Year of Faith

Sunday and Monday was my weekend.  No work, and only a few chores to do, it was great.  I like having free days like that, and it’s a chance to partake in my favourite pastime- video games.  I could spend days at a time with a controller in my hand and a decent title in the box.  It’s becoming such a passion that you might be seeing a post on religion and video games here in the near future. But with the Year of Faith project underway I feel like I need to be spending every moment in Taoism, or whatever religion of the month I will be in.  There’s a lot of books to read, a lot of people to meet, things to do, etc.  I’m constantly feeling like I’m missing something.  But on the other hand, I need downtime.  I hate it when I have no time during the week that is devoid of anything, a happy little blank expanse that is totally and completely mine to deal with.  So little of my time is my own, I get very protective of it.  So this weekend I realized that I need a day or two where I can leave my life behind and just unwind.  To this end I think the best schedule for me, writing wise, is to have a post up every weekday that I’m at work.  That means at least four during the week, maybe one or two on weekends.

I realize the futility of trying to shoehorn myself into a schedule, but I really do see the success or failure of each day in the Year of Faith project in terms of how much I update the site.  Updating means I had something to write about, having something to write about means I had a new thought, or a new experience, and that means I learned something new about the religion.  Or I just had a funny story.  Either way, I think it works as a good mechanism to keep me on task.

Next week I might have yet another plan of attack.  I’m definitely still playing this by ear.

I’m meditating regularly now.  Honestly it is getting kind of addictive.  It’s not that I’m craving it, rather I’m more and more curious about how it will progress.  Every time I come away calm, peaceful and focused and I can maintain that mindfulness for a few hours afterwords.  It makes interacting with people easier and feels more genuine, makes food taste better… no, that isn’t right.  Meditation has, so far, made it easier to focus.  That’s it.  Nothing else is really changing, I’m just better at being in the moment, isolating things and experiencing them one at a time.

This is why it feels like I’m high.  When you’re stoned, you become more sensitive, more receptive.  Similar effects, different causes. And this is only from a few sessions no more than half an hour long.  People in monasteries do this for hours.  I could also be completely on the wrong track, I don’t really have any idea right now.  Could just be all in my head.

Heh, “All in my head.”  What?  I thought it was funny.

One of my dream careers would be to become a Christian priest, probably protestant (lots more free will, a lot less tempting young boys, apparently).  I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to learn the true length and breadth of Christian doctrine and how it relates to other religions and to people directly.  I could be the spiritual head of a diverse community of believers, and lend spiritual and moral wisdom to numerous personal issues and problems, and lead compassionate initiatives internationally and throughout the community.

I’ve always seen the priest as a mix of two things that are very important to me- accumulating knowledge and wisdom, and then using that knowledge to help people in a very real and immediate fashion.  There are so many opportunities to help people deal with their faith and their understanding of God and their religion, to be able to have these kinds of conversations with the troubled and the curious.  This kind of prospect genuinely excites me.  Now I might have a completely unrealistic and romanticized view of the priesthood, but that’s the point of a dream job, isn’t it?

Slight hitch though, not a big problem, but something that may or may not come up once in a great long while- I don’t believe in God. It would be an unorthodox kind of life to lead, to be sure, an atheist priest.  Someone who is supposed to lead people to God and understand God and yet has no such faith.  Probably wouldn’t go down so well with the congregation, I fear.

Stranger still though, it’s never occurred to me that this would be detrimental to my understanding of the Christian faith, God, or Christ.  Knowing these things inside and out, as I am want to do, and knowing how to interact and converse with people in a religious sense seem to be the real necessary skills for a priest.  So long as I could cultivate these things, as well as the skills necessary for the other minutiae of the priesthood, isn’t that enough?

I honestly believe that being able to deal with a congregation from the point of view of an atheist would be a real boon rather than a blunder.  An atheist knows how difficult it is to accept the idea of God, they know the ins and outs of all the arguments, they know how absurd faith can be, how hard it can be to square this faith away with reason, and they certainly know how religion can be criticized and assailed from without and within.  I love religion and God just as much as the average Christian, I just don’t believe He exists, which changes the kind of love to be sure, but I’m still very much caught up in the whole thing on a  day to day basis.

The reason I bring all of this up is that I recently read a news story about a fellow who is actually living my dream.  Klass Hendriske turned more than few heads in the Netherlands and throughout the Christian community in 2007 when he published a book called Believing in a God Who Does not Exist: Manifesto of an Atheist Preacher. He obviously came under a lot of scrutiny from the powers that be (or may not be, in this case) but just recently the Protestant Church of the Netherlands declared that they will not be taking any action against Hendriske, saying that his views are actually sympatico with other liberal theologians within Protestantism.

So no burning collar, no cassok striping, nothing ontoward at all.  As you can imagine this news was rather uplifting for this little dream of mine.  I doubt that it will actually happen for me, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible.  Seems that the Protestants have put themselves on some shakey ground though, as Hendriske himself says, “If my view is allowed, then there’s something wrong with the foundations of the church.”  Yes Klaas, there is something wrong, and you and me both know what it is.

In any case, I’ll be looking forward to an English translation of his book.

