Divining

My thesis: God is a verb (to divine), and should not be a noun. (This may well be my next paper, so comments are appreciated.)

This is something that has increasingly come out my readings of Catherine Keller and John Robinson, although neither of them say it as such. The premise is that we just don't think any more of a God in a theistic sense; that we think of this as being not only silly and naïve, but also dangerous and oppressive (see much liberation theology or eco-feminist work as to why), and yet, that there is something more than flat and dead, mechanical, secular humanism (to use Robinson's description).

There's several ways that I've come to this. Thinking about the Trinity, and interpreting it in a narrative (rather than an ontological) sense, we have the time of the 'Father' (theism), then the time of the 'Son' (Jesus), and then those who follow Jesus as radical, political liberator (in the 'Spirit'). Jesus, then, "dared to accept the role of sonship, of standing in God's stead.” (The Human Face of God, 217-8) “Put the other way round, henceforth 'God' is to be represented no longer simply as a personified being over man's head, but in and by man and his responsibility.” (218) “'God' now means, for us... that by which he is represented, his surrogate – the power of a love that lives and suffers for others.” (218-9) In short, Jesus showed that God isn't an 'other', a being, but God is only ever perceived (and therefore, is only) in action.

In Exploration into God, Robinson writes, "[the Bible] describes reality much more readily in terms of verbs than substantives." (p.35 ...and if God is 'ultimate reality' as Paul Tillich claims...) Robinson goes on, "The reality [of God... is seen] in action, in suffering, rather than in words." (55, my emphasis) He pulls from Thomas Aquinas (of all people) and writes, "there are common nouns and proper nouns - and 'God' seems to fall into neither category," (58) - so is God not a noun?

Here's a paragraph from my recent paper From Ground to Ocean: (Ful)filling the Abyss. (The 'tehom' refers to the Hebrew word in Genesis 1, which Keller associates with 'deep' and 'ocean of infinite possibility'.)

But we must remember our question: Is the tehom God? And how does the creature/creator, the divine/cosmic, relate to tehom? The short answer to the second of these questions is 'creativity'. In the bottomless tehom, the infinite potential, there is nothing and everything. 'God' is the differentiating, the distinguishing of these potentials. “'[E]verything' in a state of potentiality is no thing,” (Face of the Deep, 180) and so this 'chaotic buzz' needs a decision to be made, a decision which eliminates some possibilities while selecting others to be created. To help describe this Keller uses 'divine' as a verb: “[A] primal Other not separate from but within God – différance in precisely the sense of the originary non-origin... this radical genesis divines the potentiality of the tehom. Its creativity does not create by itself. By itself it makes no difference... The great cosmic decision has been traditionally, with justice, named the creation; its agency, the creator.” (180) The tehom by itself, the potential everything, is no thing – it makes no difference because within it no difference is determined, or rather, divined. God, then, is the process of actualising/ realising/ differentiating/ choosing/ divining the tehom, in an interconnectivity where God is nothing without the potential to be (the tehom), and the tehom is no thing when it is merely potentially everything – without the divine, without being divined. “If the godhead, or rather the godness, 'in' whom unfolds the universe can be theologised as Tehom, the ocean of divinity, the divinity who unfolds 'in' the all is called by such biblical names as Elohim, Sophia, Logos, Christ. ... [T]he names Tehom and Elohim may henceforth designate, if not 'persons', two capacities of an infinite becoming.” (219) Is Tehom divine? Yes, but not by itself, for Tehom as mere (only/oceanic) potential is no thing without Elohim. And is Tehom God? No. For while “Tehom has taken on the names and aura of a certain godness, [it] has never been identified with 'God', nor with the All; it 'is' not pan or theos. It signifies rather their relation... The relations, the waves of our possibility, comprise the real potentiality from which we emerge. So tehom, metonym of the divine womb, remains neither God nor not-God but the depth of 'God'.” (227) Finally we reach a place where we can divine the highly nuanced difference between Tillich and Keller.

War on science

"WAR on SCIENCE" declared the poster stuck to the street lamp. Yes, I thought, finally. I looked closer. It's a film showing at the Brunswick theatre, a place that I know shows good films and interesting documentaries. So I looked it up. And was sorely disappointed. For this BBC film is yet another in the "Evolution vs. Intelligent Design" debate, featuring Richard Dawkins. It's not the war I hoped for. It's a war by pseudo-scientists on pseudo-scientists.

But the war on science needs to happen. Not by intelligent designers, or other fundamentalist groups with horrific political agendas. It needs to be a war of liberation.

The past few centuries have seen the increase in the power of science. It has, in many ways, been a fantastic force in the liberation from oppressive religious power structures, and through science many good things have been accomplished. Because of this, more and more people have knelt before its authority, hoping that it will explain all the mysteries of the cosmos better than theism did. And it does. But it's become an idol, and it's been subverted by exploitative capitalism.

People trust science. People trust scientists. People trust those who speak for scientists, in language that they can understand. People trust far too much.

