Hills and Mountains

(also posted at The Exponent)

The other morning I ran up Tumamoc hill. First time I've ever been able to run up the whole thing: It's short, 1.5 miles to the top for a quick 3 mile round trip; but brutal steep: you climb up 730 ft in that 1.5 miles. I've jogged parts of it before but always had to stop and walk those last few switchbacks. This was was an invigorating first for me and Tumamoc.

I like my hills all in one gulp, straight up, the condensed version. There are plenty of trails and roads where I can get nice rolling, gentle-up-gentle-down routes depending on my hiking, running and biking needs. But I really find myself attracted to the intense all or nothing versions: Tumamoc, Blacketts Ridge, Saguaro National Monument, Mt Lemmon highway, Josephine Saddle (or, when I have the whole day, continuing on from Josephine Saddle up to the peak of Mt Wrightson). Etc.

I love hills and mountains. I broke my belief system wide open on these hills and mountains. It's no wonder to me that many religions hold journeys to mountains for spiritual enlightenment as part of their mythos. I've queried and cursed and argued with God on these hills and mountains. Halfway up Mt Wrightson, muscles shaking and drenched in sweat, I broke with God and offered some of my first prayers to the Goddess (a terrifying step for one raised on stories of women excommunicated for such blasphemy). Eventually, I broke with divinities all together and these hills and mountains became the place for just processing whatever needs processing in my life.

It is amazing the ideas and possibilities that open up to a heart pumping faster and a mind flooded with endorphins. (I have to be careful, I have shot off dangerous emails while still high on a good hill.)

It is something I believe in: blood and body fluids. In heart and mind. In always looking for new ideas, new paths, new heights to reach.

And hills and mountains,
I believe in hills and mountains.

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Now, In a similar vein, you must go and read xJane's exquisite posts Worship and Creation, and ALSO Sandra Wickham's Functional Nerds post Brains need Brawn, and ALSO mfranti's post Paradox.

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Not a Tucson mountain, but still love to climb it: Mt Timpanogos in Ut.

we are not our faces

While thumbing through this book, I ran across this essay about fantasy writers by Neil Gaiman.

An excerpt:

"...Frozen in black and silver for you now, these are simply masks. We who lie for a living are wearing our liar-faces, false-faces made to deceive the unwary. We must be- for, if you believe these photographs, we look just like everyone else....
Read [our] books: sometimes you can catch sight of us in there. We look like gods...
Read [our] books. That's when you see us properly: naked priestesses and priests of forgotten religions...
[Our] words describe [our] real faces: the ones[we] wear underneath. This is why people who encounter writers of fantasy are rarely satisfied by the wholly inferior person that they meet..."

It's a fascinating statement on many levels. (Gaiman is just pure fascinating in general.)

a few of my random thoughts:
~Wow, aren't writers an audacious bunch: "we're not like other people."

~Actually, yeah, writers (and artist, creatives, scientists, etc) AREN'T like everyone else. That's true.

~Really, humans in general are an audacious bunch, inclined to feel "not like other people", what with our cliques and religions and social/political groupings (not to mention geography, race, gender, sexual orientation, etc etc etc...)

~Gaiman's statement was oddly reminiscent to me of blogger Stephanie Nielson's statement "I am not my body" after being badly disfigured in an accident. (minus the Monster God aspect.)

~Gaiman's statement touches upon one of my more cherished beliefs as a Mormon; that we are more than what we look like, that underneath the ordinary looking skin mask, we are God.

~It was a painful/hard/difficult time when that audacious sense of I Am God dissipated. When I realized that, in actuality, I might be nothing more than meat. (Neil Gaiman is meat too.)

~I am meat that likes to think of its self as "not like other meat."

god and sex

The following are excerpts from a post entitled We Believe There is an Actual living God Who Exist in 3-D Reality- Monitoring our Genitals" over at Betty Dodson/Carlin Ross's blog, which is a very sex positive blog and very NSFW so consider yourself warned. The author had some very provocative thoughts on God; those excerpts I shared here. Also, the author alludes to religious shame regarding sex/genitals and while I didn't share those portions here it is, nevertheless, interestingly congruent as Mormon Matters just did a post on Sexual difficulty between spouses, and Feminist Mormon Housewives recently had a lively discussion about genitals and orgasms.
Therefore, without further ado...

"So many people argue about the existence of God. To me, this is a complete waste of time. Clearly God exists. There are images, texts, statues, paintings, buildings, cities and countries, and entire world religions devoted to God. God exists.

The problem is this: God is a symbol. Symbols exist. God exists as a symbol. However, because our brains lack the most basic ability to distinguish reality from symbols and sensations in our head, we believe that there is an actual living god who exists in 3-D reality who cares about our genitals.

This is incorrect.

There is no actual, living, 3D reality god - much less one who cares about our genitals. There is only an infinite amount of ever expanding symbols for god - created by us sexual mammals. We love god like we love sex because they both flow from the same place in our head.

A symbolic place....

....The only thing we can say with certainty is that we are symbolic mammals who have lots of sex and believe in gods. We believe in the symbols we create, and we are willing to live and die by our beliefs in these symbols. Remarkably, the symbols in our heads can even mess up our own ability to experience sexual pleasure.

