The Idolatry of Monotheism

I'm not yet done with MacIntyre, but I'm putting it on hold for a post or two.

There is something a little off about Aquinas' famous distinction between the truths of faith and the truths of reason. In the latter category, one finds those truths known to the ancient Greeks--especially Aristotle--while those peculiar to Christianity are to be found in the former. While certainly not all theologians would agree with Aquinas' system of classification, its profound influence in Christian theology since then indicates, I think, that it points at something profound at the heart of Christianity.

The very names of the categories are suggestive Christianity is not, at bottom, a rational religion. The most one can say is that it is compatible with reason--at least, with certain conceptions of reason. This is not unique to Christianity, but it is in Christianity that it becomes a problem to grapple with, a dilemma that demands a solution.

I believe this is a dilemma at the heart of all the great monotheisms. And I believe I have an inkling as to why.

The Language of the Cosmos

Mathematics is the most universal language that we know of. Every culture seems to have had some form of it, however primitive or advanced. The striking thing about it is that, no matter how old a mathematical proof might be, it will never--if it is indeed a real proof--be overturned or denounced by experts in the field. Mathematics is the only field which can find anything like this certainty. Though ambiguities, I am given to understand, seem to present themselves at the more abstruse and difficult levels, this is probably to be expected given the complexity of the subject and the relative feebleness of the human mind.

Mathematics is indeed so universal that it may well be the language of the cosmos. At the very least, the physical world seems to be governed by mathematics at the deepest depths we have plumbed. Though mathematics, humans have been able to make and interpret measurements up from estimates of the relative weights of protons and electrons to the vast distances between the galaxies.

It is no accident that mathematics is the most rational language we have, as well. There seems to be a direct relation between how universal a discourse is--or at least, how universalizable--and how rational it is. Though Chinese philosophers might be in many respects less fully rational than the ancient Greeks, the same logical principles underlie many of Confucius' arguments that Aristotle categorized and and formalized. And unless certain rational elements were found in nearly every society, it would be almost impossible for us to communicate and live together, let alone come to anything like a mutual understanding.

Against this rationality the irrational and particularistic elements of our nature work. I was raised on standard American fare, so I usually prefer hamburgers to sushi--for no good reason, that I can tell. Likewise, I'm more likely to say "um..." when deciding what to eat than "etto..." I would sacrifice a kidney for my mother, but probably not your mother, even if yours needs it more.

Our irrational, particularistic, and tribal sides are not to be gotten rid of. They are what make community possible. Nor is reason to be gotten rid of; tyranny and warfare will inevitably result. But there is a conflict between them--a creative conflict if we manage it well. While not all human universals are rational, and not all irrational aspects of us are particularistic, it seems to be overwhelmingly the case that rationality and universality are intimately linked, and irrationality and particularity are likewise, if less strongly, linked.

The Irrational God

Religion seems to be one of those areas where particularity and irrationality are most strongly linked. The religious practices of one era or people can seem strange or even laughable to another. The Greeks were astonished by Egyptian religion, and those certain aspects seem to have garnered great respect, many Greeks scoffed what they took to be the worship of animals, creatures lower even than humans.

This is a problem for monotheistic religions. The mono-God of the Christian and other traditions do have elements that are rational and/or universal in character--omnipotence, omniscience, ubiquity, and so on. But at the same time, there are particularist and irrational elements essential to the character of particular monotheistic religions. Thus, Aquinas perceived so keenly the need for a distinction between truths of faith and truths of reason.

By their nature, reason cannot convince people of the truths of faith--whether that faith be Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. Yet this presents monotheistic religions--or at least Christianity, Islam, and a few more recent faiths--with a problem; their doctrines are by nature universalistic, intended to apply to all people in all places. All people, eventually, are to bow before Allah. Christ commissions his followers to preach to all the nations.

The practical consequence of this is that the religion spreads, not through the rational appeals that give, e.g., Platonism and many forms of Buddhism their power to convince, but through an exertion of the will over the minds and hearts of others. Whether through bribes, persuasive speech, or force and intimidation, the religion is spread by whatever means necessary. Frequently, competing religions are condemned and sanctions are placed on their followers--up to and including death for attempting to practice or spread their religion. I can think of no better way to characterize the hegemony that Christianity gained over Europe, or Islam over the Middle East, than as the exercise of the will of the religious leaders over the minds of the people.

I don't mean to say, of course, that all conversions to a monotheistic religion are impelled by others in this way. But I do not think that the tremendous success that these religions have had in imposing themselves across multiple cultures is attributable, as many of their proponents would have us believe, to the persuasive power of the religion rather than the zeal of inquisitors and devout rulers.

So much for one major practical consequence. There is also a theoretical consequence: idolatry.

