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.

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Demotivational Speakers

Is there anything as demotivating as a corporate motivational training session?

I don't think so. But why is this? Why is motivation, or rather the attempt at motivation, so destructive to our motivation?

And then again, why do we need to be motivated in the first place? What are we doing everyday, and why is it so antithetical to our inborn motivations, that we have to artificially generate motivation from elsewhere?

Answer? Obvious really. We're working.

Humans have been on the planet around 3 million years. Humans have been working as we know it for around 10 thousand.

So...
3,000,000 years
Vs.
0,010,000 years

And yeah. We haven't had time to acclimatize ourselves to voluntary slavery just yet.

So, motivation. The way the Pharaoh tries to convince the serfs to build his pyramid for him.

Am I being too cynical? I don't think so. People across the American Frontier reported settlers running away to join the native bands. People recounted the phenomenon of white captives returned by natives in prisoner exchanges who then fled back to their captors.

People run away to join the circus. Nobody runs away to join corporate America.

And so here we are tricking ourselves with false motivational speeches. Everyone seems to think humans need motivation to do anything. Wildebeest don't need motivation to graze.  Hyenas don't need motivation to hunt. Why do other species manage just fine without these forced motivations?

If all humans needed motivation from outside sources, then we might blame some quirk of human nature. But it's not all humans. It's only the humans trapped in the bowels of civilization. And people can and do flee from this prison. And you can too.

If you dare to dream of freedom.

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Is Monotheism toxic to the Human Soul

The human mind has a fetish for pattern recognition and specifically patterns which resemble the Human form or other recognizable forms. The human mind also  loves to leap tofalse positive conclusions, and is happy to do so very readily.

In other words, the Human Mind is seemingly tailor made for seeing and/or birthing an every growing armada of old and ever newer gods and goddesses, angels and demons, devils and saints, monsters and magical spirits and on and ever on again.

Imagine how difficult a Pharoah or Emperor or High Priest or God King would have controlling the message of the gods and their dictates regarding how best to serve the king and the priests. Imagine, when every household has a god, and every village has a shaman with whom all the unique local entities converse; imagine how hard it is for the aristocracy to assert control over a divine message under such circumstances.

And so, monotheism. Better for the Kingpriest and his lackeys to demonize, quite literally, the competition. Everything that isn't our One True God is a false god or a demon or, better yet, an illusion of the mind.

But.

But again, the Human Mind seems tailor made to find or invent or build, or whatever you like, new Gods. And so the hermetically sealed purity of monotheism  cracks and splits and schisms again and again. Syncretism runs rampant in rural folk religious versions of the Abrahamic religions. In the Central America, the Mayan gods have slipped into Catholic doctrine. In the Caribbean, African Yoruba  traditions and Orishas have been added until Voudun and Santeria became distinct traditions. Folk islamic traditions frequently reincorporate animistic beliefs. Judaism has even recorded their people's struggles with competing gods in the Torah itself. Even outside the Abrahamic tradition, Tibetan Buddhism can't escape the Tibetan folk traditions such as the Bon.

So. Is monotheism a fundamentally useful idea or Not? It doesn't work. It's alien to the Human Mind. It runs counter to the entire body of our preceding spiritual traditions. It is valuable only to the King and the High Priest.

So... monotheism... It doesn't keep. It spoils and sporulates new gods and demi-things of all types. It serves only the rulers.

And on top of that, it acts as a sort of spiritual castration which prevents practitioners from administering their own communion with the divine. Which serves kings and high priests very well. Because once the masses are spiritual castrated and muzzled by monotheism, the One True God speaks suspiciously with a voice not unlike the voice of the king. And the One True God makes pronouncements that seem to serve the nobility, no matter how revolutionary and populist a religion's message began.

So. If you aren't a Pharoah or a Kingpriest, if you aren't Pope or Emir or Ayatollah, if you aren't an Imam or a Bishop or an Emperor or a Duke, if you aren't part of the privileged elite, what use is monotheism?

Even Martin Luthor and the protestant revolution couldn't prevent the stratification of power and access to communion, despite its dangerous (to the Catholic church) promise of parishioners having a personal relationship with the Almighty. The needs of the elite to control  the message to the masses was too great. So, is monotheism useful?

