POLITICS AND RELIGION, BOTH SHAKY

New thinking, such as Steve Benen’s new book, “Imposters” about how over the last decades the Republican party has left its original premise as representing a school of political thought in favor of achieving raw power for the Senators, has me thinking about religious institutions.  In Christian terms I was originally Presbyterian through family; left that in undergrad years; while living in a village on the Blackfeet rez, casually participated in the Methodist congregation, and finally served as clergy in the Unitarian Universalist; Association, which I left in 1988.  Since then, informed by the University of Chicago Divinity School MA in Religious Studies, I’ve been trying to understand the major changes to our lives because of scientific explosion since WWII.

The untenability of the old Christian anthropology —  in which a big humanoid in the sky had created little puppets on earth who were controlled until an eventual fate determined by virtue — was replaced by the hominin record; by the awareness of species genomes; the functioning of our bodily identities as interaction in societies; “deep history” about demographics and the vast new “map” of the cosmos; the challenges to biology-based families — all these forces have meant we are in a mental and emotional crisis.  Normally, religious institutions such as denominations would have provided stability, but now they seem to be as powerless as the secular organizations like political parties.

My original participation in the Presbyterian church came from my mother’s family, where her father was a strong local participant who became invisible at pledge time because he never did have much economic success as a rural contractor, just enough to keep the family afloat. His wife, a gentle and dependent woman, preferred the Baptist’s emotional warmth and — since that church was next door to the Presbys — she would slip over there sometimes.  My mother chose her father’s side.

My mother was hampered by us being a one-car family in those days so she left the rather massive and imposing Westminster Presbyterian church, joining instead Vernon Presbyterian church which was only blocks away.  Part of my leaving was the character of the minister, J. Arthur Stevenson, who was an ambitious man in the pattern of the educated and admirable man who drove success.  But he was also arrogant and racist, despising the Chinese family next to the building.  Their daughter was in my classes.  My mother, influenced by missionaries, admired Asian people.

In college I first attended the young Presbyterians, but soon left partly because of classes with Paul Schilpp, a major humanist, and because of the lure of theatre.  This latter insisted on the value of all humans and the importance of understanding how their lives shaped them in various vital ways that did not compete except in terms of story.  I formally withdrew from my mother’s church which caused J. Arthur to condemn me from the pulpit.  My mother rose from the pew, walked out, and joined the other bigger church where she had wanted to be a member earlier.  For a big part of her life, she volunteered in their office, and she buried our father from there.  The congregation began to have schisms and quarrels, and by the time she died, she no longer attended and would not accept their ministers in her house.  We could not discuss “faith” peacefully.  She never really made the transition from her original rural and literal beliefs.  

She was the only active church-goer in a family secular on both sides, maternal and paternal.  My father declared himself to be Atheist in the Progressive and early counter-cultural way, claiming Bertrand Russell and science as more enlightened.  He flirted with the UU’s who became hyphenated at a Portland conference in the year I graduated from Northwestern, 1961,

My first job, teaching on a rez, meant that the Methodist church had become the “Protestant” white alternative while the Catholics shepherded the tribal people.  Because of my association and then marriage to a white man born in 1914 and committed to the rez, I was marginally included in semi-secret traditional ceremonies and informed anthropologically.  It was a vivid and persuasive alternative which the Div School accepted in terms of Comparative Religion, the justification of various forms.

This is all preamble to explain why I left the UU’s, though they had purported to be as tolerant of differences as it was possible to be through education and awareness.  The problem as I see it now was the definition and finally domination of the denomination by the socio-economic forces that have also challenged political parties.  The Niebuhr brothers have been eloquent about this.

The UUA is more open to the larger society than many denominations, coming out of the Boston educated classes that uneasily joined with the rural mid-America tradition of Jesus Christianity, avoiding the supernatural dimension and the moral rigidity of some denominations.  This internal friction has been frank.  The stance that the denomination was inclusive and progressive was challenged hard by the war in Vietnam, black empowerment, and the sexual revolution.