Bait and Switch

While it is entirely beyond my (or anyone's) ability to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt otherwise, it does not seem credible to me to say that the source of all being (however we might characterize it) has the sort of special relationship to humanity posited by Christianity and, to a lesser extent, Islam. In both religions, the final destruction of the world is centered around humans; in both cases, humans alone are resurrected. The point of the destruction is the creation of a new world in which the righteous will be blessed and rewarded. In Christianity, humanity is even further elevated; the Supreme Being deigns to incarnate himself as human.

This strikes me as improbable in the highest degree--nearly unthinkable, I had better say. However, the common objection I have heard from Christians to this judgment is that I am illicitly presuming that God must follow my own limited human notions about what God must be like. I find this response rather astonishing from people who believe that the world will one be destroyed for the sake of humanity, who believe that God himself took on human form--and only human form, and only once. I understand that this apparent illogic is the result of the cultivation of an attitude of submission to Christ (of which a part is submission to the doctrines of the faith), but that does not make it any more reasonable; it only makes it somewhat more believable in a practical, living faith.

If idolatry is to be understood as replacing a grand truth with a shoddy image, easier to perceive and understand, then surely the religions that cry the loudest about idolatry--that created the concept as a category of sin and wrongdoing--are the very religions that commit it the most blatantly. It is one thing to suggest that there are divinities below the highest and most divine creator that have dealings with humans (and if one looks at, for instance, Platonism, the relationship is further and further subdivided, as gods do not communicate with humans directly, but use daemons as intermediaries). It is quite another to say that the font of existence is personally concerned with our species above all others.


Final Thoughts

I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not saying that the irrational has no place in religion. But it is in our personal relationships and our particularity that it has its place. It is in the way we relate with the world and have dealings with it. But I would follow innumerable thinkers in noting that, to understand the divine, to attain all its qualities, one must attempt to abandon human limitations--one must liberate oneself from human assumptions and prejudices. So it is that the great contemplatives of India have ever sought to look behind Maya, the world of merely human perception, action, and emotion. But for everyday religion, for living religion, the irrational is indispensable. Without it, I don't know if any social projects would succeed.

I also want to praise modern Paganism for a recognition that few (if any!) of the ancient Paganisms seem to have made in rejecting the total centrality of man in the world. The recognition of the immanent divine in the natural world, in the complex interrelation between plants, animals, the soil, bacteria, etc., in the great web of a living ecosystem, utterly explodes the hubris of both ancient and modern society. We are not simply a halfway point between the lower animals and the gods above; we are on an even footing in fundamental ways with the rest of life, and the highest attainments are to be found at least in some significant part in how we harmonize and reconcile ourselves with the rest of the world, as a peer and not as a dominator and exploiter.

The Perils of a Single Vision

Monolithic, Up To a Point

One of the elements of the Aristotelian tradition is the view that the ideal-typical human is of a singular type. There is one best way to be, one way to be perfectly virtuous. This coheres well with the view that there is one best way for the State to be, and finally, on Aristotle's view, a single Unmoved Mover whose fundamental unity is the telos--end or function--toward which all things aim. The world, for Aristotle, is a cosmos, an ordered unity. And so it is that Aristotle, like Plato, believed that there is one kind of best man, the man that has all the virtues. And importantly, the virtues will never come into conflict with each other. Confusion about what to do is confusion about what the good is, and it can be remedied with the application of clear thinking and philosophizing.

This view of ethics is more than a little optimistic. For MacIntyre, the tradition more or less takes the place of the cosmos and the Aristotelian biology. Telos is provided by common agreements about what constitute the good for man. And it is never entirely self-consistent; as I noted in my last post, the struggle to clarify and understand the good is an integral part of the tradition.

Nonetheless, even for MacIntyre, differences about what constitutes the good--and thus what constitute the virtues--seem to be framed in terms of conflict. One might suppose, from his scanty words on the topic, that whichever conflict is present at the moment is not irresolvable, for the conflict presupposes certain broad agreements, and the terms used by the various sides are commensurable. Though resolving this conflict will lead to another, it can be resolved. And it remains the case that all interlocutors within the tradition agree that there is some best way to display the virtues in a particular time and place, even if they cannot agree what that way might be.

That MacIntyre would seem to take this view is unsurprising. Much of After Virtue is dedicated to the task of showing that the abandonment of the Aristotelian tradition by society as a whole underlies the fractured and irresolvable nature of modern ethical conflicts. For instance, in the middle of his discussion of Sophocles, MacIntyre writes:

There is a sharply contrasting modern tradition which holds that the variety and heterogeneity of human goods is such that their pursuit cannot be reconciled in any single moral order and that consequently any social order which either attempts such a reconciliation or which enforces the hegemony of one set of goods over all other is bound to turn into a straightjacket and very probably a totalitarian straightjacket for the human condition... I take it that this view entails a heterogeneity of the virtues as well of goods in general and that choice between rival claims in respect of the virtues has the same central place in the moral life for such theorists that choice between goods in general does. And where judgments express choices of this kind, we cannot characterize them as either true or false. (AV 143)

This way of characterizing the idea is typical within After Virtue. While MacIntyre does not say outright or explicitly that he believes a tradition is to be characterized as the sort of unity I outline above, he certainly implies it. I wish I knew if he wrote more clearly on the topic elsewhere; I can only assume, since he has characterized himself elsewhere as having an Augustinian Thomist viewpoint on moral theory, that my interpretation is more or less correct.

