God Brand

Ran left some interesting thoughts on my piece about God as anomaly: “God” is a brand, with lots of associations we do [...]

to be constantly ready to cast aside old concepts and make new ones. To hold onto old myths is the opposite.

Actually, a big part of what kids seem to do is revel in learning the old myths, because they are not old to them.

Why does the corner we explored have to be the only one that’s not an anomaly? To me, that seems like the weirdest one of all.

It’s because we’ve explored it that it’s not an anomaly. I think I wasn’t clear enough in my language. We explore something, we tell stories about it, we explain it, but always it merges into something beyond that we can’t explain yet. So we explore that, we change our stories to explain it, we find more anomalies beyond that, and so on. I see the universe as an onion, where we peel away layer after layer, except we start from the center of the onion, and it’s infinite!

As for God, I think it’s really a tactical question. “God” is a brand, with lots of associations we don’t agree with, kind of like the American flag. Do we try to redefine the brand for our own uses, or do we drop it and make something new?

To me, “become as children” means to always look at the world as if we’ve never seen it before, to be constantly ready to cast aside old concepts and make new ones. To hold onto old myths is the opposite.

“God is the tangential point between zero and infinity”

It seems like an awkward attempt to force a synthesis between our own explorations and a silly idea from our childhood about an omnipotent sky father deity who looks like us.

That’s backwards. We are told that “we are made in God’s image.” This means that God is not anthropomorphic, WE are God-morphic. Insofar as my eyes see, they are the Eye. Insofar as I live, I am Life. Insofar as I act, I am Action.

Why should we be ashamed of our childhood stories? They are closer to where we came from than we are now. We should “become as children.” If we have hang-ups, they are our own inabilities to deal. The Judeo-Christian control structure is your heritage. You can no more ignore it’s influence on you than you can your parents. We can rail against the Demiurge, but that must be a passing phase. Even the Demiurge is the spitting image of the One.

Our concept of “God” may be anthropomorphic, but that is our concept. The same goes for small-g gods. If I had been raised in polytheism, what would my perspective be?

They are! It is critical that you think about this proposition until it makes sense to you! The Priests aren’t the bad guys anymore; everything is backwards! Morality, the scientific method, and truth itself are all under attack and we need all the help we can get, even from - oooh, stinky poo (for you) - The Roman Catholic Church!

Now small-g “gods” are different, because they’re just flawed entities who manipulate our world from a realm we don’t understand, and that actually fits with what the anomalies are telling us.

How about this: the entire universe, with the exception of the little corner we have explored, is an anomaly.

For instance, I don’t know how much chaos magick stuff I have read that has people spitting on crosses and such. If you are free of the cross’s power, then you have no need to demonstrate it. (”Real gangsta ass niggas don’t flex nuts/ coz real gangsta ass niggas know they got’em.”)

It’s like teenagers who reflexively do the opposite of whatever their parents approve of. Whether they rebel or not, they have still allowed the domain of possible actions to be defined by someone else.

A more fruitful approach to the problem of religion is to recognize that it is the natural result of misinterpretation upon literal reading upon misinterpretation over the course of the history of civilization. “Kabbalah water” and “Davey and Goliath” can both be traced to the Eschaton, just like everything else.

Or erase “infinity”, and write “nothingness”, “space”, “eternity”, “substance”, “life”, “truth”, “virtue”, “terror”, “art.”

Transcendant concepts are the direct reflections of the one thing. Meister Eckhart tells us that insofar as we are Good, we are God, since there is no Goodness, Life, Truth, etc. apart from God.

“Eternity” is not time unending, but eternal Prescence.

If we take the masters (and our own intuitions) seriously, we know that the transcendent is prior to the particular. Systems of thought are created by us and imposed on reality. Glitches in systems are the natural boundaries of those systems. We should not be surprised to see these glitches, we should rather be surprised if we cannot find them: that would seem to imply that we are operating entirely in the context of that system.