Lamentations for a Lost God/dess

[robertpaulsen]

http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2010/09/lamentations-for-lost-goddess.html">Lamentations for a Lost God/dess

You raise up your head
And you ask, "Is this where it is ?"
And somebody points to you and says
"It's his"
And you says, "What's mine ?"
And somebody else says, "Where what is ?"
And you say, "Oh my God
Am I here all alone ?"
-Bob Dylan "http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Ballad-of-a-Thin-Man-lyrics-Bob-Dylan/3036AE87105EE4984825696900294B34">Ballad of a Thin Man"



On Sunday I attended another LA Peak Oil Meetup at the Cat & the Fiddle in Hollywood. This meeting was not as well attended as the last meeting I attended on August 1 that I http://americanjudas.blogspot.com/2010/08/technocracy-is-it-way-to-change-how.html">wrote about previously. In fact, there were only three people in attendance this past Sunday, including myself. We certainly had a good time together, sharing drinks, discussing new developments involving politics and Peak Oil, and agreeing that the next time we meet, it should be in coordination with some event that more people would want to attend and talk about afterward. Next time would hopefully not coincide with another Meetup group meeting in the same place. We jokingly lamented the fact that the atheists had a much better turnout for their Meetup in the courtyard than we did.

But being less popular than atheists gave me much food for thought. What is the future of religion in a post-Peak Oil society? Michael Ruppert weighed in on this prospect in the Chris Smith documentary Collapse, where he said, "Everything is on the table, God is on the table, every religion in the world is on the table now. They'll all be measured as standards by 'this is reality - and this is what the religion says' and every religion in the world is going to be under a huge microscope. This is going to be the greatest age of evolution in human thinking that's ever taken place". For someone whom his detractors try to paint as a doomsayer, I think that's a much more positive perspective than one I could envision. It's an incredibly hopeful prospect to foresee society participating in an Age of Enlightenment rather than the Dark Ages.

Perhaps there will be both enlightenment and darkness, depending on which region you happen to be lucky or unlucky enough to reside in. Stupidity has a habit of getting intransigent in the face of extinction; the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominionism">Dominionists and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamism">Islamists are sure to create continued misery for the regions they inhabit in the wake of declining resources. But in regions where the majority of the population retain their intelligence, the major religions of the world will undergo a tectonic shift in their focus of how they appeal to rational souls that they are in fact relevant to the new way that the world works. That means that rational Judeo-Christo-Islamic Biblical teachings will have to sidestep previous exhaltations of http://bible.cc/genesis/1-28.htm">Genesis 1:28 to "be fruitful and multiply" by saying essentially, "That was then, this is now". What I believe will happen within this community is a renewed focus on the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel">Tower of Babel story in Genesis chapter 11 as an allegorical tale of what happens to humankind when they attempt to grow infinitely within a finite planet while living off finite resources - God, i.e. Reality smacks them down!



So what does the future hold for people who reject these old constructs reimagined for an overpopulated planet finally confronting the reality of finite resources it ignored far too long? I propose that people like me start taking religious affiliations a little less seriously. Where am I at, spiritually speaking? It's easier to say what I am not. First, with all due respect to those super-popular folks who outdrew us at the Cat & Fiddle, I am not an atheist. While I respect their right to their own opinion, I think atheism is just as wrong as any other religion for the one simple reason that they claim to know what they're talking about! As I see it, the problem with almost every religion in the world is that they claim to understand the spiritual realm. Atheism does this by saying it definitively doesn't exist. I say they're all wrong. But I'm not agnostic. Agnosticism is just too wishy-washy for me. I can't say we don't know whether or not there is a metaphysical realm beyond our physical comprehension of the universe. I believe it does exist. I just don't think anyone knows what it is! I also believe anyone who claims they know is wrong, myself included!