So I’m trying to find a process by which I can update this blog on a semi-regular basis and keep my own personal journal that documents my experiences. There is a whole lot that I don’t put on this space, and that makes me feel like my lovely little blog is being neglected. So I think that I shall be a bit more regimented in keeping daily journal entries, and will put up some choicer bits here instead of trying to remake the pentagram every time, as it were. I will also use this site for reflections on current religious events, news items, etc.

Or not. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime I have made a bibliography page to keep track of all the books I have read or made reference to throughout the year. It was either this or try to organize my library.

I assure you, the choice was a simple one.

The reason for the lack of updates lately is simple- I’ve been living, and by that I mean I have been indulging.  I have been slothful, lustful, prideful, and just plain full.  I have probably had more intoxicants in my body this past week than I have in the entirety of 2009, and I am only getting started.  It’s been a lot of fun, but I’ve been paying the price these past few days with some wicked hangovers, so I’m having an early night tonight.  But first, some thoughts.

The Satanic Bible often makes the point that Satan has many names.  The SB is divided into sections titled Satan, Lucifer, Belial, and Leviathan.  Reciting a list of infernal names is required during every Satanic ritual, which are different names for various cultural devils and demons.  But my favourite of the list is Lucifer.

The Roman god, Lucifer, was the bearer of light, the spirit of the air, the personification of enlightenment.  In Christian mythology he became synonymous with evil, which was only to have been expected from a religion whose very existence is perpetuated by clouded definitions and bogus values!

-The Satanic Bible, p. 39

Lucifer in the New Testament is meant to represent the morning star (another meaning of Lucifer) and is used to reference a dethroned Babylonian king, and is not explicitly tied anywhere to the devil.  Nevertheless Lucifer has come to be synonymous with Satan, and thus with Satanism.

LaVey characterizes Satan as many things- as being masterless, as the prototypical adversary, and as the light-bearer, the herald of knowledge and understanding. This is why I have an affinity with the title ‘Lucifer.’ It has a lot in common with how I tend to see humanity.  In the first section of the SB, the “Infernal Diatribe,” LaVey writes a long tirade from the perspective of the Devil, calling down God and Heaven and challenging Christian moral precepts.  But halfway through, the emphasis changes, and Satan is no longer shouting alone.  The diatribe begins as Satan, the fallen angel, addressing God and man, but it switches to ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ and suddenly Satan is identifying himself as one of us, as another human being screaming at the heavens.  Satan is not just some anthropological adversary who exists to challenge God, he is depicted as rooting for us, as urging us on.  He becomes a rallying point for earthly delights as well as our accoplishments and our lust for life, our will to power and to be great.  Satan becomes the pride of humanity.

I think, when seen in this way, Satan can be compared to Prometheus, that old Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity.  I always see this story as a recognition of our potential, a freeing of our souls from mediocrity.  Satan is often condemned for his pride in the Abrahamic faiths- for refusing to bow down to the first man, or for wishing to become God.  He is that which will not scrape, who will not bow down, he does not flinch in the face of the greatest of all gods.  He is just like Prometheus.  Satan strives for the greatest of all possible things, to be God, and LaVey depicts him as that force which wishes the same for humanity, ceaselessy trying to steal fire.

When on this topic I tend to think about T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, specifically the last few lines,

This is the way the worlds ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

This last line is my personal mantra when considering the future of humanity- “Not a whisper” (whisper, in my humble opinion, is a better choice of words).   I fear that we may all be snuffed out by some errant asteroid or our own bloody mindedness before we really make something of ourselves.  I want us to be endless.  I want us to be able to see the end of our solar system, the end of our galaxy.  This seems in line with what I have learned about Satanism so far.

Satanism is a bang, not a whimper.

PS- The contact form works now.  Much thanks to S.

You can now read all about my lovely self and the lovely project in the about section.

I am also trying to get a contact page working.

Right now though, I really want to go outside.

I want you to imagine a terrific expanse of yellow, and a dark man composed entirely of right angles, with the exception of his smooth, hard-hat covered head.  This man, his head surfing at an unnatural height just above his shoulders, is bent low over a dark pile, also composed of right angles, wielding some kind of tool, stabbing into the unkown.

That is what you would probably see right now if Geocities and it’s atrocious gifs were still around.  But for now we have this, and as you have probably guessed, we are under construction at the moment.  Sorry about that somewhat pretentious opening paragraph.  I warn you that there may be a lot of that in the future.

At the moment I am trying to get into contact with local religious groups and lining up my reading lists for each month.  I want to try to get all of my preliminary research out of the way before the year starts, so I’m not spending time during the year trying to prepare for the months to come.  I won’t be able to mitigate that entirely, but there is still much to be done.

The schedule probably ins’t going to change now, and I’m going to start working on the different ‘About’ pages, one about the project and one about myself.  Perhaps I can finish those this evening.

One of my old proffessors has been invited to a Buddhist ceremony tomorrow morning, and he invited me to come along.  It is the celebration of the Amitbha Buddha’s birthday, a key figure in Pure Land Buddhism, at the Golden Buddha monastery. I was looking forward to it until I realized how early I need to wake up tomorrow.  Sounds like a ludicrous reason, but I really am not a morning person.

More to come.  So much more.

T-minus eight days. I am terrified by the amount of stuff yet to do.