![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI've been thinking somewhat about god, lately. About the intersection of experience and society and belief, and how those things combine and diverge and change.
My upbringing was... vaguely Catholic. I suppose you could call it that, and be honest: I had the standard lessons for First Communion and Confirmation (the latter under protest, but 11 or 12 isn't really old enough to completely break with what other people think you ought to do). But my grandmother had an English divorce, from before you could get an Irish one. My mother never married, and her spiritual beliefs were as influenced by yogic mysticism as they were by the Catholic cachecism of her youth. My first school was non-denominational and majority Protestant, of whatever stripe, and I suppose I formed early the opinion that it didn't really matter what you believed: 'God' was an arbitrary designation for an authority the adults wanted to invoke, and 'heaven' was where pets went when they died.
I never understood the idea of 'God' as father. Possibly because I never met mine. And I never understood the idea of 'God' as friend. 'God' belonged in high echoing churches, and high-minded words that didn't match my understanding of how the world worked. Friends were equals, not external authorities that could reward and punish on a whim.
(Though one of my few, very strong memories of church is hearing the offeratory sung by a young bass-voiced priest, and it was beautiful.)
Secondary school was Catholic in ethos, but I met all of three nuns in my time there, and religion? Was not a large part of the curriculum. Doing right by others, kindness, charity, learning for its own sake: these things didn't, for the most part, come with 'God' attached. They were just things you did, because they were right in and of themselves.
Science taught me reasoning from first principles. History and English taught me logic, and comprehension, and the ability to reach my own conclusions. Religion class - and a couple of religion teachers who, though devout Catholics, had a background that was strongly in history and philosophy - convinced me that the Jewish/Christian/Muslim 'God' figure couldn't make sense.
If you dismiss as anthropomorphising the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons, and hold up the Hindu pantheon as examples of human traits writ large, it's not a long reach to see 'God' and 'Christ' in the same light. The exercises in philosophy - cogito ergo sum, or are we? how do we know a table is a table? how do we know the table we see is real? - it all boils down to perception: we choose to believe in the reality of our existence because we experience it: society is consensus reality, but not everyone sees and experiences society in the same way. 'God' in the absolute sense can only exist if we posit an objective reality, but we - none of us - ever actually experience an objective reality, a reality that exists in and of itself. Reality is always mediated through our senses. Thus our experience of that thing which we term divine, that locus of power and agency we find outside ourselves, that we call 'God', is created by our experience of it.
Does this make it less real? I don't know. But it does mean that 'God' is, has to be, individual, never universal.
The odd thing is, for a good couple of years after I finally figured Christianity made no sense, I was a pantheist. Stubbornly clinging to the concept of a universal power, numinous, luminous and connecting. Irony, thy name is hindsight.
The true nature of the universe is ultimately unknowable, since the universe is infinitely vast and we, as always, are so incredibly finite. There are more things in Heav'n and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy - that may have become a trite phrase to quote*, but it's true nonetheless.
Weirdest thing is, though I'm an agnostic nine days out of ten these days and atheist the tenth, I realised something. Power, divinity, doesn't need to be externalised to be numinous, luminous, great and good and hopeful. Because humans can be, can create these things if they choose to. If they, we, choose to be the best of ourselves, all we can be be.
There's wonder in science, in the annihilation of atoms and the birth of stars. In nature, rock and leaf and water and tree and the slow vastness of geological time. And chaos theory and the observer effect, science creating and resolving more puzzles day on day and year on year.
And there's wonder in people, the ones who are kind and generous for unselfish reasons, who smile at strangers for no reason but to spread the joy of living, who see poetry in sunset and peace in the rain, who create art for art's sake, who make the world a cleaner place for being in it.
The universe is a cold and beautiful place, but those people make it warm and luminous, and no less beautiful.
And for some reason my heart is just running over with gladness tonight.
Oddest thing of all. Thursday, the Armed Forces had a stand up in the concourse in college, information on cadetships. Long time ago, I had dreams of being an officer, before my hopes were dashed, as they say, on the rocks of poor eyesight and hypothyroidism, and reality.
So I'm hovering about, scratching, as one might, the old scabbed ache you get from broken dreams. And this nice captain asks me am I interested in a cadetship? And I say, I used to be, and mention the eyesight. And he says, they haven't turned you down officially, have they? Take the booklet. Think about it.
I know it's a mirage. A dead dream, a romanticised ideal. But that captain restored my hopes in more than just the idea of a uniformed career. That moment, there:
They haven't turned you down officially, have they?
It reminded me of something I should never have forgotten. Dreams don't die, not even impossible ones. Not unless they're crushed underfoot, and sometimes not even then.
And crushing dreams underfoot? Is not something you should do to yourself.
I took the booklet. And though I may never act on it, I'll be keeping it.
*I always preferred the lewd quotes, myself. Or 'What's the news?' 'None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.' 'Then is doomsday near.'
