Truth Is a Pathless Land, and That's OK

Those who read this blog are aware of my religious and spiritual ruminations over the years. My spiritual journey began as one of questioning what I was told when I was young, and that questioning nature within me has never quite been satisfied with the answers I've found along the way. 

Christianity -- specifically, Catholicism -- was my home base, the place where I was planted. And though I came back to it later in life after a long journey through the wilderness, in my heart of hearts I could never take the teachings literally, as was expected of me. Symbolically, I could grasp them. Mystically, they made intuitive sense. But taken literally, it all breaks down for me into a hopeless thicket of contradictions and logical impossibilities. 

In this painful world, we understandably crave the comfort of certainty. When life makes no sense and it feels hard to press on for another day, it's reassuring to think you have every answer to life's problems at your fingertips, chapter and verse, all conveniently contained within a single book. That book might also give you hope that there's a light at the end of the tunnel -- that if we just have faith and submit to the will of a higher authority, there will be someone there to reward us for a life well lived, to take us by the hand, and lead us home.

It has to be nice to be able to fall back on that kind of belief system.

I can't do it. And I've tried. Believe me, when you've suffered bodily for years and your undiagnosed physical malfunctions take more out of you with each passing year -- indeed, when every day feels like a near-death experience -- you long for some kind of peace, some reassurance, some word from somebody, somewhere, that everything is going to be OK. 

But wanting it doesn't make it so.

And yet even I can't chalk up my suffering to pure randomness. I do believe, based on my own life experiences, that something exists beyond this material realm -- that the material and spiritual are the yin and yang of our being. And suffering, for better or worse, plays a role in that state of being.

Catholics like to say that suffering builds character, but I've got to say that if that's the case, then I've had quite enough character-building for one lifetime, thank you.  

But what if we're suffering as a result of our past misdeeds? That's where karma and reincarnation come into play. 

I've joked before that I must have been a horrible person in a past life, but sometimes I wonder if it's more than just a joke. The Problem of Evil remains, well, a problem when you take for granted the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing deity. But the problem largely solves itself if you accept that our karmic debts carry on from one lifetime to the next, and that we have to keep coming back, lifetime after lifetime, until we settle our debts and set things right. 

The idea is not new to me. Jon Anderson, the lead singer of Yes, led me to the teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda many years ago. Alan Watts helped me build on those Eastern concepts. And everyone from George Harrison to the driving philosophy behind John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra only reinforced what I'd already learned. 

In the West, we of course call this overarching Eastern philosophy Hinduism. But that word has always set uneasily with me, inasmuch as it smacks of a colonialist ignorance that imposed from the outside a name on something not fully understood -- much as Islam was once referred to by non-Muslims as Mohammadenism. To someone from India, the term Sanatana Dharma would be an accurate expression of a way of life that embraces the various strands of India's native religious traditions.

I find Indian religion fascinating in many ways, but it's such an inextricable part of Indian culture that it feels inauthentic for someone outside of India to adopt it. And indeed, there are Indians who agree with this view, that you can't be fully "Hindu" without being Indian. I felt the same when I was exploring Buddhism in some of its Japanese expressions -- Nichiren, Pure Land, Shingon. Stripped-down Western Buddhism to me felt cold, self-absorbed, and thus rather missing the point, but "ethnic" expressions of Buddhism felt like something that was off limits to me -- though that admittedly had more to do with my own hang-ups than with the way anyone at any of the Japanese temples ever treated me. 

My wife and I have been reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I have the Upanishads on my to-read list. I'm reading them not so much with an eye toward converting to Indian religion as to gain a better understanding of what makes "Hinduism" tick. And the more I learn about it, the more I'm coming to understand that "conversion" would result in little more than trading one group of superstitions (i.e., literalist Christianity) for another, as it does appear that most expressions of "Hinduism" within India are indeed weighted down with superstitions, most notably as they apply to a literal belief in a pantheon of deities, and the subsequent rituals, prayers, and offerings that go along with that literal belief.

Alan Watts and others who helped bring Indian religion to the West have focused more on something called Advaita Vedanta. Without getting too far into the weeds, Advaita Vedanta shares the core philosophy underpinning Indian religion while cutting through some of the Indian cultural trappings. One can still honor the gods and goddesses if one wishes, while thinking of them more as aspects or symbols of Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, rather than as entities in and of themselves. The deities aren't objects of worship, per se, but symbols to help us visualize the Divine.

Vedanta also posits that atman, the soul or self, is not separate from Brahman but actually a part of it, and that our goal is to cut through the illusion of the world we think we live in to discover our true divine nature and thus facilitate a reunion of atman with Brahman. Ultimately, then, there is nothing but Brahman, and Brahman, while itself without attribute, is inseparable from sat-chit-ananda, or the state of existence-consciousness-bliss. 

Most traditional "Hindus" take a dualistic approach to religion, seeing atman and Brahman as related but separate. So the monism of Vedanta is a minority view in India, but it would seem to be a flavor of Indian religion that translates well to other cultures. Westerners tried to do something similar when they imported Buddhism and removed anything that felt "foreign" or "superstitious," but my 15 years of exploring Buddhism left me feeling that the attempt was not so successful, as Western Buddhism feels like little more than a self-help program with some meditation thrown in for an "exotic" feel. 

But even in its Eastern setting, it feels to me as if Buddhism tried to get too cute when it took the idea of atman and rejected it with the concept of anatman, or no-self. In an attempt to stake out a viewpoint contrary to the "Hindu" belief he would have been raised with, the Buddha created a seeming contradiction, wherein he denied the self but simultaneously claimed that something about ourselves survives death and is reborn. Vedanta, like Buddhism, encourages us to cease our clinging to an illusionary world, but unlike Buddhism, it doesn't try to deny that there's something eternal about us that survives bodily death. 

In any event, I'm not here to proselytize for Vedanta. Even if I wanted to adopt it for myself, there's no Vedanta community within hundreds of miles of where I live. The only remotely "Hindu" things near me are a cultural center about an hour and a half away and an ashram about a two-hour drive from me. So I'd be undertaking the practice by myself. 

All I'm saying is that after all these years, I've ended up pretty much in agreement with Vedanta, without actively trying to -- which I find really interesting. Reading about Jung's collective unconscious and Bernardo Kastrup's theories on consciousness from a scientific point of view kind of closed the loop for me. Science can't explain consciousness, how a slab of meat in our skulls can account for the subjective inner experiences of living that we all possess, and so Kastrup (and others) posit that consciousness, possessing no other obvious origin, might be a fundamental building block of the universe, like gravity. If so, that points us back to the Vedantic idea that the universe is consciousness itself. Another way of looking at it is that the universe is a gigantic organism, and we are its mind -- the vessels through which the universe experiences itself. 

The only question, then, becomes whether what we experience through our temporary vessels is real or an illusion. Vedanta, of course, would argue for the latter -- that we are, as Alan Watts put it, merely pieces of God playing hide-and-seek with himself, and that eventually the game ends and we all go home. I don't have an answer for whether we experience reality or illusion in this life, and ultimately I don't think it really matters. My opinion would only be just that, an opinion, with no bearing on what actually is. 

So as much as I'd love to check my brain at the door and sign up for a religion that gives me all the answers I'll ever need, I don't think that's in the cards for me in this lifetime. I'd love to have the escape hatch that that certainty would offer, especially when the insanity of the outer world and the pain of my inner world overwhelm me, as they do most days. I want a shelter from it all. Work, music, books, and family are the only safe havens I have, and they'll have to be enough.  

It feels like a resignation, a defeat, to say these things, after all these years of desperately combing through the world of belief in hopes that something might stick. I know now that I have to settle for resonating with bits and pieces of Taoism, Zen, esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Druidry, European paganism, mystical Christianity, and, yes, Vedanta, with an overarching emphasis on the Sacred Feminine. Actually following those paths, with the fervor of a devotee, is for others, not for me. But I can at least take from them what works for me, in whatever way I have to mix and match them. I can go to a high Latin Mass, listen to the lovely Gregorian chant, and contemplate Brahman if I want to. It's about the best I'm going to be able to do. 

I went into 2022 with a mind toward cobbling together my own religion. I still think it would be fun to share my views with others in a ministerial role, and I believe there's a unmet need for people who are rethinking religion and spirituality in new ways. But I also wonder if my logical brain would nag at me and say that even my grab-bag approach to religion is not much more than a security blanket.

In the end, I've come around to seeing the beauty of Jiddu Krishnamurti's insights. K., as he was often called, was plucked out of obscurity as a child and groomed to become the next World Teacher, the incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddha to come. But he publicly rejected this role for himself and spent the rest of his life speaking to crowds around the world as a sort of anti-guru, dispensing practical wisdom while remaining adamant that he didn't want any followers. His unwavering belief was that once you begin to seek truth through a guru, a church, or anything external to oneself, then you've abandoned your own search for truth in favor of taking on someone else's idea of truth. He insisted that "truth is a pathless land." You have to climb the mountain on your own. No one can do it for you. That can be tough medicine to swallow for those who want easy and satisfying answers, but I don't think he was wrong. 

Ironically, that makes K. perhaps the wisest guru of them all. It could be that rejecting the role of Maitreya was necessary for him to become exactly Maitreya, or for all practical purposes the same thing. In that sense, I think he also represents what Vedanta leads people toward: an abandonment of blind belief in pursuit of what's true, rather than what we want to be true. After all, if authentic (i.e., non-superstitious) Indian religion does anything well, it's in encouraging people to seek, to question, to explore, to find their true selves, rather than simply giving them a hidebound list of rules to follow in exchange for a supernatural reward. 

Moreover, if atman is Brahman and Brahman is atman -- if you are that, as the saying goes -- then that changes everything. And it transcends us far beyond anything that the scriptures, or K., or any human religious system could ever hope to impart to us. 

That beats wishful thinking any day of the week... and twice on Sunday.

