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I wrote this on the back of an envelope a couple of weeks
ago, after doing a bit of reading since then, I think it may be a spin on Bertrand
Russell’s orbiting teapot concept from an Ignostic/Igtheism stance/viewpoint. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism But personally I'm more of a Jungian:-
...
There is no death.
...
There is no death.
We must best assume that there is nothing that anyone has
ever experienced that can be called death. Since part of death is the negation
of the self and therefore the absence of the experience of death, per-se. Life after death is intrinsically
contradictory. If it is Life after Death then how was the death a death at
all? And if death has occurred how can, what remains, be meaningfully defined
as Life? (like ice becoming water,
they are distinct and one can never be the other.)
So death is really only definable as the absence of life.
Only in part, is life defined as the narrow lens of consciousness,
through which we attempt to interpret the observable (one can be biologically
alive and unconscious). To use Descartes Cartesian model, the idea that consciousness
would have any value let alone ability without physical, biological
manifestation is to place far too much weight/worth on the concept of constructed
western consciousness and deny its fragmented reality. So what we conventionally call the process of ‘experiencing’
must cease, thus, death does not translate to experiencing or consciousness.
And by rights we cannot experience another’s death for/ with them, so no one
can ‘experience’ death.
Imagine walking down
the street with a friend and they suddenly point and say “look. There is a dead
person” we would expect to see some Ghost or Zombie- like figure, or more
usually a corpse. Some signifier of the absence of life, but in reality we
should rightly expect nothing, if it were not for the vague use of the word ‘person’ in there sentence. , Like
Un-good, Death can be expressed in Orwellian language as Un-living or Non-life.
My favourite way of expressing this, (normally whilst in a
pub) is to use the example of Ketchup. Picture a bottle of ketchup it seems
unlikely that anyone would ever want to express something such as Non-Ketchup, or Un-ketchup, or No-Ketchup,
or X-tchup. This ‘X-tchup’ would simply be defined and
expressed as the absence of Ketchup.
So we have the abstract notion of Death (Non-life) defined purely by the absence
of Life.
Similarly the abstract ‘X-tchup’
(Non-Ketchup) defined purely by the absence of Ketchup, and so on.
Now.
God.
Obviously we have the No-God
as defined by the absence of God.
However there was (is) never a God in the same way that
there is the bottle of Ketchup or in the same way that there is (the assumed)
current Life of a James Mason. We assume to the best of our knowledge that
there is empirically ‘The Bottle of
Ketchup’ and that there is empirically the ‘Life of James Mason’. God has never been afforded this
quantification. **
Thus we can no more quantifiably state ‘No-God’ than we can ‘God’*.
There was never a God so there can never be a No-God it
remains constructed, vague, perhaps a manifestation for projected ideologies, the
un-conscious, the sublime or personal wellbeing.
half full?
It seems that one thing that would unequivocally bring about
the end of all religion would be for God to be empirically and quantifiably defined
as real, and existing. Sapped of Its mystification & personal
interpretation and no longer requiring faith, god would be found to be much the
same as Carrots, Oxygen, Gravity, Syntax, Cognitive Dissonance, Marcel Duchamp’s
Fountain, London Buses, or the Smell of Burnt Almonds, or any other Google-able
Thing. It would be Ketchup.
To define God is to Kill God.
I hope this is not a burden of proof debate. I suppose I
could see how science might be regarded as the Ketchup used to define against
the Non-existent, Non-Ketchup of God, but not being a creationist, I disagree
that they fulfil those functions in relation to each other.
I don’t think I am shifting God around to conveniently slot
into some Quantum Singularity at the edges of the universe or some unknown
function of the pineal gland at the core of the brain. I don’t think God
resides in anything except human anthropology and culture and the projected un-conscious.
God exists as a reflection of our selves, to be found in the whole not the
individual parts, to be continually reimagined by man. As an artist I think we
best understand ourselves through the relationship between abstractions and
events/observation. And I am at my most happy with ambiguities. (Although I have just written a blog defining
my ambiguities to myself, but that’s part of art too. And surely the most
ambiguous thing of all is to define a rough frame work for your ambiguities,
and then probably not stick to it.)
:Quote
-‘But why should you call this something “God”? I would ask:
“Why not?” It has always been called “God.”’
-C.G. Jung.
An interesting lecture From Paul Bloom on the psychology of religious/any beliefs, natural assumptions and the double difference to authority figures. Which seems a much more insightful way to approach the subject than most manage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttSULfIoWHU
*Those best at quantifying God and thus destroying faith are
often the religious and fundamental religious, thus the atheist debate. However
I don’t think too many conclusions should be drawn from any individual’s choice
to describe themselves in any specific religious way.
** Re: Bobby Henderson’s /Dawkins’ “Flying spaghetti monster”:
To me, this is ketchup, which is to say that I know what a flying spaghetti
monster would be. (Flying, a monster, and largely composed of spaghetti) thus
it exists in a specific abstract sense like a griffin or Cyclops or any other
monster it exists notionally. Even perhaps in a similar way to “Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously”- (Chomsky)- we know what it means, but it doesn’t have
any resonance for us again, its lack of ambiguity and history robs it of
abstract, symbolic meaning. Although now the flying spaghetti monster is acquiring meaning in the parades and art of Neo-Darwin
atheists, which I quite like and is how new cultures and religion start.
