The empty name of God

[moobu2]

'The basic doctrines of the major religions have their roots in the superstitions and fancies of illiterate peasants living several thousand years ago'

What religious people mean by “god” means nothing to me beyond an incoherent cluster of concepts from which the aforesaid folk choose the subset most convenient to themselves.

But the word brings to mind the man-made phenomenon of religions, whose net effect on humanity now as throughout history has been, by a considerable margin, negative. It would be so just because of the falsity of belief; and the consequent absurdity of behaviour premised on the idea that there exist supernatural agencies who made this very imperfect world, and who have an interest in us that extends to our sex lives and what we should and should not eat on certain days, or wear, and so on. But it is worse than false: it is far too often oppressive and distorting as regards human nature, and divisive as regards human communities.

It is a frequent source of conflict and cruelty. Monstrous crimes have been committed in its name. And more often than not it has stood in the way of efforts at human liberation and progress.

Apologists for religion point to the Sistine Chapel and Bach’s Mass in B minor as some sort of justification for it. I answer: first, the church had the money to commission these things; second, lots of wonderful art is about naked women and bowls of fruit, and required no belief in deities to prompt its production; and third, the existence of religious art does not excuse burning people alive at the stake for disagreeing with some doctrine or other.

good stuff

[struggle4progress]

1. It seems unfortunate to me the learned sneer at the ancient illiterate, for the illiterate have

contributed much to our history: they learned to use fire, to work stone, to smelt metal, to domesticate wild animals, to plant crops and to breed better ones (such as maize and wheat); they colonized almost the entire world, regions of bitter cold or with little rainfall or isolated islands; they discovered medicinal value of various plants and invented surgeries such as trepanation; and of course it was the illiterate who invented writing

[ThomCat]

5. These things are all true

but at some point we need to take the good things that the ancient illiterates gave us and leave behind the bad or useless things.

Civilization is a collective pack-rat. We tend to hoard the bad things too and insist that it all still has massively important value even when it's imaginary junk.

We need better filters, and we need to learn to ignore the things the filters leave behind.

[struggle4progress]

7. Almost no one will dispute the idea of trying to take the good while abandoning the bad,

or of trying to hold onto the useful while letting go of the useless

But such a moral imperative is so tautological, that it is almost entirely uninformative and perhaps even nearly content-free

[ThomCat]

8. Given how much we dispute what is good and what is bad

or whether this, that or almost anything from the past is bad, I disagree that no one will dispute the idea of taking only the good and abandoning the bad. Any attempt will cause one hell of a fight.

So how is that content free? If you skim over ideas without actually digging then I guess you might see a lot of things as content free. :shrug:

[struggle4progress]

14. "A tautology ... says nothing" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922

[rrneck]

2. Those illiterate peasants

are how the human race was designed to live on this planet. Everything that happened after the advent of agriculture my turn out to be more trouble than it's worth.

[Why Syzygy]

3. The name.

Just ran across this today. I don't read Hebrew, so I'm taking it at face value unless other evidence refutes it.

The Hebrew word for "God" is transliterated as "AL" and is made up of two Hebrew character letters, namely "Aleph" and "Lamed". "Aleph" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like an Ox head and has the meaning of "strong" or "powerful" or "leader" or some combination of the three. "Lamed" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like a sheperd staff and has the meaning of "treacher" or "yoke" or "bind" or some combination of the three. So "God" is the "strong powerful leader and teacher" - a pretty accuarate description of "God".

The Hebrew word for "father" is transliterated as "AB" and is made up of two Hebrew character letters, namely "Aleph" and "Beyt". Again, "Aleph" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like an Ox head and has the meaning of "strong" or "powerful" or "leader". "Beyt" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like a house (kinda like a floorplan) and has the meaning of "family or "house". So "father" is the "strong powerful leader of the house and family" - a pretty accuarate description of "father".

The Hebrew word for "son". is transliterated as "BeN" and is made up of two Hebrew character letters, namely "Beyt" and "Nun". Again, "Beyt" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like a "house" and has the meaning of "family or "house". "Nun" in the ancient form is written as a pictograph that looks like a seed and has the meaning of "continue" or "heir". So "son" is the one who will "continue the house or family via the seed" - a pretty accuarate description of "son".

I'm not posting the source link because it loads JAVA for some reason.
This link is presented as supplement:
http://www.ancient-hebrew.org/28_chart.html

[saltpoint]

4. Starting with Bach, I would argue that he was possessed of the talent

to compose the B-minor Mass whether or not it was in the service of Christianity, more specifically, institutional Christianity, and also that its language is universal rather than "Christian" or "doctrinal."