7 Goals for 2022, Provided the World Doesn't Collapse

As I mentioned in my last post, I've come to peace with the reality that civilization is burning down and there's probably not anything that can be done to stave off a total collapse. I don't know if it'll happen in a year or a decade, but it's coming and it's inevitable at this point. We've just gone too far off the rails. We're too atomized, too fearful, too obedient to the forces that manipulate us for their own ends. 

Too many people are OK with resegregation, with reverse racism, with subordinating biology to feelings, with creating a new class of untouchables and banishing them from society, with the politicization of science to manufacture and enforce specific social and political outcomes and to protect the ideologies and financial interests of our institutions of power, the likes of which we haven't seen since Galileo butted heads with the medieval church. 

Too many people are incapable of independent thought. Too many people hand over their brains to the leaders of the tribes they identify with and the ideologies they're told to embrace. Too many people are too self-absorbed with whatever micro-identity they choose to make themselves feel special in a world that doesn't care about your feelings or how special and unique you are. And we're all compelled to nod our heads and celebrate as others play pretend, denying the evidence of our own two eyes, as if someone can simply identify into manhood or womanhood like they were interchangeable costumes.

We've become surrounded by legions of masked zombies, conditioned to believe that immune systems are a dangerous right-wing conspiracy, who scream at us to respect their pronouns and check our white privilege, while their Woke High Priests threaten to cancel us for violating their dogma, unless we bend the knee, rebuke our wrongthink, and confess our Original Sin of being born white. 

And thus it is, in a culture where everything has to be hyperpoliticized, that logic, reason, individual liberty, personal autonomy, and the right to free thought and free speech are giving way to authoritarian superstition and irrational hysteria, as we sink into a new Dark Age.  

And it's all being accelerated by a sanity-shattering climate in which humans are discouraged from even making human contact, as we're relentlessly conditioned to see every other human as a walking disease -- as if our bodies lack the ability to fight off a respiratory virus with a whopping 2% death rate. 

Had I known a decade ago that the world would go so utterly insane, I probably would have opted for another pet over a child. I dread to think of the world my poor daughter will have to grow up in. So in 2022, I intend to simply do more of what's in my control to do, in hopes of making her life tolerable and our family's existence an act of quiet defiance against the status quo, inasmuch as I intend for us to live as normal a life as possible, in spite of the madness raining down all around us.

My goals for the new year, then, are as follows:

To be as good of a husband and dad as I can. That means hoping my body holds out so I can continue to provide for my family, but also making sure I balance work with personal time. My wife works tremendously hard to keep our house functioning, and I probably don't thank or support her enough for all her selfless dedication. My daughter, meanwhile, needs plenty of dad time. She comes to me to learn, to ask questions, to feel secure, to have fun. She likes playing card and board games, and she wants me to join her in some of her videogame worlds. I need to manage my time so I can do that. I know how much it will mean to her. 

To be a better Stoic. We began exploring the ancient philosophy in 2021, and I think I need to keep at it. I see how angry my daughter gets at the stupidity in the world outside our door. I used to be the same way, just filled with rage at everything and everyone. It's hard not to feel that way. I've managed to find a somewhat better balance by tuning out the divisive propaganda of the 24/7 news cycle. Whatever will happen will happen, whether I complain about it or not. I used to crap all over social media griping about the state of the world, but it didn't change anything. It only served to stress me out. So why do it? No one cares, just like no one will read this blog post. But at least this is my only outlet now, and it's a rare outlet at that. I'd rather focus on what I can control and find the equanimity to tune the rest out, to the best of my ability. 

To be more mindful of personal spending. Because I'm not getting any younger, and you never know what financially trying times lie ahead.

To simplify. We have a big house that's full of clutter. I have a strong desire to purge.

To try to at least maintain my current level of health. Every day is a challenge when you feel miserable all the time, you never know what affliction awaits you next, and you've given up hope that the doctors will ever figure things out. But I intend to hang in there for as long as I can. My goal is to at least see my daughter grow up. 

To indulge my new hobbies of mixology and sartorial peculiarity. We're trying out a new cocktail a day, and I got a drink-a-day book for Christmas. I enjoy experimenting with various flavors and adding a bit of spirits to our meals. I've discovered that I enjoy gin, tequila, and vodka, but not so much whiskey, brandy, and rum. I already knew I enjoyed port wine, sweet reds, and some kinds of beers. So I'm just expanding my horizons to see both where things go and what flavors are out there.

As for the sartorial part, I've taken recently to wearing bow ties. I don't like neckties, but my daughter gave me the idea of trying a bow tie with my Sunday church attire. I like the way the experiment is going so far. I feel a little better about myself when I dress up and figure it might even help me feel less ill all the time, as a good frame of mind counts for a lot. And I've already noticed that people seem to treat you with more respect if you dress well. They're more likely to strike up a conversation. Or maybe it's just the peculiarity of the bow tie that acts as an icebreaker. I guess time will tell.

To continue my spiritual growth. Though I was born and raised Catholic. I've come to terms with understanding Christian teaching in a metaphorical way. It's impossible for me to take any of it literally. I continue go to church because it's comforting and familiar, and I'll probably continue to go to our local Latin Mass until the horrible, petty little bureaucratic bully of a pope that runs the church kills off the traditional Mass once and for all. I may split my time between the Latin Mass and the Byzantine Catholic liturgy, though the Byzantines live over in the jackboot people's republic of Washington, whose proto-fascist governor could at any time declare that papers be shown and useless masks be worn as a condition of entry even into a place of worship. We have none of that nonsense affecting the Orthodox church here in North Idaho, which is like the Byzantine Catholic church in all ways except that I'm not invited to communion with the Orthodox -- and I don't think I have the stamina or the patience to go through the long catechism classes that the Orthodox require before I can partake in what Christ offered freely to everyone at the Last Supper. 

I'll probably continue developing my own theological system that incorporates Taoism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, the Sacred Feminine, and a little bit of Hinduism and Christianity, mixed with bits of Jung, Alan Watts, Jiddu Krishnamurti, the idealistic pandeism of Bernardo Kastrup, the notion of a universal consciousness, and more. I have a book rolling around in my head that lays out all the tenets. I envision an intertwined three-part story that involves new scripture, an academic explanation, and an imagined conversation in an abandoned church between the Virgin Mary and Lilith, whom I envision as one of the most maligned and misunderstood characters in all of Judeo-Christian history and legend. I was going to join an online seminary program in 2022, with the end goal of taking holy orders in a few years, with the laying on of hands, apostolic succession through the Old Catholic order, and all that comes with it. I'm already an ordained minister and hold a Th.D. degree, but the idea of being an actual ordained priest holds great appeal. I just don't know if my dodgy health will hold out. Even if I started an actual church as a priest, there are periods stretching for weeks at a time where I can barely get myself vertical. So I just don't know, physically, if I could do it. That's something I need to weigh before I take the next step.

Meanwhile, my daughter, who considers herself a Taoist like her mom, is also thinking she might want to give Wicca a whirl. Being the most spiritually knowledgeable one in the house, I'll have to be the one to get her up to speed so she can properly assess the belief system and see if it's something she'll want to pursue. 

I also plan to keep up our daily Zen habit of drawing ensos, to help us embrace imperfection and spontaneity. And I intend to finally go through with my plans to devote one day a week to being silent, in an effort to remind myself of how much mindless chatter we all engage in, and to cultivate my own mindfulness. I hate talking anyway, so I don't think this will be too hard.

---

That's seven goals for 2022, and that's plenty. At a bare minimum, I just hope I can stay vertical and sane for another year. 

Fingers crossed.

The Taste of Life

I've been doing battle with a malfunctioning body for many years, and lately the malfunctions have been winning. In years past, I would have been pacing the floors at night, fretting about things I can't control, wondering why me, and simultaneously hoping for a miracle and trying to figure out why the God of love I was raised to believe in would let people suffer so much.

Now... well, now I feel something that's not quite what I'd call a weary resignation, because the feeling is more one of acceptance than of defeat. It's a foreign feeling for someone like me, but if the past year and a half has taught me anything, it's that I have absolutely no control over anything in this world. And that includes the grinding march of time and the toll it takes on one's aging body.

I recently wrote a 12,000-word essay in exchange for receiving a somewhat honorary Doctor of Theology degree. No one needs to lecture me on online scams and diploma mills: The degrees are conferred by an actual practicing seminary, one that offers holy orders through the laying on of hands, making the recipient an official priest through the Old Catholic line of apostolic succession. I received my minister ordination through this same seminary four years ago; now I want to take the next step and receive my holy orders one of these days. The online program takes about two years to complete, so I guess I'll have to see how my creaky old body holds out.    

The point is that I think of the Th.D. as a reward to myself, for all the years I've spent exploring the world's religious and spiritual paths, in search of something I can call my own. I love reading and researching, and since I'll never have the time or money to attend an accredited seminary school, this is the next best thing for me. Besides, mainstream seminaries will expect you to line up with their theological worldview, and I don't line up so well with what other people want. Fifty years of life experience has taught me that, if nothing else. I take what works, regardless of the source, and weave it into a way of life that makes sense to me. It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.

That thought stuck with me as I was doing some research for a homeschool project on the pagan Wheel of the Year. I'm the theology teacher in our house, and while I fit in whatever else I can toward our daughter's education, my tireless and dedicated wife handles the bulk of the work. 

Paganism isn't new to me, but I'd never jumped in quite so deep as when I was gathering information for this latest project. I gained a greater appreciation for how our primitive ancestors lived closer to the earth, in rhythm with the seasons -- and it occurred to me that it wasn't because they were nobly enlightened tree-huggers that would put our conservation efforts to shame, but because they had to pay attention to the climate and the change of seasons if they wanted to survive the long, harsh, cold winters. They needed to prepare everything they consumed by hand. All the food supplies had to be safely stored away before the snow started to fly. And there had to be enough to last until the next harvest season rolled around. You couldn't just drive over to the supermarket to buy some bread if your grain stores were depleted. Either you planned ahead or your family starved. So of course they'd try to appease their gods through prayer and sacrifice, in hopes that their crops wouldn't be destroyed by storm, pestilence, or drought. We romanticize their lives, but their lives were hard, and often short. They were only doing what they felt was necessary to push through for one more cycle of the seasons.

