BOOM !!

If I’m going to be critical of Medium, I should include POSITIVE criticism, and just in time, here came an article that blew my eyebrows off. When I first signed up for Medium, I expected much more writing like this piece linked below. Instead what appeared was a deluge of what they call listicles, “ten ways to wear lip gloss” and the like.

https://medium.com/@UptheCypherPunx/why-this-radical-leftist-is-disillusioned-by-leftist-culture-63419aa85a58#.kqfmq2och

This is as good a partial answer to why I left the Unitarian Universalist ministry as any I’ve read. (There were other reasons, too, like being pulled irresistibly back to the Blackfeet rez and the East Slope of the Rockies.) The comments should be read with the article, though they may make your bangs flop. They’re pretty polarized and some comments are along the lines of “if I don’t get my way, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue.”

This is my ministerial robe.  Was.

How does one stand apart from the main culture because of believing it has gone radically wrong, and yet keep solidarity with all the good and conscientious people one lives among. Do you go join a commune? Do you turn academic and make distance that way? Do you just plunge into a book? (That’s my choice.) Do you get a custom t-shirt made? (That’s recently been the UU way.) Do you curse and shout and slam things?  (All the cats disappear.)

Never did I consider the possibility that I might align with “punks” or even “cybers”, much less cyberpunks. But here I am. Not even an official Lefty. It partly comes from being poor and old. (Trigger warning.) Partly it’s because my thinking is now world-based instead of bourgeois-based. (Trigger warning.) Partly it’s raging sorrow over what happens to those I care about. (Trigger warning.) Etc. Partly it’s just my temperament. (Red-headed — what can you expect?)

These examples dawn life were found in China.

I don’t want to digest the article for you — I’d prefer you to read it. But if you can’t or won’t, that’s okay. It might trigger you as much as it does me. Maybe the BOOM of it is the collision between indignation and reading about “deep time” before any fossils at all — pre-Cambrian and before — and cutting edge neurology research. We’re so fungible. (The first time I heard that word it was about money.)

Once I talked about “pre-Cambrian life” in a UU sermon and was mocked because, the man said, that’s an oxymoron. There WAS no pre-Cambrian life. As it turns out, there was merely none perceptible at the time (’80’s) but now , see above. This same sort of man (WEIRD, the acronym) becomes very angry over the idea that their identity should exist apart from their wordy consciousness. They are what they say, which they consider to be logical thinking. The idea that their brain was working while they were asleep, that the body needs constant neurological action as much as blood circulation — or the body dies — was simply invisible, inconceivable.

We must abandon “me and mine,” sequestered and guarded from harm, and everything else denied except a reflection of “me” on the bottom of the clouds that is imagined to be in charge of everything. We must admit that our boundaries are imaginary and arbitrary — we are a part of everything and must begin to perceive the imperceptible. Even the primordial beginnings that religion used to think they owned and which may still be echoed in what people are now calling “spirituality.”

I’m not talking about the magpie accumulation of cautionary insights nor about the pillow-fluffing of some religionists. I’m talking about acceptance of the shit and pain and cum of life right alongside the glorious moments when everything is fulfilled — for a split second. Even without the idea of God, the theodicy issue still grips us. We know in our gut that the survival of one is linked to the survival of all.

But we are not sufficiently aware of how many have died in the past to bring to us where we are. I’m talking about the brutality of childbirth, war, and famine. We’re getting all sad about the loss of every preemie or distorted baby among the people we know, but have forgotten that until germ theory was well-developed, women (like my great-grandmother) often died of child-bed fever and how much of the war between the sexes started with war between the stepmother and her predecessor’s children, making room for her own children. I mean my grandmother was mocked and blamed, with consequences to my mother. Or how much longer after that it took to allow women anesthesia.

If a person tries to enlarge awareness, never to turn away consciousness of need and suffering, identity can get stretched to the point of explosion or poisonous judgmentalism. You can’t just go around raging all the time, nor can you sit at home doing needlepoint and waging war on dust. Well, you can, but it won’t make you live longer. And it may cut off your access to joy and delight, your ability to get blissed out — which can be a potent antidote to psychic bruising and avascular necrosis (bone death). The hell with listicles — I want testicles. Not because it’s so funny when someone kicks them (how did we ever get to that idea?) but because they are the containers for what is inserted in the act of love, no matter the gender or even — (HERE’s a trigger!) species.

