The Renewed Mind is the Key

This is just stunning. Absolutely stunning.

Messiah Remix

Why Theology?

I've been a professional student of religion & theology since 1993. Nearly fifteen years now. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing in God. I can't put my finger on when, but I am consumed by why.

The short answer: traditional notions of God simply stopped making sense to me. By traditional, I mean that of a transcendent, all-powerful, all-knowing Father. As I explored alternative notions of God, first through Buddhism, and then through radical Christian renditions that identified the Father as dying with the Son on the cross, I at first tried to equivocate when people asked me if I still believed. "Sure," I'd say. "Just very differently." Anymore, I'm not sure answering in the affirmative is at all helpful. Any explanation I offer will be involved and require lots of patience on the part of the curious, to the point that I suspect most would just say, "Why didn't you just say 'No'?" So, for all intents and purposes, no, I don't believe in God.

I repeat: I don't believe in God.

And yet, I must confess, it is still hard to write that. This is not because of some residual nostalgia. I do not sometimes wonder, "What if all my evangelical friends are right." I do not, when I think about death, experience fear because of the anxiety of burning in hell or eternal separation from God. My fear, rather, is one of human weakness -- of not being able to face the end of individuality, the collapsing of consciouness to nothingness; and of not being able to comprehend the complex ecology whereby the individuality of my living and dying unfolds into a ever-expanding network of human and non-human, via the constantly changing kaleidoscope of memory, the process of physical decay in which my body literally feeds the earth, or the seemingly infinite tapestry of decisions I've made that connect me to this world, and this world to me, even after my dying breath. It could well be said that the welcoming of this weakness is the reason I do not now believe -- though, I would be lying if I said I was aware of this when I first realized I did not believe. (That is the subject of another post, or perhaps even a book -- the evolution of disbelief.)

And yet, it remains hard to confess this. Not because I fear the reaction of others. My mom's reaction, maybe -- less because of what she would say to me, but because of how she would take it on as yet one more thing to worry about. She is a smart woman, I tell myself. She must know already. Or, like many from my past, suspect it, but wish to think otherwise. After all, the lies we tell ourselves about others sometimes make for the most polite conversation.

No, it remains hard to confess my disbelief in God because I do believe in miracles. Which is to say, I believe in acts of love and heroism. I believe that you do not get simply what you see, and that what you see is what you get. I believe there is more to a body than even the body knows. There is more to the individual, to the body-politic, to the universe untold than its constituent parts -- not that something divine transcends or permeates these parts, that there is anything BUT finite parts, but that the parts themselves are more than themselves. I believe that this is the stuff of creativity -- the creation of potential and possibility and power. The capacity not simply to change or evolve, to become something else, but the capacity to become something more, something that explodes from within expectations fashioned by past use, present desire, and future profit. Indeed, where these expectations alone explode beyond themselves.

I realize this threatens to become New Age mumbo-jumbo, so I'll be more concrete. In thinking things can be different, more than the horizon of expectations allow -- I am not content, for example, with a new president, a stronger Democratic party, a wider social safety net, or universal health care. I will take them all. But they are not miracles. The stuff of theology, as I understand it, of a political theology that matters beyond propping up the moralizing of sex or the extension of militaristic aggression or xenophobic hatred, prevents this from being the horizon, because theology, even without God, is the discourse of miracles.

What kind of a miracle am I talking about? One can only ever venture guesses and estimations, but what about forgiveness of debt ... a worldwide forgiveness whose results we cannot even imagine. It's insane. Horrific, in fact. Economies would crumble, money would become meaningless. In a word, chaos. Miracles, after all, are not always pretty -- they are not always the result of beneficient forces. Debt forgiveness could come through mass legislation, or perhaps revolution; but more than likely through natural forces like environmental collapse. Miracles emerge from the spaces that exceed, but do not necessarily transcend, intention and agency, cause and effect.

What happens after miracles, as we've witnessed in those religions we believe and disbelieve, most of which were themselves borne from miracles, is always unknown and always contingent. To believe in the miracle, though, is not simply to believe in what follows, be it a doctrine or a constitution, but to direct one's attention to what matters: the miracles from which these emerge, which they try to keep from happening again, and to which they ultimately fall. If this sounds a lot like the structure of myth, that's because in a way it is. Attention is paid to miracles in the quality of the myths we create and enact in our daily rituals. The fact that we no longer believes in miracles is indicative of the death of mythology, replaced by the spinning of tall tales and cons.