In some ways, we haven't changed. It occurs to me, for example, that a lot of humans, even in our modern world, haven't stopped trying to appease their chosen deities in hopes of extracting some kind of favor. I ought to know. I did it for most of my life. With the preacher on TV telling me that all we had to do was ask and we'd receive our prayer request, I can vividly remember being on my hands and knees, tears streaming down my face, begging God to please fix me and make me feel better. And the healing never came. 

The problem is that we're always looking for a miraculous way out of our predicament, when maybe there just isn't one. We treat the Judeo-Christian God like a wish-granting genie, but that's not how the theology works. You can't change God's mind, so they say, and he already knows how your life story is going to play out. So you might as well stop groveling and come to grips with the hand life has dealt you. Prayer isn't going to do a thing. 

So why did Jesus go around performing miracles, then? Well, I think it's important to remember that he never healed people to make them better; he did it to point people toward God so that they would see the miracles the Son wrought and in turn glorify the Father. Because apparently the perfect creator of the universe needs his ego stroked like that. 

Recall that when Jesus found out that Lazarus was sick, he deliberately waited a few days before going to Bethany. Why? So that Lazarus would die first and Jesus would have to resurrect him -- which he says he did so that his disciples would believe in him. Seems pretty sadistic and self-serving to let Lazarus' family watch the poor man die just to prove a personal point, but that's how the Father and the Son roll. They don't do things for our sake. They do them so that we'll fall down on our knees before them and tell them how great and wonderful they are. Seems like a God of love would just heal people because he loved them and didn't want them to suffer. But with this God, there are always strings attached.

If it sounds like I'm angry with God, I'm not, because I don't believe in that God anymore. I find the entire belief system far too absurd, objectionable, and illogical. If a God does exist, it's not the God of the Bible. I still admire Jesus' ethical teachings and the spiritual lessons the Gospels try to teach us, and Mary is still the face of the loving, nurturing Sacred Feminine to me -- but I just can't pretend to hold a literal belief anymore in any of the Bible's supernatural claims.

And then let's compare the story of Jesus and Lazarus with the story of the Buddha and the grieving mother, as the contrast between the two stories illustrates my exasperation with the way Christianity does things with regard to people in need. 

In the Buddhist tale, a woman came to the Buddha, beside herself with sorrow, asking him to please perform a miracle for her that would bring her son back to life. The Buddha said he would do this for her, and that all she needed to do first was to bring him a single mustard seed from a house that death had not visited. The woman traveled from home to home, but everywhere she went, all she heard were stories of sorrow just like hers. Every home she entered had tasted death. Eventually, she realized what the Buddha had been trying to impress on her, that death is a part of everyone's life, and she returned to him with gratitude for the lesson learned.  

Now, which person's solution was superior? Jesus' or the Buddha's? Well, Lazarus is just going to die again someday, and Jesus' motives for resurrecting the man were self-serving; while the Buddha's comparatively selfless and more compassionate lesson was that we all die and that it's nobler to accept that reality than to want to bend the natural laws of the universe just to bring a grieving mother some temporary comfort. After all, her son will die again one day, and it could happen before her time is up, leaving her to grieve all over again.

That's how the Buddha did things. He knew that we all suffer in this life, and he wasn't going to try to give you false hope, or sell you a fairy tale, or glorify himself with some cheap parlor tricks to get you to worship him. All he gave us was an Eightfold Path to follow that he said would minimize our suffering and lead us to peace, if we could only walk the Path with sincerity and purpose. The Buddha was neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but a hard-headed rationalist, pointing us toward what is and what works, rather than what we want the world to be. The world doesn't care about our will. The most we can do is face whatever the world throws at us with equanimity.

You can see the Buddha's approach symbolized in an old Chinese painting called The Vinegar Tasters. In this allegorical scene, we find the leading figures of China's three predominant religious traditions gathered around a vat of vinegar. All three have dipped their fingers in to take a taste. 

Confucius wears a sour expression. To the Confucian mind, if something in life is sour -- and for the Confucian, it almost always is -- that means it needs to be fixed, usually by external force. So when the Confucian sees a world full of messed-up people, he assumes they have no hope of navigating life without being subject to a long and rigorous list of hierarchichal rules and procedures, with the belief that compelling order and obedience will bring about a virtuous society. Notably, this is more or less how the Chinese Communist Party exerts control over the people even today. The Confucians are the central planners, the power-hungry bureaucrats, the micromanagers and control freaks who don't trust the people to make their own decisions. They were the wear-a-mask-and-show-your-papers people of their time.

The Buddha, meanwhile, has a pensive look, as if he's acknowledging the bitterness of life but thinking about how he can apply his own hard-won logic and reason to make life more tolerable for those who are suffering. 

Then there's Lao-tzu, the mythical writer of the Tao Te Ching. He's wearing a broad smile, as he acknowledges that some things in life are bitter and some are sweet, and that the vinegar is doing nothing more than just being vinegar. The nature of vinegar is to be sour, and it would be absurd to expect it to be something other than what it is. You'd only scowl like Confucius if you expected vinegar to not be vinegar.

I think all three characters have some valuable lessons to teach us. You can control life to try to force it to work the way you want it, like Confucius; or you can accept things as they are and try to make the best of them, like the Buddha; or you can grin from ear to ear like Lao-tzu and say, "There is no 'best of it.' There's just it." Who knows what's good or bad? Life happens, and you just ride the waves as they come, and then one day you die and return to nature. The end. 

Lao-tzu's reaction makes me think of Doc Holliday's death scene in Tombstone, when his friend Wyatt Earp comes to visit him in the sanitorium. Wyatt's having trouble letting go and moving on, when Doc, channeling the ancient Taoist sage, asks Wyatt, "What do you want?"

"To live a normal life," Wyatt says.

"There is no normal life," Doc tells him. "There's just life."

In other words, you have to let go of the need to control things you have no power over. Things are what they are, not what we want them to be. So change what you can, and find peace with what you can't. 

This relates to me in the sense that I want to see my daughter grow up, and I'll certainly do what's in my power to make that happen. But at the same time, the autumn season we're experiencing now is a vivid reminder that all things pass in their time, and that the leaf doesn't cling to the tree when its time has ended. It's futile for us to hang on to that limb, yellowed and in decline, having played our part in the pageantry of life, all while praying to be made green and vital again. It doesn't work that way. Old life declines to make way for new life. The pagans know that. The Taoists know that. But our ego fights against it. It wants the nature-defying miracle. Fearing the potential for nonexistence, it wants to live on after our meatsuits give out. 

Had Jesus been a fourth vinegar taster at the well, he would have turned the vinegar into wine, to glorify God through himself, and would have promised everyone eternal life as he handed out the drinking cups. That's who we want to show up. We want someone who will make the bad stuff go away and give us hope of something better. But wishing something to be so doesn't make it so.

Maybe some essence of us does persist after death. Maybe it doesn't. But if that's our focus, we're missing the point. Some people are so obsessed with heaven that they forget their life here on Earth, with all its highs and lows, its rewards and its challenges, its beauty and its ugliness. 

There's just life. So go live it while you still have it.

Find Your Own Truth, Before It's Too Late

Vietnamese C-19 propaganda
poster. 

By definition, there's nowhere for a person who doesn't follow the crowd and submit to authority to feel at home. It makes for a lonely life, but I can't change who I am. 

I got to thinking about this in recent days, as I see the madness growing and deepening all around me. No one will read this, but it all seems worth saying nonetheless. 

First off, I decided to read some Philip K. Dick before bed last night, and I stumbled on the part of his exegesis where he argues that the universe is actually insane. We think in terms of a benevolent creator or an indifferent Tao, but what if the thing that gave rise to the universe actually was certifiably looney-tunes? It would really explain a lot, especially now as we see the world devolving into a profound mass psychosis. 

I've been working on stitching together my own theological worldview, since I deeply believe there's something "out there," yet organized religion has never really cut it for me. I gave it one more try recently with Eastern Orthodoxy, but I think I've gone as far as I can go. On one hand I find comfort in some of our world's religious traditions, but on the other hand they all leave me wanting in one way or another. They get it, but they don't get it. Which I guess is understandable, since I think whatever the Truth is, it lies far beyond the ability of our feeble mortal minds to ever fully grasp. 

Accordingly, I'm working in fits and starts on a book that lays out my own mash-up of theological ideas. Seems like I always have these Big Thoughts rolling around in my head. They've been in there for years, as I've tried to beat my own path up the Mountain of Truth. And the more I try to make the world's traditional paths -- i.e., organized religion -- work for me in some fashion, at least to the extent that I can use one of them as a foundation and spin off from there, the more I'm reminded of Jiddu Krishnamurti's wise words that truth is a pathless land. No one else can make the journey for you, and in fact it's quite foolish to think that anyone could. There's no avoiding putting in the hard work yourself. 

Relatedly, I plan to enroll in an online seminary next year, with the goal of receiving holy orders to become my own priest, with actual apostolic succession in the Old Catholic line through a laying-on-of-hands ceremony. By then I imagine I'll have managed to fully flesh out my own theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Whether anyone will listen, or come to my church, is another story, because I don't imagine my vision of things will resonate with many people. 