I say it is way past time to create new religions rooted in this simultaneous embrace of doubt and faith. Just recently, a friend from high school told me that he is the founder of "the fastest growing religion on earth" and gave me the details in a Facebook comment:

It is called apethism. We believe that many things may be true or untrue but we are simply too disinterested to find out. Services are held whenever and when someone gets around to it. i leave you now with the apethists credo, "May god bless you and keep you, you know, if you're into that sort of thing man."

Well, maybe that religion is bit heavier with the embrace of doubt than faith. But in that spirit, but with a heavier embrace of faith, why not take a known fictional construct and imbue it with religious faith? As long as it is a concept that can accept faith and doubt in equal tolerance without wallowing in fundamentalism, what difference does it make who thought it up? Why not believe in this:




I'm not talking about worshipping Alec Guinness, or George Lucas for that matter. I think we need to stop thinking of God as a person and embrace God, to paraphrase John Lennon, as a concept. I'm talking about embracing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_(Star_Wars)">The Force. For those poor souls who have yet to experience this Immortal Truth and know not what it is, I shall quote the definition from Ben "Obi-Wan" Kenobi in Star Wars: A New Hope, "It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together". Imagine attending church services at The Force Cathedral, training to be a Jedi Knight. Pretty cool, huh?

Or, for those of you not impressed with the prospect of the conversion of sci-fi fanboy geekdom into a religious order, perhaps you might find George Carlin's metaphysical perspective more persuasive:



"I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron…whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while."

I wonder if, in a post-Peak Oil society, worshipers of The Force and The Big Electron will be true allies or passive-aggressive frenemies. Personally, I don't think I would join either one. I'm more inclined to start the Church of The Thin Man. Instead of trying to attain Nirvana, we all stay content being http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Ballad-of-a-Thin-Man-lyrics-Bob-Dylan/3036AE87105EE4984825696900294B34">Mr. Jones. Because we know something's happening, but we don't know what it is.

Then again, in the wake of planetary devastation in the form of that other civilization-shaking effect of overconsumption of fossil fuels, Global Climate Change, there might be a return back to The Goddess. The embrace of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis">Gaia theory, that the Earth is a living, breathing system of organisms, might revert back to its Greek origins of worshipping http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(mythology)">Gaia, the Goddess personifying the Earth. Those who believe might do so with the faith that such worship combined with adherence to obeying certain ecological principles will heal the planet, and by extension, the people. Hopefully there will be an atmosphere of tolerance between all these prospective religions. But then, as far as those who worship the planet go, there might be intolerant responses from the Dominionists and Islamists toward them. Intolerant to the point of being homicidal. Nothing new for "civilization". George Carlin summed up this tendency toward violent religious intolerance quite vividly:

"Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death— has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians, all taking turns killing each other because God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the lamb, vengeance is mine, millions of dead motherfuckers, all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question: "Do you believe in God?" "No." Boom! Dead. "Do you believe in God?" "Yes..." "Do you believe in my God?" "No." Boom! Dead. "My god has a bigger dick than your god!""

[silverweb]

1. My answer to the question of belief is "possibilities."

Anything is possible.

We know so little in the overall scheme of things, who's to say what's possible or impossible -- or what "supernatural" being(s) (at least, beyond our current level of "natural") might exist in this or some other galaxy or universe or dimension(s) that we just don't know about or how to interact with.

While I'm certainly no apethist, since I care a great deal about questions we have no answers to yet, I'm not at all upset about having no answers and find the whole business extremely entertaining to speculate upon.

God/dess(es), The Force, The Big Electron, The Multiverse, et cetera, et cetera? Sure! Why not?

One of my favorite people has summed it all up nicely in a couple of ways:

"I was barked at by numerous dogs who are earning their food guarding ignorance and superstition for the benefit of those who profit from it. Then there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source. They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who—in their grudge against the traditional "opium of the people"—cannot bear the music of the spheres. The Wonder of nature does not become smaller because one cannot measure it by the standards of human moral and human aims."
-Einstein to an unidentified adressee, Aug.7, 1941. Einstein Archive, reel 54-927, quoted in Jammer, p.97.