In reality, sex and god are one in the same. "

creating gods

(this post also at Feminist Mormon Housewives)

So that's me, at the back of the church, hiding out in the last pew. The atheist mommy with a sketchbook.

Lisa, Moriah and I got talking about the act of creating, of making art, and how it related to our religious beliefs. It was interesting, our different approaches. Me: I'm the naval gazer: having thought and read my way out of all belief in any literal Gods, I still find myself as an artist, obsessed with the symbols and icons and language of religion (in particular, my native religion: Mormon). God has been pivotal to my art for years: here's a piece I did a while back as I worked thought my issues/concerns/etc about approaching God.

Nowadays, I find myself obsessed with taking the stories and re-working them, twisting them, turning them, doing a bit of re-arranging (for example, I am currently hard at work re-telling the story of Eve). In my mind what I am doing is scraping away the white-washing; trying to get down to the raw, messy stuff that is at the root of all of our belief systems. My tools are pretty simple: pencil, pen, paint, a bit of ink and other odds and ends. With them I go sifting through all the shards of my broken belief.

Art is my therapy.
Art is also one of the only forms of worship that I practice at the moment. I guess you could say it is my homage to the reasons we humans make our Gods (see here and here) and also, to the way we make our monsters. (Sometimes I think those are the same thing.)


(In case you are wondering, one of the reasons I hide way at the back during church is because, quite frequently, what comes out of my pen while listening to the talks/lessons is either quite disturbing, or rather blasphemous. WARNING. Those links are disturbing and blasphemous.)

conditioned to love the monster god

[now posted over at The Exponent also]
Here is a half-baked thought that has been marinating in the back of my head for a while:

Sermons and lessons in the LDS church have elements in them that condition us to accept a Monster God.

(Probably not LDS alone, but that is the majority of my church going experience so it is where I have seen it the most.)

What I am thinking of here is the numerous talks, lessons, etc that use as their object lessons examples of extreme human suffering to teach about God. Two in particular stand out in memory (and I'm too tired to hunt down more):

1)From elder Monson's conference talk from last year (ironically entitled "Be Of Good Cheer") in which he talked about the German Mother in war-torn Prussia and how she had to bury her children one by one, having only a spoon to dig their graves with, until the very last child died, and at that point, she had even lost her spoon and so used her bare fingers against frozen ground to bury her baby.

2) From a local Stake Conference a few years back; the Stake President, as part of his talk described in great detail, how at a family cookout, the young toddler pulled the charcoal grill full of red-hot briquettes over on top of himself. The Stake President went on in great detail about the extent of the irreparable damage done to the toddler's body. I don't remember exactly what the SP's point was (probably prayer, or faith, or something) because I had to leave the meeting (leave my toddler sitting in the pew with his father) so I could go throw up.

I'm thinking that these gospel teaching elements are included as a coping mechanism, a way to preemptively curtail questions about the atrocities that occur and how an All powerful All loving God fits into this world of carnage. Perhaps, they are included to be intentionally numbing? (activism is frequently downplayed to make place for faith/acceptance.)

We are taught to Pray to the Monster God for protection (for he is mighty to save) while simultaneously being taught to accept that, at His humanly incomprehensible whim, He may chose not to save you. In spite of unwavering devotion, you and your loved ones may in die in a multitude of agonizing ways. Or live in a multitude of agonizing ways. And lesson after lesson in church is constructed to condition you to that fact.
So pray for patience.
For faith.
For understanding.
Or at least for acceptance.

It is storytelling.
Turning tragedy into faith promoting stories.

My own thought is that reality isn't very faith-promoting.

As an interesting segue: after the Earthquakes in Haiti earlier this year, JohnR wrote this post about suffering, and storytelling, and how we can cope with tragedy without trying to piece an all Powerful all Loving God into the story.

To end with, a little sacrilege.
Have you seen the painting "One Nation Under God" by Jon McNaughton?
In thinking about The Monster God, it occurred to me that the anonymous artist who did this parody of it might have been on to something.

Our Dysfunctional Heavenly Family...

Jessawhy just put up a great post at The Exponent (thoughts about an absentee Mother in Heaven) and it got me thinking about our concept of a Heavenly Family, the one with all powerful, all loving divine Heavenly Parents.

(the following is expanded from my comments on that thread, which I probably should not have made there anyways.)

I realized, that if you took out the All Powerful and/or All Loving parts then the Divine Parentage analogy makes more sense (taken in the context of the horrific human wreckage that occurs every day on this earth).

One actually could view this world as the offspring of a couple of abusive, inconsistent, conditionally-loving, favoritism-playing parents.

Or even just normal run-of-the-mill-good-intentioned-but-fallible parents. Parents who are like us. Who make mistakes and don’t always have the answers and some days just don’t have the energy or the patience. Who maybe do things with the best of intentions only to find that what they did has horribly tragic consequences. And sometimes horrible things happen for no reason at all and they are unable to do anything about it, helpless to help, helpless to save, only able to weep in anguish at it all. (Or perhaps shutting their eyes so they don't have to witness the damage.)