See, I keep coming back to a kind of binary system similar to that of the Gnostics, who I think dreamed up one of the best explanations for why the world is the way it is. It neatly explains the Problem of Evil and so many other things for which theologians have had no satisafctory answers down through the ages. My thought, similar to that of the Gnostics, is that most of us have been fooled, by the Great Deceiver himself, into confusing the diabolical for the holy. And boy, after doing a PowerPoint on Islam for my kiddo, believe me, I'm more convinced than ever. Where the Old Testament merely relates stories to us about a malevolent God who commanded his armies to kill everyone, rip open the bellies of the pregnant women, dash their babies on the rocks, and keep the virgins for themselves, the Quran literally commands the reader to commit these kinds of atrocities himself, against all the indifels who won't submit to Allah. It's truly horrifying.

Among the reimagined scriptures that will pepper my book, there will undoubtedly be a verse that goes something like this:

Thereupon Satan, having posed as the Almighty, went to a place of many warring tribes, and, disguising himself as an angel, he told the greatest of all lies to a man taking rest in a cave. These lies united the myriad warring tribes as a single great warring tribe, and they sowed chaos throughout the world in the name of their God, and Satan roared with laughter as the people called it a religion of peace. 

At least for today, I took some solace in the words of the great medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who speaks for those of us who have never been content to live by others' truths, religious or otherwise: 

We cannot live in a world that is not our own,
 In a world that is interpreted for us by others.
 An interpreted world is not a home.
 Part of the terror is to take back our own listening,
 To use our own voice,
 To see our own light.

When you think about it, it's kind of the 12th-century equivalent of saying "Kill your TV."

It's scary to step out on your own and have the courage to not live life the way others expect of you. You pay a price for nonconformity, often a steep one. But, paradoxically, I think it's the only way you'll ever find true peace. And maybe at the end of it all, the world will actually look slightly less insane.

Either way, the alternative -- a world where safety and conformity smother freedom and choice -- is clearly untenable.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has for years been talking about the growing culture of safetyism, where every threat is exaggerated and we become more and more afraid to take risks. Seatbelt laws, safe spaces, and trigger warnings are all examples, as are coddled kids whose parents force them to live in a bubble where no perceived harm can ever come to them. 

The state of our current world is the end result of the overwrought hysteria of safetyism. Faced with a virus that the overwhelming majority of people will survive, we have mandated everything from porous masks that do nothing to getting a shot as a condition of continued employment. And now we're reverting to show-your-papers Germany, circa 1943, just to gain access to public events and places. Maybe there will an "Unvaccinated Only" lunch counter segregated out for the untouchables, or maybe you won't be let in at all. But that's where we're heading, and we're doing it at a breakneck pace.

This can only happen when we let fear override our critical thinking and turn over our lives to a tiny cabal of propagandists with lots of guns and money.

The lesson we never seem to learn is that whether it’s a government, a religion, or a multinational corporation, concentrating power in the hands of a few almost always ends poorly. The rights and freedoms of the many are restricted in favor of the few who hold the reins of power. They do it using fear and the threat of punishment. And it works because humans have a hardwired tribal instinct. The average person has a job and friends and social obligations. So most people don't want to be the one who steps out of line and risks alienation. They might hate the conditions they live in, but staying quiet and conforming is much easier and carries little social cost. Just ask Jesus, Gandhi, or Dr. King what it costs to stick your neck out. The tribal leaders leave you alone if you don’t rock the boat. Fear is a powerful motivator, and people in power understand this all too well.

What they fear most is the day when the people come to the realization that we outnumber them. Massively. And that's why they work so hard to divide us, to lessen the chance that we'll ever unite in common cause against them, cast off our shackles, and finally become free people with free minds and free wills.

This, in a nutshell, is why I'm an anarchist. I'm just fed up with everybody's bullshit. That goes for institutional powers as well as for those who empower them by constantly rolling over and exposing their bellies -- and then having the audacity to blame our problems on the people who didn't obediently submit.

But I struggle even to find common ground with others who call themselves anarchists. A lot of them, far too many for my liking, think Marx was just misunderstood and his policies misapplied. And the rest, especially those from the liberatarian wing, labor under the false assumption that government is the sole threat to our self-determination.

Religion, for one, controls a lot of people. Some might say the world would be better off without religion. But I'm not so sure, because people will always fill their religious impulses with something. I don't think religion is inherently bad, so long as we use it to discover our place and ponder our origins in the face of a vast universe. Instead, the religious tend to either hand over their brains wholesale to their priests and pastors, or they let the teachings of their holy books fill them with self-righteousness and hate. The whole point is to tame our egos, not sacrifice our critical thought processes.

Far more powerful, and to me far more worrisome, are today's multinational business interests. Corporations should exist primarily to serve human needs, not to enrich their executives and their shareholders on the backs of what amounts to slave labor in the sweatshops of far-flung dictatorships. Nor should they be able to wield their power to control or compel social or political behavior, especially when it's done at the behest of a government that uses corporations to enact its will by proxy. "Private companies can do whatever they want," goes the tired mantra, but the problem is, whether it's a CEO or your governor enacting a restrictive mandate, you're being oppressed either way. But even if we accept the capitalist apologetics of that argument, then companies should be small and powerless enough that if they do whatever they want, their actions would have no large-scale societal consequence.

Then there are our political institutions. This one is simple: Governments should exist at the smallest and most local level possible -- if they exist at all.

That's the world I want to live in. And I doubt that I'll ever see it. In fact, I think there's a good chance I'll live out the remainder of my life as a prisoner in my own home, looking out my window at a world gone mad. I refuse to submit to this insanity just so I can earn a permission slip to exercise what should be my own inherent freedoms.

If somebody time-warped to the present day from, say, a decade ago, I think he would be baffled at just how easily the entire planet can be propagandized into obedience and submission, and then programmed to blame the people who refuse to follow the script. We're upending our entire way of life over a bug that has more than a 98% survival rate. We're treating as an existential crisis an illness that generates mild to no symptoms in the overwhelming majority of people who contract it. We're being programmed to wear masks with air gaps and with pores 20 to 30 times larger than the virus itself, and then demonizing those who point out the plain fact that masking a healthy person is like ordering people to wear garlic necklaces to ward off vampires -- i.e., rank superstition. We're redifining herd immunity as mass vaccination, ignoring the obvious fact that our bodies generate their own natural immunities. The sky is falling, the sky is falling, and it all truly blows my mind. Either critical thought is in even shorter supply than I ever imagined, or fear really is that powerful of a motivator. Maybe it's both.  

Times like this are exactly why we've taught our child to always question what authority figures tell her to do -- to examine the facts, and to say no even if she's the only one doing it. I'm glad we live where we do, in a pocket of de facto resistance. But I fear the noose will tighten and the propaganda will become so relentless that there will eventually be nowhere left to go.

Whether that happens is up to us. Only we can save ourselves. 

On Suffering, Despair, and a Long-Shot Hope

I've been wrestling with some kind of physiological and/or neurological ailment ever since I was in my late teens. It used to consist mostly of panic attacks and insomnia, but it has manifested itself in increasingly physical ways as I get older. 

No doctor has ever been able to tell me what exactly is wrong. I even took three months off work a few years back, during a particularly severe flare-up, to try to get to the bottom of it all. But after being bounced around from doctor to doctor and specialist to specialist, and after undergoing any number of blood panels, CT scans, brain scans, and other invasive procedures, no one could tell me what was wrong. Something is clearly amiss -- even the "experts" agree on that -- but I don't seem to match up with anyone's university textbook definition of a clearly defined illness, and Western medicine appears unable to think outside the box for an answer.  

Now in the midst of another flare-up, I'm doing my best to hold things together. But as I've been devoting most of my free time to immersing myself in studying religion, spirituality, and philosophy, my current bout inevitably stirs up memories of my first significant episode, and how it shaped my relationship with religion.

My adoptive parents were Catholic converts, but Mom especially had an evangelical streak that she could never break. She'd watch preachers on the local religious channel, serving up fiery sermons as they stomped around and yelled, prowling the stage of their megachurches, microphone in one hand and Bible in the other, railing about the atheists and the homosexuals and, yes, the Catholics, and how everybody needed to repent and hear the true gospel before Jesus came back to take all the faithful to heaven. 

I never understood that kind of worship. I only ever found it chaotic and neve-racking, with a wild emotionalism that felt deeply at odds with the calm, ordered, structured, mature, thoughtful rationality of the Catholic Mass. I always felt comforted within the Catholic rituals and traditions, the beautiful architecture, the music, the candles and incense, the statues and stained glass, the organ and choir, the predictable rhythms of the yearly church calendar, all of it. 

I always had trouble taking the teachings on a literal level, and I had a never-ending litany of questions about what we were expected to believe, yet there was something deep and meaningful underlying it all that always drew me back. I was rescued from an abusive bio-mother, and that abuse left its marks -- mentally more than physically -- and I think that the church offered me a place where I could go to make sense of everything and feel as if everything was going to be OK, because someone out there might just care about what I'd gone through. No one used the term "safe space" back in the '70s and '80s, but that's pretty much what church was for me. Mary, in particular, was the mother of unconditional love that I never felt I had. She was my beacon of hope through some pretty hard times.

So fast-forward to my late teens -- I think around age 17 -- when my childhood anxieties blew up into raging panic attacks, completely out of context from any immediate threat. I'd get dizzy and disoriented, my vision would blur, I'd experience brain fog, I couldn't sleep, and my head felt like it was going to explode. I truly thought I was going to die. The attacks sometimes went on for weeks. I'd never know when another one would hit me, but they always came back. 

Even back then, doctors could offer me few answers. One genius physician decided my dizziness was the result of an ear infection and flushed the wax out of my ears. Naturally, it didn't help any of the other challenges I was facing. The most I ever got from doctors were best guesses, pills, a referral to a shrink, and advice on how to breathe and relax. But all those things ever did was lessen the symptoms I experienced during a flare-up. They didn't treat the underlying cause, whatever it was. 

My adoptive dad was a believer in healing through the laying on of hands. Our hometown church had a "charismatic" (as they called it) prayer meeting in the church basement once a week, with people speaking in tongues as they gathered to pray over the sick. My dad and my godfather both attended every week, and they both engaged in the glossolalia that always left me feeling rather uneasy. But if people could be healed of their ailments, I eventually figured I'd put aside my unease and go along with the program in hopes of a miracle. So I asked Dad and my godfather to pray over me. They did, and nothing happened.

