...New Years resolutions. I guess it's the last thing I can do before embarking on the New Year. People think it's a silly waste of time, and most of the time, it seems like they're right. But like my friend Kierra mentioned, if you actually give it some serious thought, have a concrete plan with specific steps and a time for when you're going to do them, your chances of actually achieving them increases. Plus I'm a sentimental fellow, so I also enjoy the notion of New Years Resolutions on an aesthetic level. It seems right to make goals at the beginning of a new year. To most of us it's more than just a unit of measurement; it's a symbol for change. Otherwise people would call it Following Year, not New Year. That being said, here are my resolutions:
-I'm going to observe Lent. Usually I just give something up, something minor like drinking or movies or whatever. This year I'd like to make a sacrifice of my time and energy, something infinitely more valuable than some small possession. I'd like to
observe this time a little more traditionally, as in going to Church, prayer and contemplation etc. I would like to try fasting on specific dates, but we'll see how that goes. The life of a student, specifically a student actor whose time is almost completely devoured by a mainstage, can't always afford the luxury of voluntary poverty and self-denial (in some ways, the job's already been done for me!) I am doing this for a couple reasons. First of all, I'd like to see if I actually can do it, after being estranged from religion for so long, to see if practicing Christianity still has any relevance in my own life. In light of the ideas I've been going over from Karen Armstrong's book, I've been inspired to seek some spiritual guidance if I ever hope to cultivate this aspect in my life, because I think without it I would not have the ability or experience to do it on my own. When people are initiated into Buddhism, they are required to take refuge in the Buddha, the Teachings of the Buddha, and the Sangha, which is the spiritual Community. In the Gospels Jesus Christ said that when "two or more are gathered in my name, I am there". Community is emphasized in all religions from east to west, so it seems like it would be counterproductive to make this effort alone. We are social animals after all. Part of a religious effort requires one to reach out, seek out and find oneself in the Other. Although there is a place for solitude, if a religion can't help you function properly among other people, it's not a very good one. and if nothing else, this is to see if I can sustain a routine like this for at least forty days and forty nights. There's a time limit to it, so if it doesn't work out, it'll be over and I won't be obliged to continue with it. I'm doing this as an experiment, essentially. The last time I went to church several years ago, it did absolutely nothing for me. But that could be for a number of reasons. What's to say it'll be that way now, after everything I've learned in that time?
-In the summer time, I am going to devote more time to my visual art, and writing. The winter at school is for the theatre and I don't want to take any focus away from it, so I've reserved Summer for painting and drawing, something which I've neglected for way too long, much to my own detriment. I feel like drawing feeds my imagination and complements my storytelling in ways that I could not do without it. So there it is.
-I will learn at least one new recipe from my More-With-Less cookbook. I think this is doable.
-I will use my bike. Now that I have a light and gloves for the cold I'm better equipped. Now if only I could find my helmet...
-as I said a few posts ago, if I'm not doing anything in the Fringe Festival, I'm going to try my hand at the 3-Day Novel Writing contest. You heard me. Anybody want to join me?
I'm telling you this, readers, not to show off so people will be all "ooo look at everything Liam's going to accomplish this year", (especially if I don't accomplish these things, and then won't I be a supreme ass?) I'm telling you this because you have a part to play as well. If I didn't say anything to my friends, I would probably be less motivated to do it. I haven't hammered out all the details for these goals yet, but I need people around me to support me so I don't give up, and actually follow through. If anybody has any resolutions they need support with let me know and I'll gladly do the same. I guess they're not so much new Years resolutions as they are things I've wanted to do for myself and this seems like the right time in my life to do them, and they just happen to coincide with the oncoming year. They're more like New Years projects than resolutions. The term New Years Resolution does smack of triviality nowadays, doesn't it? Well, there's no reason why it can't be reclaimed. After all, 2010 is the Year of Extraordinary Thinking: so what better time to start than now?
Have a good night, everybody!
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Reflections on The Case For God by Karen Armstrong
I have been inclined to agree with the argument that all religions essentially preached a similar (if not the same) message of compassion, and more importantly that their founders were all inspired by the same experience. This is an idea that many liberal-minded intellectuals, artists, and spiritual authorities like the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu seem to advocate. But I was always troubled by it; without absolute certainty, it seemed like wishful thinking. There was always an irrational fear at the back of my head and the bottom of my heart that what if maybe, just maybe, one of these many many fundamentalist sectarian groups are right, and the rest of us are all right screwed? Again, it's an irrational fear, but it was there nonetheless. Even if they're not, how could anybody prove that the religious figures of the ancient world thought in these high-minded terms that we yearn for today? After all, Yahweh, the God of the tribe of Israel was just another tribal deity competing for mastery over the cosmos in the pantheon of Middle-eastern believers; a symbolic measure taken by these people to galvanize themselves as a nation. Pragmatically speaking, what did it matter whether it was true or not, as long as it got the job done? What this book illustrated for me was that in fact these religions were indeed inspired by a similar spiritual experience, and there is more historical evidence for it now.