When I joined at first in 1975, I was trying to regroup and become respectable after a confusing divorce.  It took actual service in churches to reveal my real problem: I was not socioeconomically the same as the leaders.  Being female was part of that, being older (forty) was relevant, and I was now challenging my dynamic of attaching to powerful males as a helper rather than a wife so as to preserve my independence.  It was very simple: I didn’t know their music, had not participated in their type of gatherings, didn’t cook or eat their way, didn’t read the same books or attend the same movies — little daily stuff that got in the way.  They were as devoted to conformity as any other prosperous people, just in a different way.  I was not.  I was guided by ideas.

The emphasis for clergy was on securing personal prosperity by serving a big church with a major budget and — more than that — making the denomination grow financially and in size.  No different than my father’s task of growing rural co-operatives.  These goals were unachievable — determined by demographics — but the aura of elitism has remained and has attracted People of Color, as a way for them to acquire status, particularly women.  This has pulled the institution to the Universalist side, converted theology to therapy, and challenged the Elite both in leadership and in theological style.

Realizing that entering this vocation was not helped by my excessive idealism and interest in science, which was more culturally approved decades earlier, challenged prosperity as a goal, and pushed social service off to the UU Service Committee (the Quakers did the same), I had to face the likelihood that I would always be at the periphery and in poverty.  I was still just enough Presbyterian to reject that.  But I wasn’t enough of a hippie to go full-blown counterculture.

Conventional religious denominations are shrinking and I suspect the political parties have been doing the same.  Efforts to reinvigorate these structural social forces have had to struggle against the new vision of the world and increasingly intense competition and “re-framing.”  Some are probably doomed.  Do we need to find new sources of structure or is it possible to morph the old parties and denominations into something that works for a new society?  I don’t know.  I’m working on it.  Can one live like Jesus in a society that sells Hallmark love?  Can one think one’s way to safety in a world of sharks and viruses?

"THE TWO POPES": Reflactions

"The Two Popes" is a film not directly about Christianity, which is an historical institution, but rather about how to be compassionate and to serve what is right in a world that will torture and kill.  Creating this film is a brilliant concept and it is glorious to watch.  But the real value is in thinking about it later.  

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-two-popes

This is the official trailer.

Pope Emeritus Benedict did not think about the implications of his chosen "Pope name" in America -- either breakfast treat (eggs benedict) or traitor (Benedict Arnold who was a general in the new United States army until he betrayed his role and reverted to the old British Empire).  Though the real man is seen in small glimpses through the film, as is Pope Francis, Benedict is softened for the film.  In fact, some consider him a fascist and he himself admits he is 90 with the usual frailties including Alzheimer's dementia.  Nor did he keep his promise to stay quietly out of events so there would not be two Popes.  His love of glamour and luxury is clear and his ethnic heritage in a Germanic seed bed of attempted dominance is not avoided.  But Anthony Hopkins at least gives him a bit of likeable sentimentality and regret.  As a mandarin in an ivory tower, he is unavoidably obtuse.  No red loafers can redeem him.

"Jonathan Pryce plays Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who has been called to Rome by Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins), to discuss the latter’s decision to renounce the papacy."  

https://www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2019/12/20/whats-it-play-pope-francis-interview-jonathan-pryce-two-popes  This is a little informal since it's a sound blog, a "podcast:"  It explains one of Pope Francis' major contributions, abolishing the rule that imposed silence on sexual offences like pedophilia among clergy.  He fights the Vatican Bank, which is much more difficult than fighting old theology.  Linking to this shows my sympathy for Pope Francis as does the film.  But there is a lot of other news about Catholics in the podcast that isn't common knowledge.  The interview starts 12 minutes into the program.

The explanation of why and how Bergoglio, Argentinian, becomes Pope Francis is explored at length.  Argentina has struggled to escape dictators and historic willingness to shelter WWII monsters.  Bergoglio was confronted with this real world dilemma of how to escape, how to protect others, how to survive the self-accusation of betrayal and inadequacy.  His compatriots were tortured and murdered.  One forgave him finally; the other did not.

