Some Conditions May Apply

I apologize because I have to be a pedantic little shit. Terms, in this case, matter. I’m going to start using a different set of words as an example of where I’m moving forward.

“Gard” is one of the root parts of “garden” and “guard” and the etymology between the two shares the same semantic space: “This is something precious; we recognize that and so we protect it from harm.”

“Farm” on the other hand, shares a similar root to “firm” and, etymologically, comes from the idea of an obligation. It’s rent, a lease, a payment. You farm something because that fucker OWES you (the land being the target of that epithet).

Starting with that as a foundation, I’m going to turn back to faith. The modern vernacular wants you to believe that there are facts and there is faith. Facts are “solid, real, and experiental”. Faith is “ephemeral, imaginary, and centered on doctrine”.

That’s bullshit. That’s a modern fallacy.

Faith for tens of thousands of years was and is simply the belief that a system larger than you understand works. A person has faith that when they click on a light switch, the light will turn on, despite the concept that they may not understand the technology behind it.

Equally applicable, the oldest ideas of reincarnation came from the singular observation that when you eat a cow (or a carrot), you do not turn into a carrot (or a cow). And since people die, it is equally possible that what is valued in them disperses into the landscape. This is confirmed by those wild occurences that happen when the landscape is beneficial to you (when it shouldn’t be) and also the observation that some children are born who act like ancestors, despite the fact of never having met them.

Is that above idea correlative or causative? Hard to tell at first glance. It’s a vital part of linking a society to the physical earth around them, and if we want to go deeper into that discussion then we get into “what is consciousness” “what is self” “what is human” etc.

Faith is endemic to life. In fact, animistically speaking, it’s probably the distinction between what modern folks call “life” vs. “unalive”

In animism, everything is considered to have a motive force. Everything moves towards maximizing the flow of the universe, or the system.

In short, everything has a spirit.

So what distinguishes a rock from a sparrow?

In short, faith.

Rocks don’t particularly need faith. They follow set laws and set patterns of behavior for the most part.

But… bacteria? They are operating on the idea that if you throw up a bunch of lipids around you — in essence a very fragile wall which -breaks- flow — then you are creating a situation where you can take advantage of all new directions that the rocks can’t conceive of.

That is, at its heart, a completely batsh-t concept. The idea that you can build a leaky wall and slosh around inside it for a while. And depending on the modifications, you can wander around a volcanic vent or invent & build a rocket ship.

It’s wonderful and amazing and based on the idea that there are forces / systems out there beyond your comprehension that allow this to happen.

What hominids have is the ability to Story, to create narratives that can persist in time. We have had that gift for, conservatively, about 1-2 million years (based on the cultivation of fire as an ally).

What we did with Story was cross the world and intimately examine the faith of both our own species and others. Where we couldn’t understand, we used entheogens–substances that produced a psychedelic response–to shake us from from pre-conceptions so we could build a deeper most robust relationship with the land around us.

There was and is no need for special senses. We used what we had and placed it in the context of Story and if we didn’t have it, we borrowed it from others (observation of other species).

I CANNOT overemphasis how powerful a tool Story in combination with observation is. For example, ayahuasca is an entheogen that contains DMT. DMT breaks down easily and completely in stomach acid; it’s only when a second plant that alters your stomach acid when DMT becomes effective. When folks in South America were asked how they knew what plants to use, they consistently said “the plants told us.” They were able to take observations + Story and create a dialogue with two seperate species of plant.

That’s hardly the only example of this.

Because of this powerful tool, faith throughout hominid history is the driving force of culture and they are inextricably tied to culture’s success or failure. While there are a few that recognize a potential force outside time or space or the physical world, most address the gods of here-and-now. The oldest ones that do talk about an external force usually present it as a mystery that we generally should be grateful to (like a grandfather) but don’t have a special interest in it.

When it comes to this kind of faith, the original meme becomes both an affirmative “yes” and is sublimely ridiculous. It’s “yes” in that since your immediate environs impact your Story. OF COURSE a person in L.A. would be following a different faith than one in New York. It’s ridiculous in that what’s being presented is not a matter of faith: it’s a matter of colonization.

I should note that I’m talking about the healthy faiths above, which is the vast majority of the animist faiths.

Religion is a modern thing, born about 10K -ish years ago in a small section of the world. It only took over the planet in the last 400 years. Religion is very much based in the clusterf–k that is farming.

Farming is very much Roe v Wade.

Farmers can say they love the land. They can say they are working hard for the land. But the reality is that they are demanding that the land produces stuff for them.

And they are more than willing to hurt the land in order to achieve this.

This is a miserable f–king way of life and the specialization that must form around it creates a state of disconnect. The easiest way to answer this disconnect–and the negative emotions that come with it–is to say that God(s) demands it.

Rewards to come later.

You are obligated to follow God(s)’ invisible commands.

Thus religion.

Religion has, from its onset, become more and more unhinged. From god-rulers, to psychopomps, to god-replacement, all the way down to One God(tm). Even the religion that a portion of the farming world setting on–stolen from the Jewish tribes–ended up fracturing and re-fracturing until it’s now a bunch of shiny shards and heretical factions.

Religion got so bad, it created a whole swath of people who rejected faith entirely. They only relied on their immediate senses and the delusional belief that everything meaningful could only be dissected and catalogued by Science(tm).

Religion in its current form is mostly a tool of colonization, where the invading culture tries to bend the entire globe to its unhealthy and abominable need to expand. It vastly disconnects people from any reasonable form of reality. That’s the reason why I spend my time ranting about it.

Theosophy, and its commentary on the unseen world, gave birth to New Age faiths. Their embrace of an unseen world, is merely One God(tm) repackaged. It places everything conveniently outside of space-time so that you can argue imaginary stories until the cows come home. Without a recourse to actually figuring out what actually works to nurture culture. Aand by default, the world in which culture grows.

Quantum entanglement is real and important. The idea that there are forces beyond space-time is amusing, interesting, might be real or might be a Story. But both are not immediately accessible in a meaningful way. And realistically, either fall into Religion’s role of de-coupling lived experience from its consequences.

The Story, in its greatest sense, is an intimate way of embracing the living universe. But some corrupted and co-opted it to try and deal with their own trauma.

I work hard to try and restore the Story back to a reasonable shape.

#original#anti religion#pro faith#fuck civilization#your trauma should not be the foundation for culture#trauma politics

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