I'm a bit behind the game on this one, but Fallen Sparrow has an interesting post about severed heads and their bodies which touches on science fiction, Catholic theology, zombie movies and many other things:
Dualism, Zombies, and Persistently Conscious Heads
I was particularly struck by the fifteenth-century painting of St. Denis holding his severed head, because as Fallow Sparrow points out, both the head and the bloody stump of his neck have haloes around them!!
The Robert Olen Butler book he discusses sounds very interesting indeed. And I was reminded of Land of the Headless.
Via Eve Tushnet
PS: Sorry about the title. Couldn't resist.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Friday, June 13, 2008
Terry Pratchett
I'm not entirely sure what to think of this news item. But it seems that Discworld author Terry Pratchett's views on the gods or God have mellowed somewhat:
"...in an interview with a Sunday newspaper, he said: "It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, they just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows. That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless - it doesn't take you anywhere. But it fills a hole."
These comments are apparently linked to a recent experience which Pratchett describes. However, last year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, so I'm sure many people will dismiss any new opinion because of that.
"...in an interview with a Sunday newspaper, he said: "It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, they just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows. That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless - it doesn't take you anywhere. But it fills a hole."
These comments are apparently linked to a recent experience which Pratchett describes. However, last year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, so I'm sure many people will dismiss any new opinion because of that.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Dark Space, etc.
Aka recently pointed out this book review, written by R. J. Burgess. It begins thusly:
It's surprising how rarely a true God shows up in science fiction. For a genre so fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, SF often seems reluctant to speculate about the existence of a great almighty. Classic novels such as C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker aside, God-like entities seem, more often than not, to be viewed as bad Star Trek clichés, as though the genre insists on denigrating such beings to the status of highly advanced aliens or artificial intelligences.
It's good then to see that Dark Space, the fourth novel by Australian writer Marianne de Pierres, is one of those rare examples of SF that sits firmly in the "taking God seriously" camp. The Sole entity at the heart of this galaxy-spanning series is a great big MacGuffin of a deity that is thrust at us from the very first page as being something so utterly unique and alien that it can only be classified as a god.
That first paragraph reminds me a bit of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun. It introduces a pantheon of active gods and goddesses and reveals that they are artificial intelligences. But the pantheon also includes a "minor" god, the Outsider, who turns out to be a whole lot "bigger" and more mysterious. (And there are alien deities in the following Short Sun trilogy.)
God is generally not very easy to incorporate into a work of fiction, not as a character in any usual sense. Once you start to delineate and explain and provide motives, it's no longer God at all, at least not in a transcendant capital-G sense.
Anyways, in other (vaguely related) news, here's an interesting quote I came across today from Karen Armstrong:
Yes, once I'd stopped prancing and posturing around on TV, where I was expected to have an inflammatory opinion and to let people have it. All this was pure egotism. I did some early television programs and expressed my secularism very cleverly. I'm slightly down on cleverness, which can be fun and witty at a dinner party and I enjoy that as much as anybody else. But it can be superficial. Once my television career had folded, I was left on my own with these texts. There was nobody to exclaim derisively about the irrationality of a Greek Orthodox text or the stupidity of a certain Jewish mysticism. I began to read them like poetry, which is what theology is. It's poetry. It's an attempt to express the inexpressible. It needs quiet. You can't read a Rilke sonnet at a party. Sometimes a poem can live in your head for a long time until its meaning is finally revealed. And if you try and grasp that meaning prematurely, you can distort the poem for yourself. And because I'd been cast out from the media world, and was living in a world of silence and solitude, the texts and I started to have a different relationship.
It's surprising how rarely a true God shows up in science fiction. For a genre so fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, SF often seems reluctant to speculate about the existence of a great almighty. Classic novels such as C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy or Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker aside, God-like entities seem, more often than not, to be viewed as bad Star Trek clichés, as though the genre insists on denigrating such beings to the status of highly advanced aliens or artificial intelligences.