In more broad philosophical terms, this film addresses the problem of every community:  how to reconcile the values of the past with the necessary new ways of the future.  Peter Raible, past minister of the Seattle University Unitarian Church, now deceased, used to say that a congregation was an institution of "memory and hope."  He meant the accumulated experience of everyone plus their envisionment of a future together.  The work of the denomination is keeping both alive.

My own metaphorical version of that is that everyone carries three "narratives," little stories to use as guides.  I like the idea of a little railroad with an engine being the identity.  Behind it is the line of events leading up to where the engine is going along.  Ahead of it is the line of expectations.  The story told by the religious context is the rails that guide the wheels.  Overhead is the trail of smoke, which is fantasy about what has happened, the narrative one tells oneself while ignoring the carloads of convictions one is dragging behind.  This formulation is sharply crucial as we face these days.  Our headlight has gone dark.

Pryce has an ability to embody what is grave and "high" while at the same time suggesting what is mystic.  This means he plays a lot of religious figures, but I hardly noticed him until he became a key player in "Carrington" (1995), a movie about that little English knot of artists called The Bloomsbury Group, in which he plays Lytton Strachey.  (Dora Carrington is an actual female artist portrayed by Emma Thompson.) In it Pryce is a writer so intense, complex and atypical that he is like some religious eccentric who wanders the world.  In "The Two Popes" Pryce leaves all that but preserves the sensitivity to the inner life of others.  Through the film Francis we become forgiving to the film Benedict.

Pryce is discussed most often right now as "The High Sparrow" from "Game of Thrones" which does address ideas about whether one can be an ultimate authority, drawing on the supernatural, without becoming corrupt and bought off by the government.  Trump and the Evangelicals come to mind.  I haven't seen the whole GofT series, so I can't comment, but maybe the younger viewers of "The Two Popes" will be interested.

Both Popes, one very old and the other who has had disabilities from before his election, are obviously mortal and coming to the ends of their "scripts" which makes the film that much more poignant.  The strong political impact of this film is on an institution that has historically claimed to be as unchanging as "God"  but has in fact always adapted to the times, just as God has.  If leaders are inadequate, the Catholic church is in danger of extinction, just like God.  But the world moves on without any care for vapor floating over the progress or many clues to what will be around the next curve -- perhaps a void, an abyss, a black hole, at least from the point of view of people who count on life being predictable. It is not.  But themes repeat and anguish demands compassion.  

I recommend this 3 part sequence of art history to throw light on what the film is showing, particularly that long room full of images where so much dialogue was filmed.  Waldemar Januszczak, the art professor, is not dry.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DHHWMOC-ZI

NEW RELIGION

What is the "ur-story" that might be a "new religion"?  This guy named Loyal Rue is pretty sure it's not postmodernism, that fancy and inscrutable stuff from Derrida and Foucault, but he nominates Darwin.  Darwin??!!  He only knows the old-fashioned version.  But gets it wrong, that march towards progress of the white male. As usual, his "new" is just a reversal of the old.  The point of Derrida et al is total reframing as deep as one can go.

"In his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution, Loyal Rue, Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Luther College, explains the challenge of multiculturalism: “A particular story may be mine, and it may be worthwhile, and I may be diminished without it, but it is not a story that speaks for everyone’s experience.

"Thus, Rue asks “Where do we go for a universal narrative account of how things are and which things matter?” His answer: The paradigm of Darwinian evolution. In contrast to the majority of cultural and religious narratives, which are anthropocentric, the paradigm of evolution is ecocentric and based on the fact that we originate from, live in, and depend on a physical world of interrelated systems, and that as the place where all stories happen, indeed, that makes all stories possible, we must care for the natural world above all else." 

I would narrow this down even more to the individual's experience of the particular space/time they inhabit.  In fact, the way I survived all those barmy theologians and philosophers in seminary was by looking up their life stories.  That was the lens by which they were intelligible.  Few of them were all that ecological:  they only considered living organisms, never geology or the origin of the solar system.  Climate has as much influence on us as our mothers and offers less opportunity to have a dialogue or influence.