Michelangelo, we understand, had to navigate his artistic impulse through the confines of Church higher-ups. While money did change hands, his art IMO vastly transcends what the Church asked of it.

The reader of history and the lover of the arts cannot study either field without making some genuine attempt to acknowledge the roles of Judeo-Christianity or any of the other axial-age faiths, plus pagan cultures and traditions, and so forth. The universal insists on itself and imposes a decidedly universal standard upon its members. Which is its unique privilege.

There are distinctive and rather large female genitalia in the works of "secular" artist Georgia O'Keeffe, which is not to say that her subject is separate from the goddess religions of long ago. If a given O'Keeffe painting is vividly vaginal (god I loved typing that), the possibility that it is a reverent act for the creational human does not subtract from its power to inspire, nor is it dimmed if she sold it to a museum back east. What is traceable to antiquity may also occur unbidden in the modern mind.

"Worship these," Dysart tells his audience in EQUUS, "and more will appear."

Joseph's "coat of many colors" is a remnant garment from the pre-Judeo/Christian goddess cults. Jehovah is a bachelor god. But there is that coat, and look again now under the desert moon of Rousseau's SLEEPING GIPSY. The human figure on the night sand wears the same coat. We see those colors in the dead of night by the mercy of that ancient moon, or is it the moon this minute outside our windows in 2009?

Some studies suggest that scientists and artists share expansive brain capacity. But which young woman or old man in an anonymous rice field in Southeast Asia has the capacity of a da Vinci or an Einstein or a Mozart? That peasant woman may be uneducated but wildly intelligent and capable, even if none of us knows her name.

Someone without a degree in Art History from Yale drew a horse and other animals on the wall of a cave in France over 10,000 years ago. A group of modern adolescents claimed the cave as their personal space, a grownup-proof haven to gather in before eventually reporting the findings. That horse was not a ceremonial animal, nor a war horse, nor a circus horse with elaborate colors, nor a city coach horse, nor a farmer's field horse nor a horse that hauled crops to nearby towns. It was a secret horse, drawn on a cave wall, beyond any specific purpose, beyond observation itself -- just for the love of its image from the man or woman who drew it there.

It's as difficult for a rich man to get into heaven as it is for a tenured Art Historian to march through the woods and slither into a cave to behold something that eclipses his entire career.

The argument can be made that there is no god. IMO the stronger argument is that there is something visceral and sustaining that cross-knits creative acts. "Proof" is not something anyone has at the ready, even if Bach is marvelous, even if da Vinci was acutely brilliant, and so forth. Bach's talent, in the service of any other cultural context, would still be talent. O'Keeffe also painted a barn or two that will knock your socks off.

[JerseygirlCT]

16. That was lovely, Saltpoint. Thank you.

For me, creativity cannot be separated from my idea of God. And that creativity is present in us all, in some way or another.

[saltpoint]

17. Hi, JerseygirlCT. As always, very good to see you.

:hi:

[stopbush]

18. Re: Bach's B-Minor Mass

The piece was never performed during Bach's lifetime. There's a question as to whether or not he intended it to be performed. Like Handel's Messiah, much of the B-Minor is cobbled together from earlier works that Bach had written for other occasions, some of them, secular occasions. A new text here, a different orchestration there, and, voila! A new piece.

Most likely Bach brought the various sections of the B-Minor together as a single work as something of a portfolio/calling card to be used to seek employment.

Bach's talent wasn't restricted to sacred music either. His genius is on display in his "Coffee Cantata" as well - a piece written to show the effects of the pot of his day. Likewise, his purely instrumental works show the same genius.

On the business side of things, Bach's letters to his various employers show him to be much more concerned with whether or not he was being paid enough, whether his work hours were too long and whether the various churches that employed him were providing him with performers suitable to the task at hand. I'll let you guess what Bach's opinion was of the above.

Of course, Bach also famously said, "Music's only purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit." In addition, Bach often signed his compositions with the letters "s.D.g.": soli Deo Gloria, or "glory to God alone." Bach wrote, "If you love God, you do everything at the highest level of competency."

We could do with such competency in the world today.

[saltpoint]

19. Yes. I allude to Bach's secular instincts, if that is the right phrase,

in post #6.

Those 20 younguns might not ALL have been inspired by "the glory of God" !

I chose the b-flat minor Prelude and Fugue almost out of pure selfishness. I love the piece. It is sadly underperformed.

But it is such a fine thing.

[saltpoint]

6. Lascaux was a temple, a very early one, and not the only one.

That horse had been there for many thousands of years. Then one day 4 kids found it. Marcel, Simon, Georges, and Jacques. No art historians for miles. Eventually some were summoned to the cave and we can look it all up at the library.