Religion as an Alternative

Curtis White has a fantastic two-part essay on "the idols of environments" and the "ecology of work" ([1] & [2]) in Orion Magazine, which by the way is a fairly new online magazine that is well-worth looking through if you're interested in eco-issues. Both parts really hit hard on an issue that is increasingly important to me: religiously re-animating our passion and our relationship with the earth & existence.

White first captured my interest a couple of years ago with his book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves. Since then, he wrote an underappreciated little book called The Spirit of Disobedience [see summary version from last April's Harper's]. I've never blogged about this last book, but it has proven really influential to me in terms of offering me a new grammar to conceptualize the kind of research & work I'd like next to do.

Judging by his essay in Orion, it has also set White's current course. In the second part, he does, I think, have an error. He asserts that humanity is naturally inclined to live in harmony with itself and its environment. I think he is fundamentally wrong here. The history of human civilisation has found it not simply a witness but a cause of an ecosystem's collapse. This is no radical claim either -- just read Jared Diamond's Collapse. Now, this isn't to call humanity a virus, or something dramatic like that. It's an observation, not a moral judgment, that we consistently tame nature to its submission, and in many cases our own demise.

What is a moral judgment is the hope for an alternative. To call for a different & religious way to approach and live within our ecosystems, as White does, should not be framed in some kind of nostalgic or idealistic plea for 'the way things used to be'. It is far less practical than that: its focus is about the way things might be. This was basically the point of my long, likely-ignored post last week about marketable religion. Only when we have figured out a way to think something different (note: not think something differently, which just assumes we see that "something" in a different light), and thus to breach the defining confines of practicality and productivity, is it possible to proceed "religiously". The aim of religion, in this perspective, isn't simply to project imaginative fantasies, but somehow to inspire and organize us to proceed from these fantasies imaginatively.

Marketable Religion

There is a general, running assumption that defines our globalistic political economy: if the market tanks, we're all fucked. By 'we', the assumption does not refer to the already impoverished. They are already fucked. All measures to save them now are efforts to assuage the collective first-world conscience. No, by 'we', this assumption refers to the workaday hoi polloi -- those of us with a little bit of 401-K stock, casual day-traders, or even those with no stock at all. The market, so goes the assumption, is so deeply inbedded into our experience of reality that the two are now now fully indistinguishable. When somebody imagines an alternative lifestyle, say, on a commune, most of us conclude that this simply isn't practical. When somebody else suggests that we individually try to 'opt out' of the market, or to 'escape the grid', we're told this kind of singular action isn't productive. Indeed, so goes the trump card, neither are they even feasible, for the market itself makes possible the the existence of its alternative -- even the thought of its alternative. E.g., those Europeans can enjoy their fancy universal health care, we're told, because Americans are the suckers stuck with the market-based health care, where billions of dollars are pumped into research and development.

On one level, this assumption rings true. For the sake of a blog post, I'll accept it as such anyway. Now the more interesting question: why is this true? Why exactly is the market the limit-experience by which which all other experience is defined -- the paradigmatic paradigm? Why exactly do we read with embarassment our religious texts, when they tell us to give away all we own, or when they indicate the implications of recognizing desire as the root of suffering, and recognizing our experience of life as one of vanity and/or illusion? Why do we then rationalize and/or spiritualize these texts into something more palatable -- something more marketable and productive?

The answer, of course, is as simple as the question is complex, and betrays a religious element to our political economies. Our religious myths almost universally, be they orthodox or heretical, speak of an original -- or immanently recurring -- lie. A deception at the heart of our experience of what we take to be real. A deception that is the original melancholic "fall" (or, for the philosopher, "being thrown") into existence. For some, this deception is an evil that never should've happened; for others, thinking beyond this original evil is impossible, for where there is no deception there is no creation, and where there is no creation there is nothing & nobody to gripe about the deception. It is here that we find an important analogue between the mythic/religious 'original lie', whether it be a deception that must be reversed or one redeemed, and our position with respect to the the market & marketable religion.

Almost across the board, religious myths are built around the notion that in some way the basis and limits to our lived existence (be they the lie or the market) can be overcome. However, to resist the lie (or, by extension, the market) or at least the degree to which it defines us and the possibilities for our future, is not a matter of coming up with transcendental or utopian alternatives, as though we might imagine some truth that is beyond or trumps the plane of existence (and thus of the lie / the market). We are, on the contrary, stuck with the great lie, to the extent that it forms the basis for all existent, marketable truth.