. . . according to social psychologist Kenneth Gergen: “The emerging multiplicity in perspectives is undermining longstanding beliefs about truth and objectivity. Many now see science as a sea of social opinion, the tides of which are often governed by political and ideological forces. And as science becomes not a reflection of the world but a reflection of social process, attention is removed from the ‘world as it is’ and centers instead on representations of the world.”  But the equipment of a human being MUST be limited by sensory and processing capacity.  Science, even with ingenious instruments, cannot exceed itself.

"John Alcock, Emeritus Regents’ Professor of Biology at Arizona State University, deals with these relativist claims in his book The Triumph of Sociobiology. . . . Alcock also argues that “one cannot brush [sociobiology] to one side with social constructionist claims that scientists operate in a social context, which is somehow supposed to make it impossible to validate scientific findings. Scientific conclusions rest upon the impeccable logic of the procedures that are used to test all manner of potential explanations."   This is where he goes off the rails.  All manner of tests have shown that every human has prejudices and is lucky if they are conscious enough to recognize.  Excluding women, excluding emotion, excluding all those without degrees, are only the beginning of the blind spots that afflict so-called "reason."

"Admittedly, we will always privilege certain knowledge, but if humanity aims to transcend the limits of the status quo and thereby repair social and environmental ills, the knowledge we privilege must be based on what we verifiably know about biotic reality and interdependence. The ecocritic Glen Love makes this point in the Afterword of his book Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment, and his argument is my own: “My contention is that Darwinian evolutionary theory offers the truest basis with which to deal with the perils and opportunities of being human, as that awareness affects not only our work as teachers and scholars, but also our relationship with the nature which binds us to life on this decreasingly commodious sphere.”  This was written in the days before horizontal DNA swaps and so on, literature newly presented by David Quammen.

"Now is the time to tell the story of all time. To this end, postmodern theory has done all it can ever do, as have the majority of the manifold narratives it seeks to privilege. Social constructionists and environmental realists want the same thing: to find common ground. But let us do so in the most realistic, sustainable, and inclusive way possible: Let us begin by looking beneath our feet."

Good advice.  At this point I come back on board.  As far as I can see, the story must be a time-art, like a dance or music.  A performance. Though I'm not pleased with a focus on the writer instead of the examples of static books, paintings, buildings, there is a sense in which any creator's work forms into a separate art form, that of life itself.  "Works" represent points on a lifeline.  Some people who have not written blockbuster books or whatever have nevertheless made themselves into accumulative remarkable narratives.  But there is still a sense in which there must be some kind of guiding pattern even if it must adapt to change.  What about occasional conversions when people even reverse themselves, as though hit by a meteor?

A newly available dimension of this story-making is the nature of our "life-instrument", our bodies, part of which are brains operating on circuits built as we experience life from the earliest existence.  On the one hand, it is "plastic" and impressionable, ready to process to new information.  On the other hand, it is organic, existing, reluctant to physically change itself by either adding new systems or deleting old ones, and vulnerable to trauma or even something so simple as a shortage of needed materials from the environment.  It is largely "self-making" but also open to change initiated by others, much of that by attachment.  That is, attachment to others has the capacity to renew and enlarge us as it did in the womb.  But we are also able to shut out, shut down, refuse anything from outside our bodies and its already decided pathways of behavior.  Alongside "story" exists "no-story."

WHAT THE HELL IS RELIGION?

Otherwise educated magazines are forever making big "alas" statements about the disappearance of religion.  What they really mean is that THEIR religion has weakened.  This quoted and linked article is an English comment on America which takes as diagnostic two aspects of the phenomenon of denominations: the formal creed and the practice of "signing up," maybe in an actual book.  I can't quote anymore of the article because of their pay wall.  This intro is supposed to make you want to sign up.  As though they were a religion.

https://econ.trib.al/MzCu8My

"For anyone who studies Americans and their beliefs, the most startling phenomenon of recent times has been the rise of the religious “nones”. About a quarter of the total population, and about a third of those who became adults in the new millennium, identify with no creed. Some new figures suggest the flight from organised religion is even quicker than previously thought.

