Muddled thoughts about Cathedrals

I'm still reading "Second Nature " by Michael Pollan. And in it, Pollan suggests that cathedrals are an attempts to replicate the feeling of being a sacred grove. The idea being that the tall pillars replicate tree trunks and the hushed sound and subdued lighting replicates the dabbled light through leaves and quiet of the grove.

I don't dispute the similarity. But by contrast the modern civilized ideas of religion are deliberately non-participatory, non-interactive. You sit in the pews and listen to the minister speak to you of God. The idea that the congregation would have something to say about the understanding of the sacred, is itself a blasphemy. Because the worshipper is a sheep and priest is a shepherd.

And the morality of civilization contains a madonna/whore complex regarding wilderness. Note the term: virgin woodland. Again, don't touch. Don't interact. The idea of the witch with her garden of herbs in every village. The idea of personal vision quests. Participation in a living religion is very dangerous to an established power structure.

Hierarchy is a pyramid. And we use pyramids to house dead things. Which tells you everything you need to know. Everything important goes in the pyramid, in the tomb, in the mausoleum. Embalm Lenin. Mummify Pharoah. Build a rendition of Lincoln, carve his visage in stone to stop time.

And we do the same thing with ideas. The idea that new ages might require new ideas is sacrilege. The priest and pharoah  hand down the correct ideas to masses, the flock of obedient sheep. And inevitably these ideological concepts are anthropomorphic, because we assume humans are the top of the pyramid, the Pharoah in the tomb. One step below god in the cathedral. We assume top-down order, a chain of command in a hierarchy, almost without fail.

And because we assume order is hierarchical we also assume that natural laws must be prohibitions and restrictions laid down by some divine creator. If we are forced to live under a king, clearly God must also be a king. And if kings rule by decree, then so must God. And with these incorrect ideas we caused ecological disasters that killed Empire upon Empire. Because the laws are actually laws of cause and effect like the laws of motion described centuries ago. And we don't care that these ideas don't work when applied to the real world, because we have faith in the idea. We are loyal to the doctrine. Heaven gains precedence over earth, scripture overrules skill.

The tyranny of ideological purity, assuming that ideas are more important than the messy physical world, originates from an underlying assumption that ideas predate the physical world rather than the spring from it. And what does this gain the Pharoah at the top of the pyramid?

Control. Control of the medium. Control of the message. This is why the Pope feared Martin Luther, and why the German Princes sought to control and exploit his efforts. Under civilization, power rises up the pyramid, driven by an abstracting of knowledge from nature and an encouraging of a sterility and helplessness masquerading as purity.

And this is why kings prefer cathedrals to sacred groves and why shepherds like sheep.

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God is Dead. Long Live God

I don't like April Fools Day. So I leave it to you to find the trick here.

People seem to have trouble differentiating between the doctrines of a religion and actions of individuals practising a particular religion. People who espouse membership and adherence to a religion are rarely universal in their adherence. We see consumption of alcohol amongst Muslims and Consumption of bacon matzo balls by Jews and Christians wearing tattoos. It might be tempting to dismiss such people as not belonging to the religions they espouse.

And yet. The modern practitioner of Christianity or Islam or Judaism looks very little like practitioners of one hundred years ago, to say nothing of the practitioners of these religions from earlier eras.

But a religion is changed by the actions of it's practitioners. As groups drift apart in their method of adherence, new religious sects form from the difference in application of these religious doctrines.

So it is ridiculous to talk about a religion of peace or a religion of war or a religion of any other ideology. Because a religion is nothing but the actions of the religion's  practitioners.

It is not incorrect to say that none of the people who today identify as Christians practise the same religion as those who identified as Christians one thousand years prior.

So there you have it. Religions are incredibly fragile but incredibly hard to kill. Because religions love in the human mind and reproduce when passed on to another person. But when passed, the old religion stays in the mind that holds it. The new practitioner now hosts the son or daughter of the original practitioner's religion.

Religion is dead. Long live religion.

Why is this? Why is religion so malleable?  Why is religion so resilient and unkillable? Why does religion breed like rabbits and survive like a cockroach?

Because religion is a child of human mind. Because religion is a child built from the needs of the human mind and the history of human evolution. And the human mind keeps going back to religion and keeps reshaping it to suit the needs of the human mind at a given moment in time.

We can't escape religion because it is both a child of and a parasite within our own minds. And so it seems we are destined to give birth to our own religion and let it feed off our own minds. So, if this is the case, you better raise that child right and train it up to serve your needs rather than the needs of some half baked would ve prophet or the needs of some long dead bronze age king.

It's your life. It's your mind. It's your choice. But realize that if you are accepting another's religion as your starting point, you have their ideology to sort through and their intent to overcome. It's the ultimate test and the prize is your mind.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.