King Jr., St. John, Nietzsches, and Me

Doing It, Religiously

[Above: Russian nesting dolls originated in the 19th Century. They were inspired by earlier Japanese dolls that depicted nested series of Japanese gods -- a polytheistic image.]

Anitra and I spoke Friday at Tim Harris' University of Washington class on poverty and homelessness. After the class, Tim drove me back to the Real Change office while Anitra ran off to spend all her money on tomato plants. In the car Tim played the recording (see A True Revolution of Values) he made of himself backing up Martin Luther King Jr.'s Riverside Speech on the guitar.

The speech contains this passage:

"This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept -- so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force -- has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John:

Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us."

The call for love is great, but at the risk of once again prompting the question "So, Wes, when did you first decide to worship Satan?" (answer: The first time some idiot asked me that question) I am going to heap disrespect upon the monotheological underpinnings of King's call to fellowship and offer a polytheistic perspective.

Consider this a continuation of my rant, begun with Extremes of Worship, in which I complained about the notion that all religions are fundamentally the same, that we all worship the same God, blah, blah, blah. Notions that invariably disregard whole swaths of hard-core polytheists.

Oh sure, King is fine with Hindus and Buddhists, as long as they agree with him in the existence of an ultimate reality. But he would compare to "Nietzsches of the world" anyone who doesn't buy into that ultimate reality, and guess who those people include? Me. And I'm not a Nietzsche of the world.

King supports his view with a quote from St. John, the same guy (?) who put the words "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" into Christ's mouth. Way to kiss up to the non-Christians. Not.

My own polytheistic view, (not to be confused with all of them, which is an undelimitable generality of no significant application) is at odds with all the great religions of human-kind but nevertheless still ends up agreeing with the call to love, is that there is no ultimate reality.

In fact, a large class of the gods can be identified with the individual realities "on the shelf."

Realities are narratives about what is, and decide what is. The decisions as to what is are mindful. Without mind there is no what is. There is no reality.

There is no singular ultimate mind. There are minds and states of minds and realities, plural. There are realities within realities, gods within gods. There are realities that are unstable, that transform into other realities, which transform into others.

The gods (of this class) are metaphors for these realities, or they are these realities. The distinction doesn't matter, since the word "god" is totally up for grabs since nobody else ever gives it a legitimate definition anyway. (A legitimate definition being one which allows you to identify whether an entity is a god or not, as opposed to naming an entity that is presumed to exist, declaring it to be unique, and listing attributes.)

So where does that put us? No ultimate reality, so Martin Luther King Jr.s call for love, in so far as it's based on a presumed ultimate reality that doesn't exist, is BS.

John's assertion that Love is God, becomes, to the polytheist, Love is A god.

So how can I still agree with King?

The answer is that even though polytheists do not believe in any ultimate reality, we are not thereby forced to be naive relativists, granting equal value to all that calls itself value in any reality that comes down the road.

I am NOT Nietzschean! In spite of sharing some superficial similarities. I use exclamation points and short one and two sentence paragraphs, yes, but there are such things as Wes realities distinct from Nietzsche realities. I am someone else.

[Right: Not me.]

My realities have grown out of my life, and I have been my realities, and I, or rather my realities, have chosen how we were to grow, and we (the realities that I consist of) have histories and dynamics and we grow into each other and we have identities within identities, and we can own ourselves and what we are.

The outcome is, I can agree with King not because God is within me, but because THAT god is one of me, and I have chosen to embrace it.

The difference between the polytheist decision to embrace a god and the monotheistic decision to embrace that aspect of The God, is the difference between a free choice (modulo the understanding that we are our choices) among alternatives and a decision to surrender to an irresistible power.

The god of love is NOT an all-powerful god. It IS weak, as the "Nietzsches of the world" would have it. But I differ from the Nietzsches of the world in that I consciously take the side of this weak god over stronger ones, to add my strength to it. Weak, yes, cowardly, no.

[Below: Cat-gods within cat-gods.]

Extremes of Worship

Doing It, Religiously

Every now and then I'll run into a Unitarian or a Southern Baptist or somewhoever, and after it's established that I'm not Christian but I claim to being "religious" in some ill-defined sense, I get told this: "Well, we all worship the same God really, don't we?"

I have to stifle my laughter sometimes. There are two ways in which that statement is comical to a polytheist such as myself. The obvious way, and the not so obvious way.