The realization of the day is that the world is seminal. Change, mutation, and destruction shape the process of time into creatures and their creations, whether we are talking about what insect legs look like or about how to run a bank that succeeds. The innovations/the destructions proceed holding hands, but the results can be near-impossible to bear. Impossible indeed for those who don’t make the cut, like the dodo. How does one be progressive or even optimistic in the face of this?

This house is full of cats. They teach me one-day-at-a-time and that stretching in the morning sun alongside me is the key to the universe. They also use their claws and make the most gawdawful sounds when I step on tails or toes. They are NOT human babies. They are NOT lovers. But I love the feel of them purring away like little engines while they sleep draped over my ankles in the night. I try to resist strangling them when they destroy things. Simple existence is enough for them. (And if you won’t feed them, they’ll feed themselves.)

The Striped Terror arrived uninvited as a starved kitten.

And I try NEVER to forget that there are babies going to sleep with bottles of Mountain Dew rotting their teeth, having eaten less than any of my cats, trying to suck life from an old unsterilized nipple. (If Medium is perceptible to the hidden underground of advertising, I will soon be getting ads for Mountain Dew and disposable baby bottles.)

A THEORY OF RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

The new UUA headquarters.  Not a cathedral -- a manufacturing warehouse

The Unitarian Universalist denomination, which I don’t mention in a proselytizing way but rather because that was the context in which I did most of my “religious” thinking (meaning institutional thinking about religion) has two opposing forces within it.  Today I would claim that they correspond to Ray Rappaport’s ideas about survival of the group versus survival of the individual and the tension between the two.  Rappaport was an anthropologist, not a theologian.  He's outside the theological circle.  Maybe I am, too.

In practical institutional terms, the UUA is more open to the larger culture than most other denominations, which often base their identity on standing against change, science, and forces like commodification or the sexual revolution.  But because the purported basis of the UU consensus is the obligation of each individual to find his own set of values (within the principled guidelines) the persons may find themselves in opposition to their own congregation and denomination.  Even in opposition to their own previous selves.  So I’ll try to outline my own position in this post.

The central problem of the monotheistic religions is “theodicy,” meaning that if there is an all-powerful God he/she must be a monster to allow the evil we see in the world.  Solutions to this problem include the idea that humans deserve suffering, or that it’s all an illusion, or that there’s a second “force” named the Devil and we’re merely the ground of struggle.  And so on. Science, which is a worldview with the power of historical religions, deals with the problem by dispersing God.  I go with that.  There is no God, no matter how defined.

But then the problem of Evil becomes more pressing.  If there is no authority figure to force people to be good, won’t people run rampant over each other and destroy each other and the environment?  The answer is yes.  Some of them in the name of God.  But for those who want to find another way, what guidance is there?  I say it is a kind of ultimate ecology in which each small but deeply related part of the Everything is so connected that whatever they do will affect everything else.

Time rushes through you, making you the conduit between your tiny past and future because, no matter how small they are, they are a piece of the whole.  You know those stories about going into the past and accidentally making some change -- maybe stepping on a bug -- that evolves into a different world you didn’t necessarily want?  That’s what’s always happening in the present:  you’re making the future for yourself and all of existence.  This is part of the appeal of the idea that existence is infinite in its variations so that every possible eventuality is playing out at the same “time” -- somewhere unaccountable.

While the individual is moving through time, the culture is also transforming and pressing against the “givens” of the person.  What is bad behavior in one place and time might NOT be bad behavior in another place and time. This is confusing unless we give up thinking of both person and culture as something unchanging and rigid as a Pythagorean triangle.  There is always an interface and it is always transforming.

Evil is part of that transforming.  It is human, both in origin and execution.  Therefore, we can change it.  Evil feels as though it is an outside force, a malevolent oppression that comes out the sky, too powerful to resist.  Sometimes it feels like a seeping, creeping, sneaking dark (hard-to-see) bile that oozes among us, waiting for a weak moment.  These images make it easier to give up, to accept the evil we make, or at least claim it’s not our fault.