''The share of Americans who acknowledge being members of a religious group is falling much faster than the proportion who, perhaps loosely, hew to one faith tradition or another. Comparing 2016-2018 with the last three years of the 20th century, declared participants in organised religion have plunged by nearly 20 points to 52%. And among millennials, signing up to a church is a minority (42%) pursuit, according to Gallup, a venerable pollster."

Something happened twenty years ago.  Whether it was plotted or just was a response to conditions, it suggested a deep change to the point of subtly shifting everything.  Let's consider the possibility that it was a religious change or maybe an interval between "religious" aspects of life that were unsupported and a new one that is forming but quite different. This is very difficult to think about because what we call "religion" is so complex and often so unconscious.

It forms like a pearl, some sharp intrusion is so painful that it is coated with explanations, insights, aesthetics, group support, and safeguards.  Eventually it becomes a sphere with no entry point but much beauty, easy for those who wish a point of attachment.  Some say religion is an idea-ball that is whole and must not be broken because that will destroy its value.  Others reject the pearl idea altogether and see religion as seeking bravely and possibly individually. 

Here's a list of possible aspects, a list of pearls:

1.  God is dead so we can do what we want to, because He was the source of all commandments.  This is why people are doing so much bad stuff now.   We need God.

2.  Mental health is subjective and conditional.  It is possible for a Mafia Don to go to a good shrink and not leave his life, just be a happy and well-balanced criminal.  You could watch a show about it.  Why do you suppose this series is popular?

3.  Religion is about congregations and if one attends on Sunday, takes Communion with the "little cracker", as Trump calls it, that's enough.  It's little ceremonies done with a group of believers.  If you do the ceremonies well, they will be efficacious.  This is the millennia-old belief of the Mass, even without a congregation.  

4.  Religion is access to another realm beyond human knowledge or comprehension that can be reached by faith, believing in it.  It is magic, but vulnerable to tricks so fakers are dealt with harshly.

5.  Religion is a moral platform for doing the right thing, which is lined out for members either as rules or principles or as an expression of compassion.  Maybe sermons are needed to supply examples.

6.  Religion is a natural response to the world that is felt even by animals.  Moments of awe and wonder must be organic, real, not thought out.

7.  Religion is a source and justification for the order of the world and we must not let the differences among religions get entangled in government.  Keep them separate in order to preserve the precious, but still do work that might be dirty and dangerous.

8.  Religion is an organization with a name, a CEO, an income like taxes, a hierarchy, a building, a program of education, and a history.  There are a lot of religions in a democracy but that must not break the unity of the governing body.  The governing body must tolerate the plurality of private belief.

9.  Since all good religions come to the same principles (Golden Rule, etc.) it is legitimate and even desirable to use "themes" to organize worship that is a smorgasbord of prayer, hymn, liturgy, and ceremonies -- all from religions in other times and places.

10.  Religion is something we act upon in our daily lives whether it is consciously formed into a covenant or not.  Part of the work of meditation and prayer is trying to realize what drives or shelters us.

This short list is only some of the ways we explain religion.  It used to be waved around to make people do what society wanted, like not have sex before marriage.  Now we are faced with a question like "would it preserve life on this planet if all the humans were removed?" when human survival is the most primal drive.  The proof is that so many of us are still here.

One of the basic principles of many religions is the protection of the family and some of our destruction comes from our neglect of families and children.  In fact, at this moment in the US it's easy to prove that we are willing to destroy families and kill children, mostly those we call "brown" people, though they are actually just culturally different, thus vulnerable.  Mafia is a competing organizing government based on survival of their own families.  They stay secret because of using criminal methods. Why do the rest of us accept that?  Because stigma, not least that of using drugs, has taught us to be secret within our own small groups.  One drive of religion is safety.  Pointing out that the President is Mafia is dangerous.

WHY WE NEED RELIGION

This bright Saturday is Homesteader Days in Valier.  I don't know how many actual "homesteaders" are left.  People are quite different now, but they like to remember a historical practice when people and the nation were different.  It's kind religious.

In Kansas City the General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association is proceeding, gathering those with the money or backing to talk about what concerns their sociology, mostly unconventional post-Christians with a good income and some high education.