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."
-Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."
-Albert Einstein

[robertpaulsen]

3. That is some beautiful insight from Einstein.

Thanks for sharing that, silverweb! I didn't realize he had such an appreciation for the wonder of mystery. That definitely piques my curiosity.

[silverweb]

6. He's one of my heroes.

Carl Sagan is another. Both men extraordinary scientists, both men very wary of dogmatists (particularly religious ones), and both intensely spiritual in their awe/appreciation of the mysteries we are all a part of.

I'm glad your curiosity is piqued! Curiosity is the springboard of imagination, imagination fosters knowledge, and knowledge leads to further curiosity -- feeding the expanding spiral of wonder and awe.

[struggle4progress]

2. This is what I think I've learned from thinking about environmental issues and popular culture:

people often construct their philosophies as rationalizations of what they actually do

if you want to change behavior, philosophical analysis won't work: you have to construct opportunities for changed behavior and give people real options to change their bgehavior. when the behavior changes, the philosophical rationalizations will change as well

[robertpaulsen]

4. That is so true.

Funny how I keep going back to Carlin, but when you said, "people often construct their philosophies as rationalizations of what they actually do", it reminded me of what he said about the "sanctity of life":

"But don't be giving me all this shit about the sanctity of life. I mean, even if there were such a thing, I don't think it's something you can blame on God. No, you know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? 'Cuz we're alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don't see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We're not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What's the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. 'Cuz JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They're fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It's a self serving, man-made bullshit story.

It's one of these things we tell ourselves so we'll feel noble. Life is sacred. Makes you feel noble. Well let me ask you this: if everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die, where does the sacred part come in? I'm having trouble with that. 'Cuz, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don't practice it. We don't practice it. Look at what we'd kill: Mosquitos and flies. 'Cuz they're pests. Lions and tigers. 'Cuz it's fun! Chickens and pigs. 'Cuz we're hungry. Pheasants and quails. 'Cuz it's fun. And we're hungry. And people. We kill people... 'Cuz they're pests. And it's fun!

And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn't seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says 'Save the tumors.'. Or 'I brake for advanced melanoma.'. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up!"

[GliderGuider]

5. I had to deal with a severe existential depression a while ago, brought on by Peak Oil.

In the course of my efforts to get a handle on the 10-ton bag of prickly shit I had started hauling around, I figured out that 57 years of strong atheism had left me feeling a little rudderless. The immediate implication was that one of the ways I could help myself was to reclaim a sense of the sacred in my life. That was all well and good, except it raised the question "What do I feel is sacred, and why?" Given my history Gods need not apply, and humanity on its own didn't look very sacred either.

I finally realized (after hunting down some very blind alleys) that pure existence, especially as expressed through non-localized consciousness, was as close as I could come. Or needed to, as it turned out.

Nice piece, Robert.

[robertpaulsen]

7. Thanks. I loved your recent piece Enough!

Seems to me, and I hope this isn't too glib, that the answer to what is sacred is the same answer to what is profane: Our Duality. I think you are on the right track by embracing that. Ruppert seems to be on a trip that's not so much about the destination as it is the journey of "evolution". Or as George Harrison said, "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there".

I can empathize with that existential depression, "heaven" knows that our journey down the 'decline' slope has great potential for darkness, however you choose to define darkness. So where do you find the light? That's the existential question I try to have fun with. Humor seems to be my latest God, with lots of intercession with Saints Carlin, Pryor and Bruce. Ruppert seems like he's doing it through music.

But no "man" is an island, as the saying goes. There is the personal journey and there is the collective journey within society. And on that level, I agree with you and say, "Enough!"

[GliderGuider]

8. Thanks for the kind words!

I've ended up on the same non-dual path that so many people seem to be stumbling onto these days. There are moments when I realize there is no darkness and no light, that those descriptions are just more of Maya's tricks. But then I still go to bed at night, wake up at daybreak, prefer joy over pain, and fucking love St. George...