Today, I did something which could prove to be either wonderful or disastrous: I quit my job.
After more than ten months of pushing bras and panties, I will be leaving the world of lingerie in exactly two weeks. To say the least, this is quite a relief. While I don’t believe in the actual existence of Hell, I can quite honestly say that, for myself, personally, the fitting room approached such conditions.
Though I may not seem it over the internet, in person I am relatively reserved. I like having my space and do not typically seek-out social interaction with large groups of people. For an introvert like myself, there are very few things quite so horrible as trying to help a veritable horde of women to find properly fitting undergarments when they are practically determined that nothing should work. Especially when your job security depends upon being as kind, courteous, and generally helpful as humanly possible.
Yessiree, turning in my letter of resignation today felt pretty damn good. There’s only one problem: I don’t have another job lined-up.
I can already feel the Experienced among you start to judge. It’s okay. I confess that I am doing it too.
Against my better judgment, I am going into business for myself while I re-double my efforts to find a better job. For a while now, it has been my dream to take a stab at making art for a living. I’m already a member of an artist cooperative and my membership has, sadly, been going to waste as I haven’t had time or space to do much of anything new in the past year. With the end of my current employment, I hope to change that.
There is something about these kinds of transitions that gives one a feeling of embracing one’s destiny. Of course, my destiny may actually be to wind-up homeless and die of malnutrition. While that may be slightly over the top, I am taking a clear risk in choosing to end my employment. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if this is exactly what I’m supposed to do.
It’s pondering things like this that cause me to wonder just how much I am actually in control of my actions. How much of my life will happen no matter what I do? How much can I actually change?
Pagans represent a large range of perspectives on the role of Fate and the importance of the choices we make. Many of us take-up astrology, tarot, runes, and other forms of divination as a part of our regular spiritual practices and pursuits. All of these rely on the notion that, to a certain extent, the future is predictable and, in some instances, beyond our ability to influence. At the same time, many Neo Pagan religions also emphasize the importance of the individual’s responsibility for their own actions. Depending upon your chosen perspectives, this can cause a little conundrum.
The question is, if you are fated to do something, are you, in fact, responsible for the actions that you are destined to take?
I’d like to hear a little from the rest of you on this subject. What are your thoughts on the subject of Fate as it applies to personal responsibility? What is your particular way of getting those two ideas to coexist peacefully, if at all? Let me know what you think!
Bright Blessings!
~LitheWolf
Friday, June 12, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Perhaps it’s time for me to jump in here.
First of all, I want to thank Cody for giving a thoughtful response to the question I posed a few weeks ago. I also want to thank the rest of you for taking time to ponder (as I’m sure you have) the problem in question.
I’m sure there are several of you who are wondering why I—a self-professed Wiccan—am bothering with a philosophical conundrum that mostly bothers monotheists of the Abrahamic religions. And on a Neo Pagan blog, no less. I have to admit that some of this stems from a kind of masochistic fascination with the mental gymnastics involved in trying to solve such a problem.
The first time I ever heard about the Problem of Evil, I was about seven years old and my father was driving me home from church. During the service, they announced the death of a little six-month old baby, the tiny daughter of a young couple in our church. The culprit was SIDS.
I was old enough to know a decent amount about germs and diseases. Old enough even to understand that some parents didn’t care for their children as they should. But the idea that a baby could be loved so much, cared for so tenderly, and still die—without catching so much as a cold—utterly confounded me.
How could something like this happen? It wasn’t fair. What was more, it seemed to contradict everything I had been taught about God, not to mention the natural order of the universe. I had been singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” in Sabbath School from the time I was three years old. And what the song said, and the related story in the New Testament seemed to indicate, was that Jesus and, vicariously, God especially loved children. If adults had good reason to believe that God would protect them from the ills in the world, then we kids should have nothing to worry about. But a baby was dead, dead for absolutely no reason, and while I had not been raised to believe that God “calls His people Home” (read: kills them) it seemed like he hadn’t done an awful lot to stop it from happening either. If he would let a little six-month old girl die of nothing, that didn’t bode well for a seven-year old girl who often got in harm’s way.