The obvious way is that, clearly, if I don't believe in the singularity of gods, then I am not going to go along with the notion that "your god" is "my god". "Which of 'my' gods, pray tell, are you saying is the same as yours, Bwana?"

[Above left: Not all directions are up. I made these to "worship" possibilities.]

The not so obvious way that the statement is laughable to me, arises from the fact that, for polytheists such as myself, we find monotheistic worship to be absurdly extreme.

Think about it. If you believe there is only one all-powerful and omniscient and all-loving god, you've only got one shot at worship. All your devotion has to be focused on your one and only worship-able object. I see this as dysfunctional. It results in the same kind of over-the-top devotion we've come to expect from stalkers.

Whereas if you can see the impersonal god-hood's multiplicity of personal faces and identities, you can spread that devotion out, and probably will.

"We're all basically the same."

Some polytheists are what are called henotheists (or monolaters). They believe in many gods but pick one out for exclusive devotion. Monotheists might see such people as being "practically" monotheists. But to see how far off that could be, consider that one of my gods is the one I call The God Of Highest Worship.

The name of The God Of Highest Worship is The God Of Highest Worship. The chief attribute and only significant source of power of The God Of Highest Worship is that the God Of Highest Worship is the god of highest worship.

The God Of Highest Worship has never created or destroyed a world or a single creature. The God Of Highest Worship is probably the weakest god I can imagine in terms of his/her/its effect on the rest of the world.

However, by meditating on how I feel today about The God Of Highest Worship, I can discover how my own values are changing. This is extremely valuable to me. It helps me figure out what I am becoming.

It's a far cry from bowing down to the God who could draw out Leviathan with a hook. Like that would matter to me.

Doing It, Religiously

More On How I Do Religion

Let's talk about morality and religion!

When I was a kid the assumed connection between morality and religion among Christians was often expressed through the use of the term "Good Christian." "So-and-so is a Good Christian" meant he was moral. If you were mean you were not a Good Christian. No one checked whether So-and-so was even Christian, or not, to begin with. There was no comparable term for non-Christians of any type that paid respect to the religion. If a good person was Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, or Atheist, you would not say they were a Good Buddhist, or Good Jew, or Good Muslim, or Good Atheist, respectively. The only way to acknowledge that they were not Christian and nevertheless good people was to say they were LIKE a Good Christian. "If So-and-so found Jesus he would be a Good Christian."

In respect to Christianity, it was deemed essential to at least appear good in public to give credit to Christianity. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." But if a non-Christian behaved morally, no one would admit that they gave credit to their non-Christian religion.

When we went to Taiwan my Mother warned me to watch out for myself because so few of the people would be Christians. But I found good kind generous people wherever I went, in a country that at that time was more than 95% non-Christian.

So I got thinking about that. What I concluded, over time, was that "Ye shall know them by their fruits" is right, and that the rampant bigotry and defiance of that valid precept of Jesus and other good teachers, in denying its application to non-Christians, regularly gives discredit to Christianity.

A good religion makes a person who does it good. If your version of Christianity leads you to deny the goodness of others, then it has led you to meanness. Therefore that version of yours is not a good religion (for you! It might not have such a poor effect on someone else.)

There are of course, truly Good Christians. But there are also Good Buddhists, Good Jews, Good Muslims, Good Atheists, Good Hindus, Good Wiccans, etc.

The issue for me became this: what ways of doing religion lead to a morally good life?

And when you put it that way you can see that to some extent it may be a matter of fit. A way of doing religion that leads one man to become moral may have the opposite effect on another.

The way that I use is a way of becoming aware of rights and wrongs through observation and consciously evoked empathy and imagination. I want to do right by knowing right. I can't be the best judge of how it works, but I'm quite sure the other ways that people have hashed out and promoted won't work for me.

In the course of studying and perceiving rights and wrongs, I came to a realization that there is very little absolute wrong in the world. What we have, mostly, are competing rights.

Therefore discernment of goods is essential. And therefore it is presumptive, and premature, in my view, to speak of an existing highest good that integrates all good. It presupposes that the work of integrating is a fait accompli.

This observation lies at the core of my polytheism, which is not a belief, but an attitude that guides and informs the imagination in the work of discernment of values and enables me to visualize the active balancing and negotiating of values that can bring a higher good out of them.