People might ask, at this point, shouldn't I be asking if these religions are true rather than asking if they are useful. And to answer simply, no.

Humans have been murdering each other over the disputed truth of their gods for unknown thousands of years. If the veracity of a religion was something possible to prove, this would have happened by now. I'm not interested in Whether the fairy tale is true, but whether the fairy tale is useful.

I feel like I'm wandering now, so I'll leave it here. Is the fairy tale useful? If not, why use it? And is this fairy tale in particular useful? And if not, why use it?

Am I saying we should discard monotheism? Yes. Yes I am.

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Unreal but useful

I've been thinking about a silly idea. We've named four cardinal directions, but only North is real

What do I mean?

I mean North is, strictly speaking, the direction to which compasses point. South is just a reversed North. East and West are perpendicular to North in opposite directions. The other directions are abstract concepts, best understood in relation to North. But North has an anchor in the physical world.

North is real. The other cardinal directions are, arguably, not.

They are useful though.

As so many unreal things are

Drawing from the Well

When we take action, we dip into a well and draw out water of a spiritual or psychological sort, pick your metaphor. It is the water from this well that sustains us. When it runs dry, we run dry.

So what is the well? Well that's the question. And it's one you get to answer, because you choose what you use as your well. Some choose ego. Some choose religion or politics or philosophy or some other outside standard. Some choose the opinions of others, the Goodwill of their friends or family.

But choose a deep well. If the well you choose is shallow, your well will inevitably run dry. And there is no shallower well than the well of the self.

To mix metaphors; we are tiny flickering lights in a vast expanding Darkness, and to think that our light alone can hold back the darkness is foolish.

You need something bigger than yourself. You need something eternal: a hole that can never be filled, a race never completed- but which you love to run.

This is why we have created so many gods and so many religions. This is why we have codes of Honor. This is why we have schools of philosophy and political parties. We need a grand Eternal story. We need a universal truth upon which we lay the foundation of our soul.

And this is all illusion, but you must choose an illusion nonetheless, so make it a good one.

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Death in Arcardia

The Guides of the Fallen

The concept of death to the Free Peoples would sound very foreign to the Civilized folk of the Glass City. The City of Mirrors sees death as a reaper, personified in various guises by the Broken, from Falsenight to Starheart and on. To the Free Peoples, death splits along two lines, neither of them an end but a beginning. As these are broad abstract concepts, they have been personified as a married couple: the Masculine Little Green Man and the Hermaphroditic Rainbow Moth.

The Little Green Man

The great instructor and the regenerator. The death of the Little Green Man is the death of green of the forest in face of cold of the darkening solstice. As autumn draws to a close, death creeps in and the world goes quiet. As Winter passes and the Rains come, life returns, regenerating from apparent devastation. The leaves are not the same leaves, the fruits are not the same fruits, but the pattern is the same. The Little Green Man does not pretend that death cannot reach us, but points out that death cannot stop us. What we have taught the next generation lives on in the next generation, they are the rains and the coming spring and summer, as their teachers are the Autumn and the inevitable cold of the Dark Moons. Death is merely a pause: breath in, hold, breath out. 

The out shell looks different, but the pattern remains, the story continues to unfold. Death is merely an interruption. Do not fear it, prepare for it and the next generation will carry your tale for eternity and you will never truly be dead.

Death is the source of all life in Arcadia. Don't fear the reaper.

The Rainbow Moth

As the Little Green Man personifies death as a regeneration, so the Rainbow Moth personifies death as a transformation. From Larva to Pupa to Adult, the Rainbow Moth is the blossoming of something new and greater- death as a shedding of lesser form. Before death, the inhabitant was small and frail and merely physical in form. Now, in death, the inhabitant's greater form bursts forth: a powerful set of accomplishments and ideals that they have lived well enough to have added to the archetypes of the Freepath and the stories of the Tribe itself. Freed from the constraints of the body, the life that the inhabitant lives becomes more an greater than said life every could have been while the inhabitant was alive.

The Rainbow Moth also venerates sacrifice and legacy and may be a little too comfortable with the idea of dying well for a great cause, but when a warrior seeks to die gloriously to buy the tribe time to retreat as the Harvester and the Men of Black and White bear down upon a village, it is to the Rainbow Moth that said Warrior says invocations.

#notyourNPC