It's good then to see that Dark Space, the fourth novel by Australian writer Marianne de Pierres, is one of those rare examples of SF that sits firmly in the "taking God seriously" camp. The Sole entity at the heart of this galaxy-spanning series is a great big MacGuffin of a deity that is thrust at us from the very first page as being something so utterly unique and alien that it can only be classified as a god.
That first paragraph reminds me a bit of Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Long Sun. It introduces a pantheon of active gods and goddesses and reveals that they are artificial intelligences. But the pantheon also includes a "minor" god, the Outsider, who turns out to be a whole lot "bigger" and more mysterious. (And there are alien deities in the following Short Sun trilogy.)
God is generally not very easy to incorporate into a work of fiction, not as a character in any usual sense. Once you start to delineate and explain and provide motives, it's no longer God at all, at least not in a transcendant capital-G sense.
Anyways, in other (vaguely related) news, here's an interesting quote I came across today from Karen Armstrong:
Yes, once I'd stopped prancing and posturing around on TV, where I was expected to have an inflammatory opinion and to let people have it. All this was pure egotism. I did some early television programs and expressed my secularism very cleverly. I'm slightly down on cleverness, which can be fun and witty at a dinner party and I enjoy that as much as anybody else. But it can be superficial. Once my television career had folded, I was left on my own with these texts. There was nobody to exclaim derisively about the irrationality of a Greek Orthodox text or the stupidity of a certain Jewish mysticism. I began to read them like poetry, which is what theology is. It's poetry. It's an attempt to express the inexpressible. It needs quiet. You can't read a Rilke sonnet at a party. Sometimes a poem can live in your head for a long time until its meaning is finally revealed. And if you try and grasp that meaning prematurely, you can distort the poem for yourself. And because I'd been cast out from the media world, and was living in a world of silence and solitude, the texts and I started to have a different relationship.
Thursday, March 27, 2008
David Martin on science, religion, and sociology
Martin is an esteemed British sociologist of religion and an Anglican priest. In 2005 he gave a lecture on the question: Does the Advance of Science Mean Secularization? He thinks that, historically speaking, the answer has been "For the most part, no" and explores the many other factors that affect how religious or secularized a society is. The sociology of religion is a fascinating and very complex topic. The lecture displays Martin's dry British-academic wit and vast learning.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Lapsarian myths
Jim Slagle has an interesting quote from historian Diane Purkiss on the history of witchcraft; or rather on the public's perception of historical witches. A snippet:
"There is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also in some parts of the Continent, midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters. Most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, some of which were quasi-magical, without arousing any anxiety. There is little evidence that convicted witches were invariably unmarried or sexually 'liberated' or lesbian; many (though not most) of those accused were married women with young families. Men were not responsible for all accusations: many, perhaps even most, witches were accused by women, and most cases depend at least partly on the evidence given by women witnesses. Persecution was as severe in Protestant as in Catholic areas. The Inquisition, except in a few areas where the local inquisitor was especially zealous, was more lenient about witchcraft cases than the secular courts; in Spain, for example, where the Inquisition was very strong, there were few deaths. Many inquisitors and secular courts disdained the Malleus Malificarum, still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was women-hunting; still others thought it ridiculously paranoid about male sexuality. In some countries, torture was not used at all, and in England, witches were hanged rather than burned.
"All this has been known for some time. Yet in the teeth of the evidence, some women continue to find this story believable, continue to circulate it. Some women are still so attached to the story that they resist efforts to disprove it. The myth has become important, not because of its historical truth, but because of its mythic significance."
She also writes:
"It is often linked with another lapsarian myth, the myth of an originary matriarchy, through the themes of mother-daughter learning and of matriarchal religions as sources of witchcraft. This witch-story explains the origins and nature of good and evil. It is a religious myth..."
Every now and then someone tells me the story of the ancient matriarchal religions. They were peaceful, kind, sexually liberated, and ecologically sensitive, and they were smashed and driven underground by the evil patriarchal religions, which have been persecuting women ever since. Ecrasez l'infame, destroy the patriarchy!