But even within After Virtue, there are indications that this understanding is not the only position that the savvy virtue theorist might be able to support.

Pleasures, not Pleasure; Goods, not the Good

MacIntyre at one point presents a blistering critique of utilitarianism. He attempts--and, I think, succeeds--to show that it is not possible to simply add up the various pleasures and subtract the various pains to determine an action that maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. How does one compare, he asks, the pleasure of drinking coffee on a bright sunny morning with the pleasure of swimming in the ocean? As he points out, there is not merely quantitative but qualitative differences between various pleasures. They are incommensurable.

Likewise, the goods internal to the various practices can be incommensurable. The goods internal to playing chess are not the goods internal to playing basketball--though there may be commonalities and similarities. The goods internal to practices--and thus what might be considered virtues specific to those practices--might even come into conflict.

MacIntyre seems to view the tradition as unifying the virtues, reconciling all those characteristics that might be considered virtues under a single notion of the Good--or at least, the notion that there might be a single Good. But why must there be a single Good that everyone strives toward? Why must there be only one way to be virtuous?

I believe that pagan traditions both ancient and contemporary present a potential rejoinder to MacIntyre's view of a monolithic--and not irrelevantly, monotheistic--tradition. The very notion of polytheism seems to present a contrary view of tradition. Worshiping shining Apollo is not the same as worshiping the Great Mother--but why should they be? Polytheistic traditions seem to present a way to reconcile the various ways of being virtuous without reducing them to each other.

Exactly how this might work out within a contemporary paganism deserves to be worked out more carefully, but the necessary groundwork has not yet been worked out. There is at least one more topic that I will have to address--in my next post.

The Challenge of Piety (Filial Piety part 2)

I was somehow unaware when I started on this topic that June has been dubbed International Pagan Values Blogging Month. It's synchronicity, I suppose, that I started on the topic of a particular virtue just as a huge chunk of the Pagan blogosphere takes up the topic.

In my last post on filial piety, I briefly outlined a couple good reasons to think that 1) filial piety was important in the ancient world, 2) we have reasons to keep it in mind in the modern world, and 3) it has theological implications. Each of these topics deserves much more attention than I gave them--especially the presence of something identifiable as filial piety in the West--but I'm going to be moving on just the same.

Before I go on, I should probably state from the outset that one problem I do not wish to undertake is the problem of parental abuse or gross misconduct. I lack both the wisdom and the experience to say anything on the topic that would not run grossly astray or cause offense.

The very idea of this kind of piety--and that it might be a kind of piety--might seem offensive to many Pagans. While I suspect that the idea will be much less problematic to reconstructionists and recon-oriented Pagans, I do not expect a great deal of agreement--at least initially--from those oriented toward more contemporary religious expressions. Though I could be wrong.

In fact, the very word piety is almost unused outside recon circles. It is not difficult to understand why. With the last fifteen hundred years of Christian dominance, the word "piety" has taken on connotations that are not at all pleasant. The worst members of that religion have been said to "piously" defend the grossest violations of human life--both of the body and the mind. I would ask any readers who find the term "piety" difficult to set these connotations aside and remember that, just as in Homer Achilles was known for his might in battle and Odysseus for his wiles, Virgil writes about the unflagging pietas of Aeneas. Piety, when I use it, is not the mendacious cover for wrongful thoughts and deeds that it has been used for, but the virtue of properly discharging one's duties especially to the gods, but also to other entities and institutions of great importance. (Patriotism could be construed to be a kind of piety, for instance.)

There are a number of problems that arise when trying to apply ancient ideals of piety to the modern world. Pagans deal brilliantly with some of them. Others require close thinking through.

As I mentioned last time, I believe the primary motivation behind filial piety is gratitude--showing rightful apprecation for the tremendous benefits we have received from our parents. Pagans have been at the forefront of recognizing our duties to the Mother who bore us all, who continues to feed, clothe, and comfort us--and who daily suffers the depredations of our thoughtless exploitation. The importance of protecting the Earth has not been lost on us. Though it is all too easy to give in to complacency and laziness, we should all continue to seek ways to minimize the damage we do in our daily lives and implement them.

Another problem is more difficult, and it is a question that I deal with frequently. The contemporary Pagan movement tends to be made up of rather independent people. We seek out our own paths, are sometimes reluctant to make commitments, and keep our own counsel--though groupthink can rear its ugly head anywhere, and often does within particular communities. This independence is not a bad thing. It gives Paganism its vibrant diversity and prevents spiritual stagnation.