In my back bedroom, which is my writing space and also lecture hall, I'm going to simply post the URL for a video touting a book by Stephen T. Asma, who is asking about religion.  I think he is searching through the roots and nature of the phenomenon in a helpful way.  

https://www.skeptic.com/science-salon/why-we-need-religion/?utm_source=eSkeptic&utm_campaign=2318e40af9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_06_20_04_56&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8c0a740eb4-2318e40af9-73504469&mc_cid=2318e40af9&mc_eid=30f767fd15

FINGERPAINT THE SACRED

Fingerpainting is a direct way to relate to the world.

I don't like this post very much because it's not digested enough and it's really lists until the end.  Probably I'll end up using the content another way later, but I've become convinced that institutions are hurting us but escaping reform because we so take them for granted.  Particularly when it comes to religion, institutions have fossilized and are preventing us from by-passing all the written commandments in order to get to the spirit of their meaning.  Instead they have become reasons to hoard and punish.

SOME PREMISES ABOUT INSTITUTIONS:

1.  Neanderthals had no institutions, but they did have art that was based on small communities of shared ideas.

2.  The first institutions were phenomena of towns which were the result of grain and herding domestication of wild sources.  They are organizations based on containers (grain bins, houses, temples, defensive walls), ownership, and allegiance, enforced by storage of resources and the defense thereof.

3.  Domestication as a survival strategy arose in several places at the same time and are related to irrigation, which ties into weather.  We’re still doing that in Valier, though far more elaborately — well, maybe not when you consider Peru or Egypt.

4.  Math and writing arose in response to the need to record, to predict, to find patterns, to confirm ownership and make contracts (particularly those related to interest from borrowing and assigning profits.  They’re for surveying land.

5.  Class specialization and privileged knowledge emerged about this time.

It is at this point in history that “religion” separated from indigenous spirituality, awareness of the sacredness of place and ceremonies related to that.  Religion was an early institution that “owned” sacredness and the power to appeal to whatever forces caused safety and even profit.  

Religious institutions became powerful by the use of writing, particularly written ideas on paper like a scroll or eventually a book with pages and cover.  Religious leaders claimed they were the only ones able to properly interpret writing, and worship ceremonies in some traditions were centered on certain writings.  History, self-management, theology are a primitive form of science, justification of privilege.

Most people today think this IS religion and cannot think of anything outside these perimeters.  

(Brittanica):  The Axial Age (also called Axis Age) is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world, the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged—with the ancient Greek philosophers, Indian metaphysicians and logicians (who articulated the great traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism), Persian Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, the “Hundred Schools” (most notably Confucianism and Daoism) of ancient China….These are only some of the representative Axial traditions that emerged and took root during that time. The phrase originated with the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers, who noted that during this period there was a shift—or a turn, as if on an axis—away from more predominantly localized concerns and toward transcendence.”

This means moving towards the abstract, the universal, the cosmic, the humanly shared strategies and interpretations of how to survive.  Most of this was happening in the first millennium Before the Christian Era (BCE) and seems clearly to have evoked major figures we revere today:  Zarathustra, Buddha, Confucius and even the definitional Jesus the Christ who may have arisen (in an abstract sense) out of Judaism interacting with ideas from Buddhism — the practical result of the Silk Roads bringing ideas across the Eurasian continent along with material goods.

Ideas take on political overtones.  Groups try to justify themselves with religious institutions.  The struggle among them may cause destruction and loss like the “Dark Ages” after the horseback invaders from the steppes destroyed the Roman Empire, or COULD evoke a way to reconcile strife by going to a higher, more inclusive system.  Right now our advances in technology may by themselves so change our understanding that we can create a “new world.”

Those who will be displaced from power (those who are uneducated, unskilled, and unconnected) have already begun to try to destroy any advantage.  These are their weapons:

1.  Emptying education so that it is only a tic list of attendance instead of a certification of achievement at a high level of thought.

2.  Emptying wealth into bookkeeping so that it is fungible, fakeable, transferable in the abstract — no longer the interacting actual solid resources of the world but rather another tic list of credits and debits, arbitrarily arrived at and enforced.  It makes minus balances possible and creates overwhelming sums like the total owed by student borrowing.