The main points I learned in this book are as follows:
-our concept of God as we know it is a modern construct
-our understanding of the words 'belief' and 'faith' is also a modern construct
-literal interpretation and fundamentalism is a modern construct
-Armstrong employs the ancient Greek idea that all methods of understanding used by human beings fall under the categories of logos and mythos. Religion, like art, falls under the latter, and the reason why people misunderstand it is because they misplace it in the former.
-religion is something that you do, and that it takes practice and skill like anything else. Rather than a set of arbitrary laws and abstract concepts, it is a technique to unlocking a person's faith and spirituality, and if any method fails to do so, if it fails to yield practical results, then it is not doing its job. Armstrong explains that this is how the believers of the ancient world thought about religion, and seeing as they are chronologically closer to the wellspring of these spiritual ideas, their opinion does carry a lot of weight for me today. Any of the rituals that religious people partake in would seem absurd and abstract if observed from the outside with a logical mind. A religious experience for the people of the ancient world evoked a sense of Mystery, a "Cloud of Unknowing" as Armstrong puts it, a depth that cannot be explained rationally and has its place in our world, even though crusaders of Reason try to eradicate it.
Probably the most radical effect that Armstrong's arguments have is that they completely changed the way I think about the words 'belief', 'faith' and 'God'. Armstrong states that our understanding of these words are all the product of our modern age, which began some 500 odd years ago. Belief, she says,did not always mean assenting to something and accepting it as true. The word might have had a completely different connotation in the ancient world. Belief is related to the word "lief" which is related to the word "love". The Latin word for believe is "credere", which meant something else as well. To say credo, "I believe", it actually was closer to "I engage myself","I commit", "I trust". So from this we can deduce that at no point does the Bible ask us to believe in the modern sense, which is to accept as true. Rather, what it asks us is to commit ourselves and invest ourselves in the words of the text. Belief to the people of the ancient world, was not blind faith. If anything it was closer to wrestling with God the way Jacob did. It required study, testing, and if necessary, doubt. It needed thorough scrutiny, a delving into the subject to reach a higher plane of being. The pre-modern Christian thinkers tried to understand their God through apophatic methods, which is the knowledge of God gained through negation. Rather than come to a conclusion about what God was, they would set up a concept, and then knock it down, saying God is not this, God is not that. The exercise was to demonstrate that human language could not accurately explain who or what God is, and the exercise culminates in a loss of words and a religious silence. And this inability to put one's finger on it did not frustrate these practitioners. They were alright with the feeling of uncertainty which Modernism seems to abhor. In fact, they delighted in it. Reaching that awed silence was the whole point.
Religion for the pre-modern world was something that required exhaustive creative work for it actually pay off. It was based on practical solutions to problems that arose in those particular moments in time and space. The pre-Rabbinical Jews went to the Temple to re-enact the creation myth in order to become closer to their God. It was never meant to be a literal account for how the world begun.
the concept of 'God' as we most traditionally know it, is also a modern construct. It came out of peoples' desire for absolute certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. The Scientific Revolution was in full swing, and it seemed that as Reason became the great beacon of light in the world to yield hard, tangible facts, peoples' concepts of religion had to keep up. Religion as an institution had to keep up, because the Church was a player that had to remain in power. In time, religion melded with science, and people tried to argue with Reason to prove the existence of God. As a result, the word 'belief' turned into the acceptance of something being true, and logic was what everything hinged upon. God became an idol of the vanity of human beings, a larger more powerful version of ourselves, and just another creature in all of creation who could killed with enough effort.
Fundamentalism as we know it today came out of post-revolutionary America as a political and cultural fight for survival, while the God of the modern age became something that people could disprove as easily as prove. Armstrong chronicles how atheism in the modern sense, the wilfull denial of a God came into being. Today, atheism has taken on a guise not unlike fundamentalism. Individuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launch an assault on religion and God and claim that these are responsible for so much bloodshed in the world. While they're not entirely wrong, Armstrong asserts that they are missing the larger picture, not just in the way that most religious people aren't as crazy as the Taliban and the hell-fire preaching Televangelists, but also that the whole notion of God that they are attacking is inaccurate. She also says that there are less staunch Atheistic thinkers out there from whom religious people would benefit in an open dialogue, and that they too play a part in our spiritual evolution.