My mom, meanwhile, was little help, mostly telling me to snap out of it while guilt-tripping me for not having enough faith.

I can't remember how old I was when I found myself alone in the living room with the TV tuned to the religious channel my mom liked watching so much. There was a pastor on the screen, telling his viewers that God was giving him word of healings that were happening even as he spoke. We, his viewers, could all be healed, too, he claimed. He said to put our hands against his on the screen and to pray with him. That was during a particulary bad bout, and I can vividly remember being on my knees, sobbing, feeling broken, and begging for God to help me and heal me. 

And again, nothing happened.

Meanwhile, I'd watch these revival meetings where the pastor, acting ostensibly as a conduit for the divine, would make people seeking a miracle crumple lifeless to the floor after he touched their foreheads. They'd regain consciousness and jump for joy as they tossed away their hearing aids and wheelchairs, healed by the Lord, their bodies renewed. And all I could ever wonder is why the Lord wouldn't heal me. Didn't Jesus say "Ask and you shall receive"? Didn't he and the apostles heal people in need? So why not me? Hadn't I suffered enough from my early childhood abuse? Why did I have to carry this physical-slash-neurological affliction on top of everything else? 

No one could answer me. All I ever got from Mom was the implication that it was my own fault for not having enough faith. All I ever got from the clergy were unsatisfactory answers about why an all-loving, all-powerful God could stop suffering but doesn't.

I eventually put my beliefs away and drifted off into Buddhism, which at least has an official doctrine of why suffering exists. No special pleading for a God who doesn't help; no hand-waving excuses that "God works in mysterious ways." No, Buddhism simply says that we suffer because of our desire for things to be other than what they are. The world is what it is, and if you've tried and failed to improve your situation, then the only thing left is to deal with the hand you've been dealt. 

That's a hard slap of reality to be sure, but at the time it offered a certain kind of cold comfort. To me, it seemed to beat the wishful thinking of pretending there's a God out there who actually gives a shit about you and your suffering. After all, if he doesn't stop war, famine, disease, natural disasters, abuse, rape, or murder, then why would he care about my problems?

Buddhism's cure for suffering is to follow the Eightfold Path of skillful, compassionate living -- essentially coming to peace with your lot by meeting the world with loving-kindness, with the knowledge that all other people are suffering in their own ways right along with you. There's just one catch (there's always a catch, isn't there?): Your karma might drag you into another existence after this life is over. The only way to get off the wheel of birth, death, and rebirth is to live such a life of equanimity that you finally burn off your karmic debts and retire to the eternal peace of Nirvana.

I have to take a moment here, because I know someone will raise an objection, to acknowledge that Buddhism technically doesn't teach reincarnation like the Hindus do, since reincarnation presupposes the existence of a soul and Buddhism denies that souls exist. But whether your soul is reborn or your karma is, you still have to come back for another round. To some extent, it's a distinction without a difference.

Either way, the concept of rebirth just sounds like a nightmare to me. I don't want to suffer through another life of so much physical misery. One is enough. But I'm nowhere near enlightenment, so for me it would almost be a sure thing that I'd have to come back and do this all over again. No, thanks. 

And I'm not alone in feeling this way. In fact, this is precisely why Pure Land Buddhism holds an appeal for so many in the East. For those in the Pure Land tradition, all you have to do is call on Amithaba Buddha at the time of death, and he'll take you to his heavenly realm, where you can burn off your karma in peace. It's strikingly similar to sola fide Christianity in that regard. Some snarkily call it "stop-trying Buddhism" because it puts no pressure on the practitioner to have to work toward enlightenment in this life -- a goal that might be easy for secluded monks but not so much for normal people with jobs and everyday responsibilities.

But being a Pure Land Buddhist isn't easy if you aren't Japanese. I've been to a Pure Land service, when I lived in Seattle, and while the people were kind and welcoming, it was quite clear that I'd never fit into the Japanese culture that the temple's members were explicitly attempting to protect and preserve. I don't blame the Japanese for doing that at all. If my temple had been shut down during World War II and I was shipped off to a prison camp merely for being Japanese, I imagine I'd want to guard my culture and traditions when I was allowed to come back. 

My last stop in Buddhism was at a Shingon temple, also in Seattle. The priest, a lovely Japanese man married to an American woman, wanted to build an "international" temple that was welcoming to people of all backgrounds, not just Japanese-Americans. I appreciated that, but in the end I still felt as if I was intruding on someting that didn't belong to me. And I don't think I was alone, in that I saw plenty of white Americans coming and going during my time there, while the older Japanese-American folks were the only ones you could count on to be at the services faithfully, week in and week out. 

Having gone through the experience of visiting Buddhist temples that were built by and intended for those of Japanese ancestry, I got a feel for what Buddhism is really like in its original Eastern context. It's nothing like the Western Buddhism that has been stripped down to a kind of meditation-based self-help psychology. The upper-middle-class left-leaning suburban white people who tend to populate Western Buddhism are fond of saying that Buddhism isn't a religion -- and they're sort of right that their Buddhism isn't, but the thing is, their Buddhism has only a tenuous connection to the very religious way Buddhism is celebrated by and large in the East. 

I can't say I blame them for reimagining Buddhism, as I'm not convinced that Buddhism is capable of translating very well in its native forms to the Western world. Zen, which by its nature is severely austere and minimalist, and therefore resistant to most cultural accumulations, may be the exception -- but it would arguably be the only one. Either way, Buddhism ended up being something of a dead-end for me. I took some useful things from the experience but chose to move on.

Since then, I've bounced around from one religious philosophy to another, trying to find a place that feels like home. I continue to find appeal in Taoism, but its foreignness makes it hard for me to warm up to it, in the same way I struggled to fit in with the Buddhist path, and sometimes it feels as if its simple philosophy of harmonizing with the way of nature is just too simple to serve as a substantial spiritual foundation.

But that's on me, and not on Taoism. To its credit, the Tao Te Ching doesn't expect you to put your brain on hold and accept all manner of exotic dogma and harsh commandments in exchange for some kind of eternal reward. It just helps you live a quiet, harmonious life. Religious Taoism does exist, but it's so innately Chinese that it could never have any cultural relevance to the average Westerner.

Meanwhile, the tradition I was brought up in continues to hold some kind of draw for me, and I struggle to understand why. I don't believe in any of the teachings on a literal level, and I find the God of the Abrahamic religions both logically impossible and morally reprehensible, often acting with more evil intent than Satan himself. 

I also find it repugnant that so many believers are so obsessed with sin and think of humans as nothing but irredeemable piles of shit -- Luther, perpetually drowning in his own self-loathing neuroses, literally likened humans to dunghills -- insisting that we all deserve eternal torment and that our intellectual assent to believing in an atoning human sacrifice is our only way out. It's such a negative and anti-human view that it almost takes one's breath away to truly confront it.

Let's consider a few problematic points about Christianity as it's understood by most in the West.

First off, God, being all-knowing, always knew from the beginning of time that Adam and Eve would sin. So why create them in the first place, when he knew they'd fail? He just set them up to stumble. Which can only mean that he enjoys inflicting suffering on his creation.

You don't get it, I hear you saying. He made us to serve and worship him.

Why would a perfect being need someone to serve and worship him? 

He loves us and wants a relationship with us!

Then why does he demand our unquestioning subservience and obedience? Why does he toss us in hell forever for merely failing to obey him? "Love me or burn" is not a relationship. It's the threat of a psychopath.

We have to have the freedom to resist him. He gave us free will so we wouldn't be robots!

Free will is an illusion if an all-knowing God knows every choice you'll ever make before you even make it. You never had a choice if he always knew what you were going to do. Why do you think the Calvinists always talk about predestination? 

But those who believe in his son are guaranteed everlasting life!

Why does it have to be conditional on a human sacrifice? 

Because God needed someone to pour his wrath upon. God is so holy that he can't look upon sin. But by sacrificing his son, we can cover our sins with his atoning blood.

Why is God so hung up on bloody sacrifices? In the Old Testament it was innocent animals. In the New Testament, it's Jesus. Being all-powerful, he could have just forgiven us with a snap of his fingers. 

His ways are not our ways.

No, definitely not. I don't tell people not to kill and then turn around and order mass genocides. I don't tell marauding armies to keep the virgins for themselves, to dash babies against the rocks, or to rip open the bellies of pregnant women. I also don't flood the entire world, animals and children included, because humans did exactly what I foresaw they would do before I even created them.

Do you want to face God's justice too? What does it cost you to just believe?

I don't believe things just to avoid being punished. 

But the Bible says...

The Bible is an ancient collection of stories, some contradictory, and many of them violent and atrocious, written by primitive people who needed explanations for a world they didn't understand, and a god who could beat up the other tribe's god. The stories do express certain universal truths to us from across the ages, but taking the stories only at literal face value misses the point of what they're trying to tell us and forces you to believe in absurdities and reject objective facts about the world. Just ask Galileo.

They're not just stories! God literally created the earth in six days. Evolution is a lie!

And on and on it goes. 

The way I see it, you can express your faith in one of two ways: through love of neighbor, or through fear of punishment. And the more believers I encounter, the more it seems that they choose the latter. Their religion is little more than fire insurance. (Side note: Why am I supposed to be scared of the threat of hellfire when the nervous system in my meatsuit will be dead? I never quite got that.) 

These are the self-proclaimed torch-bearers of Christianity who ignore Jesus' call to lovingly follow in his footsteps and instead quote-bomb Paul, a man who never met Jesus and never says a word about Jesus' life or teachings, to remind us that women should sit down, cover their heads, and shut up, and that gay people will never inherit the kingdom of God. 