But independence has its prices. For some of us, it may be more difficult to see the benefits that we gained from where we came from. After all, very few of us were born into Pagan families. We took up our respective Pagan paths for good (hopefully) reasons. This can make it difficult for us to see the ways we may have benefited from how we were brought up. And some of us (alas, myself) may sometimes find it difficult or unpleasant to look on ways that we have depended on or benefited from others in the past.

It can be easy to forget our parents, especially given the mobility of the modern world. We might find ourselves half a continent away. In America, we do indeed have certain days set aside for remembering and honoring our parents--Mother's Day and Father's Day. It is my recommendation that, as people who recognize and honor the immanent divinity within a world birth, death, and rebirth, we remind ourselves of those responsible for our own particular births, and honor the way that the Great Mystery worked to bring about our lives.

Of course, this kind of filial piety is not the same kind that existed in the ancient world. It cannot be; one aspect of filial piety in those times was carrying on the religious traditions of the family. Not a live possibility for most of us, I suspect. But in keeping that ancient aspect in mind, we might be reminded that religion is important. Perhaps it is unwise to step away from the tradition we grew up in without good reasons. At the very least, we should avoid the spiritual consumerism that plagues American culture in general, including Pagan culture. Being Pagan ought not be a facile identification to give our lives a veneer of purpose without any substance or real work underneath. (Which all piety--and not just the filial kind--requires)

Speaking of putting substance to our words, my great aunt is very old, and is not getting on as well as she used to. I have too often been negligent in going to see her these last few months, so I will leave this post at that, and pay a visit.

Nuclear Family, Cosmic Family (Filial Piety part 1)

If there is any idea fundamental to modern Paganism, it is that the ideas, values, and religious expressions of the ancient, pre-Christian world have something valuable to contribute to the present day.

I am not alone in seeing the virtue ethics of Aristotle as a profoundly important contribution to the world. Even if the precise virtues important in Aristotle's day turn out not to be quite as relevant, the framework itself is extremely useful. Today, when a panoply of seductive choices are presented to us, many of them very bad for us, hardly anything could be more important than cultivating a character which tends toward making better choices.

While I cannot speak for anyone else, I believe that pursuing the virtues is an essential part of my religion. How can I adequately honor the gods if I cannot keep my own life on the right path? What is my veneration worth if I show myself unable to choose the good over the bad in the other areas of my life? And furthermore, I believe that as we become more virtuous, we will be more inclined to religious observances. (Which is not, of course, to say that as we become more inclined to religious observance, we become more virtuous. There are countless counter-examples.)

To show what I mean, I would like to use the example of a much under-appreciated virtue in modern life: filial piety.

I realize that the application of the term to the ancient Mediterranean whence so much of Paganism derives is not entirely historically proper. The term "filial piety" entered the English lexicon not from the writings of the Greek philosophers, but from translations of Confucian texts. Nonetheless, I think it is perfectly appropriate. Archaeological and textual evidence shows that it was an essential part of both Roman and Athenian society. Veneration of one's ancestors was an essential part of the household religious ceremonies. One of the great defenses of traditional religion in the ancient world against skepticism (and against Christianity) was that it had been passed down from ancient times by the ancestors. In Latin, the word "maiores"--literally, the greater ones--was a common term for one's ancestors. And the Greek terms for "piety" and "impiety" are from time to time used to refer to proper and improper treatment of one's fathers, as in Plato's Euthyphro.

It would be very easy to disregard filial piety as unimportant for modern life. Many people would laugh at the idea that it should be given greater focus in the modern age, and many others would consider the idea to be dangerously authoritarian, the sort of thing that perpetuated slavery and continues to perpetuate racism. There is some justice to these claims. Whatever a modern filial piety might look like, it cannot look like ancient piety; in today's society, such a thing would be difficult at best, and damaging at worst. And it is indeed important to gain discernment not to perpetuate the harmful attitudes and behaviors of one's parents.

But on the other side of the coin, the lack of filial piety in America is a significant problem. Far too many Americans tuck the elderly away in nursing homes, where they will cease to be an inconvenience (though I understand that in today's work world, the time and money to care for an elderly mother or father is sadly becoming a luxury). And the mother complaining about how her children never even give her a phone call is an image so common as to be a pop culture trope.

I find these trends rather disturbing. There is something deeply ungrateful about such an attitude. Our parents gave us life, if nothing else. I myself have been fortunate enough to have wonderful parents who have bent over backwards to provide for their children and raise them well. (And I'm sure this colors my attitude to the subject; I may not be quite as happy with the idea had I been poorly raised or even abused as a child.)

