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When I gave up religion, I gave up the nonsense I was taught that this experience of transcendence was named God, that it was male, that it was other, outside me, independent of me, and much superior to me in every way, superior beyond description or imagination. I gave up the idea of "worship" altogether. It made me feel small and weak and I knew by then that the true expression of my spirit made me feel invincible.
While I was still in the Church, however, belief in Mother in Heaven provided a transition for me from Father-god to god-within, and I was learning that before there was God, there was the Goddess. But I had no desire to go back to ancient Goddess religion. I rapidly rejected the notion of putting a skirt on God, calling him "the Goddess," and worshiping essentially the same sort of being, enwrapped in dogma and hierarchical trappings. God in drag is still God.
Pleasure--a gratified response to quality--is rooted in the senses, and for pleasure to be revalorized, the body and the senses must be revalorized too. In Classical Greece the senses were considered inferior to reason (as if they were not connected with it); in Christianity they were doorways to sin; and in the modern period they are are seen as inaccurate guides to external reality. . .
Many thinkers have perceived the wretchedness that results from eschewing pleasure, and choosing "duty." . .
To act against one's impulses to pleasure is to act against one's best self, and makes all subsequent actions wretched. To deny one's own desires and needs is the first step into loss of self, into adoption of the image urged by patriarchy, a self devoted to creating an appearance of power (if male) or submission (if female). Nothing in patriarchy is more demoralizing in the true sense of that word than a morality that calls pleasure and selfhood vice and selfishness, and miserable submission to imposed identity and goals duty and virtue. . . .
We act for our best selves when we strive for pleasure; we also give others the gift of those best selves as example, as encounter, and a source of pleasure to them.
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It is sometimes said that discretion is the better part of valor, or something like that, and I find myself pausing for a moment on the brink of writing into this section, wondering if some additional discretion is in order. Throughout my career as a person doing feminist theory--as a male person doing feminist theory--I've been advised over and over that guys expounding on what is or is not 'feminist' walk a shaky tightrope and that if I wish to consider feminists my allies and have them consider me one of theirs, I should consider sticking to safe topics.
Topic people think I should be writing on: men, and what feminism means to men, and perhaps vice versa.
Topic I'm poised to begin writing on: God, and what God means to feminism, and perhaps vice versa.
Somehow the distance between men and God never loomed so.
But seriously, I actually find myself for once looking back over my shoulder at where I've written from, wondering to what extent I sound as if I've issuing pronouncements of feminist truth so that all who read shall know what the feminist truths are, and hoping I don't already sound as if I've claimed for myself the authority to speak for others when I can't show that what I'm saying is representative of what those others might think on the subjects I speak of. And yet, after a moment's consideration, I realize that either I have something new to say, in which case of course I can't show that my thinking is representative, or else I don't, in which case I could perhaps find better things to do than restate what has already been said.
So I will continue. Pardon the digression. It is seldom said that digression is the better part of...
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Consider for a moment the God in whom the atheists disbelieve: God the Being Almighty, Answerer of Prayers and Creator of Heaven and Earth. This is a God external from yourself, and from myself as well, and from much everything else; we are natural, this God is Supernatural and exists in some manner apart, and you pray to this God on Tuesday and God mulls it over and gives you your answer on Thursday, or watches what you do on Saturday and as you confess your sins on Sunday considers striking you down or blessing you accordingly. This God is a Being, an Entity, a Consciousness that experiences the passage of time and has thoughts and intentions, and the atheists who conjure up this vivid vision of this God (in whose Holy Absence they devoutly believe) tend to picture him (usually a Him) in gauzy semi-transparency. All in all, they would most likely tell you, He is as well-developed in myth and imagery as Santa Claus, and perhaps a bit better than the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, all of which many of us as children were taught to believe were true creatures, but none of which seem to have any manifestations sufficient to convince the reasonable skeptic that they actually exist.
Indeed, I've usually found that they have difficulty believing that anyone does not share their perspective; mostly they would claim to be as moved by and fascinated with rainbows and roses as the most devout of believers in the beforementioned God, and they find themselves flabbergasted at the suggestion that being swept up in the beauty of the universe should compel them to believe that the existence of such things means there has to be a God to have made them and put them there. They will point out the clockwork of rational forces interacting that gives rise to these beautiful phenomena, perhaps even expressing awe and admiration for the elegance and majesty of those forces and the patterns by which they interact as well as the beauty that is their natural expression, and conclude: why detract from all this with this ill-fitting notion of a personified God running around winding up all the clocks and painting the rainbows?
