Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
on a pace
March and April were heavy posting months. Time to slow down. Take stock. Yadda Yadda. La de da.
Friday, May 03, 2013
you used to say live and let
Deleuze is right, you can't go tromping around in your past too much. There's nothing there - "let the dead bury their dead," as Christ would say. I wondered yesterday what might have happened to the little pentecostal church that met in the bank basement 32 years ago. The one where my mom decided to get off insulin at - "on faith." I tried all kinds of google searches and couldn't find a trace of any of those people. Mostly they were good people, earnest people - they just believed bizarre things coming from a theology we called "name it and claim it." Why do you reckon people leave mainline churches (or even established pentecostal churches) for this: like it's not real if an institution of any sort backs it, but this group, led be a minister who split off from a group that split off from X (itself a nth generation split off) has got to have the real stuff - the real 2nd chapter Acts thing - unvarnished with "the doctrines of men" - a free and open spigot of the Holy Spirit!
When I was a kid I grew up in the country where everyone went to church. Every one dressed up in suits and dresses. Even as a kid I had to wear a tie and coat. None of this clothing fit right; I felt like an encased sausage. I suppose it's to be expected: when you think about the principle that what "preaches" are actions, then this pleasant mainline country church was a real cognitive dissonance factory. People claimed that they were effected by the things said and would have defended to the death their status as believers - they just exemplified nothing that was read. I was a kid. Kid's notice these things. They would have said, "you're just a kid. You don't understand the real world."
Is consciousness something to do while DNA seeks to replicate more DNA. Human, lizard, worm, bird - all the same to GATC as the process makes and unmakes, zips and unzips, replicates and over inscribes, working out a complex calculation 107.7 billions lives plus are needed for over the course of N-billion years. And we, locked in our subjectivities, look for patterns. Patterns are how consciousness moves forward. And consciousness moves forward by invention. We are inventions by the time we come to moving on our own - such that we might not be moving on our own as much as we think.
Surely I'm a lazy thinker. It seems to me the whole rational/irrational dichotomy popular among some evangelical groups is a misstated problem. Especially when they call Kant irrational - I blink and wonder if I'd read that right. In many ways it's like arguing about the dead ball vs live ball era. It's probably the same ball in both eras - it's more always using a clean ball vs never bringing in a clean ball era. Every human thought is a mixture of rational and irrational. It's uncertain what we're doing with the ball - or what the ball is.
Absolutes are often framed with this "without these absolutes there's only chaos" - Whatever it is that they want to call absolutes (they = people selling morals as social panaceas, usually), the one absolute in that statement is chaos. Maybe the question is why do we fear chaos? What if we embraced chaos? What if we learned to use so called Chaos? Are we unable to be kind; are we unable to treat each other as human beings in Chaos? We can learn. We have the imagination to do this.
Above all: Don't give me that Old Time Religion. It was bad for Abraham and Jacob (Jacob testified that his life was miserable. OTR played a big role in that misery); It was bad for Saul and David; it was bad for countless others; It was bad for Jesus and Paul. You'd think by now we'd be wise to its corrosive properties. OTR is bad for you and me. OTR has made some old guys very rich - but for most of us OTR has only meant misery, injustice and oppression.
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