Maybe we don’t hear about Heavenly Mom because she LEFT Heavenly Dad. Maybe they had a nasty divorce with a really bad custody battle and right now we’re on Dad’s weekend visit. That would make much more sense to me regarding the silence about Heavenly Mother:

Us: “Dad, tell us about Mom”

Dad: [on a good day] “Mom is… doing something important… somewhere else… don't worry about it…” [or on a bad day] “Shut up kid”

Maybe things just got outta hand, more kids seemed like a good idea at the time but now they realize that they just don't have a handle on things, stuff is out of their control, falling between the cracks (they are probably doing a good bit of arguing about it to each other behind the scenes, blame enough to go around with left-overs)

...Yah... like you are going to hear THIS preached over the pulpit anywhere.

The thing is, this explanation/analogy of a Parent God certainly might shed some light on the current state of the planet. BUT, there is nothing in this view to inspire any sort of devotion or adoration or emulation etc etc etc. Even going to that bit about well-meaning but helpless divine parents, who sincerely love their children, whose hearts break for all the grief down here... It is an image that inspires pity, but not devotion. (Would you offer up pleading prayers to a loving but helpless god?)

That's about the conclusion I came to a while back. The next inevitable phase was to realize I just didn't believe in God.

Back on that exponent thread, m&m expressed a bit of horror at my view, which is understandable. This is a pretty bleak picture I just painted of our Heavenly Family. But even laying aside all that bleakness, I frequently hear sentiments of sadness and horror about the belief that there is no god, that there is no hope or consolation or meaning to life without God, about being unable to process all the sadness without God. I am actually working on a post (have been for a while) about finding meaning, finding purpose, finding joy in a Godless world.

Eventually I'll get it finished and posted.

Eventually. :)

(Once again, sorry Jessawhy, for threadjacking your post. Thanks for being you.)

waiting to get the okay to change your mind..

[This is merely a rant.
I have to say it here, and not at the post where the discussion is going on, because I am really feeling the need to be sharp. And that blog is not a place for much sharpness.]

So you say things are the way they are because God say's so. And that's that. You believe it with every fiber of your being and you have created all sorts of explanations to help you rationalize this belief (necessary, because the belief really does fly in the face of logic).

But, you also admit that it's possible God may speak again, and change the way things are. You do prepare yourself for this. You prepare to then believe, with every fiber of your being, the OPPOSITE of what you believe now. To discard all of your carefully constructed explanations (because they no longer apply at all).

So you sit. And wait. Wait for permission to change your mind. NOT asking questions! It is not your place to question, but to wait. To wait to be told. To be given permission to think something different.

[To be fair, that's not true, the persons I am ranting about are not sitting around. They are active, intelligent, participating individuals. The topic at hand is probably one they rarely think about at all. Easily compartmentalized in a safe location, requiring little effort on their part. While, for me, it is the topic that caused the initial tearing of my beliefs. Hence... A rant.]

cherry picking and making it up

Here's a page in my journal from about two years ago. I was working out my own personal Godhead. Not a trinity but a quartet: Father, Mother, Son and (female) spirit.
Desperately trying to restructure my belief system to incorporate a little divine feminine influence in a otherwise utterly male hierarchy/power structure.

Also I was re-thinking the after life: The whole three-degrees-of-glory + spirit-world-missionary-work thing just no longer working as the perfect answer I had taught about as a Sunday school teacher ("Isn't God loving? Providing a way for us to be baptized for those who died never hearing about Joseph Smith and the plan of salvation??") A version of re-incarnation, where our "essence" or "soul" or "[whatever?]" continued to be re-born again and again and again until it reached a sort of nirvana, made much more sense.

Eventually the irony of making it up as I went along dawned on me. Picking and choosing what I liked, altering what needed to be altered, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, discarding this, keeping that.

Really just making it up.

Finding myself face to face with the question: "If this is all metaphorical anyhow, what's the point?!?" (And questioning the necessity of the skewers of religion).

One of the points Dawkins makes in The God Delusion when the liberal theologians raise their re-interpreted Divinity is the problem with baggage. That term "God" and what it means in the minds of most believers is really very problematic.

That's what I started wondering about; my own hodge-podged theologies and why I bothered. The only divine entity[ies] that made any sense had not much in them to inspire devotion, adoration, or belief. (etc... )

The end result being the realization that I really didn't believe in the hodge-podged (or otherwise) theologies I was propping up for myself.

But, on a different level, I do so love the picking apart process. A few links on some of my pet topics: BiV's and Kiskilili's thought provoking questions about the Virgin Mary, Kiskilili's and Lynnette's dissection of Eve and the Creation, (BiV also takes on the Creation with an eye to science) and Lynnette on takes on Heavenly Mother. To make a quick segue into SF, have you read Parable of The Sower by Octavia Butler? LOVE Lauren and her earthseed religion.
There's so many others. This is just off the top of my head.

(and now it's outa my head and in print, so maybe I can be productive today....)

my god delusion

Just a few quick thoughts while I'm in the middle (pg 155) of reading Dawkin's The God Delusion; I like biology! Wow! And the cosmology stuff the Dawkin's just finished delving into, seriously, my son's favorite book to read at night one about the universe and it was freaky cool to suddenly have a few more interesting tidbits of information to impress my kindergartner with.

But when Dawkins gets into the scientific proofs about why God could absolutely not exist (ie, a being so complex as to have 'created' the universe is even more highly improbable and raises more questions than the creation of that universe in the first place and the problems with declaring God un-research-able and outside the realm of science etc etc etc ...) he sort of loses me. And I'm trying to figure out why.