Nevertheless, in my view, our religious myths & cultic practices are not means of cooperation or compromise. (Such compromise is what we find in traditional formulations of sacrificial atonement -- i.e., Christ dying on the Cross to satisfy the penalty for guilt, etc. -- and various proposals now to use use the market to solve problems caused by the market -- e.g., carbon credits, etc. I do not find either very compelling.) To overcome the great lie, our religious myths remain fully a part of the lie they expose, and thus are prey to inherent weaknesses, flaws, and aporia, but inform a cultic practice whose power is not accessed by marketable efficiency. If, then, religion can be found to participate on the level of the lie, and perhaps even provide our political economy with its foundational myth, the cultic practice of religion might then also inform us of a means & aesthetics of our resistance.

I recognize that all this comes dangerously close to an apologia for fundamentalism. When Thomas Frank wondered, 'What's wrong with Kansas?', he failed to adequately explore the religious basis for many rural poor voters to go against their own temporal (financial) interests and instead home in on moral issues. While I affirm there are solid religious reasons for these voters to vote against their interests, and thus to reject marketabl efficiency, I fully reject their equation of morality and religion. Such an equation, in my estimation, requires little to no actual cultic practice -- and, thus, very little in the way of actual religion. Contemporary religion, in the east now as much as the west, has traded in the power of the cult that cannot be measured for the power of its marketable return. This need not be a the immediate return of, say, a bomb exploded in the name of a deity, for it could just as easily be done with a view to deferred eschatological future that never arrives. Moral civic religion is, in short, not simply a reluctance but a full-scale unwillingness to take traditional religious practices at their word -- that is to say, is to not really believe in their power or truth.

A point of discussion, I hope, is the the extent to which we have almost completely lost the sense that religious practice has been traditionally limited to minoritarian communities. Monks, of myriad religious stripe, for example. This never meant that an individual culture was without religion. Superstition has, of course, always been rife; we might even say there was enough inbedded religious belief that, to the outside observer, the culture itself was religious. But, for the most part, it seems that traditional religious practice consisted of patronage -- that is, supporting that smaller community who was seen as actually believing in, and thus practicing, the religious myth. In this way, the greater community reaped the benefit by cultic proxy. There is, perhaps, something to this sense of the true believers believing for you.

If that is the case, casting alternative religious visions & practices, in spite of the protests of some, is not an irresponsible apology or rationalization for the religion & religious ideology that exists (even if unknowingly) to maintain the lie / the market. It is, rather, one of our most essential tasks.

On the Hereafter

This quote is completely stripped of its context, and I'm not even going to say much about it. But it's something I came back across this evening and thought worth sharing.

The secularist and the Marxist criticism of the vision of marching to Zion claims that the promise of pie in the sky bye and bye cuts the nerve of action today. The expectation of "fairer worlds on high" is supposed to detach the present from that which is promised.

This may well have been the case when in recent centuries the beneficiaries of the social system appealed to a future world to encourage their subjects to remain docile. But our interest is not in asking whether the eighteenth-century religion could be the opiate of the people, but rather understanding the function of the apocalyptic vision in the first-century church, whose seers were not on any drug.

In the world view of that time the gap between the present and the promise was not fundamental. What we are now doing is what leads to where we are going. Since the "this-worldly" and the "other-worldly" were not perceived in radical dichotomy, to be "marching through Emmanuel's ground" today is to be on the way to Zion. Terms like "hereafter" are in that kind of context affirmations not negations. They do not say that that to which we look forward is in a radically different kind of world from the world in which we now live, but rather that it lies farther in the same direction in which we are being led. The unforeseeable future is farther along in the same direction as the foreseeable future for which we are responsible. (John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus, 248-49).

'Take What You Need'

Last night I was talking to a friend and he told me about a church service he'd recently heard about. Just after a sermon about giving & receiving, the preacher had the offering buckets distributed throughout the congregation/audience and told everyone in attendance to 'take what you need'. When the buckets returned to the stage, there was still money in them. So, he proceeded to exhort them all the more to take the money, and if they didn't he would shread it at all (as he did with a few bills). The upshot of all this was to tell them about how the church's benevolence ministry is there to help people out when they've fallen on hard times.

Okay, so here's my question, is this a good lesson? I'll confess that I'm pretty ambivalent about it. On one level, sure, this is all well and good. They're sharing money with one another, etc. I get that. But my initial, and stronger, reaction is more negative. I'm just not entirely sure why. Part of the reason is that I know the Sunday services of this particular church are (or at least used to be -- no clue about how things are now) 'seeker-oriented', and thus not intended to be a full manifestation of their fellowship & teaching. If that is the still the case, this just seems really flashy to me, and possibly (though I'll hold off from assessing their intentions here) a little disingenuous.