Eventually, the matter of prayer comes up in such discussions: if I pray and God answers my prayers, there has to be a God, the believer says. Bull, says the atheist: If you pray for a sunny day tomorrow and you hear God promise that the sun will shine, that proves you believe things vividly; and if the skies are not cloudy all day it still proves nothing about God.
Actually, both atheist and believer tend to get into trouble with such arguments. Consider it as logic problem...
IF A is true ==> B is true
Given that B is true,
is A true? <==
...the answer is no, or at least "no, you can't assume that it is". To give an example, suppose we figure that logically, if bulls are enraged by the sight of red, then waving a red flag where a bull can see it will enrage the bull. So we con someone into trying it, and the bull charges the person waving the red flag. Charges right at the red flag, in fact, enabling the person holding it to step to one side and whisk the red flag out of the way at the last moment. Proves that bulls are enraged by the sight of red? Actually, no, I've heard that bulls are colorblind. (They seem to have a thing about waving flags, though). Now consider the opposing argument.
IF A is true ==> B is true
Given that A is not true,
is B also not true? -xx->
...again, the answer is no, you can't assume that. If someone could prove to you just before our bull experiment that actually bulls are colorblind, you might conclude that waving the red flag in front of the bull would not enrage the bull. So you take the flag and go in front of the bull...uh oh! I do hope you are agile and can rapidly incorporate new and unexpected data!
But enough bull. I promise to return to the topic of prayer at a later point, though.
Eventually, our prototypical argument between the believer and the atheist comes around to the invariable point where the believer challenges the atheist to explain how the world got here in its majesty and glory and beauty, if not in accordance with the plans and wishes and creative power of God. The atheist ratchets the clock back an eon or so and explains how the world that was back then gave rise to the one that is here now, cause and effect. The believer raises the ante and asks how that older world came into being, then. After a few cycles of this exchange it is established that the atheist traces life back to a world that didn't have any until some chemicals got together through sheer opportunistic chance and random combination until the complex machinery of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen led to adenine lycine cytocine guanine...RNA, DNA, self-replication processes, and the ability to ingest and incorporate the necessary building block chemicals to do so...that it all evolved more or less because it could, without intentionality, without God. And long before that, the physical world got off to an even more auspicious start--there was a nothingness, a nonworld of a universe with neither space nor time, until it experienced (or became the experience of) a big bang in which nothingness divided itself into negatively charged and positively charged forces and particles (they would all cancel each other out if they weren't so energetically exploding forth) with all the matter of the universe hurling itself into existence from a tiny originating pinpoint, to expand forever and gradually cool off and begin the long long process of entropy, burning itself out into the eventual heat death of the universe and in the process making galaxies star systems planets that became places where the beforementioned complex machinery of complex matter like carbon and oxygen could come out to play with hydrogen and eventually give rise to life, all of it once again more or less because it could, without intentionality, without God.
So, says the believer, flabbergasted: we all came from nothing? By accident? Like if you leave a million immortal monkeys in a room with a million typewriters they'll eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica? And from this you get rainbows and roses?
According to the deists, the Lord had made this machine and set it going but then went to sleep or off on a vacation.
But according to the atheists, naturalists, and agnostics, the World was fully automatic. It had constructed itself, though not on purpose. The stuff of matter was supposed to consist of atoms like minute billiard balls, so small as to permit no further division or analysis. Allow these atoms to wiggle around in various permutations and combinations for an indefinitely long time, and at some time in virtually infinite time they will fall into the arrangement that we now have as the world. The old story of the monkeys and typewriters.
In this Fully Automatic Model of the universe shape and stuff survived as energy and matter. Human beings, mind and body included, were parts of the system, and thus they were possessed of intelligence and feeling as a consequence of the same interminable gyrations of atoms.
But the trouble about the monkeys with typewriters is that when at last they get around to typing the Encylopaedia Britannica, they may at any moment relapse into gibberish.