Maybe it's because I see how absolutely futile his arguments would be, say, in a dinner table discussion with my family? Or maybe it's because I still have my own lingering theist/deist biases that continue color my thinking? Or maybe it's connected to Dawkin's tendency to be a bit dismissive of believers (believers making up the vast majority of my friends and family). Perhaps it's because my own loss of belief in God went through an entirely different route than pure scientific rational inquiry. Still thinking on it. And enjoying the read in the meantime.

Anyhoo... random but related, while doing a bit of reading for my last post I stumbled upon Answers in Genesis (a website Dawkins references several times in his book) and did a good amount of eye-rolling as they try to pander to a female base by raging against Darwin's sexism, because Christians are ALL about equality of the sexes, so poo poo to you Darwin. Yah. Whatever.

words about God

From two different friends, two fascinating quotes about belief in God.

From Jana:
Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.
~Thomas Jefferson

And from Judith:
[excerpts from THE AWAKENING By Don Marquis]
...The God that we have worshipped for a million years begins to be,
And he whom we have prayed to creates himself out of the stuff of our prayers...

For them that have desired a God create him from the stuff of that desire....

He builds himself out of the desperate faith of them that have sought him,
And his face shall be wrought of the wish to see his face....

Out of agonies and love shall God be made...

For he builds himself of the passion of martyrs,
And he is woven of the ecstasy of great lovers,
And he is wrought of the anguish of them that have greatly needed him.

[This poem is much longer but these were phrases that particularly caught me. Unfortunately, I cannot find an online version. Let me know if you find one.]

I'll have to say more later...
For now, I just wanted to put these up, frame them together, and think about them for a while.

you say that like it's a BAD thing

[also posted at The Exponent]

Atheism- the absence of belief in the existence of deities.

At a large family dinner a few years ago, the conversation turned to the topic of one of my cousins (not present at this gathering). It had been discovered that this cousin no longer believed in the church (!!) which revelation brought about a general round of disappointed head-shaking. But that was not all, the informant continued, "he told me he no longer believes in God!" Gone was the disappointed head-shaking, in it's place was a profound sense of horror.

In my heart (a heart already secretly dealing with questions about the church) I also felt that sense of horror, my own hidden fears that I might lose God.

As manifest by the reactions of my family, the label "Atheist" is a slur, a tragedy, an almost incomprehensible failing, a fate worse than death (well, okay, maybe that's going a bit far, but you get the idea, right?)

[My trusty Webster's dictionary at home has as it's first definition of Atheism; UNGODLINESS, WICKEDNESS. ]

It always intrigues me when I see an individual address a predominately believing audience and refer to their own atheism. It doesn't happen very often. When it does, I try to speak to them about it afterward. Frequently they share the small reservation they feel about stating such a thing out loud in such a setting, there being such a negative stigma attached to the label amongst believers, but that they felt it should be included in their remarks anyways.

I, for one, am always glad they do.
Because, you see, I don't really believe in God anymore, and I'm having to confront my own reservations about admitting this to myself and my peers. (I was recently asked to give a lesson in relief society and was strongly tempted to say "Sure! But I'm atheist, do you still want me to teach the lesson?" But I didn't. I just graciously declined the invitation. Maybe someday.)

I have been delighted to discover the non-theist community is extremely diverse, full of good works, purpose, hope and joy. To discover, as Phil Zuckerman puts it, "Lack of theism does not render this world any less wondrous, lush, mystifying, or amazing."

I have an absence of belief in the existence God.

Which is very ironic because I have always been and still am a spiritual person. But it's not tragic and that's the point I'm trying to get across. There is incredible room for personal growth, for wonder and awe and profundity and mystery within the realms of non-theism. There are amazing people in this world, contributing members of society, friends, spouses, parents etc who do so much good even though they don't believe in God. (Funny isn't it, the impulse to add a caveat about how a person can be good without believing in God.)

I sort of wish I could go back in time to that family dinner and respond to the pronouncement that this cousin was atheist with something like "you say that like it's a BAD thing" and try to get a discussion going that perhaps distilled some of the negative associations with the label.
Maybe next time. :)
Meanwhile, I'll take this opportunity here, on this blog, to get a discussion going.

This is not a post to promote atheism and I want to avoid here any bashing or proselytizing of either theism or non-theism. I'm just curious what your own experiences with the label have been.

Break The Vessel

I encountered an amazing short story the other day.
Break the Vessel by Vylar Kaftan.
It is speculative fiction with some rather gruesome and erotic aspects to it, just to give you fair warning. (Also a warning, this post may give away spoilers. So read the story first if you are interested. It's not long.)

Break the Vessel in it's self is fascinating but I was particularly struck by a strong resonance between the two main characters and my own experience as a Mormon and questioning Mormonism.

On the one hand, Numa, our narrator. A ranking priest in the Temple assigned specialized duties to Sun God. Faithful, a believer, fully immersed in the the doctrines and in the role that has been assigned to him. His role is intended to make the audience recoil just a bit, we would maybe even consider it a vile disgusting duty Numa must perform. But how blessed, how honored Numa considers his lot. At several points in the story, Numa ponders the deep doctrines of his particular role, fascinated, faithful, and in awe.