But at the same time, they say that all you need to get your free ticket to heaven is to say you believe in Jesus. That's it. Nothing else. Despite the entire Sermon on the Mount, despite the separation of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25, you don't actually have to lift a finger to ever help anyone, love your neighbor and your enemy, turn the other cheek, do unto others, or care for the poor. What do you think this is, some kind of works-based salvation? Be as rotten as you want to, even if you're the only face of Jesus others will ever see. None of it matters, because your ticket to heaven is punched and irrevocable. Who cares about anything or anyone else?

Ranting aside, let's be honest: The story of Christianity, if you're expected to take it literally, makes no sense whatsoever. It may have made sense when humans believed the earth was at the center of the universe and God accordingly had a special interest in this planet. But now that we know that Earth is just one of trillions of planets, not even at the center of its own galaxy, which itself is one of trillions of galaxies, it defies all logic to think that the God of this incomprehensibly vast universe would give two craps about one insignificant little blue dot in the middle of nowhere, a grain of sand in a vast cosmic desert -- and then that he would show favoritism to one particular tribe on this insignificant planet, and then that he would micromanage the dietary, sartorial, and sexual habits of the people of this one particular tribe. 

"God gets quite irate."

This God did a passable job as a local tribal deity of storms and war, but I think it's safe to say he wasn't cut out for his promotion to god of the entire universe. And, of course, the blame for that falls not on an ancient Jewish conception of God, because you really couldn't expect anything more from a primitive warrior tribe, but rather on those who continue to insist on taking these ancient stories completely literally, and then demanding that everyone else believe exactly the same way. As such, I don't "hate" God, as I'm sure any fundamentalist reading these words would claim, but rather I reject both the fundamentalists' particular concept and interpretation of God, and their insitence that I and everyone else share their viewpoint of, and unquestioning obedience to, their concept and interpretation of God.

And despite all that, here I am, suffering through another rather severe bout of my lifelong mystery illness, an illness that the God of love has chosen to ignore, and against all logic and common sense I still feel a pull back to the religious tradition I was raised in. Am I that stupid? What the hell is wrong with me?

The only thing I can figure is that we all crave comfort, safety, and familiarity in times of stress. If church was my safe space when I was a kid, an oasis of calm and beauty where I could at least pretend something greater knew about me and cared about me, maybe I'm craving that again as an adult. Not only has the outside world gone mad, but when I've lived in constant pain and discomfort for the past four or five years, maybe I just need to hold out hope, however slight, that something really is out there that cares, and that maybe it cares enough to one day bring me relief from my unrelenting suffering. Obviously, wishing doesn't make it so, but you can't blame someone for trying, especially when all else has failed.

What's more, the figure and story of Jesus continues to hold tremendous appeal. There's a reason it has endured. The idea that the God of the entire universe would love us so much that he would choose to put on human flesh and humble himself, by entering into the world to suffer for our sake, has life-changing power. There's a reason they call it the greatest story ever told. It's incredibly compelling, even if not a lick of it is literally true. 

Yes, I've repeatedly used the word story here, and that was a deliberate choice. My wife, a fiction writer, would argue that humans need stories, and I think she's right. In our materialistic and coldly scientific world, we ignore the deep truths embedded in fiction, myths, and legends, discarding them as useless tall tales of a bygone age, not realizing that doing so cuts us off from stories that help us navigate the world. 

After all, we humans are more than just a temporary collection of atoms, bones, flesh, and blood, no matter how much a scientist might try to deconstruct us that way. We are living, breathing creatures with curiosity and emotions and social impulses and physiological needs. Moreover, we have a consciousness that makes us aware of our existence and our mortality, and as such we have a desire to make sense of the universe and our place in it. Philosophies and religions both seek to grapple with the Big Questions, and just because a certain religious system might be embedded in outdated notions of the physical world and makes certain extraordinary claims, that doesn't mean it has nothing useful to teach us.

Protestant theologian Rob Bell once made a good point that the modern world misses the point of religious stories from both sides. Funadamentalists, for example, will insist that you believe that Jonah literally lived inside a giant fish for three days, while materialist atheists will scoff at those who can still believe in such ancient fables. All the while, we miss whatever deeper meaning the story is trying to get across. 

Our culture seems to struggle with metaphor and symbolism in general, and we perhaps see it nowhere more than in the interpretation of religious writings.

Another way of stating it is that while there may be no way to verify religious beliefs on a literal level, they still convey truths on a metaphorical level. Here's Bret Weinstein:

And so we find we can point to constructive reasons to hold to our religious beliefs -- reasons that transcend the fundamentalist impulse to try to impose a rigidly literal religious viewpoint on the world. Jung, in fact, would go a step further and suggest that the religious impulse serves a universal human psychological need. Materialists, who in many ways are merely the mirror image of religious fundamentalists in their exclusive worship of what can be observed, measured, and weighed, have neglected to take this into account when they reduce human beings to a collection of biological processes. They accept the human but disregard the humanity, what it actually means to be human. They thus promote a worldview that's rationally watertight but lacks any inherent meaning. That view of the world has the potential to be every bit as harmful and destructive as the fundamentalist religious view of the world.

I suppose that search for balance -- delving into religious traditions for truths about the human condition, without having to check one's brain at the door -- is one thing that keeps me coming back to the spiritual world. As far as the story of Christ goes, I'm always drawn in by three chapters in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus delivered what I believe is far and away the greatest moral and ethical code ever expressed, in the Sermon on the Mount. If we all lived by its words, this planet would virtually be a paradise. It's all enough to make you overlook the horrendous atrocities of the Old Testament God. 

What's more, the suffering of Jesus, when understood in the context of Christ as the incarnation of God, helps give meaning to my own suffering. No one will ever be able to satisfactorily explain to me why an all-powerful, all-loving God would allow so much suffering in his creation, but at least our human suffering seems to take on some relevance in the sense that Christ, God incarnate, suffers alongside us. Conversely, his willingness to submit himself to great suffering gives us the courage to push through our own suffering in imitation of him. In this sense, suffering can be redemptive, like a cleansing fire. 

The old pre-Reformation churches get this. As Jordan Peterson once said, the driving view of the Orthodox church is to "pick up your damn cross and stumble up the hill," as that is the only road to theosis -- i.e., "becoming by grace what God is by nature."

That view actually gives meaning to being a Christian, rather than the empty and childish evangelical idea that you should love God and accept Jesus just so you don't go to hell, and that the only chance you have of getting into heaven is to drown the shit that you are in sacrificial blood so that our wrathful God can even bear to look at you. The Orthodox conception of Christ and Christianity gives us something to strive toward, rather than something we simply need to accept if we want to avoid eternal punishment. 

Accordingly, in Orthodoxy, the concept of sin is seen as an illness of the soul, with the church acting as a spiritual hospital and God as the merciful divine physician; where in the legalistic Western church, sin is a moral failure worthy of condemnation by a vengeful cosmic judge, with the church representing God's courtroom. This is why, if I ever do make my way back to the church, it will most certainly be to the Orthodox church. 

Then there's the matter of Jesus' mom. Mary has been a constant throughout my religious and spiritual life, even when I was as far away from Christianity as I could have been. Like I said before, she's the mom I never had, and for me that makes her a powerful symbol. My attraction to the Sacred Feminine also puts her in a place of prime importance in my theological worldview. An all-male conception of the divine puts both our spiritual and material worlds out of balance and has done real-world harm to women for millennia. 

Protestants either ignore or denigrate Mary, but I think she's essential to a Judeo-Christian view of the world. I look at it this way: As Jesus is the incarnation of the Father, the Word made flesh, so Mary is an embodiment of the Mother, Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The pre-Vatican II Catholic church took criticism for essentially handing the role of the Holy Spirit over to Mary -- but the thing no one ever says is that there was never anything wrong with giving her that role, inasmuch as Sophia is another name for the Holy Spirit, and that Sophia came to Earth in the person of the Immaculate Virgin. In her many apparitions to the faithful over the centuries, she continues to fulfill the role of Paraclete, the Comforter that Jesus promised to send after his departure from Earth. What greater comforter than a mother?

But of course, that's a heretical view, so I could never express it out loud in a church. What I can do is put myself close to her, in a church tradition that continues to at least honor her place as the Theotokos, Mother of God. If that's the best I can do, if it's one of the only things I can salvage from Christianity, so be it. I can see myself holding privately to Taoist philosophy, while taking what meaning I can from the religion of my youth, where I can follow the example of Christ, hold out hope for a health miracle, and take refuge in the compassionate arms of Mother Mary.

Sometimes I wish I could turn off my brain and be as uncritical and unreflective as most people are about their beliefs. But I can't, and I've never been able to. Part of me also wishes that I could just hang up this religious impulse and deal with the world as it is, without the need of a security blanket. But I'm not even sure that going down that road is healthy for humanity, as I think we need a balance between a scientific understanding of the world and something that speaks to the human condition in a meaningful way. 

And besides, when your health is perpetually fucked up and the world has gone to hell, sometimes you just need that hope of a divine lifeline. It may never come, and it may not even exist. But holding out for the possibility that it might be there helps make an existence of unrelenting misery seem just a little more tolerable. 

The Unexamined Life

space.com

In my last post, I expressed my struggle with the seeming paradox between free will and divine omniscience. As I continued to explore the tension between the two ideas, I reached the conclusion that there is no logical way for what I'll call the "omni-God" (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) of Judeo-Christianity to exist. Indeed, as someone who's flirted with the idea of atheism in the past, I think this is where a lot of modern minds get off the bus with regard to old traditional religious views and scuttle their beliefs altogether.

But I think that's selling spirituality short -- throwing the baby Jesus out with the bathwater, if you will. Rather than proclaiming that God doesn't exist, maybe the problem is that we had the wrong idea of God all along. A God who is separate from his creation, perfect in all ways, demanding of worship and of rigorously following his rules, and ever ready and eager to punish those who disobey, like some divine law-and-order judge, seems more a projection of ancient cultures conditioned to the unbending rule of a monarch, emperor, dictator, or some other kind of rigid autocrat who liked to make examples of those who challenged the lawgiver's authority. 