Armstrong basically does a broad sweep of the history of Western religious thought, beginning in the Paleolithic era, steering eastward to the early Indian philosophy which the Upanishads were based on, back west to the roots of Jewish religion, to the Greek philosophers, to the early Christian Church, to Islam, to the Middle Ages, and up to the Modern Age that began in the 16th century to the Enlightenment, and culminated in the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, looking at post-modern philosophers as well. Among the people she cites are the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Augustine, Muhammad, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Voltaire, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Heidegger, and even Richard Dawkins! She points out all the places where religion was warped for political and tribalistic agendas, from the Crusades up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. It also illustrates the different religious experiences that people had all over the ancient world, and the striking resemblance they all had with each other, even though they were culturally and geographically worlds apart. The whole book is thoroughly researched and brimming with insight. It felt like a story as well, with a soaring narrative that brought me along with its key characters as I skipped across the history of Western civilization.
I knew that God was an idea that evolved throughout time and was subject to change based on the Zeitgeist of society at any given point. This troubled me, because I wanted a more concrete idea, somewhere along the road that I could pinpoint and say "there! That's what it's all about!" I knew that Jesus was a man, and it troubled me deeply because I so badly wanted a Son of God but knew better. But now I feel like my intellect and my non-rational need for faith are not irreconcilable. Peoples' ideas about God are the product of their time, and not from divine intervention, and I'm okay with it now because I don't have to relinquish my yearning for God because of it.
This understanding I've gained from reading this book hasn't made me a better or happier person, nor has it really changed the things I hold to be true in my life. It hasn't solved the question of whether there is a primordial, Unmoved Mover of the universe, and whether this universe is ruled by fate or chance, and I have not subscribed to a particular faith. But I think it has caused a slight shift in my way of thinking, which although is small now like a slight change in degree, may prove significant and radically alter things further down the road. Of course, it is too soon to say. Ultimately what this book did for me was release me from the need to be certain for the time being. It has also given me a LOT to think about for a long time to come, and I feel incredibly happy and relieved for it.
She obviously goes into waaay more detail and covers way more subjects then I mentioned here, so please go read it. It's very well written, and I highly recommend it, whether you're a theist, atheist, agnostic, or are simply curious about the subject.
The main points I learned in this book are as follows:
-our concept of God as we know it is a modern construct
-our understanding of the words 'belief' and 'faith' is also a modern construct
-literal interpretation and fundamentalism is a modern construct
-Armstrong employs the ancient Greek idea that all methods of understanding used by human beings fall under the categories of logos and mythos. Religion, like art, falls under the latter, and the reason why people misunderstand it is because they misplace it in the former.
-religion is something that you do, and that it takes practice and skill like anything else. Rather than a set of arbitrary laws and abstract concepts, it is a technique to unlocking a person's faith and spirituality, and if any method fails to do so, if it fails to yield practical results, then it is not doing its job. Armstrong explains that this is how the believers of the ancient world thought about religion, and seeing as they are chronologically closer to the wellspring of these spiritual ideas, their opinion does carry a lot of weight for me today. Any of the rituals that religious people partake in would seem absurd and abstract if observed from the outside with a logical mind. A religious experience for the people of the ancient world evoked a sense of Mystery, a "Cloud of Unknowing" as Armstrong puts it, a depth that cannot be explained rationally and has its place in our world, even though crusaders of Reason try to eradicate it.
Probably the most radical effect that Armstrong's arguments have is that they completely changed the way I think about the words 'belief', 'faith' and 'God'. Armstrong states that our understanding of these words are all the product of our modern age, which began some 500 odd years ago. Belief, she says,did not always mean assenting to something and accepting it as true. The word might have had a completely different connotation in the ancient world. Belief is related to the word "lief" which is related to the word "love". The Latin word for believe is "credere", which meant something else as well. To say credo, "I believe", it actually was closer to "I engage myself","I commit", "I trust". So from this we can deduce that at no point does the Bible ask us to believe in the modern sense, which is to accept as true. Rather, what it asks us is to commit ourselves and invest ourselves in the words of the text. Belief to the people of the ancient world, was not blind faith. If anything it was closer to wrestling with God the way Jacob did. It required study, testing, and if necessary, doubt. It needed thorough scrutiny, a delving into the subject to reach a higher plane of being. The pre-modern Christian thinkers tried to understand their God through apophatic methods, which is the knowledge of God gained through negation. Rather than come to a conclusion about what God was, they would set up a concept, and then knock it down, saying God is not this, God is not that. The exercise was to demonstrate that human language could not accurately explain who or what God is, and the exercise culminates in a loss of words and a religious silence. And this inability to put one's finger on it did not frustrate these practitioners. They were alright with the feeling of uncertainty which Modernism seems to abhor. In fact, they delighted in it. Reaching that awed silence was the whole point.
