The Drab, Euclidean Underpinnings of Atheist Thought

Richard Dawkins writes: "Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it."

Two problems:

1. Why say that anyOne went to the trouble of "designing it"? Replace this Attic notion of agency with a more cybernetic, self-organizing framework and all watchmaker quibbles evaporate.

2. Who says complexity must arise from complexity? Here the venerable don sounds like a creationist! Kali's secret name is z² + c.

Milton's Muse

From a very nice hosanna to Milton in the Guardian:

In the second and third personal interventions in Paradise Lost, he talks of how he has fallen on "evil days" and "evil tongues" and is surrounded by dangers, but in spite of this is able to receive his "celestial patroness" or, as he called her, his Christian muse, Urania. She comes to him sometimes early in the morning, sometimes in the night, when she "dictates to me slumb'ring, or inspires / Easy my unpremeditated verse."

The extraordinary claim that he takes his verses as dictation from a celestial being establishes his unshakable belief in himself against the disparagement of his enemies. Singled out from above in this way, he was all the same sensible enough to edit his heavenly Muse. After dictating what she had given him, and he had memorised, to one of the friends or assistants who came to write for him, he set about cutting extensively, and revising. Did he really believe in Urania and her night-time visits? No doubt he believed with one part of his mind. She may have hovered between allegory and symbol, among other inhabitants of his imagination, bright seraphim with angel trumpets, gloomy Dis who ruled the underworld, wood and mountain nymphs, Pan, Apollo and Robin Goodfellow.

Beautiful Blog Post

From Patricia Bralley... "God is peering through right now... In this moment."

My Crackpot Theory of Everything

I don't have the whole thing yet, elaborated fully into all its geometrical, ethical, world-historical, metaphysical, and nutritional aspects...but I'm workin' on it. Not workin' all that hard, I'll admit, but...I think about it once in a while.

The Crackpot Theory of Everything seems to be a stage each of us must go through at some point, in some incarnation or other, as we walk the spiritual path. It's even part of certain systems, like the A.A. is part of the long slog towards the B.S., so to speak. I certainly haven't the slightest wish to be "the leader of a school of thought" and I must not be all that far towards my own mystical B.S. degree since I have no "proposals for [the Universe's] welfare and progress"...it seems to be progressing just fine on its own (this progress, in fact, which my CTE conflates with evolution and divine entelechy, is central to the forthcoming Kalibhakta Explains Everything [Llewellyn Press, 2012]).

These musings are prompted by a skim of a summary of Yeats's A Vision, the poet's CTE and considered by him his finest work, all those lake isles and rough beasts notwithstanding. Do you have to have hallucinations of grandeur to concoct a CTE? Well, get this, from the mouth of the bard: "I send you the introduction of a book which will, when finished, proclaim a new divinity." (Imagine how he'd brag if he'd just written Chess for Dummies!) Admittedly, Yeats is writing at a remove from himself; he cloaked A Vision within a frame tale in which a white male (of course) travels to The East (of course) to uncover a complex (of course) system of hidden (of course) knowledge. Kalibhakta (of course) is interested in it because a) it's weird and b) it involves Yeats's own theory of the Holy Guardian Angel--that Being of psychological or spiritual or archetypal origin Who hath appear'd in many guises throughout time, from Sumerian spirit guides to WiHW's dynamic co-star, Laura (artist's conception above).

I'm sure I can be more, er, scientifique than Yeats, right? I mean, it's 2008! Vive la pocket protector! You got your Supreme Architect of the Universe, Who reveals Herself in Her unfolding (creation + how we perceive/imagine it), becoming, for those who recognize Her, the Source of Love and Joy-- the very love and joy She uses to call us to consciousness of Her and awaken our inner light, thus mirroring on the micro scale the evolution of the entire species, Universe, Multiverse... each positron and "random" event actually a point in Her Mandelbrot Set of self-revelation... well, that's a little abstract, but... OK, how about this: everything you see around you manifests divine Intelligence and Will, but none of it makes sense until you put it together for yourself-- assemble the pieces into your personal catechism or CTE...but you lose the game if you get too attached to your theory...you want the game you're playing with Deep Black to be an Evergreen.

So lemme see... the Goddess! Angels! The Grail! Eastern tantra! Western tantra! Isis! Eleusis! Chaos! Self-organization! Hypnagogia... paranomasia... elephantoplasty...! A dollop of Engelbreitian Splenda! A smattering of dark elegance!

That's the blurb-in-progress...

