Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Faith

  • A Valediction to the Church of England

    A Valediction to the Church of England

    Only the Church of England would sign its own death warrant.

    Our local church has no incumbent (they can’t afford it, it seems) and a retired clergyman offered to take services there for free, in addition to providing a choir and organist at his own expense.  The services were to be based on the Book of Common Prayer, which is currently outlawed at our local Godshop.

    In their great wisdom, the Churchwardens and the bureaucrats from head office (think “Yes Minister”) turned him down. Apparently no changes can be made at this moribund and all but abandoned building until a new full time vicar is appointed. Which will be another 18 months in the making.

    It is too radical apparently to offer a service whose liturgy was written by Archbishop Cranmer and has served more discerning members of the Church of England for over 500 years.

    To look a gift horse in the mouth is a brave and foolhardy step for an institution on the edge of extinction.

    Most of these places are waiting to die as, sadly, are most members of the dwindling and decrepit congregation. God’s waiting room as they say.

    At my local church there is no organist and the few services they offer are accompanied by a juke box. The services themselves are low church, which is fine for those who like badly written lyrics and tunes only a child under three years old could properly appreciate.

    There is no Book of Common Prayer. Instead, there is something written in a language designed for those unable or unwilling to expand their vocabulary beyond the 500 or so words they customarily get by on.

    The beautiful old building is locked and barred every day.

    What use is a church if it is closed to visitors? What use is a place of worship if it locks out those who would rest there a while  in quiet contemplation?

    As usual with human affairs, the whole matter is cursed by politics.

    My parents lived in the village for 30 years and both are buried in the local churchyard.  I myself own a cottage here and although not a conventional god botherer, find solace in the beauty of the music and the ritual of the traditional church.

    I offered to be a key-holder so that I could open up the venerable old wreck to visitors who came knocking at my door.

    But I am not an insider and apparently the right to a key is a closely guarded privilege. Perhaps one has to be an apostle or at least an ordinary disciple?

    Insurance companies would prefer churches to be opened every day – statistically an open church is less likely to face vandalism.

    Given such an attitude, an early death is assured for this and countless other local churches.

    So there you have it. An empty and locked church with virtually no congregation. Requiescat in pace.

     

     

     

  • Hearing the Logos

    Hearing the Logos

    In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

    Or was it a song or a vibration perhaps? If there has been one abiding and constant thread to my life it has been a yearning for mystical experience. To see the face of god, to touch it. To witness the very essence of reality.

    You do not need to be conventionally religious to have your spine tingle, to feel the hairs rising from the back of your neck when you hear those words. You certainly do not have to subscribe to dogma – Eastern or Western.

    Perhaps my earliest conscious exposure to the concept  was from the Magician’s Nephew. I can not count how many times I thrilled to that song in the dark, calling life and existence to a barren and empty world.

    I have become tired these past few years of academic discourse, of science, of learning of any sort. Philosophy bores me, not least because of its arcane and incomprehensible jargon. As with religion, I have a strong conviction that most philosophers are stumbling blindly in the dark, however much they may believe they have discovered “Truth”.

    I can not claim that I know what reality is; I can not define the ineffable, let alone prove that it exists or that it is the fount of all being.

    I can only rely on my beliefs, my feelings, the strength of my conviction that behind the scenes there is some deep mystery we are missing. That behind the curtain there is a Wizard, even if he is not a conventional mage but a selection of obscure and thus far hidden laws.

    Science is wonderful – there is no doubt that without it we would be living a life of abject misery. Of poverty, disease and mud huts. But so far, while science has shown something of the mechanics of matter, it has failed to get to the bottom of what matter is.

    Consciousness is a prime example. Some claim it to be an emergent phenomena, arising from physics and the laws of nature. Others that it is in itself a separate law of nature – that consciousness simply “exists”.  Yet others still believe in a soul or a supernatural explanation of what we are.

    I can claim no expertise; I can venture no opinion.

    What I can say is that while science has explained much about how this particular physical universe works, it has left unexplained more than it has revealed. So far.

    Even if there is no such thing as a “supernatural”, the wonders of the natural are still so little understood that “god” may indeed yet be found in the gaps.  God in the sense of the ultimate explanation, the ultimate driving force of reality.

    Take the photon, electricity, the strong and weak nuclear forces. Take matter, energy. On any intuitive level has science really conveyed to us what they actually are? Where they came from? What they mean?  We know a little of what they can do but as to the rest, it is shrouded in deep mystery.

    What of the multiverse? Does it exist? How did it originate? Does it share the physical laws of this habitat of ours?