3.  By pretending that corporations are people and that “share-holders” actually own or control anything, and that the only good is growth, we have justified terrifying abuses of people, animals and land.  In fiction narratives we have already begun to explore the ways people can possibly survive the unsustainable imaginary conventions that are controlling our lives and threaten to trigger violence.

These are some of the unhappy surprises that may tip the balance:

1.  Catastrophe, beginning with climate turbulence and shift.  Drought and high temps in the tropics are as devastating as were the great glaciers that ground over the northern continents.  Rising sea level is erasing land.

2.  Disease, often the direct result of changing climate and population density.  Some bug will eventually hit the balance between traveling so quickly that it’s self-snuffing and infecting so deeply and ingeniously that its cure will be very slow coming.  HIV is still doing well.

3.  Interruption of fertility.  There are hints of this and fiction has been following up.

4.  Gradually achieved toxicity of the land itself and the major water sources so that our food and water supplies poison us.  This is already happening.

5.  Violence and terrorism are likewise already sanctioned by institutions both religious and secular.  The fire is there -- so an accelerant will be what sweeps our lives.

6.  Destruction of power grids and the internet.

How can we achieve innocence enough to escape the prescribing and limiting institutions that are strangling us?When designing experiences intended to reach for and maybe even touch the sacred, to kindle meaning from inside the people, one must first sit down and feel with one’s own guts where those people are in themselves.  Are they scared?  Are they exuberant?  Are they confused?  Are they depressed?  Are they enraged?

Ira Progoff was a journal-keeper who taught a particular procedure very much in line with this kind of thinking.  In his workshops a person would make a list of the turning points in that person’s life: a death, a birth, a marriage, a divorce, a graduation, a decision to leave a job, a house burning down — maybe things that no one else even noticed or thought was important: starting a garden, wallpapering a bedroom.  He called them Stepping Stones.  They were like Turning Points. Then one went back and thought about the intervals.  What might be the metaphor that captured the feeling of that period?  Was it a flower blooming?  Was it a tractor harrowing a field?  Was it a night of falling stars?  Was it an old rotten floor in an abandoned house?

So what is the metaphor for beginning a designed experience?  A tightrope?  A well?  A kite?  A scalpel?  Not literally, but metaphorically what suggests the FEELING you want?  The idea is to be totally separated from everything you already think of as church, institutional church.  Go to art.  Finger paint the sacred.  Start new.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram

AEON LOST ME TODAY

Aeon.com lost me today.  I’ve been slipping away for a while. Now to mix the metaphor.

A python does not squeeze its prey to death.  That’s too much of an effort, which means a waste of calories.  It’s all about calories (money).  So the snake waits until the mammal (us) has made itself a bit smaller, maybe by exhaling or maybe stretching longer.  Then the python fits itself to that smaller diameter.  The same thing repeats and repeats until finally the mammal doesn’t have enough room to take a breath.  Then it dies and the snake can eat it without wasting calories on struggle.

This is what Aeon and other websites are doing.  Like Vivaldi.  Tell us what you like!  As a convenience, we will only present what you like so you don’t have to go exploring or think about alternatives.  Pretty soon, that perimeter of “what-you-like” will be all you can get.  You’ll starve your mind and shrivel to blankness, and then you won’t be much trouble to swallow.

The bait on Aeon was the “high quality” BBC tone and the TIME magazine science.  Lurking in the background was the restrictive right-wing philosophy of Templeton.  When I looked him up — and I’ve known about him for more than thirty years but didn’t ask questions — that was one veil of illusion falling away.  What AEON had in the background was “landed gentry” — the King’s Friends, cleverly disguised as a monastery.  It has nothing to do with religion in the sense of sacredness.  It has everything to do with walls, privilege, elitism — the things Christianity has come to represent.

It’s not really about either Christianity or religion.  It’s about empire, siphoning off all profit to the hoarders.  Empire is the formation of institutions that control, protecting and feeding the snake.  When the pundits and surveyors talk about how religion is dying in America, they mean institutions are collapsing.  Protestant denominations are not and never were a religion.  They were splinter groups of institutions, usually dissenting over some slight or dogma or economic force, protecting their icons, going to court to secure their communion silver.  They have nothing to do with belief, and everything to do with the status quo and solidarity, even when they are a splinter group that has drawn their walls in closer and higher.  It’s “Game of Thrones.”  Game of Altars.