My God (dess)...I Am a Total Failure

The last post was when? October??? Nobody's still reading this thing, are they???????

And not only does no one read it and I never post, but I'm writing this on somewhere between a 5th- and 7th-grade level????

I am a total failure.

iamatotalfailure.blogspot.com

Sophia, kindly, sez: Well, I'm sure the grade-level software is picking up on the fact that you use "I" a lot, and all those ellipses... and you use not entirely conventional sentence structure, too, like intentional fragments...

Yeah, but there's a clear pattern in the syllabic stats in the graph above (provided by the Juicy Studio readability test): whoooole bunch o' one-syllable words, fewer (a lot fewer) two-syllable, fewer still three-syllable, etc. My semi-literacy is a damn pre-algebra problem, it's so easy to graph!

But wait... one-syllable words are good! I remember an interview where Galway Kinnell rhapsodized about Whitman's Anglo-Saxon vocabulary...slough of boot-soles, the blab of the pave... let's run Leaves of Grass through the old Flesch-Kincaid, shall we???? There's some ellipses for ya, buddy! Hey, what's the average number of syllables in the name "Flesch-Kincaid"? 1.5! Same...as...my...blog!!!!!!!!!!!

[But seriously, folks: I apologize for my absence. I hope you are well and happy. Keep those cards and letters coming... someone said McCartney's solo stuff wasn't as good as Lennon's because Paul was happy, and to make great art one must be miserable. Judging from many of the blogs out there (oh, god, even mine when it first erupted, in all its monosyllabic glory, into the troubled logo-geography of Planet Blog) there may be a grain of truth in this. But on the other hand... not only am I deliriously happy right now, but I really like McCartney's solo stuff! Not that horrific "simply having a wonderful Christmastime" song, but..."Let 'Em In" and "Silly Love Songs" are genius!!! And Mac did the only good James Bond movie theme song, ever!!! And it's reeeeeeeeeeeaaaally good. So is "Band on the Run"! And (readability experts: do not dog me about the sentences starting with "And." I'd like you to check out a little something called...the King James Bible!!!!) how about "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey"??? Does readability software check punctuation?]

Chaotic Beauty

Traces of the sea in sand...they remind me of Wallace Stevens's "fire-fangled feathers"... a Cherish'd Reader implored me to post something so she didn't have to look at "that hideous picture of Mother Teresa" every time she checked my seemingly moribund blog... I apologize on both counts... :)

My life has been filled with chaotic beauty lately--this beach you see above, as the sun sank and Sophia in her white dress waded in the tidal pools...Sophia herself, so long a friend and now infinitely more...the chaos isn't wreck or disorder, but change, the unveiling of beauty...chaos in the creative, Mandelbrot sense...

one reason I haven't been blogging a lot recently is that I don't want this to turn into a romance blog...but Sophia is all I want to talk about! But as much as I'd like to write about Sophia and me, it's more fun to be me with her, to live who we are...and then there are the invasion of privacy concerns... right, Sophia? (It's probably bad blog manners to indulge in what, in radio jargon, is called "point to point communication," but Sophia still loyally reads this so-called blog and I doubt, honey, that you want all that mushy, ♥-y dovey stuff spilling over here... ☺)

Anyway...it's time to leave work and I may have succeeded in kicking the future saint below the fold...

I Make My Peace with You, You Old Slag

You've probably heard about the recent revelations of Mother Teresa's agonizing spiritual doubt, and you may, if you are an obsessive Kalibhakta fan, remember that somewhere on this blog, in some post I don't have time or energy to look up, I dissed Mother Teresa, citing Christopher Hitchens's infamous rant about the recently departed though damn near sainted nun.

There's an even better anti-MT rant on the web now--Susan Jacoby's "Road to Sainthood Paved with Good Publicity," and though I understand every argument and ideological tack and jibe therein (and still sympathize with many of them), I am far less on board the H.M.S. Nunsense than I used to be. In fact, I now count myself among the brainless theocrats who believe, in Jacoby's words, "that Teresa is even holier because of her overwhelming doubts." MT's dark night of the soul (aka "the Abyss") not only fits to a "T" the classic description of this dreadful malady, but is the longest such night I have ever heard of...the Divine Mother has given me little tastes of the dark night and they were more than enough...

