posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
devohoneybee at 12:51pm on 13/12/2005
devohoneybee at 12:51pm on 13/12/2005Why God? or, a god?
We need the idea of God in order to tap into ideas and feelings that are larger than we can grasp. Our minds are not organized. We fight for every scrap of logic, for self control. And yet we aspire to clarity, and calm.
Thus there is an ideal, a Truth, a Light, a Peace (that truly, by definition, supasseth understanding, or else, what good would it be?) And there is Love, the balm for every tear in our spirit, there because the world is an imperfect nest.
All well and good. But why does it all get taken so personally? Why is one person's God, their Ein Sof, their that beyond which cannot be conceived, have to become an urgently shared belief? Why dogma, and Inquisitions, and missionaries?
Gazzaniga said that just as the human world is social world, so the human mind is a social mind. He called it "the modular brain," and explained faith as that great big cognitive dissonance resolution to end all cognitive dissonance resolutions. We believe, in other words, because it is absurd. One part of our brains, the "interpreter module", operates to create paradigms that make sense of all the co-existing rest that's running simultaneously and in all directions. We are lured and seduced to the illusion of unitary consciousness. And once the interpreter module does its trick, Gazzaniga says, nothing will stand against it.
It's like the fox who said the grapes were sour. That's the way we say, "There is sense in all this." Because such a great bloody leap in logic had to happen, to say, "there is sense" when what there is, is a million billion directions of feeling, sensation, thought, inside ourselves and outside all at the same time and perhaps there IS an order to it all but for damn sure it's not one a human mind will ever know.
Not unassisted, that is. Not without borrowing, linking, communing, touching, channelling some kind of angel, archetype, or god. Or at the very least, a Spirit of the Age. Real/not real -- I don't know. I'm just saying, watch out, please, for the tone of the true believer.
I went to a party yesterday, a party for homeless women in a federally-funded service center. It was run like a church meeting of some kind, near as I would know. There were testimonials and songs and prayers, and Jesus figured in every one. There was no effort, no awareness, none whatsoever, to be inclusive in language to those of us who were not Christians. I found the whole thing profoundly irritating, even as I fought in myself to release judgment, to see the Spirit at work in whatever way made sense to that group of women. But it was a taste of a kind of painful exclusion, and an even more painful mentality that can lead to oh so many dark and dangerous things.
I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition -- but that is how it started, you know, rooting out Jews who'd converted to the Church (the alternative was death), but who still persisted (a stiff-necked people) to be Jews.
Yes, yes, it isn't personal, this party yesterday, these women's prayers. It just made me wonder. I can see and appreciate how "Father Jesus," might have saved the woman who named God such. i just wanted her to leave it at that, and not try to bring me along to it, as she stated in her prayer. I don't hold her faith against her in any way -- on the contrary, it clearly shines through her and is, she says =convincingly, a mainstay of her recovery from the most sordid sort of life. I was more concerned with the absence of any effort to provide inclusion and balance in the language from the staff, the federal dollars-paid staff. It raised unpleasant childhood memories, of attacks physical and theological. I am so aware of what short steps there are between piety and oppression.
God is not a parent, a father, a mother, a lover -- not any of the images we make, except when he or she is. You, yes you, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, tell me of your God, the one you mused/found/made/connected with/got sorted out by... and I will tell you mine. Or not.
God is not a parent, and often, not apparent, either.
And that's all right. That's the beauty of the struggle, the reaching, the co-creation of meeting and meaning. If it doesn't live in the numimous, in the momentary, in the place that can never be entirely named (not even close), that's really quite all right. It is all supposed to be, after all, a Mystery.
We need the idea of God in order to tap into ideas and feelings that are larger than we can grasp. Our minds are not organized. We fight for every scrap of logic, for self control. And yet we aspire to clarity, and calm.
Thus there is an ideal, a Truth, a Light, a Peace (that truly, by definition, supasseth understanding, or else, what good would it be?) And there is Love, the balm for every tear in our spirit, there because the world is an imperfect nest.
All well and good. But why does it all get taken so personally? Why is one person's God, their Ein Sof, their that beyond which cannot be conceived, have to become an urgently shared belief? Why dogma, and Inquisitions, and missionaries?
Gazzaniga said that just as the human world is social world, so the human mind is a social mind. He called it "the modular brain," and explained faith as that great big cognitive dissonance resolution to end all cognitive dissonance resolutions. We believe, in other words, because it is absurd. One part of our brains, the "interpreter module", operates to create paradigms that make sense of all the co-existing rest that's running simultaneously and in all directions. We are lured and seduced to the illusion of unitary consciousness. And once the interpreter module does its trick, Gazzaniga says, nothing will stand against it.
It's like the fox who said the grapes were sour. That's the way we say, "There is sense in all this." Because such a great bloody leap in logic had to happen, to say, "there is sense" when what there is, is a million billion directions of feeling, sensation, thought, inside ourselves and outside all at the same time and perhaps there IS an order to it all but for damn sure it's not one a human mind will ever know.
Not unassisted, that is. Not without borrowing, linking, communing, touching, channelling some kind of angel, archetype, or god. Or at the very least, a Spirit of the Age. Real/not real -- I don't know. I'm just saying, watch out, please, for the tone of the true believer.
I went to a party yesterday, a party for homeless women in a federally-funded service center. It was run like a church meeting of some kind, near as I would know. There were testimonials and songs and prayers, and Jesus figured in every one. There was no effort, no awareness, none whatsoever, to be inclusive in language to those of us who were not Christians. I found the whole thing profoundly irritating, even as I fought in myself to release judgment, to see the Spirit at work in whatever way made sense to that group of women. But it was a taste of a kind of painful exclusion, and an even more painful mentality that can lead to oh so many dark and dangerous things.
I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition -- but that is how it started, you know, rooting out Jews who'd converted to the Church (the alternative was death), but who still persisted (a stiff-necked people) to be Jews.
Yes, yes, it isn't personal, this party yesterday, these women's prayers. It just made me wonder. I can see and appreciate how "Father Jesus," might have saved the woman who named God such. i just wanted her to leave it at that, and not try to bring me along to it, as she stated in her prayer. I don't hold her faith against her in any way -- on the contrary, it clearly shines through her and is, she says =convincingly, a mainstay of her recovery from the most sordid sort of life. I was more concerned with the absence of any effort to provide inclusion and balance in the language from the staff, the federal dollars-paid staff. It raised unpleasant childhood memories, of attacks physical and theological. I am so aware of what short steps there are between piety and oppression.
God is not a parent, a father, a mother, a lover -- not any of the images we make, except when he or she is. You, yes you, to paraphrase Mary Oliver, tell me of your God, the one you mused/found/made/connected with/got sorted out by... and I will tell you mine. Or not.
God is not a parent, and often, not apparent, either.
And that's all right. That's the beauty of the struggle, the reaching, the co-creation of meeting and meaning. If it doesn't live in the numimous, in the momentary, in the place that can never be entirely named (not even close), that's really quite all right. It is all supposed to be, after all, a Mystery.
There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)