Frankly, the idea that we might live in a universe governed by such a tyrannical being is the stuff of existential nightmares. It's the very kind of God I've never been able to wrap my head around, yet it was the one I was always told existed when I was a kid, by adults who I assumed knew better. "God just put a big red X in his book," my adoptive mom would tell me anytime I did something that went against her beliefs. I always jokingly used to blame the Catholic church for my guilt complexes, but really I think Mom had more to do with it than any priest or church doctrine did.

And yet I still can't find a good substitute way to frame the God of the Bible. In searching for an avenue of thought to pursue over the past few weeks, I hit on a concept called process theology, which grew out of an idea from early 20th-century thinker Alfred North Whitehead. Process theology neatly explains away the Problem of Evil -- how can an all-knowing, all-loving God allow bad things to happen? -- by proclaiming that God is subject to natural law, directing the evolutionary process yet himself evolving alongside us. He persuades us to do good but is unable to force us. Instead, he is "the fellow sufferer who understands." 

Sounds great on paper, and it keeps God from being a tyrant -- but is a God who's unable to actually do anything really a worthy substitute? I'm not so sure that rape victims, people who lost a loved one to murder, or parents who lost a child to cancer are going to be comforted all that much by knowing that God really cares and hurts along with them. The idea is well intentioned, and it does resolve the problem of why God doesn't help us in times of need. But it really only replaces it with a new problem: Why should we even bother with a God who's so powerless?

And so that puts us right back to Square One, with the omni-God. The funny thing about this God is that church leaders tell us he's eminently unknowable, yet those same church leaders are always the ones who insist on the omni-ness of their God, and they're also awfully quick to mete out God's judgment for him. For a being they don't know very well, they sure do seem to be able to act decisively on his behalf. As Susan B. Anthony once observed, "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." I guess some people were just born to be hall monitors. 

Maybe most of humanity is OK with that, and maybe that's why such unhealthy religious beliefs persist. After all, if the past year and a half has reminded us of anything, it's that most people are blindly obedient to authority. They won't question any narrative that comes from an "authoritative" source, even if obeying is to their own detriment. We are instinctually tribal animals, and the tribal elders would never lie to us. They only have our best interests at heart. It's been shown over and over that this is how the majority of people think. And it's a significant part of the reason humanity can't advance. 

Add fear to the mix, induced by the tribal leaders themselves, and not only is obedience strengthened, but anyone who challenges the narrative is seen as a danger to society who must be silenced for the good of the community and the preservation of the status quo. From Jesus hanging on a cross, to the murders of Gandhi and Dr. King, to the exile of Snowden and the imprisonment of Assange, to contemporary woke censorship, the story is always the same: Challenge the prevailing narrative -- the one on whose power the ruling authorites rests -- and suffer the consequences. 

The point being, maybe so many people are OK with the idea of a law-and-order God handing out harsh punishments because they're OK with the human equivalent. In fact, I'd posit that many would feel unmoored and frightened without that kind of authority ruling over their lives and telling them what to do. It's easier than thinking for yourself, after all.

I should pause here to explain that I've never looked at the world the way most people do, and I'm painfully aware of it most days. Maybe being abused at a young age had something to do with the way my brain developed, or maybe I'm just naturally wired differently from most. My bio-mom was a drug-abusing schizophrenic, so it's hard to say what I inherited and what is just me being a weirdo. I just know that most normal kids don't suddenly stop playing one day as the terrifying existential question Why am I me? roars into their head from nowhere. There's been no end to my quest to explore the Big Questions ever since. 

The point is, I've always felt as if there was something wrong with me on many levels -- one of them being that I reflexively recoil from the idea of blind, tribal, fear-based obedience. I've always been this way. Even when I was a kid, annoying my adoptive parents in church by asking them question after question about what we were supposed to believe, I just couldn't understand why, if God gave us rational brains, we shouldn't use them to question the things we were told. 

Carl Jung.

I admire the story of Christianity at its core. I just can't wrap my head around a lot of it if I'm expected to believe everything on a base surface level. If, however, I can approach the teachings on a deeper level, as Jung did with his idea of universal human archetypes and the collective unconscious, then I can embrace the entire framework as one of speaking to our fundamental human need for finding meaning and transcendence. As we all possess that need, Jung believed that God was an innate part of the human psyche. (Which means that Nietzsche was wrong when he proclaimed that God was dead, since God, as a psychological construct, can't be killed.) 

Thinkers from Pascal onward have further argued that we all have a "God-shaped hole" in our hearts, and that if we don't fill it with God, we'll fill it with something else -- whether the pursuit of material gain, celebrity worship, Wokeism, or what have you. Best, then, to attempt to fill it with something reflecting its intended purpose -- something that will lift us up rather than drag us down to our basest instincts.

Anyway, I couldn't resort to atheism with any sort of intellectual honesty. I actually think it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a theist, as there's simply too much about the universe we don't know, and there are things that suggest to me some kind of divine blueprint. And so, while I waver some days between agnosticism and a weak belief, I do my best to take some concept of "God" as a philosophical and psychological given. 

I've stumbled across some mind-bending arguments that see consciousness as an innate part of the universe, and it's a small step from there to postulate God as a kind of universal consciousness from which we all draw, reminiscent of Alan Watts' Hindu-ish observation that we are all pieces of God playing hide-and-seek with himself. Now, see, that conception of God I can easily understand. It's just the ones that anthropomorphize God into a violent cosmic judge that have never made any sense to me. Those conceptions of God seem to say far more about the people who wrote them down than about anything resembling what the actual nature of a divine being would have to be. 

And so I continue to tussle with the peculiar Western conception of God the best I can. It's never easy, but pondering the possibilities of What's Really Out There makes for good mental exercise, and I'd certainly rather live with some theological uncertainty than with the rigidity of fundamentalism.

Here's the way I see it: On a literal level, Christianity makes almost no sense to me. On a spiritual level, I understand what it's getting at, even if the message quite frequently seems lost in today's churches, buried under layers of dogma, corrupted by fundamentalist self-righteousness, or watered down into meaningless feel-good platitudes by liberal theologians. But on a symbolic and psychological level, I can mostly get on board with everything Christianity teaches -- though even that depends on the flavor of church. For example, I like the contemplative tradition of the Quakers, I admire the simplicity and the Sermon-on-the-Mount-centrism of the Anabaptists, and there's something about the pre-Reformation traditions and high-church practices in general that have always deeply resonated with me. But the hands-in-the-air emotionalism that usually exists in tandem with a belief in the total depravity of mankind? I can't run away from that stuff fast enough. 

Indeed, I love the ancient traditions that the Orthodox keep alive, and I feel a sense of transcendence when I'm in the presence of a beautiful old church -- Catholic, Orthodox, or otherwise -- with its ornate architecture, the statues and icons conveying their silent theological assertions, the rafter-shaking pipe organs blaring out their majesty, the choirs sending a chill down the spine. It's like bringing an image of heaven down to Earth. I might struggle with belief, but insofar as the church pursues and venerates the transcendental ideals of goodness, truth, and beauty, it succeeds in bringing me out of myself and connecting me with something bigger. 

Moreover, on a cultural level, the Catholic and Orthodox churches make me feel rooted in my own Western heritage. Western civilization wouldn't exist without the church, particularly Catholicism, and in some sense I think I feel an obligation to honor that connection and help keep it alive -- especially now, when our bedrock Enlightenment values are under such relentless attack.

It's times like these that make a lot of people clutch on to the security blanket of fundamentalism. But fundamentalism only drives people away from a spiritual tradition that they might otherwise find fulfilling and enriching. And that's not to mention the actual violence that fundamentalism can visit on its enemies.

It's tough to escape the fundamentalists these days. They're everywhere, not just in the churches. You have the cold, mechanistic, atheistic view of the science-minded materialists, who reject any semblance of spirituality as thoroughly as a fundamentalist insists on a literal reading of Adam and Eve. You have the disciples of the Republican and Democratic parties proclaiming their team as savior and the other as the devil. You have medical fascists ordering us to shut down our lives, deny ourselves human contact, wear masks that do nothing but signal obedience and compliance, shoot experimental vaccines into our bodies, and carry around privacy-invading vaccine passports if we want to participate in "normal" society again -- all over a virus that gives most people mild symptoms and has an astronomically high survival rate for the overwhemling majority of the population. And of course, you have the Woke Left that thinks in irrational absolutes and possesses all the religious zeal of the Inquisitors and witch-hunters of old, demanding that you recant on bended knee for your ideological sins, lest you be sacrificed on the Altar of Cancellation.

And so those who desire the honest pursuit of knowledge with the least bias possible (we're all biased about something, after all) are left to fight with groups of people who by definition limit the acceptable range of inquiry. 

What do you do with that? That's been the puzzler for me as I've been gorging on the ideas, thoughts, and theories of people both ancient and modern, in an attempt to suss out what a realistic spiritual path would look like for someone of my temperament. I've been exploring numerous paths over the course of my adult life, and while I've picked up useful ideas from many of them, the two I keep returning to are Taoism and a very eclectic kind of philosophical Christianity. 

Taoism holds the appeal of simplicity, with no arguments for or against God, no complex theology, no commandments, no damnation. You simply follow the Way, using nature as your guide, as you attempt to harmonize the complementary opposites in the natural world -- light and dark, warm and cool, even the energies of male and female -- to achieve the balance of a unified whole. The well-known tai chi symbol of yin and yang represents that balance, with its waving lines suggesting the effortless flow of opposites from one to the other in a continuous dance, and the circle in the deepest part of the opposing color suggesting that one aspect is never fully separated from the other. Indeed, yin and yang define and complete each other. 