So much about Numa reminds me of younger self as a member of the church. Heavily involved in service in the church, preoccupied and obsessed with the doctrines, with the spiritual. Mind oblivious to the gaps, the inconsistencies, the contradictions therein.

Then, there is Aki. A God in his mortal incarnation. With no memory of his former Glorious Divine self, but raised from birth with the knowledge that he is Aki, the Sunlord. The Chosen one with a vital role to play for his people.

But Aki comes to a point where he can no longer ignore the gaps, the inconsistencies, the contradictions.

He has questions.
A conversation between him and Numa is so familiar to me:

“What if I am not a god?”

“What?” I ask, shocked beyond propriety.

“What if there has been a mistake?”

“No mistake can be made.”

“How do you know I am Aki?”

“It is faith, Sunlord.”

But blind faith wasn't a satisfactory answer for Aki.

And his quest for knowledge only revealed the boundaries imposed upon God by his own Temple and High Priests.

Anyhow... It resonated. Just thought I'd share.

Aweism [and labeling within the secular humanist community]

In the latest issue of Free Inquiry Phil Zuckerman seeks to create a new label within the Secular Humanist community: Aweism.

A brief overview of his thoughts:

"'Atheist Is Fine, But...
Of course I am an atheist; I don't believe that any of the gods that have been created by humans actually exist... But it's not [a label] I feel comfortable using when people ask me to label myself. Here's why. First off, the term is one of negation rather than affirmation... Second, the label 'atheist' doesn't adequately capture the joy of living that I often experience... I find that the self-designation of 'atheist' simply falls short....

'Agnostic' Is O.K., But...
"Is [agnosticism] really even a position? It is actually more like the absence of a position, for it entails nothing more than admitted indecisiveness or embraced fence sitting... In sympathy with the agnostic position, I believe that there are just some eternal unknowns out there. The God question is not one of them, but other questions do persist that may ultimately be unanswerable... But when I ponder the existence of certain existential questions and cosmic mysteries, I often have an emotional reaction beyond that of mere dry puzzlement or cold contemplation...

'Secular Humanist' Is Better, But...
I do find the designation of 'secular humanist' useful and appropriate now and then... [But] I find that that secular humanism is more accurately a position or agenda that I support... a set of values, ideas, and practices that I advocate... [But] when I first heard my eldest daughter's heartbeat in that small doctors office in Eugene, Oregon, I didn't feel like a 'secular humanist.' What I felt was a tearful joy and wonder...

Yes, I am an atheist. Yes I am an agnostic- at least the version that suspects that there may be limits to human knowledge. Yes, I support and advocate the sane and noble goals of secular humanism. But I am something more. I am often full of a profound feeling. And the word that comes closest to describing that profound feeling is awe...

Aweism
Aweism is the belief that existence is ultimately a beautiful mystery, that being alive is a wellspring of wonder, and that the deepest questions of life, death, time, and space are so powerful as to inspire deep feelings of joy, poignancy, and sublime awe... There are literally hundreds of words to describe the religious... and yet when we consider the labels and self-designations available to secular folk we can count them on one or two hands... We should not shy away from articulating the various shades of secularity that we may experience, for it is important to others as well as to ourselves, to accurately describe the numerous ways in which one can be godless..."

Okay, now that I have cut and spliced, sliced and diced Zuckerman's article for you, the reason it stuck out to me is that I am somewhat up in the air as far as a belief in deity is concerned and one of the reasons I have been conflicted about discarding a profession in the divine is that I experience moments of strong tangible physiological responses to certain situations that I have always associated as "Spiritual". So it was intriguing to read his thoughts (recounting experiences where he has felt things similar to what I feel) on how his "lack of theism does not render this world any less wondrous, lush, mystifying, or amazing."

Just something interesting to chew on.

Now I am curious to wait for the next issue and see the livid letters to the editor about his treatment of their various chosen labels.

bring it to the alter

"Alters and Their Purposes". That was the name of the Adult Education for Pagans seminar I went to on Sunday. I had no idea what to expect, but ironically enough, it was yet another group of oldish hippie-ish folk (similar to what I have been encountering at the other faiths I have been visiting) and we met in the local library.

About two years ago I got up the courage to check out a book about Wicca from the library. I don't remember the title, "Wicca for Beginners" or something like that. I was searching for "The Divine Feminine" and had really enjoyed Sue Monk Kidd's Dance of the Dissident Daughter (I'll have to blog about that book sometime.) But I did have a harder time relating to most of the books I found about modern paganism- the appropriation of ancient culture's gods and goddess for use in spells for prosperity and love... I just couldn't get into it. The book that I enjoyed the most, The Body Sacred, ironically was also the last pagan book I read as it really brought home to me that a faith surrounding the Goddess (or Lady) had several problematic and contradictory aspects just like the patriarchal tradition I was questioning.

