unscriptured

After I discussed with God last week a little of what capitalism and religion have in common, he took some time this week to point out some other similar things. Not things that are essential to capitalism or religion but things that are in the same vein.

The main thing he talked about was the production side of things.

Mass production is how capitalists keep their costs down and allow us to buy an incredible array of things for prices that just about anybody can afford. Mass production is about taking your design work and amortizing its costs over a whole lot of essentially identical copies. In religion it’s about having one guidebook, a bible, if you will, that everybody works from. It used to be that every tribe had its own shaman and he pretty much got to make up whatever stories got across his vision of the gods, but along came organized religion and suddenly your spiritual leaders have a codified book or set of books that they have to work from. They still get to vamp and improvise, but only so long as they don’t move too far afield from the core reference work.

Another important thing about production is incremental improvement. You don’t just come out with a new model of car and then keep selling the same thing year after year, you find ways to improve it, or at least to change it so it keeps seeming like something new. In “western” religion we didn’t just come up with the Torah and say there it is, we’re done. We came up with derivatives and new works that took the old works as given. We’ve got the Koran, we’ve got the Christian Bible (in any number of translations), and we’ve got the Book of Mormon, and that doesn’t even take into account the variations that people like David Koresh and Jim Jones never got around to writing down.

So remember, God may be eternal and unchanging, but not religion, you can always find something new in religion.

I was thinking about politics this week so of course I decided to talk to God about capitalism. I do live in the United States after all.

What I wanted to know, is what does God see in common between capitalism and religion. For instance, one of the basic tenets of capitalism is that something is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. Just because some widget costs twenty dollars to manufacture doesn’t mean it’s worth twenty dollars, let alone twenty plus some necessary markup. The actual quality of the widget doesn’t necessarily matter, and the utility of it doesn’t necessarily matter. All that matters is what the market will bear. Now the market rarely has perfect information and, even if it did, emotions would still come into it.

God told me that that principle applies to churches. She says that some religions do great works, some good, and some not so good. Some of the best never get big, and some of the ones that did get big, got there by not so much doing good as by building a good reputation.

And of course, some got there just by intimidation. After all, there’s a lot to be said for the inspirational value of knowing that the priest gets to select the next person to be sacrificed.

Albert Hoffman died this week. It was seventy years ago when he discovered LSD and sixty-five years ago when he (accidentally) became the first person to go on an acid trip. He lived to the ripe old age of 102.

While God and I talked about that, she admitted that a lot of religious inspiration through the years has been more the result of being touched by drugs than by being touched by an angel. The right mushroom or just enough ergot, when you’re not expecting it, can be a real epiphany.

We got off onto a general discussion of spiritual revelation. She acknowledged that she connects with people in a wide variety of ways, but said that only a small fraction of what’s been attributed to her, should actually have been. The rest of it can be chalked up to such diverse things as alcohol and other drugs, chemical imbalances in the brain, and really good, or even really bad, sex.

The gist of it seemed to be that along with sausages and laws, it’s best to not look too closely at how religious revelations are made.

I was talking to God about music this week. I listen to a lot of music, some of it new, some of it old, some of it really old. I’ve never been one of those people that say they don’t make any good music anymore, although there are times when I find it tempting.

The thing is that Sturgeon’s Law applies. Theodore Sturgeon, one of the greatest science fiction writer’s to ever put words on a page, famously coined the notion that ninety percent of everything is crud, and it applies to music as much as to anything. When I was younger, I somehow had more time to sift through looking for that ten percent that’s worthwhile, but not so much anymore. Now God made a point of telling me that my ten percent is not the same as someone else’s ten percent. In music, possibly even more than in most art forms, there’s a lot of room for personal quirks of taste. But even allowing for that it just seems to me that there’s a lot of stuff that comes out that really no one should consider good, but it still sells.

After thinking about that for a minute, God told me that for a lot of people it’s more important that it be new than that it be good. It’s not that they don’t care if it’s good, they’d certainly prefer that everything new was good, but not everyone listens to music the way that I do. I tend to soak up music not like a sponge, but like a tree. I need the music to soak into my ground first before I start taking it into my soul. I put music on in the background and get familiar with it. Eventually, after I’ve listened to it a number of times, it’ll start to break through and I’ll start to really notice it. For a lot of music, that’s the point where I’ll decide that it’s neither here nor there, it’s music that I don’t mind listening to, but I’m not going to seek it out. For other music, it’ll have grown on me and I’ll start to pay attention to it. And some music, by the time I notice it, it’s because it’s started to annoy me.