As we contemplate the atheist's world of random happenstance with so many accidental forces running around with no visible means of intentionality, the central role of conscious intent in isolating the difference may become more apparent. The God in whom the atheist disbelieves may be particularly anthropomorphic, with probable overtones of Sistine Chapelhood, but there are no shortages of believers in a God more vaguely shaped, and less of a creature, perhaps more like the Force described in the Star Wars films of George Lucas, as long as this Force is full of intent and makes things happen on purpose. And it is this that the atheist denies, that there is any such entity planning it all and making it happen, or that there is any reason for postulating such a presence.
But here we are discussing intentionality as if we've established that we know what that is! Quite aside from God or less personal planning forces, the perspective of peoples such as B. F. Skinner and Orville Brim (discussed here and here in other papers of mine) would have it that intentionality is essentially a nonreal phenomenon when it comes to ourselves, that we are just biosocially mechanical objects in a strictly cause-and-effect, stimulus-and-response world. In the paper Beyond Subject and Object, with which I began this excursion into the interstices of theology and theory, I argue that to study the behavior of people in causal terms without regard for their intentions can yield predictions but not understanding. I suggest now that "cause and effect" is a viewing perspective, with its uses and its limitations; and that when any subject matter is viewed from that perspective, intentionality disappears. Because we occupy the subject position, often tacitly, we usually do not locate ourselves amidst the landscape of what we study when we use "cause and effect"--it is disconcerting to do so, to see one's acts, even the act of studying and the formulation of one's findings, as the passive results of prior events causing them--and since we are self-consciously human, the reduction by Brim and Skinner of human behavior to nonintentional reactivity hits more of us on a consciously personal level (and disconcerts us) than the reduction of the universe as a whole.
But we are, of course, a subset of that, no matter what our identities may otherwise be. Insofar as the entire universe came into being via a singular event, colloquially referred to as the Big Bang, then a moment's consideration will show that there has never existed a moment when the Big Bang ceased to be a singular event; there is still only one of them and it is still happening, and just as it was not caused by prior events because there were none, there are no subsequent ones either, just the one singular event. In order to create the world of "cause and effect", it is necessary to create categorical divisions which split the singularity into Event 1 and Event 2, and the shape of the dividing line we draw to create this split becomes the means and the mechanism by which Event 1 is said to "cause" Event 2. We engage in this manner of analysis because the singular event is huge and vast and intricately structured in its rococo and fractal patterns, and because although time is just a dimension like length and width, it is at the same time not like length and width for us--it is a special dimension because our human experience moves on that dimension as if it were a track, running in only one direction. We can switch back and forth between modes of consideration, seeing events as linked by cause and effect or as part of a singularity which extends through time, depending on the context and purpose of our thoughts.
Within the framework of cause and effect, intentionality disappears because of the divisionary cuts our minds make in the singularity, an illusion which only disappears when we trace matters back to the beginnings, when there are no prior events.
And that is a good place for a reconciliation. We might as well say that the Big Bang occurred...because it could. With intentionality, as God.
We are here because we wanted to be. By "we", I mean something larger and more all-inclusive than what that pronoun usually covers; I mean the universe, the Bang, That Which Is, which is On Purpose. In fact, I think "we" will not do for the grammatical occasion. If we say "I" to convey the most singular sense of self, and "we" when we wish to speak of something that is still self but is now plural, what is needed here is a third level sense of self, a Self to the 3rd power, a We that is all-inclusive. WEME3.
WEME3 are here because WEME3 wanted to be.
And we saw it, many of us did...
I saw it, one day, myself, and I said that it was good.
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This WEME3 sense of self is, of course, the same as was sensed from the beginning of human sensibility and given, among other, the name God. And yet at the same time, it has certainly not always been true that people who have sensed that there is God have experienced God as an aspect of self. What is largely true, though, is that when people have grasped on a personal level that God exists, they have sought and cherished the idea of merging with God, of knowing God as a sense of self!
Most of the time, especially given the adversarial and anti-communitarian separateness of experience under patriarchy, we live our lives with a very isolated sense of self. Paradoxically, this seldom means that we have a well-developed 1st-level sense of self in which we feel confident of our own existence as individuals with our own experiences and opinions and beliefs and values apart from those of others, but even as we experience a great deal of peer pressure and socialization pressure and pressure to conform and denial of our experiences whenever they contrast with the conventionally assumed description of the human experience, we also tend to feel deprived of any sense of extended self, of belonging to something larger that fully incorporates and includes our individualities while adding others and making us all feel a part of it all. Such an experience ranks among the most sought-after soical experiences in our world!