But yet when I heard about this Wiccan seminar, I couldn't resist, ditched the last session of General Conference to go have a "pagan experience". Like the books I had read, there was a lot that just didn't resonate with me and the gendered language that the group leader used (equating feminine with passivity and masculine with action etc...) was off-putting. But the concept of making a special space in a little nook or cranny of the home, collecting items that have meaning to help focus, remind... Well, I have had that thought before of making a little alter/shrine/something but never quite known exactly how to go about it. And I still don't, even after attending this seminar, but it is back to the front of my mind. One of my flickr friends posted a picture of her family alter in her home and that really stuck with me. Also back to front of my mind are the various alters of Christianity and Mormondom, sacrificial alters of the old testament, the sacrament table, the marriage alter (and the many times I passed out at that marriage alter while doing work for the dead in the temple. did anyone else ever do that? Something about kneeling for long durations, I passed out almost every time. Weird.)

Anyhow, in honor of the various little connections between Christianity and Pagan, and for your viewing entertainment, a little Dar Williams:

Take This Bread

So, as a follow up to God's Problem, where the question of human suffering and biblical interpretation led Bart Ehrman to agnosticism, we will read Take This Bread, the spiritual memoir of Sara Miles.

Sara was raised a secular atheist. A chef, an activist, a writer... religion, particularly Christianity, was the farthest thing from her mind. Then one day, out of curiosity, she stepped into a church, participated in the eucharist, and was changed forever. In her own words, "Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert: a blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian, a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism."

But the inconvenience of it all didn't matter. it happened, and she couldn't ignore it. As a chef, the core of her life was food, and feeing others, that act of 'eating God' spoke to her in a profound way, and in the scriptures she found a powerful spiritual doctrine to correspond:

"Poking around in the Bible, I found clues about my deepest questions. Salt, grain, wine and water; fig trees, fishermen and farmers. There were Psalms about hunger and thirst, about harvests and feasting. There were stories about manna in the wilderness, and prophets fed by birds. There was God appearing in radiance to Ezekiel and handing him a scroll: 'Mortal,' he said, 'eat this scroll,' and Ezekiel swallowed the words, 'sweet as honey,' and knew God.

And then in the New Testament appeared the central, astonishing fact of Jesus, proclaiming that he himself was the bread of heaven. 'Eat my flesh and drink my blood,' he said. I thought how outrageous Jesus was to the church of his time: he didn't wash before meals, he said the prayers incorrectly, he hung out with women, foreigners, the despised and unclean. Over and over, he told people not to be afraid. I liked all that, but mostly I liked that he said he was bread, and told his friends to eat him...

I couldn't stop thinking about another story: Jesus instructing his beloved, fallible disciple Peter exactly how to love him: 'Feed my sheep'... It seemed pretty clear. If I wanted to see God, I could feed people."

And so that is what she did, opening food pantries in her town to feed the needy. Because that is what Jesus wanted her to do, feed his sheep.

Sara covers many themes in this book; conversion, faith, spiritual discovery, scriptural interpretation, political activism, 'good works', the difficult but necessary path of being 'one' with god's people, women in the ministry, etc...

Here is Sara Miles This I Believe essay about her conversion, and you can read excerpts from her book here, here, and here.

We'll discuss this book Aug 13 at The Exponent. I can 't wait to see what you thought.

God's Problem

Discussion of this book is taking place at the Exponent. For more about the book, Dave Banack of Times and Seasons reviewed it, as did Chris Hedges of the Harvard Divinity School. You can also read and/or listen to the NPR interview with author Bart Ehrman.



God’s Problem is about Bart Ehrman’s problem reconciling a belief in an all powerful, all loving, actively involved God with the reality of the enormous suffering in this world. The book is extensive in its scope, and I find myself scanning my notes (several pages worth) and not even knowing where to begin. There are his textual criticisms of the various biblical passages where he contests authorship and origin, there are his extensive explanations of the various biblical answers given, and of course, there are his logic-driven rebuffs to those answers.
In tackling this problem of suffering, Ehrman did an excruciating job of detailing what is meant by that word, giving us gut-wrenching reality checks, the numbers and visuals of ‘suffering’ (i.e., 11 million dead in the Holocaust, 2 million dead at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, 30 million dead from the 1918 flu epidemic, every minute five people die of malaria, every minute 25 people die of water-related health problems, every five seconds a child dies of starvation, etc, etc, etc…). This book was not just about personal trials and learning experiences, he is talking about the extremities of human suffering that are prevalent throughout the course of human history. Those billions living in pain and dying in horrific ways, was it because they had sinned? Or as a test of faith? Or because of cosmic forces of evil?
God’s Problem brought up all sorts of emotions, challenged many of my assumptions, and left me with more questions than answers. His scriptural knowledge is impressive (I am also enjoying his book Misquoting Jesus), the contradicting explanations for suffering that he writes about have been on my mind a lot lately and his crisis of faith is one that I understand very well. I did find myself occasionally frustrated by the rigidity with which he held to an all-or-nothing view of the bible’s explanation of God. While rejecting the conservative Christian view of the bible as the literal word of God he still stubbornly refuses interpretations that are not solidly rooted in the bible. For example, Jesus as divine and suffering on our behalf, or a God that is less-than omnipotent, or an eternal reward in heaven… those are all concepts that he finds attractive, but not substantiated by enough biblical authors to be in consideration as answers; “…for a biblical scholar like me, I have to admit that it still seems problematic.” (pg 272.) I also found his ‘solution’ in the last few pages to be simplistic and shallow. However, given that the point of God’s Problem is to show how the bible explains suffering, once can hardly fault Ehrman for being rigid with what it says, or for not going beyond the scope of the book by expounding upon how we can alleviate suffering (a complex topic all of it’s own.)
This was a fascinating read, and I can’t wait to hear what you thought of it.