Also, just what exactly did he mean by 'take what you need?' Now, my friend wasn't at this church, and he couldn't be sure what the minister's exact words were, but they had to be something like this. He wouldn't say, 'Take what you want', would he? And if he did, well, there'd be no ambivalence about this at all -- I'd be thoroughly against it, but still very keen on attending the next time I saw he was preaching on the subject. But 'take what you need'? I think I'm pretty representative of a lot people's financial burden's -- even with my catastrophic student loan debt, since the value of most people's houses are bound to go belly-up in a few decades and explode the assumption of their long-term investment value -- and my 'need' would surely go beyond what I would be expected to take out of a church offering bucket. I could dig in there until I pulled out enough for rent & utilities, or whatever amount would actually put K. & me in above zero each month, but if I did so, oh dear, the IHOP would be abuzz with snickers & gasps about 'that greedy guy who took over a grand!' (None of this even addresses that one's financial need might be brought about because somebody just bought a new boat that's really straining their budget, or that gas-guzzling SUV parked out in the church parking lot, or the superfluous education one sought for the sake of getting a job that'll let him have summer's off -- not out of a real lack.)

And the heavy-handedness of cutting up money? Is the point of this to situate the reception of a church's benevolence alongside the (evangelical) Christian message that one accepts ('receives' even) Jesus as savior not simply because he loved us first but because of the content of that love -- because he was broken, beaten & killed for our guilt as sinners? Is the reception of this grace and the reception of financial stability so close?

And yet, as I say, I'm open to the potentially positive aspects of this object lesson. I'm ambivalent, though obviously not the insidious brand of ambivalence that sees a 50/50 split between the good and the bad. What about you? I'm genuinely curious what many of you make of all this.

Don't Worry, I Lit a Match

My dearest friends, approximately three months ago, on October 12, 2006, to be precise, I presented you with evidence of the existence of God. Since then, as you can well imagine, there has been a lot of soul searching here at Silentio Central. Thus the three-month silence. As one reared in the bosom and by the stern hand of evangelical Christianity, who subsequently stole away from the faith in the deepest of nights, pitch black, in fact, what for the clouds of doubt covering all semblance of light, this revelation came as, not a shock, but as the nauseating onset of something nearly indescribable, something only viewed in a small room with the door closed. Too much truth, like too much starchy food, especially curry, fell upon me, and I was overwhelmed. My cup overfilleth, indeed, and the excess left me feeling, well, a little bloated.

Oh! But fear not. It took repeated probing, but I have, only today, realized that this Lord of the Arse was not due the undying fealty I dealt it. I should say that this was not due to his inadequacy, nor to the fact that this divine sign was filled with only poo. No, this vision of a poop-chute Jesus rising to the heavens made me realize that the Lord was always to be behind me, heard but never seen; or, if seen, seen only in my wake, in what I leave behind for others; or, barring that, in a one-time visit to a website about a dog’s anus that bears a striking resemblance to our popular imaginative rendering of a biblical scene. What I realized, after much strain whilst sitting, a posture due the longest, most pleasurable but often most foul, of thoughts, was that if blind devotion is not due the Lord, it makes him no less Lord. I realized, rather, that he is created, in a series of movements, of my movements, of your movements, of our movements. All together, we squeeze together a fashioning of the Lord, and we leave a prize for others to find! A nugget of ourselves that, upon its exit, is no longer ours, for it is no longer distinguishable from all the others. Sometimes we leave a larger piece, sometimes only a trace – but it is always there. And every bit is but a whiff of the Spirit.

All this is to say, I realized it was foolish to hold it in! To make myself silent is to make myself deadly to the world. Let it rip, I said, these acts of God. I must blog, I said aloud. For to blog is divine!

Pull my finger, and it shall begin anew.

The Story Told Differently

First off, I realize this post might come off as odd. For starters, it is an actual post. Who would've thought it was still possible for me to post twice in one day? More importantly, though, I think it may surprise a few people.

I've long heard, and probably even said once or twice, the maxim that goes something like "if only we told the story differently . . . " E.g., "If only we Democrats could frame the issues better, use positive language, etc. we might win more elections"; or, as I'm sure some of the readers of this blog have wondered or said aloud, "If only Christians weren't such distended assholes, the faith always be treated like bullshit nobody (not even the faithful) really believes." There is, of course, an obvious logic to this kind of thinking. Without it, where would all our marketing gurus be today? But logic only ever goes so far for me. I can't help but wonder: is it possible for an actually existing (versus hypothetical) faith to finally and fully override and overrule either (a) what one would like their faith to be, or (b) what one would like to think this faith used to be?

