A Logical Starting Point

Pertaining to my self imposed mandate to write about the three supporting pillars of life: Budo, The Heathen Gods, and Right Living™. This is the first of many planned writings on “the Heathen Gods”, and my peculiar take on religion.

This is an ambitious project I’m starting here. I am essentially attempting to define a different way to look at an entire religion, and perhaps religion itself. I am proposing or outlining an “upsetter”, if you will, a third position to hold in a system of popularly accepted dichotomies. Which is ironically appropriate, since I’m applying it to a new religion that is as old as dirt.

But the first and most necessary question is, “who are you that anybody should listen to you”?

Fair enough. Historically, people who do what I am setting out to do fall into two categories (already with the dichotomies!): mystics and scientists. Classically there is even a lot of overlap between the two, so right off the bat it’s not a great way to separate it, but it’s useful since this is how a lot of people tend to see things. This will be a running theme, by the way, hand waving the technical details in favor of immediately useful working definitions.

I am not a mystic. It’s been a refuge for people with Big Ideas (and outright charlatans) since time immemorial. Why should you listen to one? Because GOD HIMSELF gave him this information/idea/commandment/checking account that must be filled. You can’t really argue with a supreme being, so it logically follows that you can’t really argue with a supreme beings special representative on earth. If I could get that one to fly I could say any crazy thing I wanted, but that’s not what I’m after here. I’m not receiving the special word of the gods, I’m not tapped into a special universal consciousness, I’m not getting the straight poop from dead spirits or genies in a bottle, and I’m not swimming the astral sea witnessing the whole of reality and refining it to a special message just for YOU if you give me money or mow my lawn every other week.

I am also not a professional academic. A case could be made that I’m a professional university student, but that really doesn’t mean anything special in regard to this matter at hand. I am not up in my ivory tower, buried under reams of research, writing detailed research papers with copious footnotes. I read a lot, but it’s hardly dedicated and focused research. And my ivory tower needs a new coat of paint and the basement floods, so I’m not in the right neighborhood for all that. Yet.

Do I have anything against mystics and academics? That depends entirely on the mystic or the academic. I have friends from both camps and I see value in both viewpoints (when mediated by my “third position”). And I have to put “third position” in quotations, because it’s a complicated phrase, and one that I am not using in any way related to accepted definitions thereof, so calm down. It can mean anything from fascism to Clintonian moderatism, strangely enough. Or neither, as I use it here.

So what am I and why should anybody listen to me? I’m advocating a “crazy new religion” to most people, and to many people in that “crazy new religion” I’m advocating a strange and possibly uncomfortable way of looking at it.

The first thing I will tell you is that this is honest. And you can trust that’s the truth, because I just told you I’m honest. Well shit, that doesn’t work, does it? That’s what we call “circular logic”, and it’s something I consciously try to avoid. That is one reason why I think I’m worth listening to: I am attempting to build a logical consistency to what I’m advocating, and I will abandon or modify positions when they are found untenable. I’ve done it before, and I won’t be afraid to do it again. That’s one thing that I am: someone who has explored religions starting from the outside and moving through them.

I was not raised into any religion. My father might get upset and tell you different, but the hard fact of the matter is that I could probably count the number of times I “went to church” as a child on one hand. It is true that I grew up in the United States, and have an inherent Anglican/Protestant bent to my Western Enlightenment virtues. Nobody starts off with a blank slate, after all. But if my father had really wanted me to be raised a Christian he should have actually done that rather than assuming I would somehow just turn out that way without any effort on his part. For all intents and purposes I was raised to be a secular humanist, a skeptical individualist who spent way more time with his Billygoats Gruff, Aesop’s Fables, and shelves of Time Life history books than with My First Bible.

I was, more or less, a “natural little pagan” in the missionary sense. The case had to be made to me, the proof had to be presented. I had to be shown the invisible dragon, and I just never understood people believing something just because they were brought up to. I never saw a compelling reason to participate in religion until I was an adult.

So that’s part of who and what I am. I fancy that gives me as objective a look at religion as anybody can have. I have tried several religions, reasoning my way into, straight through, and then out the backside of them, leaving them when I couldn’t make the dogma fit with observation. That would be the scientist-philosopher in me, I guess. So back to the “honesty” thing I joked about earlier: one reason to listen to me when I talk about religion is that I am not preaching at you, flinging my faith and dogma in your face and calling out your own as ignorant or evil. I’m after a reasonable approximation of the truth, and I’m not afraid to be challenged by others, or to challenge my own beliefs. That’s the whole point of this exercise, actually.

If anything that should be a refreshing change when reading about religion, so I think it’s worth it just for that.

I am educated. I am not just some yahoo with an opinion, I am a yahoo with an opinion and a college degree to confirm the high grade of yahooism I am committed to supporting. There’s another reason to pay attention to me: a sense of humor about all this. If you can’t have a sense of humor about something, you’re probably immensely wrong. That inability to laugh at yourself is the manifestation of fears and doubts that this thing you’ve dedicated your entire life and whole being to could be wrong. That is why many religious people are outrageous assholes who are likely to kill you. I have a serious message about social constructs and power that I’m going to hit you with later that touches on that more, but for now it’s easy just to point at the countries with the most conservative religious societies and highlight their rampant intolerance and raging asshole-ism.

Look. By now you’ve figured out if you think I’m worth listening to or not. If you have, it’s either because you think I’m witty and interesting OR I’ve offended you so much that you can’t stop reading. I don’t need to make a case for my correctness at this initial stage, just set the right tone. But it should be noted that I am not claiming the two aforementioned things: I am not a mystic and I am not an academic. I have no credentials other than can be found within the ideas of my writing itself. Why should you listen to me, then? That’s up to you, and you already know your personal answer.

Reviresco!