But Jacoby's not fooled. In her rather Freudian diagnosis, MT "combine[d] masochism with narcissism," no doubt due to toilet training in the presence of a crucifix. Jacoby's piece is worth reading, and allow me to repeat, she makes a real good point, which boils down to one pithy sentence: "Teresa never showed any concern, in India or elsewhere, about the root causes of poverty--including lack of education, corrupt dictatorships, inequitable distribution of wealth, bigotry against social, ethnic, or religious underclasses, and contempt for women."

Problem is, I and Jacoby and some of our fellow T-skeptics have overlooked some, er, rather obvious empirical truths. Yes, MT arguably abetted as much suffering as she ameliorated; inarguably, she made an idol of suffering. But, as one commenter to Jacoby's column puts it, "Of course had she advocated birth control liberals would love her too, but being a Catholic nun it is a bit much to have expected from her." And I would say it was a bit much, as well, to expect MT to turn down money she believed was going to help her accomplish God's work of caring for the poor and helpless. If God's work was aided by bucks from bad guys--great. Why turn them away and swap a minor ethical hat-trick for actual lives in the slums of Calcutta? And if she were clueless or blinkered about the bad guys she hung out with, I have to say she wouldn't be the first blinkered or clueless religious person in history. Hell, I've even heard of clueless, closed-minded atheists!

Even Jacoby admits a more basic point: "someone who observes extreme human suffering on a daily basis would have more doubts than most about the existence of a benevolent deity." In true faux-skeptic style, though, Jacoby bulldozes past this excellent caveat so she can flog (so to speak) her far more speculative maso-narcissist theory. It's possible that MT was doing the best she knew how to do, given the horizon of her knowledge, belief, and experience--in other words, that she was human like the rest of us. Despite the low-grade sensationalism with which atheists and other non-Catholics tend to treat the concept of sainthood, this human fallibility is exactly what makes "sainthood" so inspiring: here's somebody who had to deal with all the crap I've had to deal with and more (boils, living in a cave in the desert, being sawn in half) and yet he or she made a pretty good run of it.

If Mother Teresa could do God's backbreaking work for 50 grinding years during which she was pretty sure there wasn't a God, during which she was pretty sure it was all for naught and there'd just be lights out and oblivion at the end, then for me she embodies the Grail Knight spirit of recognizing that one's task is impossible and doing it with all one's heart anyway. It matters little whether her work really was God's, or whether it was as noble as it could be, as perfect as it could be, as well-intentioned or rational or as worthy of my approval as it could be. Kali has been gradually relieving me, for years now, of my duty to approve of everything that goes on in Her creation, and for this I'm thankful. So no, there's much of MT's career I still don't approve of, but I don't need to, and don't need to make of her an idol of goodness nor of righteous foolery. I do know that God favors certain of Her children with the dark night (for reasons John of the Cross can explain far better than I), and so I look at Mother Teresa with awe now, not uncritical awe but with a feeling of mingled affection and reverential dread; I know now that we are siblings in God's family, but I hope Mom has different plans for me.

Stained glass by Catherine A. Brock, Yulokod Stained Glass Studios

I'll Be a Post-Feminist When It's Post-Patriarchy

As will this Philadelphia Inquirer writer...

but now that I have your attention, the real reason I'm posting (besides nostalgia for once having had a blog--but you probably don't want me to blog about my life right now...it would be sooooo mushy (he said as he listened to The English Congregation's apotheosis of bell-bottom mush, "Softly Whispering I Love You"))...

the real reason I'm posting is to put something out there that will be of interest to Goddess-geeks (and probably only G-gs): a debunking-the-debunkers article from Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archive confronting one little (but interesting) corner of the Was There or Wasn't There an Ancient Goddess Religion debate. (My recent theme of skepticism and counter-skepticism owes, I guess, to a class I'm teaching now in which critical thinking plays a central role; we're reading a book by Michael Shermer, etc.)

I do respect, to a point, the scholarship of Cynthia Eller, the focus of the article I've linked to, but have also, as Dashu does, found it to be of a piece with a rather historically naive, ideologically-driven strain of "feminism" that preoccupies itself with the foibles of earlier feminist writers, seeking to redress allegedly sloppy thought and theory. Which would be fine...if one didn't, from the pulpit of reason, make even worse mistakes that served one's own narrow agenda.

I'll take Susan Griffin over Judith Butler any day; it's sort of analogous to the way one wag compared Hemingway and Burroughs. Burroughs's fiction changed the way we see the world; Hemingway's changed the way we see Pamplona. Griffin, for me anyway, changed the world, while Butler very persuasively laid out a revolutionary new theory that I first read in the eighteenth-century writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.