Now that being how I listen to music, I want the music to be good. But some people, some people listen to the music, maybe not necessarily more consciously but more actively. For those people, they get in just a few listens everything they’re going to get out of it. They don’t need to keep listening to it, looking for angles and facets that they didn’t notice before. They need new music if they’re going to find anything new and the journey is more important than the destination, so for them, new is more important than good.

Of course, some people just put on music because it’s fashionable, they have no real taste of their own, they just want to listen to something and anything will do. For those people ninety percent of everything is just fine. Not that they won’t deny that, with every bone in their body.

When people talk about the “God of Abraham” they’re usually doing it to point out that there’s really a lot in common between the Jewish, Christian and Muslim religions. They point this out to try and say, for instance, that these three religions are like the three leaves on a stem of poison oak, separate but still together, still part of the same whole.

This, of course, ignores the many further subdivisions that these religions break down into; for instance, the bickering between Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalians and Baptists, on the Christian leaf; or between Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Jewish denominations; or Sunni and Shiite Muslims. When you really start to look at it, there’s not three religions that worship the “God of Abraham” but dozens or hundreds.

So why did their God let this happen? Why did their God let them put conflicting words into his mouth? Why does he let religions offer competing “truths?” Could it be that he just doesn’t care, doesn’t care about religion?

Or could it be that short of actually physically revealing himself to every person on the planet there’d still be plenty of charlatans and con men willing to trade their own made-up relationship with God for a chance to wield power over their fellow humans?

I kept meaning to ask God about all that this week, but somehow he was never around when I thought about it.

God was pointing out to me this week that somewhere along the way most Christian nations switched from holding their weekly religious services on Saturday to holding them on Sunday. He tells me that this was actually partly in response to some prompting from him.

How come? Well, the reason apparently has to do with the work week and with praying. If you’ll recall, according to the Biblical myth of creation, God created the universe in seven days and that’s why weeks are seven days long. Or more precisely, God created the universe in six days and then rested for a day. This presupposes that the seven day week that had been around much earlier than the Bible had come out of the same event if not necessarily the same telling.

Anyway, God had developed the habit of working for six days and then resting for one. Being made in his image, we took whatever chances we could to do the same; although you’ll note that not being gods ourselves that we tend to want a little more rest than just one day out of every seven. Now being that the seventh day, the very day that God wanted to rest, was the day that so many religions were pushing for everyone to pray and otherwise clamor for God’s attention, he decided to do a little pushing back and get at least some of us to switch to Sunday.

So the next time you rush off to church on Sunday morning and it seems like you’re not really getting much attention from the big guy, just remember that it’s the Monday of his work week, he’s still getting back into the work mode and maybe even has something of a hangover from “resting” a little too hard on his day off.

I’ve talked with God before about the problem some fundamentalists have with magic, how they think that it’s the devil’s work but that miracles are different. We talked some more about it this week and I think I’ve hit upon the difference, the thing that qualitatively separates miracles and magic.

The big picture distinction is, well, miracles come from God and magic comes from anything else that’s sentient. Magic comes from humans and elves and fairies and leprechauns and so on. You might notice there that pretty much everything in that sentence is except humans is made up. There really aren’t elves and fairies and such, and there really isn’t magic. But if we ignore that magic is made up or just plain faked, we get down to the distinction being that magic comes from humans and miracles come from God.

Ah, but haven’t the saints all performed miracles? And so then, don’t miracles come from humans? Well, if you’re going to take that position then there’s no distinction I can find, a miracle is just magic and then the whole Christian mythos ceases to have anything to say on the matter.

So what is it that makes humans something other than just another animal, from a Christian point of view. It’s free will. God gave us souls so that we could exercise free will and be something more than just parts of her. So there’s the distinction, magic is an exercise of free will and miracles are an exercise of God’s will.

So are the Christians secretly opposed to free will? Looking at the politics that the Christian leaders support, there’s certainly evidence to support the notion but I hate to saddle all Christians with the baggage of their leaders. So, I’d just like to say, I’d like to see more people thinking for themselves, more people not blindly following what they’re told should be their faith. I think we’ve had enough miracles to get us by, but the world could use a little more magic.