Baba O'Riley

Pragmatic Religious Naturalism

LIVE IN HARMONY.









LEAVE NO TRACE.

Sheer Madness. Mass Insanity.

The 42% of Americans who consistently support Donald Trump are mainly white people afraid of losing to people of color what little economic security they currently enjoy.

80% of white evangelicals are included in that 42%. They share the same fear of losing economic security, plus they are worried about a variety of other "threats": scientific narratives that contradict what they embrace as the inerrant word of god; "uppity" women who want to work outside the home and control their own reproductive patterns; the existence of religious traditions that offer alternative narratives to their own. And some of them actually nourish a hope that World War III will bring Jesus to the Temple Mount and usher in the Messianic Age.

That some of our politicians are sincere adherents of evangelical Christianity is troubling enough, but almost all of our politicians are willing to cynically pander to that demographic for the sake of power. And all are infected by the virus of racism.

Racism lies at the root of American culture and politics. It is the worm in the apple of the American experiment (read Robert Bellah’s classic book The Broken Covenant).

Anyone who has lived in the U.S. for longer than 15 minutes has been infected/affected by racism in one way or another. We have all eaten the apple and the worm is in our guts. The worm drives our politics. We will sink the ship if it tells us to do so—"we" meaning the frightened whites—and it IS telling us to do so because it has read the writing on the wall.

And then there is the madness of Kanye West—a musical genius (I am told) but clearly off his rocker.

Isolated by two great oceans and bordered by two weak states, white America has led a charmed life for the past 300 years. That charmed life is now under threat by the mere fact that "our world" is not THE world (thank god). Incapable of accepting THE world with grace, we will take it down with us if we can. We are spoiled, petulant children who have been left to our own devices. Few adults appear to have remained in the room.

That said, forewarned is forearmed. Plan accordingly.

Ultimate Religion

Literature is the only religion worth having.

Poetry is spilled religion.

The high priests of my religion are all poets.

Those who insist on reading the Qur'an like a Protestant (for surface meaning) are blasphemers; the Qur’an is "recitation" and the medium is the message; translating its music into prose is Luciferian hermeneutics.

Martin Heidegger has taught us that "poetic images are imaginings in a distinctive sense: not mere fancies and illusions but imaginings that are visible inclusions of the alien in the sight of the familiar." It is the dialectic of alien and familiar that makes "the poetic...the basic capacity for human dwelling." Mortals "must ever learn to dwell."

Religious traditions are vast archives of inherited prejudice; even so, they provide us with the idiom and the imaginary that are essential for poetic production.

What George Santayana called "ultimate religion" is a poetic relationship to the archive: one that sees in it (as Northrop Frye put it) myths to live by and metaphors to live in.

Which is to say, "ultimate religion" is poetic dwelling.