    It has long been my contention, my belief that intelligence can move towards “god”. Can become “godlike”. Can become god. That consciousness perhaps is “god” if developed sufficiently. That we can move towards an Omega Point where all will be revealed.

    Who knows, perhaps it is science which will take us there.

    But is it possible to intuit what is out there, even at our rudimentary stage of development?

    The mystics would have it so.

    And if I have seen any hint of another realm in all these years, it has been in music. Especially Renaissance polyphony, that pure, meditative, ethereal vibration.

    At times I have become so lost in music that any sense of self or body evaporates and I am left with pure consciousness. And ecstasy. A complete and utter transcendence of normal existence.

    At such times I know that I am, but I have no sense of “what” I am or “where” I am. At such times I wonder whether I am the music itself or a note from it. Any sense that the music originates in physical reality disappears and I am left in pure void.

    What do I make of these moments, other than to marvel at the joy?

    It tells me that there may be more to consciousness than we might believe when in more prosaic states of mind. Even though as a subjective and unverifiable experience it proves nothing, except perhaps to the recipient.

    A  neuroscientist will be able to see bits of the brain light up during such states but this is no proof of the reality or otherwise of what is experienced by the seer.

    And how does life feel in between such experiences? Different, I guess is the answer. You are left feeling that you have witnessed something deep, true and profound. It does not make you into a “good” person (or a bad one come to that) but it certainly makes you a lot more reflective and a far less amenable to to the absurdities and lures of our Darwinian and materialist society.

    It brings a wry grin as you glance at the pompous lead articles in the press, of the right or the left. It makes you sigh with impatience as The Donald blows the shit out of yet another “enemy”, instead of making peace with him.  It makes you vaguely amused by the foibles of the tycoons and the politicians to whom power and money is the end game.

    And has it made a “believer” out of me? Have I become one of the godly, the priestly cast so anxious to tell of our sins and to explain how many angels can dance on a pinhead?

    No. No to all of that. It has simply told me in clear and unambiguous terms that there is more to reality than we are customarily able to sense. It has informed me that there are unimaginable marvels to be discovered. It has helped me to decide what is of importance and what, assuredly, is not.

     

     

     

  • Messiah – Netflix

    Messiah – Netflix

    Profound and beautiful would be my best shot at describing this wonderful new series Messiah from the creative genius that is Netflix.

    Needless to say I do not give a toss about the general critical reception and care even less for petty debates as to whether the series is blasphemous or takes liberties with the “scriptures” Hebrew, Christian or Muslim.

    I am no believer in gods or saviors of any flavor, but clearly I must have a hankering after the divine to enjoy this fictional portrayal of a supernatural being who declares that history has ended.

    My favorite scene? His meeting with the US President, himself a man of deeply religious conviction, who is moved by the Messiah’s plea to withdraw all US troops from abroad.

    Yes, peace. Call it naive, Utopian, unrealistic but it is some such shattering event for which I have long yearned.

    Peace, love, goodness a dropping of hatred, bigotry and greed. What is not to like about such a philosophy? Is he the son or god or isn’t he? Is he possessed of miraculous powers or a mere charlatan, who has learnt the power of deception and conjury from his wicked uncle? Did he really walk on water in the capital city of Mammon and did he resurrect a bunch of latter day Lazarus’s from the dead?

    Well this is not reality so the answers to those questions have little relevance outside of the curiosity to see what this tale will reveal.

    But is there not a longing in many of us (most perhaps?) to abandon this mundane plane of existence, to upsticks, to thrown down the dull tools of survival and follow some greater calling?

    Would I want some anthropomorphic god dropping down from the skies? Probably not but the idea of a new beginning, a new world, a better society, a dramatically different existence – yes, that is something I would welcome.

    Fiction it may be, but the desire for transcendence and meaning is something for which so many yearn.

    If the Messiah makes us question our lives, our behavior, our beliefs, then all power to its creators.

  • Born Again

    Born Again

    I have always been faintly amused by the idea of earnest Christian converts sliding down a giant birth canal into a pool of holy water. Or whatever it is they actually do.

    According to Wikipedia “individuals who profess to be “born again” often state that they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”  Yeah, right, well I had something slightly different in mind as I was wandering slowly through the snow covered mountains today.

    More like that equally improbable concept of a “New Year’s Resolution”. Turning over a new leaf. Starting again. Doing things differently.

    I’m not often too bothered about being born again but recently the concept of turning my back on my past has taken on a new importance.