I'm not a huge fan of The Patriarchy myself (or at least I try to heed what feminism has to say). And surely there were matriarchial religions somewhere in European prehistory. But I'm doubtful about the strictly historical value of the overarching original-matriarchy story. It's always seemed to me that it was indeed a kind of lapsarian myth, an account of the Fall. It's not about history or science, it's a mythic answer to an existential question, located (of course) in the misty land before history. We all tend to situate our Paradises somewhere in the past or in the future: Ah, things were good once, in the pagan classical era/the Catholic Middle Ages/pre-Columbian Turtle Island/the Enlightenment/the decent, law-abiding 1950s/the Clinton era... Or, just you wait until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat/Jehovah's Earthly Kingdom/the Enlightened Reign of Science/the Rapture/the Singularity. Things were/will be much better then, darn tootin.'
I'm not saying that such myths do not contain existential truth. Just that we should recognize when we've left history and entered mythology. Then, perhaps, we can compare our mythologies.
"There is no evidence that the majority of those accused were healers and midwives; in England and also in some parts of the Continent, midwives were more likely to be found helping witch-hunters. Most women used herbal medicines as part of their household skills, some of which were quasi-magical, without arousing any anxiety. There is little evidence that convicted witches were invariably unmarried or sexually 'liberated' or lesbian; many (though not most) of those accused were married women with young families. Men were not responsible for all accusations: many, perhaps even most, witches were accused by women, and most cases depend at least partly on the evidence given by women witnesses. Persecution was as severe in Protestant as in Catholic areas. The Inquisition, except in a few areas where the local inquisitor was especially zealous, was more lenient about witchcraft cases than the secular courts; in Spain, for example, where the Inquisition was very strong, there were few deaths. Many inquisitors and secular courts disdained the Malleus Malificarum, still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was women-hunting; still others thought it ridiculously paranoid about male sexuality. In some countries, torture was not used at all, and in England, witches were hanged rather than burned.
"All this has been known for some time. Yet in the teeth of the evidence, some women continue to find this story believable, continue to circulate it. Some women are still so attached to the story that they resist efforts to disprove it. The myth has become important, not because of its historical truth, but because of its mythic significance."
She also writes:
"It is often linked with another lapsarian myth, the myth of an originary matriarchy, through the themes of mother-daughter learning and of matriarchal religions as sources of witchcraft. This witch-story explains the origins and nature of good and evil. It is a religious myth..."
Every now and then someone tells me the story of the ancient matriarchal religions. They were peaceful, kind, sexually liberated, and ecologically sensitive, and they were smashed and driven underground by the evil patriarchal religions, which have been persecuting women ever since. Ecrasez l'infame, destroy the patriarchy!
I'm not a huge fan of The Patriarchy myself (or at least I try to heed what feminism has to say). And surely there were matriarchial religions somewhere in European prehistory. But I'm doubtful about the strictly historical value of the overarching original-matriarchy story. It's always seemed to me that it was indeed a kind of lapsarian myth, an account of the Fall. It's not about history or science, it's a mythic answer to an existential question, located (of course) in the misty land before history. We all tend to situate our Paradises somewhere in the past or in the future: Ah, things were good once, in the pagan classical era/the Catholic Middle Ages/pre-Columbian Turtle Island/the Enlightenment/the decent, law-abiding 1950s/the Clinton era... Or, just you wait until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat/Jehovah's Earthly Kingdom/the Enlightened Reign of Science/the Rapture/the Singularity. Things were/will be much better then, darn tootin.'
I'm not saying that such myths do not contain existential truth. Just that we should recognize when we've left history and entered mythology. Then, perhaps, we can compare our mythologies.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The mystic and the material
Andrew Sullivan quotes the notable Oliver Sachs on combining atheism with mysticism.
He strongly dislikes the idea that transcendent music and the like has anything to do with 'fictious' supernatural realities. He also says: The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in "the holy and glorious flesh," as Dante said.