Gratitude, I think, is the underpinning of filial piety. The gift of life is the greatest gift anyone could give. It is the gift that makes receiving any other gifts possible. Without my parents, I wouldn't be able to enjoy a breezy spring afternoon or pore over an interesting book. Had they not raised me around books and ensured I paid attention to my schoolwork, I might not have graduated with academic distinctions from a good college.

It is the same sort of gratitude that, in the ancient world, motivated sacrifices and festivals in honor of the gods. The gods were honored as responsible for the continued health and prosperity of the people, as founders or patrons of the city, and for some families in Rome as actual ancestors themselves. In the Greek myths, later appropriated by the Romans, the gods created humans. Plato drew upon this widespread belief in the creation myth of the Timaeus.

To honor the gods, then, is in a sense to take one's rightful place as the descendant of the gods in the cosmic family, which includes not just the gods but worthy ancestors. While this is not the only way to approach religion, I think it's a good and useful one.

In my next post, I'll take a closer look at the questions that arise in applying the concept of filial piety to life in the modern world, especially for Pagans.

Passing the Outsider Test

Atheist and skeptic John W. Loftus spends much of his time "debunking" Christianity. As I've stated elsewhere, I think it's important to grapple with the claims of atheism. Intellectual honesty demands it.

One of the tactics Loftus uses most often is exhorting Christians to take the Outsider Test for Faith. While not a particularly new argument, it is rarely given the kind of primacy Loftus not unjustly gives it. A summation of this argument can be found on the Internet Infidels:

... I propose "the outsider test for faith": Test your religious beliefs as if you were an outsider, subjecting them to the same sort of skeptical evaluation that you would give to the beliefs of the followers of other religions. If you don't approach your own religious beliefs with the same dose of skepticism that you apply to others' religious beliefs, then you are using a double standard. The outsider test is no different than the strategy of the prince from the Cinderella story, who might question 45,000 girls, all of whom claim to be the girl who lost the glass slipper at the ball last night, to determine which one (if any) of them really is that girl.

As he unpacks the argument, it becomes clear that his goal is twofold. First, it is to convince Christians that they ought to be substantially more self-critical about how they examine religious truth claims. In this sense, it is less an argument and more of an and second, to defuse arguments like those of Alvin Plantinga, who state that one can be justified in believing in Christianity even without evidence. On Loftus' analysis, the a priori assumption of the truth of Christianity's claims is a kind of special pleading.

So what does this have to do with Paganism? If my previous analysis is correct, not much. If the question has to do with truth claims, then Paganism--at least in general--is exempt, as it is not a matter of truth claims, but of approaching the Numinous or the Divine.

But nonetheless, Pagans and polytheists themselves (myself included) often do make truth claims about the gods, though Paganism does not demand this, most common among them that they are immaterial or supernatural beings of immense power and beneficence, and they can be known (in some sense) by humans.

While I think that Loftus is quite right in claiming that Christianity tends to fail the Outsider Test, I also think that Paganism, in its many forms, tends to pass it on both counts.

There is certainly a dearth of critical thinking in the Pagan community. When one reads the writings of many Pagan authors, one often cannot help but get the impression that the author perhaps has not thought things through very carefully. But this is not an irreversible problem. Real critical thinking is emerging even now, as Pagans and polytheists begin to tackle real problems in ethics and theology.

The second fork of the Outsider Test is the one with real teeth. Do Pagans, polytheists, reconstructionists, etc., commit special pleading? While I'm sure that many do, I can't think that it's a problem as systematically endemic as it is in the dogmatic monotheisms.

And I do think it's a problem for monotheists. The bloviations of so-called "evidentialist" apologists aside, the evidence for the truth of Christianity is no greater or less than that for the truth of Islam or Judaism. And these options are mutually exclusive. If the New Testament instructs correctly, then Mohammad was at best deluded, and Moses' understanding was incomplete. While one might prefer one of these three for philosophical, aesthetic, moral, or experiential reasons, historical evidence cannot decide between them. But the claim that, because one felt inspired and uplifted at a Christian religious service, Muslims run the risk of damnation, is I think indefensible. Muslims, too, feel uplifted at their religious rites and gatherings. Likewise, philosophical defenses of any particular religion are, by their very nature, complex and controversial things, and in general come to conclusions that can be reasonably disputed.

But I don't think it's a problem for Pagans in general. I, for one, have no problem with the idea that religious revelation is temporally and culturally bound--packaged and understood in terms understandable and relevant to its recipients. I have no problem believing that revelation is constant and ongoing. I have no problem believing in Amaterasu or Vishnu--though I may suspect that followers of Shinto and Hinduism are wrong about some things. But then, I suspect that I'll have to make some corrections in the future myself.

Does Paganism pass the outsider test? As I understand it, it does. And my own approach certainly does.