    Before I left for the mountains, I had been through a particularly difficult few weeks with somebody I have rather ignobly and perhaps harshly called the Pig.  I don’t have any personal axe to grind with the Pig other than my distaste for illiteracy, a lack of erudition and boorish stupidity.  No doubt were I a decent Christian (god forbid) or (slightly more tolerable) a proper Buddhist I would take a more tolerant attitude.

    But I am neither and the Pig  has really got under my skin. Before leaving London I had an unfortunate incident whereby I was so enraged by the behavior of Mr and Mrs Pig that I was frogmarched to the doctor who was ordered to get me to change my ways.

    And indeed I should. Hence on the eve of my return to that no longer “Green and Pleasant Land” I find myself resolved to turn over a new leaf. I think I have tried this a number of times before but this time it’s quite urgent.

    So what will my re-birthed existence look like? Post birth canal, it will certainly entail ignoring Pigs which means I will no longer be able to contact most of my siblings. Mercifully.

    It will also mean not giving a toss about anything very much. And quite honestly that’s about all you can do at an age when friends and relatives are dropping like flies around you and Shakespeare’s words take on an ever more poignant urgency:

    All the world’s a stage,
    And all the men and women merely players:
    They have their exits and their entrances;
    And one man in his time plays many parts,
    His acts being seven ages.

    Worry is absurd. I’ll do a lot less of that. People: I don’t think I will bother.   With the odd and very rare exception.  Meditation – I must do a lot more of that. Must try harder as the dullard’s head master might say.  Gardening, walking along beaches, mooching in country churches, singing. My wife, my son, such family as I have left I must concentrate on.

    Life is to be lived. Enjoy it while you can.

     

  • Alone in a Pew

    Alone in a Pew

    If you are going to church, go alone and go when it is empty.

    And preferably locked, so that you have to knock on some ancient’s door to borrow the huge old keys to the locks.  Make sure it’s old – quietly ringing with a thousand years’ of contemplation and quiet voices.  And it should have books – musty, sacred, old  books containing arcane prayers in a language you barely understand. And best if it is remote and utterly still and quiet except for a few rooks in the churchyard.

    Then you sit and you listen. Perhaps you look at some ancient prayers, not as an act of obeisance to some deity you were taught about in childhood, but to plumb the very depth of the human condition. To put you in touch with who you are and who we all are. Our common concerns and joys, our hopes and our fears.

    And yes, perhaps to access some sense of the “divine”, however you may interpret that word, that feeling. The intuition that something is out there, even if that something is a mere echo of the human spirit itself.  That is divine enough – consciousness is itself miraculous. The arising of feelings and mind from mere matter. Out of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen arose some spirit, some entity which could contemplate the universe and the very matter from which it arose. Special enough to produce a sense of the numinous.

    “Stand in awe…… : commune with your own heart, and in your chamber, and be still.”

    How apt, these ancient words and how beautiful. And how many such phrases can you find, combing through those musty old books. Reject what you will, take what you will. You drift, in and out of consciousness, in that quiet place. You pick a few words here and there and think about them. You  close your eyes, you drift into a mild trance.

    Somehow all seems right at such times. The watery sun peers through the stained glass and casts its glow on brass and wood and hewed stone. Yes, all seems right with the world. All will be well and all manner of things will be well.

    It isn’t a religious thing.  You are not looking for benediction or grace, for help or the defeat of your enemies.  You do not seek to be saved, you are not looking for reward or an after life.  You are looking for this life, here and now.  You are seeking your own essence, your own meaning and purpose.

    And sometimes you think you have found it. Sometimes, during that half hour of quiet contemplation, on that dusty old pew in the middle of nowhere, you have grasped at some truth, you have found some measure of true peace, equanimity.  Presumably thousands have found likewise over hundreds of years in that place of peace and sanctity.

    You aren’t looking for thanks, or wealth or health. You aren’t seeking advancement or gain or praise.

    You seek yourself. You seek truth, meaning, solace.

    And alone in a pew I usually find those things.

  • More From the Christian Cultist

    More From the Christian Cultist

    Without comment in any shape or form (lest I deviate from my new found resolve) I report the unhappy fall out from my mistaken attempt yesterday to engage with a religious extremist.

    Mea Culpa.

    May peace be with the poor fellow.

    How to Answer Fools

    I’m getting some minor harassment from someone who calls himself Zeno the Stoic. There is no reply to such men because they are driven by the same lies from Satan that got us into this fallen condition in the first place. Do not debate with such fools; let them serve their master, the Devil. However, there are things we can say that will help us understand in our own minds just how wrong such people are.