My upbringing was... vaguely Catholic. I suppose you could call it that, and be honest: I had the standard lessons for First Communion and Confirmation (the latter under protest, but 11 or 12 isn't really old enough to completely break with what other people think you ought to do). But my grandmother had an English divorce, from before you could get an Irish one. My mother never married, and her spiritual beliefs were as influenced by yogic mysticism as they were by the Catholic cachecism of her youth. My first school was non-denominational and majority Protestant, of whatever stripe, and I suppose I formed early the opinion that it didn't really matter what you believed: 'God' was an arbitrary designation for an authority the adults wanted to invoke, and 'heaven' was where pets went when they died.
I never understood the idea of 'God' as father. Possibly because I never met mine. And I never understood the idea of 'God' as friend. 'God' belonged in high echoing churches, and high-minded words that didn't match my understanding of how the world worked. Friends were equals, not external authorities that could reward and punish on a whim.
(Though one of my few, very strong memories of church is hearing the offeratory sung by a young bass-voiced priest, and it was beautiful.)
Secondary school was Catholic in ethos, but I met all of three nuns in my time there, and religion? Was not a large part of the curriculum. Doing right by others, kindness, charity, learning for its own sake: these things didn't, for the most part, come with 'God' attached. They were just things you did, because they were right in and of themselves.
Science taught me reasoning from first principles. History and English taught me logic, and comprehension, and the ability to reach my own conclusions. Religion class - and a couple of religion teachers who, though devout Catholics, had a background that was strongly in history and philosophy - convinced me that the Jewish/Christian/Muslim 'God' figure couldn't make sense.
If you dismiss as anthropomorphising the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheons, and hold up the Hindu pantheon as examples of human traits writ large, it's not a long reach to see 'God' and 'Christ' in the same light. The exercises in philosophy - cogito ergo sum, or are we? how do we know a table is a table? how do we know the table we see is real? - it all boils down to perception: we choose to believe in the reality of our existence because we experience it: society is consensus reality, but not everyone sees and experiences society in the same way. 'God' in the absolute sense can only exist if we posit an objective reality, but we - none of us - ever actually experience an objective reality, a reality that exists in and of itself. Reality is always mediated through our senses. Thus our experience of that thing which we term divine, that locus of power and agency we find outside ourselves, that we call 'God', is created by our experience of it.
Does this make it less real? I don't know. But it does mean that 'God' is, has to be, individual, never universal.
The odd thing is, for a good couple of years after I finally figured Christianity made no sense, I was a pantheist. Stubbornly clinging to the concept of a universal power, numinous, luminous and connecting. Irony, thy name is hindsight.
The true nature of the universe is ultimately unknowable, since the universe is infinitely vast and we, as always, are so incredibly finite. There are more things in Heav'n and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy - that may have become a trite phrase to quote*, but it's true nonetheless.
Weirdest thing is, though I'm an agnostic nine days out of ten these days and atheist the tenth, I realised something. Power, divinity, doesn't need to be externalised to be numinous, luminous, great and good and hopeful. Because humans can be, can create these things if they choose to. If they, we, choose to be the best of ourselves, all we can be be.
There's wonder in science, in the annihilation of atoms and the birth of stars. In nature, rock and leaf and water and tree and the slow vastness of geological time. And chaos theory and the observer effect, science creating and resolving more puzzles day on day and year on year.
And there's wonder in people, the ones who are kind and generous for unselfish reasons, who smile at strangers for no reason but to spread the joy of living, who see poetry in sunset and peace in the rain, who create art for art's sake, who make the world a cleaner place for being in it.
The universe is a cold and beautiful place, but those people make it warm and luminous, and no less beautiful.
And for some reason my heart is just running over with gladness tonight.
Oddest thing of all. Thursday, the Armed Forces had a stand up in the concourse in college, information on cadetships. Long time ago, I had dreams of being an officer, before my hopes were dashed, as they say, on the rocks of poor eyesight and hypothyroidism, and reality.
So I'm hovering about, scratching, as one might, the old scabbed ache you get from broken dreams. And this nice captain asks me am I interested in a cadetship? And I say, I used to be, and mention the eyesight. And he says, they haven't turned you down officially, have they? Take the booklet. Think about it.
I know it's a mirage. A dead dream, a romanticised ideal. But that captain restored my hopes in more than just the idea of a uniformed career. That moment, there:
They haven't turned you down officially, have they?
It reminded me of something I should never have forgotten. Dreams don't die, not even impossible ones. Not unless they're crushed underfoot, and sometimes not even then.
And crushing dreams underfoot? Is not something you should do to yourself.
I took the booklet. And though I may never act on it, I'll be keeping it.
*I always preferred the lewd quotes, myself. Or 'What's the news?' 'None, my lord, but that the world's grown honest.' 'Then is doomsday near.'