The Path(s) to God(s)

In my last post, I distinguished (albeit somewhat arbitrarily) between spirituality and religion. The difference, as I set it down, lies in the fact that religion has a constellation of rituals, practices, and images, which spirituality does not have. (To be only slightly more precise, spirituality can have these, but they're not the focus, and they're less insisted upon.) Collectively, I call this constellation the tradition of the religion, and it is this tradition which defines it as a religion.

For instance, Christianity has the Bible as its primary texts, is organized into churches which (usually) meet on Sundays, and something akin to the Nicene Creed is accepted by most. Wicca has as its primary images the God and the Goddess, is organized into covens, and requires the casting of circles, but has no creed or primary texts.

It is through tradition that the moral aspects of religion may find expression. While the presence of the numinous may involve a sense of encountering a morally pure being, or of being purified, or of being exhorted to moral excellence, this is usually (but not always) going to be undirected without tradition. That is not to say that tradition necessarily dictates moral injunctions, but that it provides a structure by which ethics can be related to the numinous.

This is particularly effective, as advocates for the 365-day bible and other daily Scriptural devotions know, when the tradition involves doing something every day. If this is not only possible to do within the tradition, but essential to it--as for Muslims, the daily prayers, and as for many reconstructions, the daily rituals for the ancestors and the gods--then the way it can shape the contours of daily life, and the experience of living in the presence of numinous beings, cannot be overstated.

Every living tradition has something it is like to be involved in it--something that its practitioners might perceive as its "essence." This is not to say that all members of the tradition will agree on what it is, but to say that, for a Christian, being Christian is a certain way of being, and for a Buddhist, being Buddhist is a certain way of being. Tradition is shaped in part by people's shifting experience of what it is like to be part of it.

Traditions can involve doctrines or dogmas. To the extent that these are clearly logically articulable, they are subject to the relevant kinds of analysis; certain empirical claims--for instance, that crystals can help cure cancer, or that a particular holy book relates an accurate history--can be investigated scientifically. Logical contradictions or serious implausibilities can vitiate an entire tradition, if found in essential doctrines.

Tradition allows for the formation of a religious community, though a religious community may not always be necessary for the founding of a tradition.

One of the things which tends to distinguish religious traditions from other kinds of traditions is the explicit or implicit way in which it upholds, supports, and/or exhorts a vision of life. When the tradition is cut off from that life, it loses much of its purpose. Moreover, the vision of life espoused or expounded by a tradition is a means by which it may be critiqued. A vision of life that is unworkable or inauthentic should not be followed.

For instance, one could criticize the pseudo-religious New Age authors for inadequately dealing with human suffering, or for irresponsibly drawing attention away from real problems like sustainability and social justice.

The vision of life--or kinds of visions, at least--underpinning pagan religions tends to involve a life lived in the sense of the immanent divine. The numinous is not simply transcendent or to be found only by looking within, but can be experienced through or as within things external, but intimately to hand, such as rivers, mountains, trees, images of gods (vulgarly called "idols" by Christians), etc. The embodied nature of human life is generally embraced, and ethics is to be seen as the embodied, social behavior it is, directed more by concerns about virtue and living the good life than by commandments absolutely enjoining particular behaviors. In essence, a more authentic embracing of human experience, even in its diversity, is sought.

How one "chooses" or "comes to" or "creates" a tradition requires a post of its own.


To sum up: Religion, as I see it, essentially involves two aspects: experience of the numinous, and the constellation of practices, beliefs, and images that I call tradition. The experience of the numinous provides the impetus, the essential core that gives the religion significance and inspires reflection and meditation. The tradition allows the religion to coalesce as a religion, and take a form more tangible than an amorphous spirituality.

Beyond Belief

I'd like to lay out two theoretical areas--though often intermixed in practice--that define pagan religion as I practice it and intend to develop it further.

First, there is what might be called the "spiritual" level. I am sometimes confronted the numinous. In part, this is a sense of a presence, a personality or at least experiencer, within something not normally considered a person--a stream, a tree, a mountain, a bay. Such is the intuition underlying animism. But there is more than that to the numinous. It is the sensation that one is in the presence of the immanent divine. Each experience differs, so it is hard to pinpoint what differentiates the numinous from the merely present. The sense can be of something masculine, or feminine, beneficent or uncaring, self-harmonious and tranquil or tempestuous and raging. But there is something else I cannot quite describe which gives it an immensity of presence to the mind. (Though a little effort can sometimes quash the sense altogether.)

If you haven't experienced something of this sort, you may not have any idea what I'm talking about.

When I say that no particular proposition need be adopted about these beings, I merely express the understanding that the experience of them--the sense of them as being, as having presence--does not entail any particular placement of them in a broader metaphysics. The personal ontology of experience differs from the propositional ontology of metaphysics.

