mood: regressive
music: 'the coming of spring' by the rapture
upon popular request, i'll try to reproduce what i was thinking about at last sunday's mass.
it's getting about that time where the sun sets late enough to be able to see the patterns of color on the center aisle. st. jerome's stained glass windows are the 50's kind that probably still have lead in them somewhere. no asbestos, though. all the asbestos was removed when i was 6 and in the first grade. the only thing that spurred it was the northridge quake early in '94. i assume that streams of carcinogenic death rained onto the pews and prompted urgent action.
now it was 11 years later, though, and i was staring at the priest standing underneath the renovated ceilings, but i still didn't hear anything he was saying.
anyways, what i was thinking about was the modern faith. think for a moment of the world in a modernist's view. i speak of modernism as the literary movement, where things could no longer be catagorized. there existed a new gray area. pre-modernism, everything was simpler, mainly because of the lack of revolutionary technology, but also because that's how the world accepted it.
so how did the old world come to discern and accept the matters of fact and the matters of fallacy? of the many possible answers, the most favorable seems to me to be the creation of a god. in my opinion, god was created my man to create order. to create a standard that existed pre-modernism.
therefore, now that we've entered a contemporary society, we must learn to accept that there isn't always an absolute answer. black and white don't necessarily exist in each case anymore. there will always be a gray area in our modernist minds each time we make our day-to-day decisions.
accordingly, god is obsolete. god was there to lay down the rules and now we are ready to throw the rules out the window. with the ushering in of advanced technology used in life support, abortion, euthanasia, and several other difficult modern-day topics, we have only proven how impractical it is to use the old standards. it's like trying like a futile child to push a round peg through a square hole.
if you seriously think about it, how much more religious were each and every family 100 years ago? and now, religion in the majority's household is fading fast. the greatest agnostic and atheist philosophers all popped up fairly recently, as in the last century or two. the number of priests is dropping. and how many teenagers have you met recently who are crazy-go-nuts over god, and not hypocrites?
of course, i am by no means a theologist of any kind. also, this is horribly, horribly incomplete. send your comments, angry or otherwise, my way.
9 comments:
Hi, (I've also left you a return comment on my blog),
I know that families are less and less religious in a lot of countries, but also that real religion is less and less popular. And who wants to admit to something so outmoded? I think religion has gone inward for most people.
The idea of humans creating God (or whatever term is applicable), I don't agree. But I do think people have created gods. Modern techonology that prolongs lifespans, or ends them with ethical approval, or clones or splices different species' genes together is a clumsy way of attempting to reorder something hardly understood.
Do you truly think things were ever simple, or black and white? Well-known as it has been that all living things age and die, what's with the early-on people in the bible supposedly living for hundreds of years, or the saints from India never aging, resurrecting people, things that don't fit with anything simple and also don't require modern technology? (I was recently speaking with someone who had just spent ten months in India, and would sleep on a raft on the Ganges. Sometimes something would bump his overhanging hand--a corpse. There is something called the "fire barrier," some people pay for the privelege of dying, but some people have readied themselves spiritually, and they alight themselves as a sort of final mediation, then go into the Ganges and explode! so this person told me, but some of the corpses were of people who apparently weren't ready, and didn't explode.)
I think these days many pseudo-intellectual people like to affirm things like, "You can't really say that someone is female or male, you can't really say anything definite about anything," but I think that is just lazy form of rhetoric, an easy out that sounds sort of intelligent. And it supports the "gray area" idea. Of course not many things fall neatly on a point of a spectrum, almost everything has multiple meaning. Hasn't it always?
But I know very little, and anything I say here is also incomplete. Any kind of cognizing, analyzing, never gets finished. By the way I am not including you in "pseudo intellectual."
i see your point in terms of simplicity and black-and-whitedness, but those old-world stories aren't meant to be taken literally. they pose a symbolic meaning that emphasize the power of god, and the power of man before his fall from grace.
anyway, i can't say that i've got a primary source into older times, so i can't honestly tell you how simple the times were back before the information age or whatever. from what i've studied, though, in the literature of the times, it seems like people started looking at things differently. the world didn't necessarily change that much, but what little it did change forced the natives into restlessness.
let me pose a metaphor: there's a pot of water on the stove. someone takes red dye and drips a few drops into the left side, and the same for blue dye on the right. they start to move freely, right? now turn on the fire of the industrial revolution. the heat makes the colors diffuse quicker. after some time, the colors have blended in some places but, other places are more red than blue and vice versa. (i didn't mean for it to sound so political...) just like our society, i think, as we've been here for longer and longer times, and we learn more and more about our world, things start overlapping and getting all mixed up. my opinion is that as things change (especially rapidly, as the times have dictated) we should see that we need to change too, in order to function in an ever-flowing society.
the way i see it, god doesn't need to be a part of that changed society.
I like your ideas here, they're very thoughtful and contemplative. Do you go to Catholic HS or was this a recreational mass?