(This is not even really a paradox; the process by which we are denied room in which to live as free individuals is the same process that denies our individual selves inclusion in anything that would constitute a broad social "we". The collective senses of self available to us operate more like Star Trek's "Borg" and "Landru" societies--the collectivity works to erase the individual self and remove any space in which individuality might thrive, and, to whatever extent it survives the process, the individual self is silenced and intimidated and certainly not welcome in the collectivity.)
Meanwhile, a common thread within established religions is the notion that the self can transcend death, that there is life after death, a hereafter, a heaven to which one might go after one's life is over. Certainly, one characteristic of the individual self that many people find disturbing is its mortality, and the frightening prospect of oblivion and complete erasure of the self that it seems to imply. Some religions (Christianity being a notable example) feature the promise of life after death as their central emphasis, in fact.
Despite a scattered handful of largely anecdotal investigations of so-called "near-death experiences", it is generally assumed that this is one element of religion that is totally unapproachable from the venue of science or theory that is rooted in experience. It is usually said by the religious believers that life after death has to be taken on "faith", that there is no way one can know it to be true without first believing it to be true.
But of course the self that is mortal and must face death is the individual self. If self exists on levels beyond the individual, and the individual is truly integrated in the larger and more inclusive senses of self through processes of communication and interaction, it is possible for an individual to die and still feel that who she or he is, the most powerful sense of identity operating at that time, goes on. People who lived for and eventually died for a social cause, knowing full well in advance that this was a highly likely outcome of their efforts, might be understood to have reached such a sense of identification. Martin Luther King comes quickly to mind, for example. When an individual reaches the point of feeling that they'd be more fully erased personally if they didn't defy the threat of assassination than if they acted so as to preserve their individual self, is it reasonable to say that who they are has died when the assassin guns them down? I would argue not.
Or, to turn to one of the world's most popular and well-known examples, Jesus of Nazareth needs to be understood as a victim of assassination before he can be comprehended as a person who "rose from the dead". I get the impression that this is a point seldom grasped by modern Christian believers, although to give them the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they simply do not communicate it well. But insofar as Jesus of Nazareth was attempting to convey a powerful and revolutionary message about love as a political and social principle, and about how love's actuality always has to take precedence over the attempts to capture its workings in law--which is my interpretation of the Biblical account of his career--he died making this point and knew he would (or was very likely to do so, at any rate), and still felt it was something he had to do. As you will recall, he was formally sentenced to death for violation of legal technicalities, while on a less formal and unofficial level he was put to death for taking on the legal-doctrinal establishment of his day.
My stomach turns every Easter when millions of Christians display that they have no clue that the larger sense of what he was about, which was us, and beyond us, God, was what survived his real and entirely genuine death 2000 years ago as a brave and visionary individual; that he lives yet because he transcended the simple individual-level sense of self, not because like something out of a vampire flick he continued to live after death as an individual.
But Dracula is neither the Messiah nor an example of a real-life phenomenon. You, as an individual, will die someday. Immortality is yours if you become one with God, that much is true, but the immortality you will obtain by that is not for your individual self. As long as only your individual self seems real, and its death continues to terrify you as representing the erasure of who you are, you have not found it yet.
In my digression at the beginning of this piece, I note that I have to be able to say things and call them "feminist" which have not necessarily already been said, since otherwise I am not theorizing as a feminist theorist, I am only writing a book report. On this basis, I gave myself permission to proceed, despite the riskiness of doing so.
At some point, though, assuming I am indeed doing my own thinking (and my own writing), I need to address the corollary question: why refer to these concepts "feminist theology" if the authorship is mine?
And there is validity to that. In fact, I have occasionally been challenged by people who have said "Allan, you cannot, or should not, call yourself or your activities 'feminist' because you are not female". My reply is that, in that case, you may call it radical allanism instead of radical feminism, and I will own this body of thought as mine.
So I will own this religion, having called it that, as mine.
