Culture

Feed The Unstable God

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I’ve been thinking about religious evangelism lately due to, well, large chunks of human history and too many chunks of current history. Most of my thoughts are about evangelizing by believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism, those who worship a god they insist is infinite and all knowing yet has the same traits and biases as humans. It seems a lot of people want us to follow their Big Daddy – or else.

The funny thing is for so many people proclaiming their undying faith – and being willing to spread it by the sword and the bullet – evangelical Anthropomorphic Monotheists seem peculiarly insecure about their deity. Considering a core part of their believe has a conflict between “infinite in all ways” and “just as petty as I am” it’s not surprising. You can feel that instability.

How do you resolve belief in a being of infinite power and potential with the idea they’re worried about, say, what bathroom they use or what day they worship at? How do you reconcile all the conflicts with experience, holy texts, other believers, and so on? A believer in an all-to-human infinite “god” has to spend a lot of time making excuses or a lot of time ignoring the conflicts – the world will mock them by existing.

This conflict is familiar to me – believing in a god both petty and transcendent is a challenge that is faced by enthusiasts for media, like fanfic writers. Every new show, every season, every episode the staff may dump a new load of continuity or retcontinuity on you. You have to constantly revise your ideas due to new input and instability – but whereas fanfic writers admit they have “a take,” believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism have to act like everything is real.

And this I think is one reason for the rampant evangelism. The world is constantly leading you to question your beliefs as your beliefs are fundamentally unstable and unsustainable without effort. So what do you do? You convert the world, you make the world believe and act the way you think it should so you don’t face conflicts.

Anthropomorphic Monotheism is inherently unstable to a level that is painful in the mind of believers. To resolve that pain they have to change the world so they don’t have conflict, so everything lines up, so everything is it should be. At some levels this evangelism is a kind of Gray Goo, Von Neuman’s Catastro-deity. It just chews up the world to replicate itself.

And, yes, the reasons for religions evangelism are more than just resolving conflicts by eating the world, but I think the inherent instability and need to convert are worth examining. Maybe it explains people’s need for an Apocalypse – they need a fundamental point where unresolvable conflicts are resolved, and are fine to watch the world die to have it.

So next time you see believers in Anthropomorphic Monotheism enragedly trying to convert people, ask how much of that is them trying to resolve the inherit instability of their religion. And ask yourself how much of the world they’d burn to fuel it.

-Xenofact

Art And Spirituality

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Last column I wrote about how my experiments with art parodying spiritual bullshit and grifty scams had been intriguing.  I understood how art was part of human spirituality,  how it our love of beauty and form and such was a way to powerfully communicate deep experiences.  This made me realize it was time to explore something I’ve been trying to put into words about art and spirituality – my parodic work helped me talk serious stuff, go figure.

Simply put, I think art is inseparable from spirituality as art is the bridge that connects us to the Universe, the Tao, The Big Picture, because it connects to our thoughts and emotions.

The universe is vast and complex, our world is complex, our lives complex – even one person is complex. We’re here trying to understand reality, move within it, live within it – but it’s so big. This is why I like the term “The Tao,” which is essentially “the source of all this and no we can’t really speak of it.”

I’m honest on my biases. But let me go on.

Now we humans, we may be small, but we are aware of how huge everything is. We model the universe, we understand it, we analyze it. To work with it, with each other, to survive, grow, explore, or even just goof off, we have to find ways to handle this great Giant Allness. Philosophy and religion and spirituality are ways to organize and naviate this world and live inside it. Obviously some philosophies and religions don’t work out that well, but you get the idea – a bad plan is still a plan.

How do you connect us to our philosophies and meditations and spells and the greater universe? Well, humans have art. Art is where thought and emotion and sensation all come together, where a single picture or image can lead us to the bigness out there. Art is connection

Art is the bridge between us and The Big Picture, the way we line everything up to really think and feel and experience the greater world. From lovely philosophical writings to complex spiritual charts, awe-inspiring gods and gorgeous meditation hangings, those symmetries and poetries help us connect.  Those synergies of emotion and word and sensation come together and we get something larger than us in a way we can handle.

