When this happens to us irl, the walls of the zoo are going to be a lot more subtle. We might already be within them. I’ve been hesitant to write a story like this myself, to accentuate the horror and the ugliness of it enough for people to feel what we ought to feel about it, because I see a lot of people who don’t seem able to bear the weight of maltheism, or whatever it is in the cohabitive zone between maltheism and eutheism[1], acceptance without submission. It’s a missing mood. There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain[2], too many, faced with an alien god, either crumple or enthusiastically betray themselves in the hope that they can become alien and feel about the zoo the same way its keepers must feel. (Which is probably not even what the keepers would want from us!)
Like, I’m wondering if Shaman Bob could have taught our man cohabitive theology if he’d been given more time, and I think it’d be good if he had.
It might be called “dystheism”, but I don’t see many groups around today who still seem to practice it. There were the gnostics, but they also committed the eutheismcope of believing that there was some other Supreme Being hiding absurdly behind the Demiurge. “dys” kind of suggests more badness than not, if it ever represented a neutral position, the word has surely discoloured over time under the light of so much eutheist-dominated theological commentary.
But I’m pretty sure there were a lot of less dominant religions that never really even considered trying to classify the creator as good or evil. I’m also wondering if Judaism migtha been this way in some eras, given the Wrestling With The Angel story.
There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain
Hm, I got the opposite impression from reading this sequence of blog posts from Bret Devereaux on ACOUP
The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. Let’s start with an analogy:
Let’s say you are the leader of a small country, surrounded by a bunch – let’s say five – large neighbor countries, which never, ever change. Each of these big neighbors has their own culture and customs. Do you decide which one is morally best and side with that one? That might be nice for your new ally, but it will be bad for you – isolated and opposed by your other larger neighbors. Picking a side might work if you were a big country, but you’re not; getting in the middle is likely to get you crushed.
No. You will need to maintain the friendship of all of the countries at once (the somewhat amusing term for this in actual foreign policy is ‘Finlandization‘ – the art of bowing to the east without mooning the west, in Kari Suomalainen’s words). And that means mastering their customs. When you go to County B, you will speak their language, you wear their customary dress, and if they expect visiting dignitaries to bow five times and then do a dance, well then you bow five times and do a dance. And if Country C expects you to give a speech instead, then you arrive with the speech, drafted and printed. You do these things because these countries are powerful and will destroy you if you do not humor whatever their strange customs happen to be.
[...]
Ah, but how will you know what kind of speech to write or what dance to do? Well, your country will learn by experience. You’ll have folks in your state department who were around the last time you visited County B, who can tell you what worked, and what didn’t. And if something works reliably, you should recreate that approach, exactly and without changing anything at all. Sure, there might be another method that works – maybe you dance a jig, but the small country on the other side of them dances the salsa, but why take the risk, why rock the boat? Stick with the proven method.
But whatever it is that these countries want, you need to do it. No matter how strange, how uncomfortable, how inconvenient, because they have the ability to absolutely ruin everything for you. So these displays of friendship or obedience – these rituals – must take place and they must be taken seriously and you must do them for all of these neighbors, without neglecting any (yes even that one you don’t like).
This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look). Let’s break that down, starting with the concept of…
When this happens to us irl, the walls of the zoo are going to be a lot more subtle. We might already be within them. I’ve been hesitant to write a story like this myself, to accentuate the horror and the ugliness of it enough for people to feel what we ought to feel about it, because I see a lot of people who don’t seem able to bear the weight of maltheism, or whatever it is in the cohabitive zone between maltheism and eutheism[1], acceptance without submission. It’s a missing mood. There seem to be no organised religions that ever managed to hold it for long before falling into rose-tinted fatalism, no group who stand before god and bargain[2], too many, faced with an alien god, either crumple or enthusiastically betray themselves in the hope that they can become alien and feel about the zoo the same way its keepers must feel. (Which is probably not even what the keepers would want from us!)
Like, I’m wondering if Shaman Bob could have taught our man cohabitive theology if he’d been given more time, and I think it’d be good if he had.
It might be called “dystheism”, but I don’t see many groups around today who still seem to practice it. There were the gnostics, but they also committed the eutheismcope of believing that there was some other Supreme Being hiding absurdly behind the Demiurge. “dys” kind of suggests more badness than not, if it ever represented a neutral position, the word has surely discoloured over time under the light of so much eutheist-dominated theological commentary.
But I’m pretty sure there were a lot of less dominant religions that never really even considered trying to classify the creator as good or evil. I’m also wondering if Judaism migtha been this way in some eras, given the Wrestling With The Angel story.
Hm, I got the opposite impression from reading this sequence of blog posts from Bret Devereaux on ACOUP