Now I understand what you tried to say to me

A while back, I said the following:

Robert Fripp has said that "any act based on principle is a good one". Dr Javad Nurbaksh has said that hooking up with even an inferior, selfish, not-properly-enlightened Master is better than letting your ego continue to run rampant. I find it very difficult to accept these propositions, because they're very similar to L. Ron Hubbard's dictum that "you must let others control you before you can learn to control yourself", which is clearly a cynical command to induce people to sign themselves up as slaves.

My main counterexample to Fripp's quote above was: "what if the principle is 'no niggers'?" Well, thinking about it, we can disentangle racist violence from - theoretically - making a principled stand on a racist basis which actually causes you personal disadvantage. (Like: setting up a barber shop in Soweto and only catering to white people? Do that and I'll give you serious points for style.)

It's like, the Catholic Church has a principle: "only celibate men can do the magic trick which turns a wafer and some grape juice into the Living Presence of the Lord Jesus Christ". I think this principle leads the Church to be (at least in part) a force for repression and negativity in the world. But what is the alternative? Ordaining women because... why? Because that's what everyone else does? The whole point of the Church - any Church - is being something other than The Real World Of Horrible Jobs, and if the aims of religion coincide with the policy aims of the State and the price signals of the competitive market, then it is surely a complete waste of time and a con-job.

Only by making a stand on principle - even a reactionary one - can you pry open some space for a different reality. It might be a shittier reality than the mainstream one, but it at least proves that different realities are possible. (I personally think that any Catholics who really object to the Church's teachings on gender and sexuality should just walk and join the Anglicans or many of the independent or schismatic Catholic congregations. Hell, become a Gnostic, they've got all the bells and smells. Attempting to change Church doctrine because it conflicts with common sense or even basic human dignity is missing the whole point of what the Church is there for.)

Godforms

The creed of monotheism, as clearly set out in the Noble Qur'an and elsewhere, can be expressed as: "Nothing is worth worshipping or fearing but God." It may come as a shock to some of our readers to hear me expressing approval of the least politically fashionable of all the Abrahamic religions, but here's an article from a rather heretical branch of Islam, suggesting how that insistence on unity above all things ties into an almost Buddhist-style "non-attachment" to worldy possessions or the good opinion of others. Which I think is something we can get behind. Not only is it psychologically healthy, it's even politically revolutionary in potential - as the Catholic and Islamic Anarchists could tell you.

Now I doubt that I, or anyone following my ongoing monologue, is going to start believing in a superhuman personality which cares for us as if it were human, which is what most people think of when the word "God" is thrown around. At least, if we do start believing in such a thing, it will be in the spirit of experiment and there will be escape hatches! However, if Richard Dawkins is right, and spirituality / believing in something more important than everyday human survival is hard-wired into our consciousness, it's best to use that correctly. Which brings us back to a question I've asked elsewhere on this board - what might a "godform" of Chaos Marxism be like?

The Ma'at crowd talk of N'Aton, a future perfected and unified human consciousness who is projecting important mystic info backwards in time to enable us to turn into him/her/it. Although I cringe at the Star Trek-style random apostrophe in the name, the idea that our equivalent of "God" is something we are working towards becoming speaks to me. In contrast to those who would use "no other gods before me" as an excuse for self-abnegation of our human nature to some frankly scary abstract being, let us imagine our equivalent of "God" as being our growing consciousness of ourselves as humans and as humanity, seen as a unified entity, with power over our whole world for both good and ill. In that sense, certainly nothing is worth worshipping or fearing than "God".

Perhaps this is religion for the new millennium. We are in a position where - collectively - we-as-a-species do have power over our whole ecosphere. This renders old-school localised polytheism and abstract monotheism both obsolete. But are we going to be a blind idiotic Azathoth, a nihilistic and indifferent Doctor Manhattan, or something more like the Earth Mother or Santa Claus that most of us would prefer to believe in?

I've used the phrase "Unborn Goddess" before. I now prefer God/dess of the World To Come. One of the big problems with humanity at this stage is our attachment to the gender binary. Attempts to go beyond that, like the Ma'at crowd, tend to look a bit creepily inhuman, just like (sadly) people of not-man-nor-woman gender identity are today. Perhaps a different model can be One Power With A Thousand Faces, All Of Them Us. I look forward to artwork and storytelling.