My interest in this problem goes beyond a little girl’s wish to feel safe again. Setting aside evil and the theist definition of God, this problem is really about what makes a deity worthy of our reverence. What sort of divine beings should we be worshipping—if any?
It is interesting that Cody brought-up the Greek pantheon. In their hay-day, the Golden Age of Greece, there was more than a little debate as to whether or not the gods ought to be worshipped. This dialogue plays out most clearly in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles. These two playwrights were contemporaries. They more than likely knew each other and we know that their plays competed against one another at the yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus.
It is well known that Euripides was not a fan of Greek religion. He saw the gods as being sub-human—the perpetrators of acts so vicious and depraved that the majority of humans seemed saintly by comparison. Aphrodite was unfaithful to her partners and oversexed; Hera was jealous to a murderous extent; Zeus and most of the other gods made a fearful habit of raping women and killing whomever they pleased. Why, asked Euripides, should humans worship a group of beings who engage in behavior that most humans would never tolerate from one another?
He explores this question in a number of his tragedies, perhaps the best example is his play Orestes. During the play, characters note at several points that while the gods are powerful, this does not seem to make them very good or even rational. While some characters attempt to defend the gods, even Apollo’s explanation for the gods’ actions (he says that the Trojan War was a much needed solution for an over-population problem) falls very flat. To Euripides, being divine didn’t get buy you a “free pass to everything.” He expects the Divine to earn his respect. If humans were civilized enough to live by codes of decency and honor, then the gods ought to do so, too.
Sophocles, on the other hand, was a pious believer. The gods were the gods—superior in every way—and if you were dumb enough to think that you understood things better than them or that you could oppose their will, you were dead wrong. This view on the gods is most evident in his famous Theban Cycle which tells the story of King Oedipus and his family.
Oedipus is born with a grizzly destiny: He will murder his father and marry his mother. In an attempt to avoid this horrifying future his parents, the King and Queen of Thebes, have the infant Oedipus taken off to die of exposure on a hillside. But the servant they charge with this task doesn’t wait to make certain that Oedipus actually dies. He wanders off, leaving the baby’s fate to the gods. A short time later, a shepherd finds Oedipus and takes pity on him, bringing the child to the childless King and Queen of Corinth. In time, Oedipus grows up and learns of his prophesied fate. He also tries to take every precaution to see that the awful predictions do not come true and runs away from home, unaware that he is adopted. In his wanderings, Oedipus kills a man who will not move out of his way on the road. He also defeats the Sphinx, freeing the city of Thebes from the monster’s grasp and winning him the hand of their recently widowed queen.
While audiences would be expected to have sympathy for Oedipus and his fate (he is cursed, gouges out his own eyes with his wife/mother’s brooch, and is cast out of Thebes), they would also have viewed it as just punishment for his crime of hubris (second-guessing or thinking oneself to be equal to the gods). Sophocles did, too. The gods were not to be questioned, they were to be properly served and petitioned. They were higher beings.
So, what do we expect of our gods/goddesses? What makes them worthy of our reverence? Is it simply enough for them to be gods, or do we need for them to exemplify certain types of behaviors and codes of honor? Maybe it’s the idea of gods—strong authority figures that will fight for us, spend time with us, and teach us the secrets of the universe—that we love. Or maybe what we really need is to use them, in all of their caricatured glory, as a mirror to see into ourselves. To confront our deepest flaws and make peace with them or, to get a better look at our finer qualities and allow ourselves to see the potential for greatness within us.
As a panentheist, there is a very real way in which worshipping a deity constitutes worshipping myself. As Joseph Campbell observed, “Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.” Maybe this is part of why I am a little bit wary of the notion of worship. I live my life, I am there every time I have done something that I knew to be wrong or said something particularly cruel to a person who probably didn’t deserve it (if these things can be deserved). My point is, I know that I am not terribly admirable. If I were a deity, I would probably be Our Lady of Good Intentions or, perhaps, the goddess of procrastination. I certainly wouldn’t put the management of the universe in my own hands. Like Euripides, I want Deity to be much better than I am. I long for a perfect world where suffering is a foreign concept and humanity is no longer psychologically capable of inflicting the kind of senseless harm that we so often do.