The movie The Future of Food impressed on me how bad this has gotten. The movie shows how rich, heartless, US corporations have turn America into a genetically modified wasteland, for the sole purpose of profit. GM crops are no better for the consumer, and don't solve the worlds food shortage. They are simply there to protect profits.

Intellectual property is the same way. Those companies are trying to patent the worlds seeds, which word give them omnipotent control over food production, allowing them to decide who lives and who starves. After hearing from Harpers that "The United States Department of Agriculture gave preliminary approval for the large-scale cultivation in Kansas of a strain of genetically modified rice that contains human genes," (Findings, May 2007) it seems that those corporations (along with many other medical corporations) are now in the business of patenting human genes, and so it doesn't seem far off that a person born is already corporately owned. Will we then need to pay dues to live? To work as slaves?

And talking of medical, I just read another Harpers article, Manufacturing Depression: A journey into the economy of melancholy, which is written by a therapist/writer who agrees to undergo drug testing for depression. The article is superbly written and shows the blatant lies the drug corporations use. Towards the end of the article he writes, "I am already deflated when I arrive for my last interview. Of course, there's no place in the HAM-D to express this, to talk about the immeasurable loss that I think we all suffer as science turns to scientism, as bright and ambitious people devote their lives to erasing selfhood in order to cure it of its discontents." "[The doctor's] chippy now, like she's trying to convince me that I ought to take my improvement and go home happy, another satisfied customer. And really, it doesn't matter. Because the point here is not to teach me anything about myself, or for them to learn anything from me. It's not even to prove whether or not omega-3s work. It's to strengthen the idea that this is what we are: machines fueled by neurotransmitters at the mercy of our own renegade molecules."

Similar things can be said in the world of electronics (where corporations receive their yearly taxes as we 'upgrade'), in munitions, and in any other place where science can be used to exploit. Science is no longer that wonderful thing we worship as science. Science is corporate-controlled ideology, designed to entrap and exploit. We need to lose faith in science, and go to war against its priests.

The result of mixing Irigaray, caffeine and magic

From whence, here one comes, as flailing,
flying, falling down.
He bites. Bites the air.
And, as landing, springs as hero, as superman-
ing. Swirling, he misses. The doves scream. Trees
cry. crying. cries.
The void. There, the shadow, the blackness
ceases to distinguish the three. Fire remains, the
only one to illume. No wonder we loved it.
But we unrealised (fail to) that we are the
three. The three are in us. Are us. The fourth, our/are
rest. Rest,...rest.
They two, they realised the three, embodied
it for all of us. They sing of it. They are the
bards, the song itself. They teach the way,
but still we seek fire.

Sinking
The flame, our desire, is extinguished. We must see
it go out. Pray for its death. For the
onset of decay.
It burns as we start to feel the earth,
the second. It wells within, pounding on high.
And the first flows. For air is third. In the flow,
the her, we find ourself, as she shows who we are.
In relation. Why .we are.

The-enpanism

I'm curious if my last post was bad/boring or if people were to busy to comment. So I'll try something shorter.

I've talked a lot about pantheism (all is God) and panentheism (all is in God) before, but Chris mentioned to me that N.T.Wright talks about the-en-panism (God is in all). I think I like it, but I'd like to hear what people think. What does it mean? What connotations does it have? Where does it put God and us? What is 'all'?

My a(nti)theism

Reading John Robinson's The Human Face of God, I came to the interpretation that Jesus attempted to abolish theism. Paraphrased, "No longer do you see God as a being in the sky who steps in to do things, you see God manifest in the actions around you when a person helps the poor and sides with the oppressed. The only way God is present is when you make God present through your actions."

I like it, for I see theism manifesting itself as an exploiter and oppressor. Theism (which I'm taking to loosely mean "belief in a transcendent being/consciousness") seems to be made manifest in three ways:

1. Deism: God created, then has stepped back to let it happened. This makes God an irresponsible jerk who seems to take pleasure in watching his (sic) creation squirm and cry out in pain.
2. Total order: God, being omnipotent, controls everything. However, this not only legitimates oppressive power structures (who model themselves off God), it also makes God responsible oppressing the poor and favouring the rich. If God controls everything, it's his (sic) fault and I have no responsibility (as I am merely a puppet).
3. Semi-deism: God occasionally steps in, and will make it all OK in the end. This is the worst of both. God is responsible for oppression and is evil because he stands back when he could and should act (he didn't stop the Holocaust sooner, even though he could have). He (sic) is also an excuse for non-action and takes away human responsibility and agency as there is a 'promise' that it'll all work out in the end regardless of what I do now. This eventually results in omnipotence and total order, as per number 2.
   

I called attention to the male language because I think theism cannot escape being patriarchal (which is another problem). I also want to clarify that I am not an atheist in the sense of Richard Dawkins, et al, because 1) I'm trying not to be a dick, and 2) I prefer the idea of mythological panentheism.