Others define evil, or at least sin, as an estrangement, separation from all that is meaningful, a kind of paralysis outside the home or sanctuary.  There is an evil called genocide that sweeps away whole categories of people with hatred and frenzied violence, or sometimes with clinical detachment made possible by technology.  It’s always incomplete or why would the young soldiers who sit in middle American operating the predator drones by satellite control develop PTSD?  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html?_r=0

More deadly is bureaucratic genocide, done with a pencil by cutting funding for those who starve.  The banal evil of bureaucracy is easy to overlook except for those who need money to do their jobs of opposing suffering whether emergency responders or shelter providers.  To separate empathy from response and reform is to leave suffering pointless, because empathy evolved to cause mercy and justice which saves the group.  Lacking awareness of suffering -- and I mean sensory firsthand knowledge of the sound and smell of great numbers who need help -- or diluting it into news reports and video extravaganzas of “ain’t it awful”  (another of Eric Berne’s games) that lets people stand at elegant cocktail parties or in the caverns of car dealerships, making tongue-sounds instead of looking for meaning.

Hierarchy of angels by Zombiesmile

The early versions of public self-governance were oligarchic: shared kingship for the landed gentry and ecclesiastical authorities.  Then hierarchies developed: many treatises about the hierarchies of heaven: which angels are more important, who’s in charge of what, which saint to pray to for which problem -- the Great Mom, Mary, who somehow evades the Great Dad, is always the ultimate.  It has not been easy nor in some cases possible to separate religious concepts based on infant versions of the world, from arranging things for the greater good even when they are new and unfamiliar.  (An Internet Tzar?  Isn't there one?)  The United States tried hard to build in structure that would increase justice -- or at least reality.

So then we went the bureaucratic route: don’t fight, legislate.  But it gets so far out of whack that the people stop voting -- deserting the core of democracy -- and start running in the streets, screaming and setting fires.  At first the written rules worked pretty well, but then they were taken over by schemers who made sure all rules went their way.  The USA representatives and senators have gone to law school to make sure they know how to do this -- and to make inconvenient rules impossible to enforce by not funding monitors.  So now where are we?

Only as trustworthy as the humans

As I write, I hear bombers from Malmstrom practicing in the sky.  I won’t go out to look for them -- it’s eleven degrees below zero and they fly too high to see.  Are they evil?  Who is suffering?  What is justice?  Safety?  If they are only potential, are they still evil?  I read they want to have more prairie sky territory in order to practice for war.  What are they not telling us?

My philosophy (no theos, so it can’t be theology) is bleak and tough, which fits my high-prairie, thinly populated ecology where constant vigilance and planning is necessary.  Whatever does not adapt either by evolution or by human provision, is doomed.  We commodify everything: the soil, the wind, the depths of stony fuel reservoirs -- war.  Somehow it is all owned by people far away, which is what capitalism means -- absentee landlords who only want profit.  Even within our small community, some try to corner all the wealth and control.

U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Matthew Dubon, 341st Security Forces Group tactical response force sniper, poses for a photo holding a M-24 Sniper Weapon System at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

It’s well established that the relationship between institutional religion and economics is so enmeshed they nearly merge.  American denominations are commonly described by the economic/educational levels of their constituents.  The UUA is generally ranked as near the top by these measures.  "We" are open to the general culture, which brings us trouble over issues of suffering like war or sexual predation or poverty.  The first reaction is talk, then writing out guidelines, then moving to a new topic and never really implementing the old one.  This gives the satisfaction of feeling that something got done without it ever really costing anything.  But, as I say, “open to the culture” and that’s the pattern of the whole.  It's not just us.

http://montanawildlifegardener.blogspot.com

There is a growing but not-quite-visible number of people who speak of “spirituality” and make their modest homes and neighborhoods into gardens.  The larger culture (esp. movies) looks at them in terms of dystopia, desperate but resourceful survivors of the catastrophic destruction of the Old Order.  But why wait?  Let Evil starve in the board rooms, sitting at their long polished tables before their portfolios of paper.