On the other hand, this is the world and the universe that we have and as imperfect it is, it is also incredibly beautiful. And whether I like it or not, a tiny portion of that universe is in my hands. I am a part of the Divine and what I say and do here has very real consequences. More often than not, this knowledge fills me with a kind of subdued terror. It means that I have to own what I do. That there is not really a third party that I can turn to and say “Why did/n’t you do x?” It means that every time I interact with other beings or my environment I am a kind of ambassador of the Divine to itself.
At the same time, I am only one part of a much large whole. There are limits to the extent of my influence, problems too big for me to fix alone or even with the help of others. It’s at times like those, when I know that I am in way over my head, that I want the God of my childhood: Someone who will see my distress and, being filled with at least as much decency as the average human, attempt to help me. In reality, it is seldom that simple.
I have a close relationship with several deities whose stories I know front to back. I have even had two classically mystical experiences and numerous religious ones. Given this, you might think that I would have some insight into the Divine but, I can say with all confidence that I really don’t. In fact, the more contact I enjoy with the Divine and the longer I try to understand it/them, the more incomprehensible it all seems to become.
I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying that I have come to think of my interaction with the Divine in general more as, well, interaction and less as worship. I have a hard time considering deities as superior to myself because I know that somewhere in them is a piece of me and—as I mentioned earlier—I know that I am not worthy of such adoration. But, I do treat them with reverence and respect. Respect because, even as ideas in someone’s head, they are a true force to be reckoned with. Reverence because of the incredible impact that they have had on myself and countless others throughout the ages.
Well, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Hopefully some of it made some kind of sense. Now, it’s time to let me know what you think. What makes your deity/ies worthy of reverence/worship? Have any more insights on the Problem of Evil?
Bright Blessings!
~LitheWolf
First of all, I want to thank Cody for giving a thoughtful response to the question I posed a few weeks ago. I also want to thank the rest of you for taking time to ponder (as I’m sure you have) the problem in question.
I’m sure there are several of you who are wondering why I—a self-professed Wiccan—am bothering with a philosophical conundrum that mostly bothers monotheists of the Abrahamic religions. And on a Neo Pagan blog, no less. I have to admit that some of this stems from a kind of masochistic fascination with the mental gymnastics involved in trying to solve such a problem.
The first time I ever heard about the Problem of Evil, I was about seven years old and my father was driving me home from church. During the service, they announced the death of a little six-month old baby, the tiny daughter of a young couple in our church. The culprit was SIDS.
I was old enough to know a decent amount about germs and diseases. Old enough even to understand that some parents didn’t care for their children as they should. But the idea that a baby could be loved so much, cared for so tenderly, and still die—without catching so much as a cold—utterly confounded me.
How could something like this happen? It wasn’t fair. What was more, it seemed to contradict everything I had been taught about God, not to mention the natural order of the universe. I had been singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” in Sabbath School from the time I was three years old. And what the song said, and the related story in the New Testament seemed to indicate, was that Jesus and, vicariously, God especially loved children. If adults had good reason to believe that God would protect them from the ills in the world, then we kids should have nothing to worry about. But a baby was dead, dead for absolutely no reason, and while I had not been raised to believe that God “calls His people Home” (read: kills them) it seemed like he hadn’t done an awful lot to stop it from happening either. If he would let a little six-month old girl die of nothing, that didn’t bode well for a seven-year old girl who often got in harm’s way.
My interest in this problem goes beyond a little girl’s wish to feel safe again. Setting aside evil and the theist definition of God, this problem is really about what makes a deity worthy of our reverence. What sort of divine beings should we be worshipping—if any?