This can be a difficult concept for Westerners to grasp, as we're so accustomed to thinking in terms of a clash of opposites rather than a unification of them. Accordingly, I've seen more than one person from the West thinking that yin and yang somehow suggest a blending of good and evil -- as if evil somehow is complementary to good. In truth, the tai chi symbol is a representation of what "good" looks like when opposites are in harmony with each other. "Evil," as we think of it, would be a yin-yang symbol out of balance. The world can't be in a "good" place if half of it is evil. 

For Western minds coming to the Tao, the challenge is to flip around so many of the assumptions we tend to hold. As the Tao Te Ching -- the central text of Taoism -- will repeatedly remind you, the supple tree that bends with the breeze will remain standing, while the old, rigid tree will come crashing down in the wind; and even though water slips through your fingers, given enough time it will wear down the highest mountains into canyons. 

The overarching Taoist philosophy, then, is one of persistent but relaxed patience. Using wisdom and intuition as your guides, you address things as the circumstances dictate, rather than pre-plan a response that may not adequately address a changing situation. You let things happen in their own time, rather than forcing an outcome. And you achieve that aim through the practice of effortless, spontaneous, non-striving action. You might say that Taoism is the art of knowing when to simply step out of the way. By yielding or strategically withdrawing when appopriate, rather than forcing one's will, one has a greater chance of surviving the onslaughts that are sure to come one's way. The onslaught anticipates your active resistance; when you don't give it, the power of the onslaught has no place to go. Think of the passive resistance with which Gandhi brought down an empire. Force only knows how to react to force, which is precisely the reason that passive resistance is such a powerful and successful tool of change. 

Taoism's simplicity was in part a reaction to the rigid, Pharisee-like legalism that Confucius had brought to ancient China. Confucius believed that imposing rules and hierarchy on the people would create a more harmonious society. And it did, but at the cost of human freedom and independence. Its influence continues today, as a convenient tool of control in Communist China. Taoism, in contrast to the Confucians, implored leaders to be virtually invisible, governing only to the necessary minimum and leaving the people to think that whatever has been achieved was done by the people themselves. 

As for the Christian side of things, I know of no denomination that mixes silent contemplation with an emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount while keeping to the transcendental beauty of the ancient churches and allowing people the freedom to approach the teachings on a psychological level. But the truth is, I miss the groundedness that the rituals provide, and I miss being admist a community that shares something mystical and beautiful together. 

In our atomized society, and especially following the government-enforced and mass-fear-enabled isolation of the past year, we need rituals like these to hold our society, culture, and nation together. They act as a social glue. I'm not a very social person, but I still understand the need for institutions, rituals, and shared beliefs. Some rituals are slowly coming back, like ball games and concerts, which serve an important secular need -- although if states, companies, and venues institute proof of vaccination for entry, they're not going to help the situation at all. Creating an entire class of untouchables, with "unvaccinated only" sections of people treated like diseased pariahs, is the exact opposite of what we need at this moment in our history. We need to move beyond the fearful superstition that has gripped our world and accept what is for most people a low risk, letting us all come together again as one. 

The problem is, most of the churches couldn't kick people out fast enough last year when the lockdowns started. The very institutions that should have stood strong as a beacon of faith were among the first to shut their doors -- and even those that have reopened have largely instituted rules and restrictions that unmask their lack of belief in the very things they teach. They've revealed the subordination of their own mission to political authoritarianism and social panic. And they don't in any way reflect the fearless Jesus who ran toward the sick when others shunned them. 

But they do remind us of the churches that likewise shut out the faithful in medieval Europe. St. Charles Borromeo went out to meet the plague victims crying out for help and mercy in the streets of medieval Milan, Italy, when even the priests were hiding out for fear of getting sick. He urged the clergy to help him serve the ill rather than run from them. "Do not be so forgetful of your priesthood as to prefer a late death to an early one," he rightly chided them. Consequently, he was able to rally enough support to be able to perform outdoor Masses, hold catechisms, and distribute the sacraments to the sick and homebound. And thus was the church able to carry out its mission -- for what good is a church that's only there when it's "safe"? 

St. Charles did the right thing and made the brave and Godly choice, inasmuch as the Christian path calls the faithful -- and especially the clergy -- to selflessness. Yet you can count on one hand the churches that defied political authority and remained open during the hysteria that gripped the world in 2020. Most of them blindly obeyed and hid like cowards. And even now, Pope Francis is shaming Catholics into injecting experimental poisons into their bodies, proclaiming a "moral responsibility" to vaccinate and any resistance to doing so a "suicidal negativism." I'd think he'd want people to exercise their conscience in the face of a a virus that, again, for most people brings only mild symptoms -- but as we've seen, the church has demonstrated nothing over the past year more clearly than its obedience and subservience to Caesar. If nothing else, at least Francis is making sure the tradition of Catholic guilt remains alive and well.

In times of political and theological uncertainty, new churches have risen up to meet the needs of the people. With church membership in a seemingly terminal decline and the numbers of religiously unaffiliated people rising as quickly, it feels as if we're at one of those pivotal moments in history. I've been doing research in pursuit of starting my own chapel precisely because I find the intsitutional churches lacking in significant ways, and it's clear I'm not the only one. But it seems like a lot of trouble to go to simply to start a new church for my own satisfaction, so I'm attempting to balance a church I envision with one that might be able to help others who are similarly floundering. Maybe they grew up with Christianity like I did, but they don't know how to make Christianity work for them anymore. I'd like to be able to reach some of those folks, let them know they're not alone, and maybe build a community for the like-minded -- even if it only ended up being half a dozen other misfits. Openness to Eastern thought and an embrace of the Sacred Feminine wouldn't hurt for anyone who wants to come my way, but I think having an independent streak and a willingness to think outside the box would be the most crucial component of all.  

What I don't want to do is feed the narcissistic beast that's tearing us apart. For example, Tara Isabella Burton's book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World chronicles an American trend of "remixing" religious ideas from across traditional and pagan practices into something whose driving force seems to be nothing more than expressing personal emotions -- not building a rational theology for a better world, but for achieving the narcissistic goal of how it makes "me" feel. In a world in which people make themselves into individual gods, reimagining their identities in their own images and declaring it blasphemous for others to raise an objection, it isn't surprising that these "remixed" religions would elevate the selfish and irrational over the social and reasonable.   

"Weird Catholic Twitter,"
by way of NYT.

I'm sympathetic to Burton's argument in a New York Times editorial that people are searching for meaning and groundedness in a ravenously capitalistic society that has turned even religion into a commodity. Quite literally, nothing is sacred anymore. But her proposed solution is, I think, bound not to work for her intended audience: a retreat into the old, sacred forms of Christianity that I've been talking about here. The problem is that she's arguing for dropping self-proclaimed "punks" -- people with a postmodern view of the world -- into a context that can't possibly resonate with them, given its conservatism on matters of life-and-death issues, its emphasis on traditional gender roles (including female submissiveness), and its view of heterosexuality as normative -- not to mention the inherent need for humility, obedience, and relegation of the self to something bigger than oneself. 

In the article, Burton name-drops Rod Dreher, the American Conserative writer who in his book The Benedict Option argues for traditionalist Christians to drop out of the culture wars and form intentional communities based on their shared faith. But that idea works for Dreher, because his worldview is already in tune with traditionalist Christianity. If Burton thinks postmodern punks can co-opt the form without embracing its meaning, I think they're only going to find more hollow dissatisfaction. If your sales pitch for the Latin Mass is "Gothic Architecture" and "Veils! Veils! Veils!," you're missing the whole point. Not everything is an ironic postmodern joke that can be removed from its context for self-serving ends. 

Latin Mass attendance is rising, contrary to most religious trends in America and the West. There is value in the old forms, for certain, but do they only represent a yearning for meaning in a time that's now long past? Can we even go back to a culture where such deep and rich traditions held meaning in a larger societal context? Can interest in the old ways change the tide? 

If I ever returned to church, it would probably be to Orthodoxy, whose ancient forms, defense of tradition, and theological stances hold great appeal for me. On principle alone, I can't return to the church of Pope Francis, with his constant hectoring of people who don't toe the line on obeying the Caesars of COVID dogma. Which is sad, because it was Francis who helped bring me back to the church with his pastoral and compassionate approach. I thought he struck a sensible middle ground between the legalistic fundamentalists who never got the memo that the Crusades were over and the fuzzy-headed liberals who festoon their churches with rainbow flags while draining their theology of any meaning other than "be nice like Jesus." But Francis seems to have lost the script. I get now why traditionalists never really liked him.

There's nothing inherently wrong with blending different theological ideas into something new, provided the new thing serves a uniting and uplifting purpose and isn't just a weak, self-serving expression of someone's transient feelings. After all, it's often forgotten that even Christianity was the result of a "remix" of Hebrew and Hellenistic ideas. Plato's ideas exerted their influence on the early church, Plotinus and the Neoplatonists informed Augustine's theology, and Aquinas drew from Aristotle. Maybe the answer, then, is to go back to the beginning, to those great Greek minds, and see how they influenced Western thought and religion in the first place. In doing so, we might be able to revitalize the ideals that the West was founded on. Maybe we can get the West back on course, whether that means a return to the ideals of the past or the beginning of a healthy new direction based on those bedrock values. Either way, maybe it's not too late. 

In fact, maybe philosophy is exactly what we need in this pivotal moment. Maybe we need to open ourselves again to ask those Big Questions about existence and its meaning. We're so eager for answers when maybe we just need to sit with those questions for a while, in the liminal space of "I don't know," and see where the speculation leads us.

At his trial, Socrates held that the unexamined life is not worth living. Like so many before and after him, he died because he challenged society's power brokers. And yet even after he was sentenced to die, he didn't flinch from his conviction that nothing was so important as the tireless pursuit of wisdom, which for him came through relentless questioning. In following his example, may we also find our way to a wisdom that will lead us forward as one, whether that means a return to the old ways, an adoption of a rational new way, or a little bit of both.