghetti Monster? What about supersititions from other cultures, like the belief that taking a picture steals your soul?

Is the difference that people in this culture were exposed since early childhood to believe in the superstitions listed above?

My post about the non-Flying-Spaghetti-Monster-Deity religion was a bit snarky, yes, i admit that.

But this is something i feel strongly about. Atheism is not a religion.

Disbelief in the existence of God is not simply the flip-side-of-a-coin from belief in God.

For one thing, faith is not belief. Faith is a way of being grounded. Faith is not mutable the way belief is. Faith does not depend on arguments and concepts and doctrine. Faith is an action that involves your mind and identity on a deep level. Belief, on the other hand, is agreeing with a statement.

Theists are theists not because of their beliefs, not because someone told them about God and they said, "Hey, that's a great idea, i think i will invest a great deal of my energy and identity in that." They are theists because they are deeply grounded in the closeness of divine presence.

Atheists are not grounded spiritually in the non-existence of God. You cannot ground yourself in a sense of absence. "Presence of absence" is not presence, it is still absence. Atheism is a fundamentally intellectual exercise.

Whether i like it or not, i have faith. This sometimes confuses me because i'm not sure what i believe or sometimes whether i believe anything at all. I veer between agnosticism and theism and atheism, but my sense of being grounded in the presence which i have felt is unwavering.

Edit. Another reason i feel strongly about this is because religion is an important part of a person's identity. If you've been a believer since birth, then your religion is part of your life and your history. If you're a convert, then your religion is something over which you labored and agonized. One does not belong accidentally to a religion, the way someone might accidentally put on a pair of pants that has a tear in the back. To claim that atheism is a religion is to claim that you know what is going on in atheists's minds better than *they* know.

What is the difference between God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

Well, the Flying Spaghetti Monster was cooked up in someone's brain to make a point using satire.

But... wasn't the idea of God essentially cooked up in someone's brain too? The purpose was different -- the idea is a response to certain kinds of experience and certain kinds of need. It also happened a long time ago, so the idea has a lot of ivy on it that the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't have.

But, ultimately, it is a concept that came from someone's brain. Whether the idea was cooked there or whether it derives from revelation is an open question. The problem is, there have been so many various revelations differing widely in detail and shape that we are left having to make determinations of validity among them, which takes us down a maze of reliance upon certain alleged revelations because they "just seem true."

And to cap that off, whether or not there has ever been a real revelation from God, claims about God are too easily turned into someone's ticket to social relevance and power. The potential for abuse seems from time to time to outweigh any emotional benefit we derive from claims of divine revelation.

This question disturbs me, because i have positive emotional associations with the idea of God. I want to believe. I was trained to believe. If i don't believe in God, i feel an absence. The universe seems like a less comforting place.

In the past i have even argued that the existence of this "God-shaped hole" is positive evidence that there's a God to fill it. Because of what i know about the plasticity of the brain now i feel inclined to reject that argument as circuitous.

All statements about God are blasphemy (including this one).

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.