I’m not sure Aeon knows what they’re doing.  I was going along until they hooked up with medium.com and immediately went to sequestering:  “My Aeon.”  It’s the same old narcissistic splintering.

Everything people in America know about religion they learned at the movies.  It’s all sci-fi written by a tableful of writers in LA, usually mostly Jewish and bearded.  Maybe some seculars flirting with Zen.  Maybe a few brash and accommodating women.  Their game is the python game:  make a movie that makes money, remake the same movie on a smaller scale (budget), then another a little smaller, until the audience is so conditioned that they never realize there is anything else out there because they can’t get their breath.

Maybe one or two of the people at the table stand up and invent some kind of wall-smasher —Netflix?   And then Netflix becomes the squeezer.  And now the squeeze is on George RR Martin to do more, better, nakeder, bloodier. . . but the “show runners” get antsy and start by-passing the original author, doing the python on him.  Amazon, Amazon.

In past years we’ve seemed to free ourselves from the squeeze by keyboarding past the institutions, but here we are again — lonesome for the Seventies when the “free” weekly newspapers really were “free” — really alternatives instead of just another cartel.  Now I watch one broad institution after another go down, only existing at all on the reputations of the earlier years.  PBS and NPR now charge for a “passport.”  “Sesame Street” has been diverted to profit.

At first TED talks and AEON and all the other trademarked shows had a backlog of rich surprising material that hadn’t had an outlet.  By now we’re down to the reruns and imitations.  Everyone went to business schools or became a techie.  They have nothing in particular to use for content.  Just a Rolodex database and an agenda.

Montana was once dominated by a big squeezer snake: the Anaconda company, based on copper.  We didn’t get rid of them, they just squeezed out all the profit and left.  Missoula was once our literary treasure and moral center but now it’s notorious for rapist athletes and selling its public water. That’s only the local version of a national — no, an extra-national -- phenomenon.  The planet has been Trumped.  Nations are obsolete.

First the corporations convinced the courts they were a “person,” a Christian concept derived from the fantasy that God was flesh, carnal, incarnated, one of us.  Then they convinced the courts that they weren’t here, so therefore needn’t pay taxes.  We’re a nation unfinanced by ghosts.  

What blood was left drained off in the pretense of “contracting out” torture and wars not even waged by people — rather by zombie predator drone machines guided by gullible young people sitting in a trailer in Indiana and developing PTSD when they finally realize what they are doing.  Any citizen who made trouble was criminalized and incarcerated where, for lack of anything better to do, they all infected each other with AIDS: don’t-blame-me capital punishment when there are no drugs or condoms.

The cloud of viruses coming out of the African jungle aren’t teaching us what we should have learned when the sub-saharan people began to die of famine.  Today the newsfeed is saying that young women are having much fewer — like 40% fewer — pregnancies out of wedlock.  The explanation proposed is that they are taking care of their health.  The reality might be more like the sci-fi stories based on near-universal sterility due to environmental pollution.  There is a flood coming.  Not a biblical flood to wipe out the wicked, but a coastal flood around the planet that will wipe out Johnny Depp’s cherished island paradise, along with the sodden peasants of Bangladesh who barely survive, the glass-walled fancy beach houses, and downtown Manhattan.

We see now that our illusory march of progress from blob to fish to gladiator to programmer was wrong all along.  We are a sheet, a web, a vast varying continuum of relationships.  And we’re torn, worn thin.

The anonymous writer on Wikipedia says:  “The word aeon /ˈiːɒn/, also spelled eon and æon (in American English), originally meant "life", "vital force" or "being", "generation" or "a period of time", though it tended to be translated as "age" in the sense of "ages", "forever", "timeless" or "for eternity”.

Nothing is forever.  The website called “Aeon” is not “my aeon.”  It’s a constrictor.  But I grieve.  I thought they were real.