What parts of this book stuck out to you the most?
What arguments did you agree with? Which did you disagree with? And why?
Anyone up to challenging or expanding upon Ehrman’s textual criticism of the biblical authors?
What are examples of LDS scripture and doctrine on suffering, and how do they correspond to the biblical answers Ehrman talks about? Do they shed additional light on the subject?
And, of course, feel free to add anything else you’d like to share about the book or the topic.

(By the way, reading this book made me very excited to begin our next book, Take This Bread, which will be introduced in a few days. Sara Miles, raised an atheist, doesn’t have Ehrman’s burden of ‘biblical scholarship’ and as such finds a powerful interpretation of divinity in the bible, as well as a personal calling to help alleviate suffering in her community.)

God's Problem

(also posted at the Exponent II)

Anyone up for a group discussion of Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem?

Bart Ehrman was raised a devout Christian, spending an extensive college career devoted to the Bible and training to become a minister. After serving for some time in various churches he found himself becoming more and more conflicted about how the Bible (and the Christian tradition) tries to explain why people suffer. In God's Problem, Ehrman delineates the contradictory explanations put forth by the Bible, contradictions which he eventually could no longer reconcile, leading him to leave Christianity; "I finally... came to realize that I could no longer believe in the God of my tradition, and acknowledged that I was an agnostic; I don't 'know' if there is a God; but I think that if there is one, he certainly isn't the one proclaimed by the Judeo-Christian tradition, the one who is actively and powerfully involved in this world." (pg 4) The idea that there was an all powerful AND all loving God could no longer held any credibility for him in the face of "young children kidnapped, raped and murdered... millions starving, suffering horrible and excruciating lives that lead to horrible and excruciating deaths... [and] sadistic tyrants savagely [attacking] and [destroying] entire villages, towns, and even countries..." (pg5). He asks the poignant question: "If God is at work... feeding the hungry with miraculous multiplication of loaves, why is it that one child- a mere child!- dies every five seconds of hunger? Every five seconds." (pg 6)

In this book Ehrman addresses and compares the major explanations put forth by the Bible, including:

-suffering as a punishment for sin
-suffering as a test of faith
-suffering as beyond comprehension since we cannot understand God
-suffering as just the nature of things and needing to be accepted
and, of course...
-don't worry, God will eventually make right all that is wrong with the world.

Ehrman's conclusion is that,if there is a God, he could be either all powerful but doesn't care, or all loving but unable to help; however, in the face of all historic evidence, he cannot possibly be both. And if, on the other hand, he is too mysterious for us to understand, than it is impossible to make any statements about either his omnipotence or his loving nature.
God's Problem is a defense of that thesis.
(Go here to read an excerpt from God's Problem, or to listen to the NPR interview with Bart Ehrman.)

I realize many of you out there will want to tackle these (blasphemous?) charges right here and now, but please resit the temptation to do that. We will be discussing this book on July 9th, and I would LOVE to hear your responses to Ehrman's claims, and your own thoughts on how you answer the problem of why people suffer at that time.

Now for those of you really disturbed that we are reading a book by a Christian who lost his faith, hang tight. Next month we will read the spiritual memoir of an atheist who became Christian and has devoted her life to Christ's work of feeding the hungry.

the mormon woman

"...Unto the woman, I, the Lord God said; I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." -Moses 4: 22

"Adam fell that men might be, and men are that they might have joy"-2Nephi 2:25

he gets the credit and the joy, she gets the blame and the sorrow.

Sometimes, when I let it, I tremble with rage.

A guest post over at Zelophehads Daughters asks about the contradictions that Mormon Women face. I copied Lynnette's response in my journal, it was that good, and put into words many of the disturbing contradictions I have been trying to reconcile:

"There are several contradictions in LDS teachings related to gender that I’ve found particularly challenging:

–We say on the one hand that Eve made the right choice, and she is honored for it. However, the Eden story remains the basis for the ritual subordination of women. Are women being punished for Eve’s transgression?

–We talk about God being no respecter of persons, and say that every human being is a child of God with divine potential. Yet while men are told that they can become like God, and are authorized to use God’s power, it’s much less clear what the eternal role of women consists of–and there are disturbing indications that their ultimate purpose is to facilitate male exaltation (along the lines of Paul’s observation that “Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.”)

–We emphasize that personal revelation is available to everyone, and yet in our most sacred spaces only men covenant to hearken to God directly, whereas women’s access to God is formally mediated through their husbands.

–We talk about marriage being both patriarchal and egalitarian, asserting both that the husband “presides” and that the two are “equal partners”. I see these two principles as being fundamentally in conflict.

–We say that motherhood is of the utmost importance, and that the most important thing a woman can do is raise her children–and yet we have no information about Heavenly Mother, and in fact are explicitly told that communication with her is off-limits.

