God (Again)

[poliphilo]

Most people make religions last a lifetime. I wear them out in a decade. I was a Christian for ten years, then I was a Witch for ten years. Right now I'm nothing in particular.

I think (but I'm not predicting what will happen tomorrow) that I've worn out religion altogether. And I mean every religion, all possible religions. I no longer see the point of getting together with other people to commune with A Mutual Friend who isn't actually there. I'm not saying there isn't a value in this for others, or that I didn't derive benefit from it in the past, but right now, at this particular point in my earthly pilgrimage- no.

For much of my life I was crazy for it. I left Christianity because I was desperate for something sharper and bubblier. But when I eased myself out of Wicca it was because the whole enterprise had gone flat. If I'm still interested in religion (and I am or I wouldn't be writing this) it's as an outsider- almost as an anthropologist.

But I still believe in God. Though "believe" isn't really the right word. It implies that God is there and we're here and there's a gulf between us across which messages may or may not be sent. That's not how I see it. Ask me how I do see it and I find myself lapsing into the kind of mystical twittering that has come to seem stale to me. So I'm not going to try. Any God I can verbalise, even if it's in the woolliest terms- "ineffable, inexpressible, unknowable"- becomes a presumption that stands in the way of the true God taking me by surprise.

I know what She isn't and that's enough.

Comments

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

It may be useful to note that Galen is the first major writer to call Christians something other than a cult and when he does briefly mention Christians, he calls them a "philosophical school" rather than a religious practice. Galen is observing the difference between the religions of the ancient world and Christianity. Ancient religions are essentially networks of beliefs built up over time and have the authority of antiquity as the founding point of cultural identity. Christianity, however, is derived from a short tradition of teachings analogous to the Platonic, Pythagorean, Aristotlean, or Stoic philosophies. In fact, the religious experiences discussed by Christians in that time and to the present are the same sorts of life transformations associated with, to use a slight corruption of the phrasing in the Imperial period, "finding philosophy."

So I don't think that it's necessarily problematic to reject religious notions outright, since their power is generally predicated on the same life-changing power associated with philosophies or Alcoholics Anonymous. As for Gods you can verbalize, this is the problem Descartes never solves. See, it's entirely possible that our thinking on "infinity" is "this thing plus this other thing and so on" and our thinking of "unkowability" being "whatever that method for infinity equals" or "the stuff I can't think of." Neither of these is a fully formed and independent concept, and hence neither really works to accurately express one.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It's my "belief" that Christianity started life as a mystery religion in the Greek style, adapted to Jewish taste. I'm not terribly literate when it comes to philosophy, but I understand that the classic Christian worldview owes as much to Plato and Aristotle as it does to "Moses" and "Jesus".

[airstrip.livejournal.com]

This is pretty accurate. Christianity forms as a spiritual belief exclusive of morality in a manner reminiscent of those mystery schools and encompassing the sort of factionalism characteristic of them. However, it spreads because of the spiritual belief qua justification for moral theory. Christians in the early days seem more moral, a point that Galen notes.