Religion for the pre-modern world was something that required exhaustive creative work for it actually pay off. It was based on practical solutions to problems that arose in those particular moments in time and space. The pre-Rabbinical Jews went to the Temple to re-enact the creation myth in order to become closer to their God. It was never meant to be a literal account for how the world begun.
the concept of 'God' as we most traditionally know it, is also a modern construct. It came out of peoples' desire for absolute certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. The Scientific Revolution was in full swing, and it seemed that as Reason became the great beacon of light in the world to yield hard, tangible facts, peoples' concepts of religion had to keep up. Religion as an institution had to keep up, because the Church was a player that had to remain in power. In time, religion melded with science, and people tried to argue with Reason to prove the existence of God. As a result, the word 'belief' turned into the acceptance of something being true, and logic was what everything hinged upon. God became an idol of the vanity of human beings, a larger more powerful version of ourselves, and just another creature in all of creation who could killed with enough effort.
Fundamentalism as we know it today came out of post-revolutionary America as a political and cultural fight for survival, while the God of the modern age became something that people could disprove as easily as prove. Armstrong chronicles how atheism in the modern sense, the wilfull denial of a God came into being. Today, atheism has taken on a guise not unlike fundamentalism. Individuals like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens launch an assault on religion and God and claim that these are responsible for so much bloodshed in the world. While they're not entirely wrong, Armstrong asserts that they are missing the larger picture, not just in the way that most religious people aren't as crazy as the Taliban and the hell-fire preaching Televangelists, but also that the whole notion of God that they are attacking is inaccurate. She also says that there are less staunch Atheistic thinkers out there from whom religious people would benefit in an open dialogue, and that they too play a part in our spiritual evolution.
Armstrong basically does a broad sweep of the history of Western religious thought, beginning in the Paleolithic era, steering eastward to the early Indian philosophy which the Upanishads were based on, back west to the roots of Jewish religion, to the Greek philosophers, to the early Christian Church, to Islam, to the Middle Ages, and up to the Modern Age that began in the 16th century to the Enlightenment, and culminated in the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, looking at post-modern philosophers as well. Among the people she cites are the likes of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Jesus Christ, St. Paul, Augustine, Muhammad, Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis, Descartes, Copernicus, Galileo, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Voltaire, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein, Heidegger, and even Richard Dawkins! She points out all the places where religion was warped for political and tribalistic agendas, from the Crusades up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. It also illustrates the different religious experiences that people had all over the ancient world, and the striking resemblance they all had with each other, even though they were culturally and geographically worlds apart. The whole book is thoroughly researched and brimming with insight. It felt like a story as well, with a soaring narrative that brought me along with its key characters as I skipped across the history of Western civilization.
I knew that God was an idea that evolved throughout time and was subject to change based on the Zeitgeist of society at any given point. This troubled me, because I wanted a more concrete idea, somewhere along the road that I could pinpoint and say "there! That's what it's all about!" I knew that Jesus was a man, and it troubled me deeply because I so badly wanted a Son of God but knew better. But now I feel like my intellect and my non-rational need for faith are not irreconcilable. Peoples' ideas about God are the product of their time, and not from divine intervention, and I'm okay with it now because I don't have to relinquish my yearning for God because of it.
This understanding I've gained from reading this book hasn't made me a better or happier person, nor has it really changed the things I hold to be true in my life. It hasn't solved the question of whether there is a primordial, Unmoved Mover of the universe, and whether this universe is ruled by fate or chance, and I have not subscribed to a particular faith. But I think it has caused a slight shift in my way of thinking, which although is small now like a slight change in degree, may prove significant and radically alter things further down the road. Of course, it is too soon to say. Ultimately what this book did for me was release me from the need to be certain for the time being. It has also given me a LOT to think about for a long time to come, and I feel incredibly happy and relieved for it.
She obviously goes into waaay more detail and covers way more subjects then I mentioned here, so please go read it. It's very well written, and I highly recommend it, whether you're a theist, atheist, agnostic, or are simply curious about the subject.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
So long, Swine '09!