    Zeno, like his namesake, stands on the outside of faith and throws rocks. He cannot possibly understand faith because he mistakenly believes that his reason is the highest faculty of man. He trusts the one thing that by necessity rejects the Creator of all things. Intellect is fallen and hostile to God and the faith He pours into our souls.

    There can be no justification for faith on his level. Faith is the faculty that eclipses reason from above it; you either have it or you don’t. Zeno does not, so there is no possible dialog except to warn him that his epistemology is no better than any other failed false religion. Every one who surrenders to mere reason will insist their own logic is the universal default, refusing to understand that the whole range of Greek philosophy was a novel rejection of an epistemology that stood for thousands of years before the Greeks even had writing.

    I realize this sounds like a harsh counter-attack, but the whole point is to establish clearly for people like him that his evangelism on behalf of damnation is not welcome. He is driven to attack because he is excluded from us by his own lack of faith. You don’t have to be nice to people who hate everything that matters to you. It won’t matter how he imagines that he is being kind and reasonable; he’s on the way to Hell and wants to drag everyone down with him.

    Zeno, don’t come back until you accept the validity of faith as the foundation of an epistemology that is different from yours. We are glad to compare notes, but we will not be lectured and insulted by fools who refuse to understand. Ask questions and stop the condemnation, as if your approach is inherently superior. We won’t take you seriously until you return the favor. And please, stop assuming that we are part of the mainstream Christian religion you disparage. If you can’t take the time to investigate how different we are from them, you will continue to assume all kinds of nonsense about us. Either way, human reason is not the answer to anything that matters.

    Addenda: Jesus did not teach inclusion. He taught that the door of repentance was open to everyone. You are welcome to join us as penitents who confess just how wretched they are without Christ. Without owning your personal moral depravity and confessing sin, you exclude yourself from Christ. He told Nicodemas that without spiritual birth, it’s impossible to understand His teachings and miracles.

  • A Gospel for the 21st Century Pagan

    A Gospel for the 21st Century Pagan

    If we 21st Century pagans were to write our own book of “Good News” what would it contain?

    For a start it would do no harm to look at the etymology of the word “pagan”.  Because its origins explain much that has gone wrong with our world. It was a word of “us” over “them”. It was a word invented by a cocky cult to derogate any who did not bend to their world view and their will.  And they had their own “Good News” which would indeed have been very good, did they ever mean a word of it.

    And in today’s mostly godless world, how should we re-write those words of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John?  Well there was nothing wrong with the words really, just with our human race in general. And in our lack of application of those words.

    If we could have our Utopian dream, free of seemingly inevitable dystopian horror, what should we aim for?

    I would not consign the likes of Mugabe and Gaddafi to the gas chamber or the firing squad (much as, arguably, they might deserve it) but I would rewrite the rules of our race (genetic and otherwise) to breed out such horrors.

    I would not hunt and illegally execute bin Laden as we in the “civilized” West saw fit to do but I would aim to eradicate the conditions which lead to the atrocities of 9/11 and beyond in the first place.

    It boils down to “hearts and minds” and, in the longer term, genetic engineering. And the eradication of poverty and the spreading of health. And freedom from pain, physical and psychic.

    In the short term if the ex colonies feel aggrieved, well perhaps we should stop milking their oil and natural resources for our own benefit. And we certainly shouldn’t be selling them arms at vast profit to our rapacious manufacturers and at equally colossal detriment to their ethnically and otherwise cleansed populations.

    But it is also a question of the physician healing himself, of glass houses, of smiting beams from our own eyes.  Before smiting motes in theirs.

    These are ghastly, horrible people but they are only human. They are merely 21st Century versions of William the Conqueror who wiped out the north of England. Are they worse that horrible Ghengis?  And why is Alexander called “great”when he was merely a successful thug?

    So the gospel we might preach could be one of practical change.  For a start it might help if we ceased to glorify war and the military.  It would also help if we ceased to allow one form of prejudice to be replaced by another in the guise of “correctness”, political or otherwise.  There are some true pigs in this world and they should be named and shamed.

    We should move away from the deification of competition and materialism and realize that economic growth does not equate with universal happiness.  That “co-operation” and “sharing” might be words to replace concepts which have dominated our species since the day we were conceived in some muddy swamp or deep ocean smoker.

    No one wants to live in crumbling sub-standard social housing (let alone on the streets) , no one wants a post code dependent health system.  And no one deserves poverty, despite the outdated view, still held by many in our more brutal capitalist systems, that they deserve it because they don’t get off their arses and work.

    No Mr Trump, the world does not work like that and it never has. Too little understanding is granted to the  fortunate that their well being and the lack of it in others is often a matter of circumstance and pure random chance.