If there is worship, it is in those drawings of animals by that anonymous artist. The kids' discovery is resonant also, but the anonymous artist really must have top billing on this palaeolithic marquee.

An appreciation of the entire process, stretching across thousands of winters, is an awed comment on the creative act.

Bach's b-flat minor prelude and fugue are IMO as exquisite as the b-minor Mass but less known, certainly less performed, and decidedly less Judeo-Christian.

I endorse your distaste for the impulse on those who follow given religious traditions to visit violence upon other people. But if there is the Inquisitor model in the medieval Church, there is also the Francis of Assisi model. Both streams flow from the same source.

We could ask the now-adult teenagers about their initial encounter in the cave at Lascaux. I'm not up to date on any of them but they would have been 13 or 14 years old in 1940 and very possibly still alive today.

We can't ask Mark or Luke about their observations of their first-century experiences and encounters, however. Unless a fifth gospel is discovered in an earthen jar in some desert, we are left to guess at the "Christian" story. The Lascaux horse painter left no published account of his impulse to replicate the animals' images either.

We can only work with what we have. Luke suggests the manger narrative, replete with dulcet shepherds and humble kings from the Orient. Also cows and goats and so forth. Plenty of hay. And far away in the distance, in a palace HQ is the angry king figure, fuming that some child may be born who usurps him. Red Riding Hood isn't much of a story without that wolf.

Bach had 20 kids. So the secular calendar must have been at least as lively as the write-a-Mass-for-the-Church schedule. If his music was glorious, his mattress was smokin'.

[saltpoint]

9. Two syntactic maps of the psychic juncture between the presence and

absence of worship, both from Peter Shaffer's EQUUS:

(Dr. Dysart yearning for connection with unfathomable truths he perceives were contained in the ancient world):

"I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say, 'Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus -- no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, certain chip shops, if you liek, and slate roofs -- just as of certain frowns in people and slouches.' I'd say to them -- 'Worship as many as you can see -- and more will appear!'"


and


(Dysart and his patient, Alan, with Dysart again in yearning mode, his young patient incredulous):

Dysart: I've been (here) too long.
Alan: Where would you go?
Dysart: Somewhere.
Alan: Secret?
Dysart? Yes. There's a sea - a great sea -I love. It's where the Gods used to go to bathe.
Alan: What Gods?
Dysart: The old ones. Before they died.
Alan: Gods don't die.
Dysart: Yes, they do, Alan. Yes, they do.


- - -

[saltpoint]

10. Dali spun surrealist imagery from his deep brain down his arms through the

brush and into the Art History books.

A late associate of mine thought Dali was "the craziest sonofabitch who ever lived."

A case could be made, yes, just as a case could be made in opposition to that claim.

I've seen the original of a loaf of bread Dali painted. It is easily the most perfect loaf of bread ever replicated. It is magnificent. There are no giraffes ablaze in the foreground, no tigers leaping onto naked women, no rodents crawling from the mouths of infants... just a loaf of bread, and it is perfect.

Dali, refuting similar assessments by his other detractors, said (paraphrased but close): "The difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad."

"She came in through the bathroom window," is the opening lyric to a fine Beatles song. Hardly your predictable do-woppa-diddy chorus from the late 50s, though. There's a cultural ambush as a main variable, plus the guitars and the long hair and the dissolved boundaries of puritans -- all in a handful of verses. If we say that John Lennon was a secular saint is it not because of his role AS one?

"Eating chocolate cake in a bag." Posing buck naked on the cover of ROLLING STONE. Drawing the ire and trespass of the FBI. Murdered in New York City on a winter's night. What saint could ask for any better narrative than that? I miss John. I'm not the only one. He's about as sacred as it gets in popular culture and yet penned "Imagine." There's that intersection again between absence and presence.

Dali returned to the Catholic Church some time after he had made a name for himself as a sane madman. The Church, needless to say, was not exactly thrilled to welcome him back to the fold.

A sane madman and a secular saint. Liminal figures. Someone has to go outside with a flashlight to see if there's a monster in the yard. And if there is, let's see if it likes Beatles music.

One of the best parts about organized religion is its absence in those who would oppose it. Francis the humble monk walking gently in the shadows of bombastic cathedrals. Caravaggio using peasants and prostitutes as models for Biblical paintings.

Amazing stuff.

[saltpoint]

11. Some statements at the intersection of power and spirit:

1. The Harmonic Convergence was a huge success; it resulted in the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.

2. The Harmonic Convergence was a publicity spasm for New Age kooks and other off-the-wall types.

3. The Harmonic Convergence is an old idea.

4. Reagan, always the trust-but-verify president, forced Gorbachov to tear down the Berlin Wall.

5. The Berlin Wall is now a museum.

6. The Berlin Wall divided a great city.

7. The Berlin Wall only divided a city physically; spiritually family members and close friends remained close.

8. Any era must confront division, and intemperance, and hyper-control; all eras share a common instinct for freedom and community.