Oddly enough I find that view pretty cogenial. (And I do remember C.S. Lewis warning about the Materialist Mystic.) The whole incarnational, sacramental aspect of Christianity, the whole startling paradox of the divine reality glimpsed only in the flesh and blood of a suffering and dying (and risen!) man, leads me in that very physical direction. It's not surprising he quotes Dante. On the other hand, while Christianity has strong resources with which to criticize notion of 'the spiritual' I don't think doing that necessarily leads to ruling out the existence of God as some encompassing being/reality underlying (or overarching) ordinary nature as we know it (I realize this leans towards panentheism, but so be it.) Salvation, revelation, indeed any divine manifestation can be seen as taking place in the material: salvation of the world by re-creation and resurrection, not by rapturing souls out of the world.
Let me once again highly recommend Take This Bread, which continues to move me deeply and stimulates my thinking about the sacramental and incarnational nature of food, relationships and faith. There's one bit where Miles recounts being trapped near a violent government crackdown in Mexico. She goes on to say that the incident was completely suppressed in the media and that the only people who knew about it, knew it 'in their own meat,' which is apparently a Spanish phrase - I don't have the book with me but I think it was en (something) carne? The book includes many varied experiences but she's tied them together with this powerful recurring incarnational motif, and the act of giving and receiving food. "Take, eat, this is my body, broken for you."
He strongly dislikes the idea that transcendent music and the like has anything to do with 'fictious' supernatural realities. He also says: The non-representational but indescribably vivid emotional quality is such as to make one think of an immaterial or spiritual world. I dislike both of those words, because for me, the so-called immaterial and spiritual is always vested in the fleshly — in "the holy and glorious flesh," as Dante said.
Oddly enough I find that view pretty cogenial. (And I do remember C.S. Lewis warning about the Materialist Mystic.) The whole incarnational, sacramental aspect of Christianity, the whole startling paradox of the divine reality glimpsed only in the flesh and blood of a suffering and dying (and risen!) man, leads me in that very physical direction. It's not surprising he quotes Dante. On the other hand, while Christianity has strong resources with which to criticize notion of 'the spiritual' I don't think doing that necessarily leads to ruling out the existence of God as some encompassing being/reality underlying (or overarching) ordinary nature as we know it (I realize this leans towards panentheism, but so be it.) Salvation, revelation, indeed any divine manifestation can be seen as taking place in the material: salvation of the world by re-creation and resurrection, not by rapturing souls out of the world.
Let me once again highly recommend Take This Bread, which continues to move me deeply and stimulates my thinking about the sacramental and incarnational nature of food, relationships and faith. There's one bit where Miles recounts being trapped near a violent government crackdown in Mexico. She goes on to say that the incident was completely suppressed in the media and that the only people who knew about it, knew it 'in their own meat,' which is apparently a Spanish phrase - I don't have the book with me but I think it was en (something) carne? The book includes many varied experiences but she's tied them together with this powerful recurring incarnational motif, and the act of giving and receiving food. "Take, eat, this is my body, broken for you."
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Philip K. Dick on JWs
"In one interview, Dick discusses an account of Jehovah's Witnesses in one concentration camp who, as part of the camp bureaucracy, typed up lists of people who were to be killed each day:
Hmm. He has a point, but I think it was a bit more complicated that he thought. For one thing, I don't think JWs (or Bibelforscher) were gassed as a matter of course. I thought that those who were put in the camps were just starved and/or worked to death, unless they agreed to sign a paper rejecting their subversive beliefs and acknowledging the Fuhrer's supremacy.
When my teenaged refugee father stopped to rest in an evacuated concentration camp, he found prisoner JWs serving tea and doing other chores. An officer (I don't know if he was just Wehrmacht, or SS) explained that the JWs were used in this role because they were totally non-violent and thus trusted. All the other inmates had been evacuated* but they got to stay. My father was impressed. I think by that time he had had his fill of war, of both the Nazi and Communist variety.
*Because, you know, the Nazis just had to kill as many people as they could before they went down in defeat.