    Right place and right time. Right idea at the right time, pursued admittedly with ruthless vigor.

    I’m not looking for a socialist paradise, the very concept is oxymoronic. Well, just plain moronic really.

    But I am looking for a modern gospel of a different sort. In the long term, philosophers such as those in the transhumanist movement reckon greed and general shitty venality can be bred out of us.

    But in the meantime we should do our best to make words such as “kindness” and “decency” objects of greater veneration than “money” and “power”.

    I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth; my bum in the butter if you insist on cruder language. Without that random lottery win, I doubt I would have had the drive to climb the greasy pole; I simply lacked the ambition. I too may have crawled in the gutter.

    So yes, actually, I would like to expand and improve the welfare state and cut the salaries of its administrators. I would like to slash red tape and wasteful, stupid, computer says no bureaucracy.  I remember reading a year or so ago of a Devon county Councillor who was paid £500,000 a year.  What sort of idiocy allows that?

    And I would like to simplify the tax system so drastically and dramatically that we could dispose of three quarters of the civil “servants” who live there.

    Oh, and thanks very much but I would like to place basic utilities back in common ownership rather than let the provision of the basics of life be subject to big biznizz and highly paid sharks.

    And then I would like, above all, to encourage and fund science. The sort of science which can make us better humans, which could let us escape our animal origins by letting us choose our behavior. Better behavior for all! Now there is a slogan. We really don’t have to let evolution continue its brutal and hateful domination.

    Thus speaks the Gospel of the 21st Century Pagan.

  • Cargo Cults

    Cargo Cults

    Cargo cults provide a fascinating insight into the origins of religion.  Far from being lost in the mists of time, John Frum’s cargo cult began in the 20th Century and therefore makes for rather easier study than the Abrahamic religions or those of the Hindu tradition.  Somewhat easier to study a religion which began within living memory  than to have to delve back three to five thousand years.

    The cult developed in Tannu island in the Pacific and was bolstered by the arrival of air dropped supplies by the US military during the Second World War.  Picture an isolated tribe with little previous contact from the outside world, whose lives became magically improved by the arrival of food, clothes, medicine and weapons from the sky.

    Man’s strongest emotion is fear. Fear of famine, drought, illness and death.  He needs food, shelter, medicine and spiritual comfort. An ancient tribe faced by even the modest technology of our own era would consider much of what we do as magic.  Little wonder then that worship develops and the providers of such munificent bounty from the sky become gods.

    Ritual behavior to appease and encourage such gods includes dressing in the style of US soldiers, building symbolic replica airplanes out of straw and cutting landing strips out of the jungle.

    Students of religion will be familiar conceptually with such practices and the accompanying belief systems. Benign gods come to live among us and promise to return. They cause people to rise from the dead, they convert water into wine and cure madness.  Their kingdom is to come after death and it promises an eternity where hunger, thirst and human misery are no more. The lion lays with the lamb and eternal peace is granted.

    Beautiful, comforting myth.  The stark reality is that we need to build our own heaven on earth by altering our violent and selfish behavior and by pursuing scientific advances to ensure peace and plenty for all.

    Image Tim Ross, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

  • The Book of Common Prayer

    The Book of Common Prayer

    The Book of Common Prayer is a much loved work of literature. Its language and phrases have permeated the English language for centuries.  It is nothing less than sublime.

    Originally published in 1549 in a version edited by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, it was subsequently revised until the version of 1662 became the official version of the Church of England. It contains Miles Coverdale’s glorious translation of the Book of Psalms from the Great Bible of 1538.  Its intended use was to define and regulate daily worship in the Church of England and it is written in English, so as to be accessible to everyone and not just the clerics learned in Latin.

    It is now used by a small minority and has largely been replaced by alternative forms of prayer using simpler and more modern language.

    You do not have to be a Muslim to enjoy the beauty of Rumi‘s poetry or a Jew to enjoy Ecclesiastes. You do not have to be a Buddhist to bathe in the beauty of Zen or the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  You do not have to be a Christian to immerse yourself in the timeless reflections of the Book of Common Prayer.

    Sit in the choir stalls at Canterbury Cathedral and listen to evensong.  Wander through the English countryside and sit quietly in a Norman Church – open up to the beauty of mattins or evensong, read quietly to yourself, perhaps while listening to Byrd, de La Rue or Vittoria.

    It need not be about belief.  It is about reflection, quiet, meditation.  It is a re-affirmation of your weltanschauung.  It is to retreat (if only for a few moments) from the world of commerce and busyness and to contemplate for a while the vastness of the universe and its mysteries.  It is time well spent.