It is interesting that Cody brought-up the Greek pantheon. In their hay-day, the Golden Age of Greece, there was more than a little debate as to whether or not the gods ought to be worshipped. This dialogue plays out most clearly in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles. These two playwrights were contemporaries. They more than likely knew each other and we know that their plays competed against one another at the yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus.
It is well known that Euripides was not a fan of Greek religion. He saw the gods as being sub-human—the perpetrators of acts so vicious and depraved that the majority of humans seemed saintly by comparison. Aphrodite was unfaithful to her partners and oversexed; Hera was jealous to a murderous extent; Zeus and most of the other gods made a fearful habit of raping women and killing whomever they pleased. Why, asked Euripides, should humans worship a group of beings who engage in behavior that most humans would never tolerate from one another?
He explores this question in a number of his tragedies, perhaps the best example is his play Orestes. During the play, characters note at several points that while the gods are powerful, this does not seem to make them very good or even rational. While some characters attempt to defend the gods, even Apollo’s explanation for the gods’ actions (he says that the Trojan War was a much needed solution for an over-population problem) falls very flat. To Euripides, being divine didn’t get buy you a “free pass to everything.” He expects the Divine to earn his respect. If humans were civilized enough to live by codes of decency and honor, then the gods ought to do so, too.
Sophocles, on the other hand, was a pious believer. The gods were the gods—superior in every way—and if you were dumb enough to think that you understood things better than them or that you could oppose their will, you were dead wrong. This view on the gods is most evident in his famous Theban Cycle which tells the story of King Oedipus and his family.
Oedipus is born with a grizzly destiny: He will murder his father and marry his mother. In an attempt to avoid this horrifying future his parents, the King and Queen of Thebes, have the infant Oedipus taken off to die of exposure on a hillside. But the servant they charge with this task doesn’t wait to make certain that Oedipus actually dies. He wanders off, leaving the baby’s fate to the gods. A short time later, a shepherd finds Oedipus and takes pity on him, bringing the child to the childless King and Queen of Corinth. In time, Oedipus grows up and learns of his prophesied fate. He also tries to take every precaution to see that the awful predictions do not come true and runs away from home, unaware that he is adopted. In his wanderings, Oedipus kills a man who will not move out of his way on the road. He also defeats the Sphinx, freeing the city of Thebes from the monster’s grasp and winning him the hand of their recently widowed queen.
While audiences would be expected to have sympathy for Oedipus and his fate (he is cursed, gouges out his own eyes with his wife/mother’s brooch, and is cast out of Thebes), they would also have viewed it as just punishment for his crime of hubris (second-guessing or thinking oneself to be equal to the gods). Sophocles did, too. The gods were not to be questioned, they were to be properly served and petitioned. They were higher beings.
So, what do we expect of our gods/goddesses? What makes them worthy of our reverence? Is it simply enough for them to be gods, or do we need for them to exemplify certain types of behaviors and codes of honor? Maybe it’s the idea of gods—strong authority figures that will fight for us, spend time with us, and teach us the secrets of the universe—that we love. Or maybe what we really need is to use them, in all of their caricatured glory, as a mirror to see into ourselves. To confront our deepest flaws and make peace with them or, to get a better look at our finer qualities and allow ourselves to see the potential for greatness within us.
As a panentheist, there is a very real way in which worshipping a deity constitutes worshipping myself. As Joseph Campbell observed, “Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.” Maybe this is part of why I am a little bit wary of the notion of worship. I live my life, I am there every time I have done something that I knew to be wrong or said something particularly cruel to a person who probably didn’t deserve it (if these things can be deserved). My point is, I know that I am not terribly admirable. If I were a deity, I would probably be Our Lady of Good Intentions or, perhaps, the goddess of procrastination. I certainly wouldn’t put the management of the universe in my own hands. Like Euripides, I want Deity to be much better than I am. I long for a perfect world where suffering is a foreign concept and humanity is no longer psychologically capable of inflicting the kind of senseless harm that we so often do.