All of these issues have been discussed at length here and elsewhere on the Bloggernacle, of course, and I’m well aware that many interpret them differently and would disagree with my assertion that they involve contradictions. But for me personally, one of the basic contradictions in my religious life has been between my experience of myself as a full human being and my personal encounters with God which have led me to hope that God in fact sees me that way–and LDS teachings and practices which challenge that notion. I can’t say I’ve resolved that contradiction, though for my own peace of mind I’ve tended to put more faith in the former and hope that the latter are tied up with the challenges of a fallen world, rather than being the result of divine decree."

All I can add is "Amen sister!"

a petty god

From Philip Pullman's The Subtle Knife;
"There are two great powers and they have been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit." (pg. 320)

This passage brought back, quite vividly, a memory from about ten years ago. I was newly returned from serving in the mission field. I was saturated in the gospel, my testimony rock solid, I had never been more assured that I would never lose my faith. Then one day I was sitting in the temple, my mind wandering just a tad during the endowment session, and an idea began to grow of this petty God who knew that his only way to maintain the little power he had was to make his subjects think they had to constantly humble themselves before him, never question him, always obey and always submit. this God knew that if they ever stopped debasing themselves before him they would gain great power, and not need him anymore, and he couldn't tolerate the idea of his losing what little authority he had. What an idea to pop into my (fully faithful) head during the temple endowment (a ceremony set up to re-enforce the notion of submission and obedience to God). I was quite shocked at what my mind had conjured up. Where did that come from? This little fantasy of God as a petty power-hungry manipulator using a smokescreen of omnipotence and mercy, what dark part of my mind did that crawl out of? Later, I remember mentioning it to my father; "so, have you ever wondered if...?" The response was immediate: "Absolutely not!!!" Of course, I didn't believe it either... but I was a little disturbed that I had thought it.

Reminds me of another passage from The Subtle Knife, the words of an officer of the magisterium (the church;) "By their fruits shall ye know them. By their questions shall ye see the serpent gnawing at their heart..."

Now, ten years later, it is the church that I don't believe in. Perhaps I had a little snake snacking on my heart, perhaps not. Who knows all the different paths I could have taken. But this is where I am. I have no faith in any religious organization to represent God. But I do still believe in God. Sort of. Sometimes. Okay, I have to admit that my concept of God is taking quite a beating. Really not sure what to think about deity right now (aside from a lingering trust that there is something bigger out there).
But that is for another post.

P.S. my copy of The Amber Spyglass is at the library, waiting for me to pick it up! I have really enjoyed this trilogy.
P.P.S my copy of God's Problem just came in the mail!!! more about that one soon....

temple worthy

A recent post at fMh took me back to the turmoil and struggle I felt leading up to returning my temple recommend. Namely, the issue of who has authority to pronounce me 'worthy' before God. In the initial post, Carol Lynn Pearson states, "We Mormon woman have a conversation about “authority” all the time, with ourselves, with each other. No priesthood, no authority. Sigh. I can’t even remember when I last believed that." Sadly, the rest of the post didn't really seem to address that issue (though it was a touching anecdote) and many of the subsequent comments bemoaned that lack. Sonnet's comment got to the root of the issue: "...the basic fact remains that you can’t go to the temple unless your bishop and SP deem you worthy (!)..." That, for me, hit at the crux of the topic of worthiness. Another person is in charge of determining it with a set list of what makes a person unworthy (heavily dependent on what they believe, what they consume and what they wear.) The church sanctions men to stand in the place of God and determine who is worthy and who is not.

What it came down to for me, was the difference between being worthy before God, and being "temple worthy" as outlined by the church. I had come to the point where I no longer believed that God was concerned if a person drank tea, or wore a certain type of underwear or adhered to the tenants of a particular religion. Those things had nothing to do with worthiness. But is still took me a little while before I could reconcile that with the notion of being temple worthy. For a little while, I still confused the two.

The realization I finally came to was the concept of respect. Respect for the rules of an organization. While I may feel that I am worthy before God, I recognize the right of an organization to impose rules as to who can enter THEIR building. Other groups have rules and restrictions with their special places (i.e. during the SLC olympics I found that there were certain parties you could go to only if you were a citizen of a particular country. I guess I didn't look Canadian enough) . Out of respect, I would not intentionally invade another religion's holy place if it was only for the initiated. And I came to feel that I should show the same respect for my own faith: it's their building, they can make the rules if they want to. And accept that while it makes me a bit of an outsider, it doesn't effect my relationship with God.

Honestly, this would be so much easier if, like Caroline, I could answer all those temple recommend questions correctly but simply chose not to go in for the interview on principle. This puts her above reproach, so to speak. My own path, however, has been different; I don't wear garments, I drink experimentally (sake anyone?), I have an array of teas I have collected and occasionally drink coffee. These things taint me in the eyes of my peers. I'd love to say that I am confidant enough in my standing before God (claiming my own authority, to take a page from Carol Lynn Pearson) that I don't need the cultural reinforcement... but to be honest, I am still rather sensitive to being viewed as 'unworthy' by my clan ("she's not temple worthy!"). Not sensitive enough that I alter my life to conform to the acceptable parameters (I feel guided in this path I am in, if that doesn't sound to corny to say)... but it is still a tender little spot that if pushed, is sore like a bruise.
Which is why, ultimately, I realized that I couldn't participate beyond a certain point in that thread at fMh without exposing myself, offending others, starting a discussion that I didn't have the energy for.