That is to say, what would it mean for the truest manifestations of the faith (be it religious or political) to be boiled down to the simple formula: "the story told differently"? What if this manifestation of the faith is, for lack of a better word, a singularity; or, to be more "prophetic," miraculous? Is it still possible, in this apparently post-liberal age, to use the same language and forms of a faith (e.g., the Bible, the sacraments, the liturgy, etc.), but for this use of language & form to be recontextualized? What I'm talking about is not a return to liberalism -- for instance, the transformation of the traditional gospel of orthodoxy to the social gospel of Enlightenment values, and thus of traditional concepts of redemption and judgment to the terms of social justice (although I'm not opposed in principle to this transformation). Rather, what I'm wondering about is the relationship of speaking and living the faith & truth: is it still possible to speak of the faith in such a way that the opposition between "story told well" and the "story told badly" makes no sense? Why? Because the story told truthfully is in-built with an intensity that makes it impossible to "frame" (and thus to circumscribe) but also impossible to silence -- i.e., that speaks itself in truth simultaneously in spite of & because of its particular context/language/form.

Which is to say, in short, what if there are no "better" stories, or "better" versions (and thus more compelling versions) of the truth? Only stories/versions that perpetually call forth the truth that is worth listening to and speaking -- the story told differently, that truth which effectively destroys it form, perhaps on a Cross, and thus all one expects and knows of it, perhaps like a god, in order that it might be reimagined into something neither qualitatively "better" or "worse," as this assumes some standard by which we judge it; but rather & simply something worth being listened to and spoken yet again, a listening & speaking in faith that is, finally, the only true act: that of creation.

Purity (Blue) Ball

Via Mark Morford I only just learned something that depresses me only because it doesn't surprise me: Purity Balls. Morford's description is better than I can offer at the moment:

Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys, but rather fancy creepy dress-up rituals taking place in towns like Colorado Springs and Tucson and Zoloft Jesusville, in which Christian dads rent a bad tux while their daughters, mostly teenagers but many as young as 6 or 7, get all dolled up in gowns from JCPenny and they all drive out to the airport Marriott and prepare to, well, lose their minds.

It begins. At some point the daughter stands up, her pale arms wrapped around her daddy, and reads aloud a formal pledge that she will remain forever pure and virginal and sex-free until she is handed over, by her dad (who is actually called the "high priest" of the home), like some sort of sad hymenic gift, to her husband, who will receive her like the sanitized and overprotected and libidinously inept servant she so very much is. Praise!

Would that I were making this up.

The dad -- er, high priest -- in turn, stands up and reads his pledge, one stating that he will work to protect his daughter's virginal purity that he has so carefully and wickedly drilled into her since birth, since she was knee-high to a disturbing dogma, that he will protect her chastity and oversee it and help enforce its boundaries, which might or might not involve great amounts of rage and confusion and secret stashes of cheap scotch, although his pledge claims it's with honor and integrity and lots of bewildering Godspeak. Which, in many households, is essentially the same thing.

Really, what can you say to something like this? I mean, it's hardly surprising, depravity with the best of intentions, but sweet Jesus, people, c'mon! I'm sorry, but NOT having sex, not even waiting until marriage, is NOT necessarily healthy sex. It's not unhealthy either, mind you. Healthy sex is that which doesn't kill you, or cause you to kill somebody else (i.e., emotionally, psychologically, physically, etc.). What about "spiritually," though, the Christian moralist squeals? Look, for one, if you want to get spiritual about it, the flesh is already dead -- sex in or out of marriage doesn't change that. It's a fleshly act that creates fleshly (& squishy) pleasure and children, mixed w/ the endorphins that make us sometimes feel out-of-body if it was especially good. There's nothing wrong this, and count me among the masses who love it ... but it certainly isn't pure, at least not in the sense implied by the intention to store your daughter's genitals, in some lame form of female circumcision, in a safety deposit box until she's married.

Maybe We're Not So Different After All

I obviously spend a lot of time frustrated at my country's undyingly fundamentalist fervor -- be it fully fleshed out in something ostensibly noble like 'justice', or something ostensibly wrong like 'revenge' -- for, in short, a messianic return. We all want a return on our investments, so why not go for the biggest return of all, the promise of which prompts the investment, cynical or pious, of many a president and professional politician.

Which brings me to Scott Peterson's excellent two-part article in The Christian Science Monitor on the appropriation of religious language, especially that of rapture and eschatological fulfillment, in the political saga currently unfolding in Iran. (part one // part two).

It's nice to think that all that divides us is the name of that tyrannical religious excuse for demagoguery.