A few things though, functional atheism started long before the industrial revolution, and even hit its stride before it as well. By the time we in America started feeling the effects [in the dissonance of the lost generation and literary modernism], Atheism had already been deeply rooted in European intellectual thought for 200 years, beginning in the aftermath of Descartes' wacky radical reason. Descartes himself was trying to undermine athiesm as what he perceived as a creeping threat to God, and ended up fanning the flames by creating a radical skeptical backlash to his quest for radical certainty. By the time the enlightenment began gaining speed, intellectual Atheism was in full flush.
While you might have a point that the 'flame of industrialization' added tumult to the pot, I personally feel it's more correct to say that functional atheism allowed for a safe space in which the free-thinking of modern scientific impiricism could create the science and empirical knowledge that led to the industrial revolution.
Anyway, you gotta love Catholic schools if for nothing else than the commitment to intellectual inquiry. I wish I would have started in HS kinda.
why, hello. welcome, luke.
i was at mass with my parents, who make me come with them at least twice a month. my school is jesuit, but they keep a much more open mind than standard catholics do, which has let me think and choose for myself quite well. my grammar school, however, tried to pound old school catholicism in through our skulls. that i didn't like so much.
hmm, i didn't even realize it started that far back. i guess i just assumed it wasn't very widespread because of that whole hang-you-by-the-hair-and-rip-your-face-off sentiment of heresies and such back then.
also, what you said about science flourishing from atheism seems true to me too. now i'm thinking that it's not really that one spurred the other, but rather that it has been and still is more of a symbiotic relationship, with one pushing the other further and so forth. excellent. thanks.
i think that if the world does not need god, it never did. if it ever did, it still does.
since god cannot be proven it remains largely a matter of personal experience and belief.
the red and blue dye could only move in directions available within the water, and couldn't leave the pot. so, what defines how free humans' thinking is? is "godless" merely a logical opposition to "godness"? does thinking have to change with the changing world or can it come up with something original?
"since god cannot be proven it remains largely a matter of personal experience and belief."
i agree whole-heartedly. religion is a big part of my life even now as i'm finding my footing in my faith. despite my disbelief in a centralized figure, sometimes i feel like i'm living an otherwise religious life. so somehow, in some way, god is a big part of my life without him/her/it actually being there, if that makes sense at all.
god should be different for all of us, which is impossible to describe through a standardized religion. god is more of an inner force to me than the kind of figure that my upbringing has taught me.
anyway, you bring up a good point with your last paragraph. if there is a god, there probably isn't a human way to comprehend him/her/it, which is both the truth and a good cop-out answer for either side of the argument.
Hey, Luke! *waves*
I like this post, and I like the discussion it generated. Very cool :) I don't really have the background in history and literature that you guys do, so I can't comment on when or why society started to move away from religion--although I would be interested to study when society moved towards religion, too. And I certainly have no deep theological understanding; my former faith was largely based on the Gospels, with a smattering of the Old Testament (I always got bored and quit reading around Numbers, but I have read the Psalms and Song of Solomon).
The reason I am now agnostic is basically because I can't get past a paradox: if there is an all-knowing, all-seeing god, then he would doubtlessly know all the horrible things that were going to happen once he created mankind, and yet he did it anyway. How is this god good, then? I can't accept the answer that he is beyond us and we therefore can't understand his ways. The only reason I can think of to create mankind and watch its suffering is for entertainment. The ultimate reality show.
I basically don't want to believe in a god like that.
However, this paradox only caused me to reject the Christian god of my former faith. It's entirely possible that there is a god who created us all without knowing what was going to happen...or thinking he could somehow keep it from happening. A fallible god. A god without perfect foresight. I don't have as much difficulty with that idea.
And it's entirely possible that there is some way to explain all this--life--without the need for an entity beyond it.
I honestly find both possibilities unfathomable. If there is a god...where did he/she/it come from? What created god? If there isn't a god, then how does everything exist? Where did it all come from? Why is it there? These questions are completely beyond me. They're beyond all of us, and that's why we cling to our belief systems--some to religion, some to science--because they are the best answer. Much better than saying we just don't know.
I, however, prefer to say that I don't know, and that I have no way of knowing. I think that maybe someday someone might know, but I also think that if that should happen it won't happen for millennia (or more) after my death. I do find it interesting to discuss--Luke has said quite a bit on the subject that is more than intriguing. But I think that there comes a point in philosophy where you have to take a step back from the worlds you've constructed and remind yourself that you really know absolutely nothing.
the faith you described in paragraphs 2 & 4 is called deism. basically, it's the belief that some enormously powerful being planted the seed for life, and just let it go from there. this god would have no personal contact with us, but would be recognized as god nonetheless. in my opinion, it's like being both devoutly religious and atheist at the same time.
as for the last section of your comment, i could not agree more. we don't know anything. i've never been a man of science, nor have i been a man of religion. i guess i've just got to get comfortably with saying i don't know. however intriguing the topic is to discuss, and no matter how self-destructive those words may be, there will be only one thing for sure, and that's that we just will never know.
heather, i have little time now but i like what you said about when humans moved toward religion. i have thought about that a lot. i think people once were the goddesses and gods intead of pointing to them...a lot more could be said, and these gods and goddesses aren't really the main thing called God/Great Spirit/Creator, etc....and i like what you said too goei because it showed more personally than the previous......gotta go for the moment
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