Brief overview of my spirituality

 A brief overview of my spirituality, lifted from a Facebook post (or two).

Religiously, I'm a Unitarian Universalist. That's the church I go to and best symbolizes what I'm teaching my kids. Spiritually, I'm a radical polytheist with humanist tendencies.

I believe in an infinite number of deities with an infinite number of forms and an infinite number of names. Do you want a deity that responds to the name "God" that hates pinball but loves trashy romance novels? I believe such a deity exists. Do you want one that hates all the same people you hate? That one's easy, too. (I caught an episode of "Toddlers and Tiaras" where a woman basically said she prayed until she found a God who wanted her toddler to compete. I totally believe such deities exist.) Who do you talk to when you pray? You talk to the deity that you know most clearly. A person full of rage will find plenty of deities full of rage, and plenty of those willing to be the deity they're looking for.

On a very core level, I don't believe humans are unique. This means, it isn't just humans that have spirits and deities, it is everything. The interaction between things in the form of systems and relationships also have spirits and deities. Perhaps that's the ecology of a small isolated valley. Perhaps that's your own circulatory system. Everything has a soul and deities from your individual cells through the complex interactions of your clan interacting with the environment or other clans. Of note, this means I believe that all spermatozoa and ova have individual souls (and deities) well before fertilization. I'm still pro-choice, however, because none of this is unique or special in any way. The individual grains of rice that go in to Rice Krispies have souls, too, just as Rice Krispie squares have souls. Do they cease having the souls of rice, once they become puffed, once they join together as a Rice Krispie treat, when a piece of puffed rice is cut when slicing individual squares? For me, that's a legitimate question.

And, I believe in things like past-life experiences without believing in even a separable soul, let alone a "real" past life. There's a notion that there is only One, and all of reality is just the One trying it understand itself. If everything is ultimately the same Oneness, then why would the ability to remember someone else's memories as if they were your own require actually owning that person's life? It's an implicit part of being an aspect of the One. I've also experienced a vision in dream that further elaborated upon how this is the case.

I don't believe in an "after" life, so much as I believe in multidimensional beings, parts of which transcend space and time. So our spiritual aspect can experience what we might consider an "afterlife" concurrent to our physical lives being all full of blood and poop. It goes one better, I believe that on a person's death, their reference for time becomes reset to the point of their birth. In effect, they are reincarnated to the same body. They're free to make other choices, but without knowing what happened previously, they rarely make different decisions. Then deja vu becomes a memory of a previous iteration seeping through. This has direct consequences for my views on depression-induced-suicide as well as terminal/assisted-suicide. In one case, pain can only be transcended by living, and in the other a return to a joyful childhood is nothing to spurn.

I have a simple concise reason for life, the universe and everything. It is universal and inescapable: To experience and to be experienced. If your life amounts to a repository of experiences for the universe, what sorts of experiences do you want to store? What do you cherish and cling to?

I firmly believe in a biological basis for what could be called the soul. (Technically, this makes the "soul" references previously states more accurately described as "spirit". Changing that language in myself to be more clear is still a challenge.) What is a person's soul? It is that which would still be like the person if the memories and experiences were stripped away. Two people with the same soul would be a lot alike, even if they lived in different places and times. It amounts to humans being "value engines", and the formula with which we assign value to things is our soul. I know my own formula, and it is simple enough that it could easily be encoded in my DNA, if not an expression of the DNA combined with developmental hormones.

More recently, and a bit more surprising for me, I've stumbled upon what could be a biological basis for the concept of original sin.

Some of these things are, for me, decades-old ideas that I've lived with and that have gradually permeated deeper and deeper in to my being. Even I didn't really believe some of them when I stumbled upon them. It was just a matter of, "Woah. This idea has merit, even if it is totally wrong, the fruit of it is good."

Justice and faith

I recently went to a 15 year high school reunion. I had a great time. At one point, my feet were sore, my back was achy, my stomach felt a little uneasy -- the night was just wearing on -- and even though I tend to be quite social, at some point I need to cease being an active participant, step back and enjoy the event as it unfolds around me. (I am an introvert by nature.)

So I was sitting there, and getting to a point where I'd kind of like some company, but not feeling up to finding company of my own. I said to myself, "I'd like someone to see me sitting here, then sit down near me and talk to me."

A few seconds later that is exactly what happened. More than that I knew that the person that sat down would eventually try to proselytize. I knew it when he sat down. It is what he does. We talked shop for a few minutes, and right on course he ends up going there. I had a good time talking with him. It was fun.

A key point in his argument seemed to be that his god's laws are imprinted on our hearts, and that all the good that humans do is an act of grace on God's part. If it weren't for this "restraining grace" we would be unable to restrain our carnal desires.