This is the essence of the unhuman... These Jehovah's Witnesses knew the situation; they knew that they and other people were going to be gassed. And yet they were typing lists, and emptying wastebaskets, whatever, as long as it didn't break some damn ordinance in the Bible like "Thou shalt not salute the flag." They'd go to their deaths rather than salute the flag, and yet they'd type up and carry lists of people who were to be exterminated!"Pink Beams of Light From the God in the Gutter, p. 17. The Dick quote is from Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection, by D. Scott Apel.
Hmm. He has a point, but I think it was a bit more complicated that he thought. For one thing, I don't think JWs (or Bibelforscher) were gassed as a matter of course. I thought that those who were put in the camps were just starved and/or worked to death, unless they agreed to sign a paper rejecting their subversive beliefs and acknowledging the Fuhrer's supremacy.
When my teenaged refugee father stopped to rest in an evacuated concentration camp, he found prisoner JWs serving tea and doing other chores. An officer (I don't know if he was just Wehrmacht, or SS) explained that the JWs were used in this role because they were totally non-violent and thus trusted. All the other inmates had been evacuated* but they got to stay. My father was impressed. I think by that time he had had his fill of war, of both the Nazi and Communist variety.
*Because, you know, the Nazis just had to kill as many people as they could before they went down in defeat.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Take This Bread
We briefly interrupt this hiatus, because I just had to tell all a y'all about this book:
Take This Bread, by Sara Miles.
I got the book Monday evening and finished reading it on Tuesday, because it was so good. Miles is a journalist, a left-wing political activist and a lesbian. She was raised by militant atheists and remained a contented atheist until age 46. Then one day she walked by St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, got intrigued by the artwork, and went inside. She took communion and had a mystical experience. From there she dived into Christianity, and then started a big food pantry in the church, serving a nearby poor neighborhood.
Along the way she talks about becoming a professional cook and getting caught up in guerrilla wars in some of the world's most impoverished places. She spent time with Ignacio Martin-Baro, one of the Jesuits who was later murdered in El Salvador.
She does an amazing job of describing the hurting world, the church, humanity, the grief and terror and joy of life. There are a lot of wonderful moments when some acquaintance or random person unexpectedly says something profound. And in a sense the whole book is a beautiful meditation on the Eucharist, which she comes at from a number of illuminating angles.
I find outsiders (ie, non-churchy people) to be the best at showing me what Christianity is and can be. Miles originally had very little background knowledge of religion, and she's unabashedly human: someone who makes mistakes, cusses a lot, doubts herself, and gets furious at people. But I can think of few stories where I've seen the Holy Spirit more clearly than in Take This Bread.
PS: A heads-up to my conservative readers: Miles becomes a Christian and throws herself into doing Christ's work, but she also remains a leftie and a lesbian (in a long-term, committed relationship.)
We now return to the hiatus.
Take This Bread, by Sara Miles.
I got the book Monday evening and finished reading it on Tuesday, because it was so good. Miles is a journalist, a left-wing political activist and a lesbian. She was raised by militant atheists and remained a contented atheist until age 46. Then one day she walked by St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, got intrigued by the artwork, and went inside. She took communion and had a mystical experience. From there she dived into Christianity, and then started a big food pantry in the church, serving a nearby poor neighborhood.
Along the way she talks about becoming a professional cook and getting caught up in guerrilla wars in some of the world's most impoverished places. She spent time with Ignacio Martin-Baro, one of the Jesuits who was later murdered in El Salvador.
She does an amazing job of describing the hurting world, the church, humanity, the grief and terror and joy of life. There are a lot of wonderful moments when some acquaintance or random person unexpectedly says something profound. And in a sense the whole book is a beautiful meditation on the Eucharist, which she comes at from a number of illuminating angles.
I find outsiders (ie, non-churchy people) to be the best at showing me what Christianity is and can be. Miles originally had very little background knowledge of religion, and she's unabashedly human: someone who makes mistakes, cusses a lot, doubts herself, and gets furious at people. But I can think of few stories where I've seen the Holy Spirit more clearly than in Take This Bread.
PS: A heads-up to my conservative readers: Miles becomes a Christian and throws herself into doing Christ's work, but she also remains a leftie and a lesbian (in a long-term, committed relationship.)
We now return to the hiatus.
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