Similarly, acceptance and experience of the presence of a close friend or a family member does not entail any particular metaphysical position. A reductive physicalist might accept that, ultimately, the sense of their presence just is physical interactions in his own brain, as resulting from light waves reflecting from the molecules which make up his friend. A radical solipsist would believe that, ultimately, the presence of his friend was the result of persistent, ineradicable self-delusion. In both cases, however, the personal ontology of experience remains the same. It is impossible for either one to accept the non-existence of the experience of the presence. Only the articulation in terms of a metaphysics differs.

Thus, the articulation of a polytheism in terms of acceding to a sense of presence of this kind is compatible with almost any metaphysics. The existence of gods, as usually conceived as independently existing immaterial beings of power and beneficence, is as compatible with this experience simpliciter as their non-existence is.

Thus far, the understanding of the numinous I have explained is not entirely sufficient for polytheism. While my experience seems to be of multiple presences, others have similar experiences in terms of a single presence whom they call God. While I believe that polytheism is a more natural sense--one that emerges more or less naturally when contradictory ideological commitments are not present--I cannot ignore the fact that in these inchoate, pre-propositional experiences, many people seem to have monotheistic experiences.

Both history of religion and comparative religion seem to agree that religious experiences differ across cultures and through time. Ideas about those experiences shape them as they are experienced, similarly to the way one's experience of a spoon is shaped by the concept of the spoon, and regular use of spoons. (Anyone who has learned to use a new utensil in this way is probably familiar with the change in how the thing is experienced when one learns what it is for, and then when it has been used.) Likewise, the meaning of great cultural texts, such as the King James Bible or Dante's Divine Comedy are experienced differently in different times.

When faced with inchoate, pre-propositional numinous experience, we must answer the question of what to do with this experience. Some simply take the experience as just a nice experience, and leave it at that. While there is nothing inherently wrong with this, I think that the history of humanity shows that, in these experiences lies the potential for personal and social change, if interpreted and applied properly.

Thus, we are faced with a dual task. On the one hand, we must remain true to the experience if our interpretations are to be seen as relevant. On the other hand, we must recognize that the task of interpretation is at least in part constructive. It is possible to set out criteria by which the constructive aspect can proceed. This dual task I refer to as constructive exploration--exploration in that it attempts to remain true to the experience, and constructive in that, as the exploration proceeds, the thing that is explored is also constructed.

Constructive exploration of the numinous experience tends to proceed, in my experience, along two lines: the spiritual and the religious. The spiritual approach attempts to articulate the experience mostly in terms of experience, and in terms of practice mainly generally. In contrast, the religious approach--usually seen as involving creedal codification, though this is not essential, and I think is probably detrimental--involves specifics of behavior much more explicitly, either in terms of ethical injunctions, or ritual, or both. The religious approach also tends toward adoption or construction of more or less clearly conceived religious images seen as significant, if not central. (The image of Christ crucified, for instance, whether portrayed in sculpture or in the prose of the Gospels, is central to Christianity.) These images, as objects of meditation, become objects of experience and means of attaining more subtly refined numinous experience.

So much for the aspect of religion related to the numinous. Of the images and practices I will have more to say in my next post.

Why Paganism? or: Why Not Atheism? Pt. 2

Reading back over that last post, I see that I failed to make a distinction I should have.

Atheism in most forms arises out of epistemological commitments. Generally speaking, atheists suppose a sort of scientific empiricism to be the way things go. We are justified in thinking something exists because we experience it, or because we can infer it inductively from experience--preferably with the aid of scientific experimentation and mathematical or statistical analysis--and we can communicate and agree about its existence.

This kind of reasoning is very good at establishing the kind of thing that can be described in terms of defined causal relationships with other things. What the atheist means to say is that there is no reasonable way to infer the existence of things causally related to the world in the way gods are supposed to be, from the existence of the things discovered by empirical reasoning, in the way that empirical reasoning progresses.

When the atheist says "gods do not exist," this is what he means. And frankly, I'm not interested in arguing with him. I'll cede the point, and go on with polytheism anyway.

Why? The religious experience, the sense that there are gods, the sense of the presence of gods, is not the kind of thing that is amenable to empirical observation. The closest thing to it that the scientist can observe is the brain of the person having the experience. There is no testable hypothesis.

It may well be the case that we cannot reasonably posit the existence of gods as the sort of thing that is related in a particular causal way with other things. And that's fine. But if I were to say that I feel the presence of Neptune or Jupiter (the gods, not the planets, obviously), would I really be saying that Neptune or Jupiter is in a particular causal relationship with me about which we can have empirical observation.

Thus, I can completely agree with what the atheist means when he says "gods do not exist," and still be a polytheist. Gods do exist--just not in the way he means.

Why Paganism? or: Why Not Atheism?

I really didn't mean for this post to take so long. Being the sort of person I am, I don't feel like I can start on a project like a blog without setting down, in the first place, what it is that I'm trying to do. My goals may change, but the initial direction needs to be put in place.