At one point he brought up the fact that if he were right, I was going to hell. I have problems with various aspects of Christianity -- particularly the bit about it being the only path to the Divine. I responded with this: Any god that would punish men who were good, honest men regardless of what was in their hearts(*) and minds but simply because they never heard about Jesus isn't so nice. "In an unjust society, the only place for a just man is in prison." If you are right I will gladly go to hell. (I'd forgotten who said the quote at the time, but it was Thoreau.)

This was, in part, my humanist tendencies showing themselves. I believe that a person can be good and can have never heard of Jesus. The Reciprocal Ethic -- what Christians call the "Golden Rule" -- exists in virtually all cultures though it is worded differently. Caring for the elderly and infirm is a trait common to all cultures regardless of religion.

We treat people with dignity and respect because we are human and this is a human trait. I don't see our social behavior as particularly unique to us, so much as it just a product of our being social animals. Other social animals have behavior that are unique to their species -- or in the really interesting cases unique to a specific culture. We can, of course, become better at being humane to each other, though if we really want it to stick it should not be out of fear of punishment but out of a desire to improve the world and make it better for everyone.

You can see evidence of the reverse at work. To commit atrocities against our fellow humans the targets must first be dehumanized. It is intrinsically repugnant to butcher humans like so many animals, but if you mentally turn the humans in to animals first it can become just another job.

The first job of all bigotry, then, is to take a wonderfully unique human individual and transform him or her in to a pest animal. There are different levels of success, of course, and only in the extreme cases is the transition complete enough in a person's mind to allow them to commit atrocities without remorse.

Anything that degrades the individual into a generalization is bigotry and is the starting point for full dehumanization. If you realize this early, you can nip it in the bud. You need to be aware of this both for yourself and your community, as any group can become the target of a lynching if tensions are allowed to be driven toward a generalized group of people.

Anyway, back to the reunion, the bar, and the interesting fellow preaching of his thoughts of Jesus.

I was being asked to believe that the only reason there is a sense of justice in the human soul is because of the Christian deity. More than that, I was told that since He created everything, He can take a group of humans and use them to kill other humans. We're effectively His playthings and He can do with us as He wishes. (Which sort of reminded me of an earlier post.)

If I was given a sense of justice because of this deity, why then is that sense of justice so offended by this behavior?

I was told that it is better for a Christian to have Jesus in mind than in heart. I was told that Christians should do or believe things that don't seem self-evident, things that are right because they are Godly, even though they don't feel right to a person's heart.

I'll be honest, at one point I felt particularly tired and felt like conceding the argument. During that time of weakness, the thought came to me, "What about the cats? He discounts their gods completely." That gave me strength to keep on. (Bless the cat gods!)

There I was, sitting in one of my gods (for aren't most bars masculine?), feeling the presence of the Divine deep within my being. My senses expanding, feeling the floor and room around me. Knowing my place in the room, in so many senses of those words.

Here he was telling me to discount everything I had ever experienced, telling me that -- literally -- I should think about whether I might be influenced by demonic forces. I felt honored that he felt the need to go "there" to argue with me.

The "demonic influence" argument was on par with my asking him if he ever considered that if you look at the Bible objectively, without the implicit assumption that it is True, it looks like the sort of BS you'd see in an abusive relationship. (I didn't go there with him.) "No one loves you like I do." "You're a worthless wretch, your lucky my son -- my son! -- gave his life to protect you." "Anyone that says I am not telling you the truth is a liar. You just tell me who they are so I can 'talk' to them."

The last of those reasons is why I never really try to convert people. They're in a bad relationship with a god that admits he is the jealous type. I have no need to get in the middle of that. I am a polytheist, so it isn't like I don't believe in their god, I just think he isn't all he claims to be.

Ultimately, I shouldn't have to subjugate my sense of justice to my faith. They should stand strong and proud beside each other, both of them supporting the other as need be. This would be one of the reasons I support social justice initiatives like marriage equality, intactivism, prison reform, etc. These things are demanded by both my sense of justice and my faith.

If you need to subjugate your sense of justice to your faith, maybe -- just maybe -- you have an unjust faith.


Footnote (*): I wanted to make sure I was framing the opposing viewpoint correctly, so I ran by the post by the person I was talking to before making it live. His response was that the Bible states that all hearts are deceitful and wicked, so there is no question as to what is in a non-Christian's heart. (No one is truly good except for God.) This also means it would be inaccurate to say he believes that non-Christians are punished regardless of what is in their hearts. I -- unsurprisingly -- do not believe that everyone has a wicked or deceitful heart. In my mind the evidence simply does not back up this assertion.

His argument is not concerned with the contents of a person's heart, as he believes he knows what is there. My argument is concerned with the contents of a person's heart. What I'm left with is such a fundamental difference in perspective that it seemed more accurate to annotate the reference than to try to change my statement.