But although it would not be fair to call this "the feminist approach to religion", this body of thought is not mine, at the same time. I do not live in a vacuum; I am affected by and participate in processes and social phenomena, and I do not do my thinking in a vacuum either. Haven't enough men stolen the ideas of women and then spoken them as their own, claiming authorship, and eventually even gotten historical credit for originating them? I have my reasons for acknowledging my teachers and my guides and those whose wisdom led me and validated things for me and helped me put things into words.
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Meanwhile, however, I would assume that there are still those who consider themselves to be religious but who, if they were to arrive at these pages and continue reading up until this point, would say that a logical and conceptual discussion of the nature and existence of God is still just secular humanism; for religious persons, God is not an intellectual abstration but the subject of a personal relationship. (And those who consider themselves non-religious might continue to draw a similar distinction, arguing that what I have said so far does not discomfit them, but that they still do not believe in a God with whom one speaks on Sunday or even in the trenches in the depths of despair).
So, having delayed for long enough, I invite you to continue reading, this time directly head-on into the subject of prayer.
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Afterthoughts --
I did not sprinkle the main text in this section with a rich set of annotations and footnotes and references, as I have done in much of my other writing; because of the nature of the subject matter, I felt impelled to say what I had to say without reference to any authority.
But my sense of alignment with and participation in the world-view and explanatory framework I call (and which is called) radical feminism is not dulled by any sense that I have said things here that are an ill fit with the rest of it--
In the Female System, god is viewed as process. Process is never constant or static. Our natural, human process is god--yet god is not just our process (paradox!). To live and follow our personal life process is to be with god.
In the White Male System, living in tune with God means getting in touch with something outside the self. God is static and good. one is expected to reshape oneself according to these external criteria of goodness. In order to be attuned to God, then, one must learn to deny or transcend the self. One must strive to be what one is not.
In the Female System, living in tune with god means being in tune with what one already is. God is changing and growing. One must only stay in tune with one's process to remain attuned to god. Our true selves are never in conflict with god. And god is not just our process and god is our process.
The old audacity of this [modern, 1970s + era] wave of feminism was that women dared to name our pain. Today we need a new audacity--one that leaves the highly ambivalent familiarity of our victimization behind us...That new audacity would dare to affirm the ultimate radical politics reflected in and reflective of the universe itself: radical integration. Integration of the self with the self (literally: integrity), and integration with each other and our vision and all of life...
One thing I almost know: in this energy we name feminism, this feminism we name politics, this politics straining to name freedom, we are poised as quantum theory is poised equidistant between absurdity and awe. We might as well get used to it. At least we're not alone; all matter and energy is poised here, too. It is obviously the place to be...
Einstein (apparently) died still interested in "whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." If you are interested in whether you do, there is no other time and space but this to live out loud. That is the point.
-- Robin Morgan
The string vibrates. The steel string vibrates. The skin. The calfskin. The steel drum. The tongue. The reed. The glottis. The vibrating ventricle. Heartbeat. Wood. The wood resonates. The curtain flaps in the wind. Water washes against sand. Leaves scrape the ground. We stand in the way of the wave. The wave surrounds us. Presses at our arms, our breasts. Enters our mouths, our ears. The eardrum vibrates. Malleus, incus, stapes vibrate. The wave catches us. We are part of the wave. The membrane of the oval window vibrates. The spiral membrane in the cochlea vibrates. We are set in motion by what moves outside our bodies. Each wave of a different speed causes a different place in the cochlea to play. We have become instruments. The hairs lining the cochlea move. We hear. To the speed of each wave the ear adds its own frequency. What is outside us becomes us. Each cell under each hair sends its own impulse. What we hear we call music. We believe in the existence of the violin. The steel string. The skin. Tongue. Reed. Wood. The curtain flapping in the wind. We take these sounds as testimony: violin, skin, tongue, reed exist. Our bodies know these testimonies as beauty....
...When I let this bird fly to her own purpose, when this bird flies in the path of his own will, the light from this bird enters my body, and when I see the beautiful arc of her flight, I love this bird, when I see, the arc of her flight, I fly with her, enter her with my mind, leave myself, die for an instant, live in the body of this bird whom I cannot live without, as part of the body of the bird will enter my daughter's body, because I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth and I long to tell you, you who are earth too, and listen as we speak to each other of what we know: the light is in us.
I found god in myself and i love her fiercely.
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