On the other hand, this is the world and the universe that we have and as imperfect it is, it is also incredibly beautiful. And whether I like it or not, a tiny portion of that universe is in my hands. I am a part of the Divine and what I say and do here has very real consequences. More often than not, this knowledge fills me with a kind of subdued terror. It means that I have to own what I do. That there is not really a third party that I can turn to and say “Why did/n’t you do x?” It means that every time I interact with other beings or my environment I am a kind of ambassador of the Divine to itself.
At the same time, I am only one part of a much large whole. There are limits to the extent of my influence, problems too big for me to fix alone or even with the help of others. It’s at times like those, when I know that I am in way over my head, that I want the God of my childhood: Someone who will see my distress and, being filled with at least as much decency as the average human, attempt to help me. In reality, it is seldom that simple.
I have a close relationship with several deities whose stories I know front to back. I have even had two classically mystical experiences and numerous religious ones. Given this, you might think that I would have some insight into the Divine but, I can say with all confidence that I really don’t. In fact, the more contact I enjoy with the Divine and the longer I try to understand it/them, the more incomprehensible it all seems to become.
I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying that I have come to think of my interaction with the Divine in general more as, well, interaction and less as worship. I have a hard time considering deities as superior to myself because I know that somewhere in them is a piece of me and—as I mentioned earlier—I know that I am not worthy of such adoration. But, I do treat them with reverence and respect. Respect because, even as ideas in someone’s head, they are a true force to be reckoned with. Reverence because of the incredible impact that they have had on myself and countless others throughout the ages.
Well, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Hopefully some of it made some kind of sense. Now, it’s time to let me know what you think. What makes your deity/ies worthy of reverence/worship? Have any more insights on the Problem of Evil?
Bright Blessings!
~LitheWolf
Friday, April 24, 2009
Open Discussion: Paganism and the Problem of Evil
Hi, all!
Time for another blog post I think but, this time I want to do something a little more interactive. That being said, Ladies and Gentlemen, please put on your thinking caps and fire-up your keyboards.
I want to open up a discussion on the classic theist (those who essentially believe in a single Deity of infinite goodness, knowledge, and ability) philosophical Problem of Evil and how it may or may not relate to Paganism.
For those of you who are not yet acquainted with this age-old philosophical dilemma, the short version goes something like this:
Let us fist assume that good and evil--being dynamically opposed forces--always seek to gain the upper hand over one another. A truly good person cannot tolerate an evil act. Likewise, a truly evil person cannot tolerate a good act unless it serves to further their evil purposes.
If we hold this to be so, then we may also assume that a being of absolute goodness would want to remove evil as much as it is capable of doing. We will call such a being omnibenevolent.
Now, let us give this omnibenevolent being absolute power. There is nothing of which this being is incapable. It can do absolutely anything that it wants to; nothing is impossible for it.
These qualities--omnibenevolence and omnipotence--are both attributed to the theist version of Deity, but something about this perspective doesn't yet make sense. Why would such a god, who both seeks for the total removal of evil and is in fact capable of achieving this goal, allow for evil to exist in our universe? Is it that Deity is not as good as we believe, or it is just not as powerful as we think? Is there any way to reconcile these two attributes with the presence of evil?
It becomes immediately obvious why this problem would be of great concern to theists of all religions and just about every monotheistic philosopher has tried to provide an acceptable answer. Some of those offered include "There is no such thing as evil,"--an argument which hinges on metaphysics more than anything and is widely regarded by philosophers as a cop-out.
Even if we say that evil exists in no ontological sense there is still the matter of the cruel and horrific things which fully sentient creatures are capable of doing to one another. Certainly, we may say that suffering is an evil which humanity and other living beings have to endure far more often than seems reasonable or necessary. If we argue that suffering exists only in the mind then it may still be said to exist. We may even consider psychological anguish to be infinitely worse than simple physical pain.