9. Power is asserted in the building of the Berlin Wall; power is humbled in its having come down.

10. Jericho is a mythic construct.

[saltpoint]

12. Some more:

(by the way, none of these is ironclad or indisputable... they're chosen because they jangle those liminal bells...I definitely do not believe Reagan brought down the Berlin Wall.)


1. St. Francis is to the Church as the Little Drummer Boy is to Luke's Christmas narrative.

2. Mary is understood as the mother of God, that is, the bearer of the divine. The pagan goddesses were also bearers of the divine, if not its embodiment. A vessel is a vessel is a vessel.

3. Bob Dylan knows what he's talking about in "Shelter from the Storm" when he invokes another era: "It was in another lifetime / One of toil and blood / When darkness was a virtue / and the streets were filled with mud."

4. Televangelists are to God what gum wrappers are to Eden.

5. Too many people chew gum.

6. Sacajawea is under-rated.

7. Thomas, which means 'twin,' was literally the twin of Jesus.

8. Christian atheism is a noble pursuit.

9. Not many Christian fundamentalists have actually read the New Testament.

10. There is likely more to most religious figures, famous or not, than can be known.

Let assiduous crews dig up every ruin they can find. Let careful truckers drive artifacts to the world's museums. May French teenagers always explore caves. Let Mark, young and clear-headed and agitated and alert, write a gospel for a later age.

We can handle it.

[Silent3]

13. I opened up the name of God to see what hides inside

I opened up the name of God to see what hides inside
A hollow space, an empty face, a never-married bride
The hopes I've lost, a latent frost, Moebius' other side
As nothing is as nothing was when nothing never died.

[roguevalley]

15. this was all good. thank you for a civil thread on God. :)

[RagAss]

20. You are the God You seek.

Never give it a second thought again.

[Silent3]

21. These aren't the droids you're looking for. n/t

Move along.

[Occam Bandage]

23. ...

[saltpoint]

22. Across the river, I agree that no religious tradition should be meddling in

the sex lives of folks, but of course, people's individual lives intersect with their relationship to religious traditions since forever. Untangling the two isn't a weekend project.

It seems as if things depend greatly on who is doing the intersecting.

There is also an inevitable intersection of power and faith traditions. And of power and CHANGES in faith traditions (I am thinking here of Emperor Julian who strove to revive the pagan construct but also of Francis of Assisi whose Christian inspiration appeared to significantly be about the absence of power rather than its application).

Upthread I reference Caravaggio's impulse to use peasants and prostitutes for religious-themed paintings, and this impulse strikes me as 'religious' and 'creational' as opposed to "Religious" and "Creational." And yet it is strikingly "Christian," isn't it? Jesus, as we are given him as a liminal figure, can be assessed in part by those he attracted to his ministry. By and large it was poor folk, the disenfranchised, the suffering, perhaps the marginalized and those alone. There are flickers of well-connectedness in the New Testament, but poverty appears more sharply definitional to Jesus than the trappings of wealth.

If Jesus can defend and rescue the woman taken in adultery at the bottom of a hole dug to punish "sinners," then surely Caravaggio can take such a woman as Jesus might defend and make her the model for his religious paintings, even if it pissed off the Church, which it certainly did.

The televangelists bray about permissive sex and "sin" and so forth, because they get to screw vicariously through their condemnation of screwing. Their flock would be better going to a museum to see some of Caravaggio's street prostitutes on the wall, hiring a modern, live one. If they cannot respond to the pathos and understand its critical relation to the example of defense and rescue, they are not practicing Christianity, at least a Christianity that is consistent with the New Testament as given.

It is Caravaggio who reflects Jesus' ministry and not the sin-squawking tv preachers.

[saltpoint]

24. Naked women and bowls of fruit, though, ARE religious expressions, in that

they assert creational reality.

By their fruits ye shall know them, and what is more spiritual than the consistent seed imagery that vibrates through spiritual constructs like an existential hum?

We hear the figure Jesus offering agri-parables. Seeds tossed onto stone do far less well than those tossed into fertile dirt. There are the lilies of the field. There is a lotus blossom on which the Buddha sits. It was the pagan goddess Demeter who revealed the secret of the grain to Triptolemus that is the source of our having dinner this evening.

There is also the matter of the pomegranate and the apple, etc. Fruits both.

The fruits and flowers of the fecund earth are not "secular" concerns but vividly spiritual -- I use a small 's' -- and their relationship to the divine runs back farther than language can trace.