Well, I was going to write a reflection on 2009 on New Years' Eve, but time was a luxury I couldn't afford at that point. But now I'm back in Vic and more or less settled in, so I can now get on with it.Thankfully there isn't enough of 2010 yet so I still can still make some timely commentary. I'm just fashionably late, that's all. ;)
I feel like I should say something big and important, but I have no idea what. Much has happened this year, as it does every year, and no grand account of it could really suffice. Plus I'm too lazy.
So we'll have to settle for this brief summary. the first half of the year was kind of sucky. I hate to say it because it had some really good moments in it, but the less desirable parts seem clearer in my mind. Essentially I came to really question whether I wanted to stay on the path I was following. This is pretty huge, especially considering that pathway is several thousands of dollars a year and will guarantee none of that money back when I get to the next level. By the time summer came around, I was pretty beat and in need of a rest. The universe had other plans, however. I was to do Summerstock, and it was too late to back out. But I did it, and that was when things turned around for me. Even though I didn't get the mental rest I was hoping for, I became gradually more optimistic as the summer went on. By the fall things were going very well and by the end of it, I feel like the personal progress I made, though seemingly small, was significant. I wrote 3 short stories, and was in 5 shows this year, one after the other (and two of them actually concurrent) with no hope of rest until Christmas holidays. But Time, being what it was, went on, and Christmas finally came. It was a very good holiday though.
I could make some sweeping commentary on world events, but I haven't enough understanding of the world. So I'll try to recount some of its most momentous moments, stream of consciousness style: A recession hit the honey-moon period with Obama eventually ended an almost revolution went down in Iran following the country's incendiary election results a handful of celebrities died people got swine flu the crew of the Starship Enterprise boldly went where no one had gone before...again...for the first time...(and it was awesome by the way!) Afghanistan had its sophomoric election leaving a bitter and jaded taste in a lot of peoples' mouths Lady Gaga shot sparks out of her boobs Peter Mansbridge stood up on CBC the Olympic Torch started its journey across Canada Jon and Kate called it quits a bunch of powerful people met in Copenhagen and seemed to do very little while they were there Obama managed to get his health-care legislation passed in his final act of arrogance of the year Mr. Harper prorogued parliament and yes. Mickey Rooney is still alive.
I always wanted to have some 'Best of 2009' spiel, but I have no idea what I would do. I can't say anything about the movies, or the music. Not even theatre, for that matter. I'm no critic and I didn't really have my ear to the ground....in any area, really. I can tell you about the books I read though. Specifically the books that shall we say had the biggest effect on me this year.
So without further adieu, the Top Five Books of 2009 (in chronological order) are:
5. Respect for Acting by Uta Hagen
I explained why this book is so meaningful to me way back in a Summer entry. Basically it renewed my faith in acting as an
art form.
4. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
What a powerful story! As I said in an earlier post, I don't condone what Christopher McCandless did per se, but I can't help
but admire this young madman, and how damned hard he tried to live up to his ideals, at all costs. He has inspired me
do the same (maybe with less success, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try!) Krakauer's prose is brilliant and he's the
perfect man to tell McCandless' story, given his own background. I rarely cry when reading books, but this was
definitely one of them.
3. The Unfinished Canadian by Andrew Cohen
In my effort to better understand Canada, at least literarily, this book launched my enterprise. He presents some
provocative ideas on how we as a people can "find ourselves", some of those ideas controversial but definitely insightful.
2. Playing Shakespeare by John Barton
This book, coupled with the Playing Shakespeare TV mini-series (from which the book is transcribed almost word for word)
almost singlehandedly decoded the acting of Shakespeare for me. Well, the theory side of it, anyway. The practice I learned
in class and onstage. John Barton and his students (including Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Judi Dench) showed to me
how brilliant Shakespeare can be, provided it's executed with skill and talent.
1. The Case For God by Karen Armstrong
I read this at the end of the holiday, and although it might be too soon to say, but it has made the biggest impact on me
that a book has made in a while. When I finished it I knew that it had significantly altered the way I think about belief,
religion and God. I'd like to go further into what this book is all about and what it means to me, so I'll have to devote an
entire entry to it...
I read some other books worth noting, like Watchmen, Tales of the Perilous Realm by Tolkien, Paradise Lost, and Up Till Now by William Shatner. Boo yeah. Reading is fun!
Anyway, it was a good year, but now it's time to look forward and press onward, as per usual. So say we all.
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