Art both focuses us and helps us get bigger.

In fact, isn’t most of religion and spirituality really art in the end? Temples and diagrams, pithy advice books and statues of the gods? It’s trying to synthesize infinity and vastness in some way you can work with it, get it, think it, and feel it.

The vast powers of the world are easily understood and appreciated and interacted with in the form of a god. You want to understand the states of existence, but the diagram of the Six Realms makes it easier (and hey, six is a manageable number). We drape art over the universe to make it both comprehensible – and to take us soaring into realms greater than ourselves.

Art, that love of form and color and combination, is the perfect tool to connect us to the universe in all its vast living potential.

I think I managed to sum up my feelings. I’m sure I’ll have more to say, but at least I said it – dare I say, made some art of it.

-Xenofact

Musings On The Lonely Men Who Hate Each Other

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The “Male Loneliness Epidemic” is something I see discussed a lot. Men feel lonely and isolated. Men fall under the spell of grifters. Men don’t find what they need and get bitter and angry. Being a pretty generic guy, I take interest in this for many reasons, including the fact a lot of (white) guys voted for Donald Trump who, as of this post, is sort of ruining everything.

Having lived many, many decades I get the concern about male loneliness. I also however was raised with the idea that you can find and make friends. I suspect some of this is really that I hit a sweet spot of how I was raised, role models, connective nerd culture, and region. I grew up thinking about making friends and connecting, and that it’s my job to do it. I guess some people missed that.

Beyond my very broad experiences, I’m not sure I can comment on the fine details of this supposed epidemic, if it is an epidemic (I don’t think so), and so on. I think what is obvious is there’s a grifty, fascistic part of Online Male Culture that uses this sense of disconnection to give vulnerable men a pathological and unsustainable role model, what one person on Tumblr called wittily the Buff Scammer.

The Buff Scammer is a sort of capitalistic/fascistic/comic book ideal of a guy as a jacked hustler always making scores and gains. You don’t actually enjoy yourself, you just have to keep up the gains and the money to show off . . . to other men. Even relations with women are ways to show off to men, meaning that you enter into the bizarrely homoerotic sphere of men thinking of men in their wooing of women. These men don’t have friends or lovers, just targets of various kinds.

What is funny is that, with my (ever-advancing age) and interest in history is I’m used to seeing far different ideals of male role models that are not the Buff Scammer.. A lot of them involved an idea of citizenship in many ways, even if there were other pathologies. The idea of a man was an idea of being engaged and part of things (even if there was plenty of toxic masculinity otherwise). It’s weird to see that in, say, 2500 year old writings, but also remember it in my youth and feel like it’s sort of been pushed aside in my lifetime.

Citizenship gives one some grounding, some sense of place – and you feel less lonely. You’re playing or seeking to play a role. Maybe it’s just me getting old, but I honestly see that completely lacking in large parts of culture, including some of the male grift-o-sphere. I meet plenty of engaged citizens who are happy, but there are zones where the idea of citizenship seems long gone.

Citizenship as an ideal leads you to not be alone and to seek connection. You have an ideal of belonging. The Buff Scammer and his ilk have none of that. That has to not just be lonely, but it resists a traditional gateway for not being lonely – the idea of being an active citizen. I mean you may not like everyone but you’re part of something.

This makes me think of the events of the first few months of the Trump administration. Trump destroyed alliances and trade deals built over decades – indeed over a century. He isolated the country in a temper tantrum, trying to look tough. He was, in short, a Buff Scammer (well, not that Buff) who has no concept of friends, of citizenship.

And then I think of the lonely men who voted for him. They have no concept of friends either. No concept of citizenship. No concept of belonging.

It’s just lonely people in a temper tantrum, disconnected, isolated, and running things, leaving them even more alone. Citizenship may be a solution, but people will have to learn to be active about it. Certainly they just found some grifter is going to make them more lonely.

-Xenofact