The question "What is paganism" is too big for me to really summarize in a single post. I have a hard time summarizing in one post just what my paganism is. Instead, I thought I'd propose my general attitude toward religion in general in terms of the biggest intellectual challenge to any Western religious person: atheism.

This is not some purely intellectual problem only of interest to academics. There are atheists in the world. They are not just a bunch of disillusioned ex-Christians who, bitter about the failure of their own religion, dismiss all religions. Nor are atheists just scientists who misapply their method in an irrational attempt to impose control and order on the world. Atheism is frequently the result of thoughtful, intellectually curious religious people trying to figure out their religion--and finding no reason to believe in it.

This is not just something Christians and Muslims grapple with. Just recently, Deo of the popular pagan podcast Deo's Shadow announced that he was ending his podcast not only because of increasing demands on his time, but because he has come to atheism:

Making deòs Shadow was usually a joy, and as the show grew more popular, we had many opportunities for new experiences which helped us to grow as people. One of the interesting side-effects of such growth is that one can end up growing out of that which induces the growth. We’ve moved on from Paganism and are now practicing atheists. (link)

So why atheism? He explains himself:

Having subsequently dropped Paganism, the question would seem to be: why not replace it with another spiritual perspective? I submit that this is the wrong question. The question ought to be: What accounts for anyone ever taking up another belief system having dropped a previous one? I think there are probably two good reasons for holding a belief. The first is evidence. The second is training. When it comes to religious belief, we lack the first independently of the interpretations furnished by the second. “Training” could mean simply being raised in a particular religious culture. Or it could mean being brainwashed by a cult… or, less ominously, being immersed in a religious culture that eventually becomes second-nature.(link)

So why adopt paganism as a belief system? It's not as if we were brought up to believe it. And it's not as if paganism has intrinsically more evidence than any other religion. (And all religions, one might point out, do make claims that contradict others. Polytheism is directly contradictory to monotheism; there cannot be many gods if there is only one God.)

Such is Deo's reasoning. Educated in philosophy as he is, he could probably go much further and expound argument upon argument, precisely elucidating every point, demonstrating his reasoning quasi-mathematically in terms of the predicate calculus. And he would probably be right. His arguments would probably work, and would probably stand up to logical criticism reasonably well--by my lights, at least.

So what exactly am I saying? It probably sounds as if I'm affirming the truth of atheism. That I'm saying it's unreasonable to believe in gods, that there is no strong evidential or a priori reason to affirm the proposition that gods exist.

That's exactly what I'm saying. But I call myself a polytheist anyway. Here's why.

I can affirm that the atheist position is correct. I can examine their arguments and agree with them. But in addition to this, I would also like to say that atheism misses the point.

Atheism analyzes religion as if it's a collection of logical propositions to assent to. A set of claims that one either believes, or does not believe. But is this really what religion is? Is this what religion is supposed to be? A Christian will say that, even if there's more to it, religion requires at least that. I disagree.

I have said that I am a polytheist. On the surface, this does seem to imply that my religion requires assent to at one proposition, belief in at least one claim: gods exist.

But what does this mean? It is consistent with Epicureanism and Neoplatonism, Stoicism and Academic skepticism, just to name a few examples from ancient Greek philosophy. It is consistent, as well, with the claim that the gods are Jungian archetypes. It is consistent with the claim that gods are anthropomorphizations of natural physical or elements. There is, essentially, no particular metaphysical or existential proposition that can be derived from the statement "gods exist," and the statement does not depend on the truth of any metaphysical or existential proposition.

When I say "gods exist," I am affirming the value of a number of kinds of practices, like sacrifice and prayer. I am saying that there are divine mysteries to be experienced but never told, tales of gods to be told which can be interpreted in many useful, pleasing, or even life-changing ways.

Where does the requirement to assent to a proposition come in? Atheism, on my view, misses the point.

First!

I've been thinking about doing this blogging thing for a while. Here, then, are my first tentative steps in that direction. At the time of this writing, I haven't even finished setting up the basic requirements. The current template is highly tentative. The blogroll isn't finished. I have no idea how the page will look when I'm done.

The purpose of this blog is mostly to be a place where I can put down my thoughts. As the title suggests, I'll be focusing on paganism. As I write my thoughts down, they will take on form. By making them public, I invite comments and criticism.

My Bachelor's degree is in philosophy, which was an interest of mine even before college. It's something I still pursue in my free time. I am sure that will become obvious in my later posts. That is not to say that I will be doing philosophy (except in a very broad sense of the term) or even philosophy lite. It is merely to say that studying philosophy has left me with a number of tendencies--toward examination of concepts, logical argumentation, clarity over aesthetics--that I will make no attempt to suppress.

Along those lines, my next post will be an preliminary overview of what I mean by "paganism" in the context of this blog--how I make sense of the movement, and what I mean when I say that I myself am pagan.