Another answer which is widely regarded as a cop-out is the Free Will argument: "Evil exists because God could not give human beings truly free will without letting them have the option to perform evil acts. Thus, evil exists." The problem with this argument is that we are still talking about an all-powerful Deity and--in most theist traditions--one that has an unlimited amount of knowledge and creativity. Though a world in which freewill exists and evil does not is beyond our human comprehension, we're supposed to be talking about a being who is far superior to us, who's mind we can never hope to understand. While we may not be able to come-up with a solution we can imagine a being who could. If God is supposedly such a being, then why did he fail?
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. Now, here's my question: Do you think that all or even some Neo Pagans avoid this problem? If so, how? What is your own perspective on this philosophical dilemma? I realize that the problem I've asked you to consider applies primarily to monotheists and theists in general, but I want to know how you think this relates to Neo Paganism, if at all. What do you think we can learn here?
Please go ahead and discuss this problem in the comments for this post. I will be reading with great interest. Naturally, I have my own perspective which I will undoubtedly give to you at great length--whether you want it or not--in the next post. For now, let's chat.
~LitheWolf
Time for another blog post I think but, this time I want to do something a little more interactive. That being said, Ladies and Gentlemen, please put on your thinking caps and fire-up your keyboards.
I want to open up a discussion on the classic theist (those who essentially believe in a single Deity of infinite goodness, knowledge, and ability) philosophical Problem of Evil and how it may or may not relate to Paganism.
For those of you who are not yet acquainted with this age-old philosophical dilemma, the short version goes something like this:
Let us fist assume that good and evil--being dynamically opposed forces--always seek to gain the upper hand over one another. A truly good person cannot tolerate an evil act. Likewise, a truly evil person cannot tolerate a good act unless it serves to further their evil purposes.
If we hold this to be so, then we may also assume that a being of absolute goodness would want to remove evil as much as it is capable of doing. We will call such a being omnibenevolent.
Now, let us give this omnibenevolent being absolute power. There is nothing of which this being is incapable. It can do absolutely anything that it wants to; nothing is impossible for it.
These qualities--omnibenevolence and omnipotence--are both attributed to the theist version of Deity, but something about this perspective doesn't yet make sense. Why would such a god, who both seeks for the total removal of evil and is in fact capable of achieving this goal, allow for evil to exist in our universe? Is it that Deity is not as good as we believe, or it is just not as powerful as we think? Is there any way to reconcile these two attributes with the presence of evil?
It becomes immediately obvious why this problem would be of great concern to theists of all religions and just about every monotheistic philosopher has tried to provide an acceptable answer. Some of those offered include "There is no such thing as evil,"--an argument which hinges on metaphysics more than anything and is widely regarded by philosophers as a cop-out.
Even if we say that evil exists in no ontological sense there is still the matter of the cruel and horrific things which fully sentient creatures are capable of doing to one another. Certainly, we may say that suffering is an evil which humanity and other living beings have to endure far more often than seems reasonable or necessary. If we argue that suffering exists only in the mind then it may still be said to exist. We may even consider psychological anguish to be infinitely worse than simple physical pain.
Another answer which is widely regarded as a cop-out is the Free Will argument: "Evil exists because God could not give human beings truly free will without letting them have the option to perform evil acts. Thus, evil exists." The problem with this argument is that we are still talking about an all-powerful Deity and--in most theist traditions--one that has an unlimited amount of knowledge and creativity. Though a world in which freewill exists and evil does not is beyond our human comprehension, we're supposed to be talking about a being who is far superior to us, who's mind we can never hope to understand. While we may not be able to come-up with a solution we can imagine a being who could. If God is supposedly such a being, then why did he fail?
There, in a nutshell, is the problem. Now, here's my question: Do you think that all or even some Neo Pagans avoid this problem? If so, how? What is your own perspective on this philosophical dilemma? I realize that the problem I've asked you to consider applies primarily to monotheists and theists in general, but I want to know how you think this relates to Neo Paganism, if at all. What do you think we can learn here?
Please go ahead and discuss this problem in the comments for this post. I will be reading with great interest. Naturally, I have my own perspective which I will undoubtedly give to you at great length--whether you want it or not--in the next post. For now, let's chat.
~LitheWolf
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