Forum Overview :: Laurence Fishburne's Dance Dance Revolution :: Re: *settles down*

[quote name="ndd"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]I apologize for being a huge dickhead, and wish to make it clear that I am willing to actually read what you write rather than take the first two words of any post and whirl off into fantasyland.[/quote] ok first off here's a picture of a liger so you have something to look at and be chill about <img src="http://i.imgur.com/jWCjZ.jpg"> if you find yourself overheating with the urge to correct my wrongness later, just flip back up to the liger and be like "that cat is cool, I should be cool too." Keep in mind this is all very recent thinking. This whole business fell into place like a non-sequitur, like if there was a big building being constructed and it was square like a bank and all marble and gold inside like a bank and bankers kept roaming around it and then like a week before it opens the letters were set over the door and read TEMPLE. My brother and I were out at dinner a few weeks ago and we were talking over sushi about how I'd dodged a bullet by not going to law school. SORRY MM, BUT THIS IS ACTUALLY THE CONVERSATION WE HAD, NO INSULT INTENDED (see liger.) Law is a razed field right now and I would have had a hard joyless slog ahead of me. "But you know," I giggled, pouring another cup of sake for myself. "I always wanted to be a minister. I mean in the Careers I Should Have Had sense." Bro was surprised by this. I was also surprised by this. I mean, I'd made jokes about it before with friends - concocting fabulous fantasies of life as a parish priest and laughing about it, but, you know... also not laughing. Stating it outright to my brother made it feel more real and dangerous. From then on I kept turning it over and over again in my mind: I've looked at this or that career, and considered dispassionately to pursue Whatever Trend X for personal gain; how much different could this be. I'm not <i>that</i> old. If I wanted to start tomorrow, what would it take? So yes, I began at the end: "I want to be a minister" and <i>then</i> considering the ramnifications. At the same time - had I not been in church choir as a kid? More importantly hadn't I had a lot of serious conversations with God as a child, imagining myself to be pious and imagining that there was something effective in faith? Hadn't I written all those stupid sermons, and Latin credos on the first page of every journal I failed to fill... And my library - there are a lot of books about math and physics and chemistry and yaoi, granted, but the ones with the spines most cracked are Bede's <u>Ecclesiastical History Of England</u> and Froissart's <u>Chronicles</u> and <i>The Black Book Of Caermarthen</i> above all, John Donne, in poetry and prose. Hadn't I conceived of a business of reading tarot cards (this is something I know so much about it would disgust you, probably.) And in the tradition of Crowley and Waite, which is to say: esoteric Christianity and Judaism. I'd hoped to use the cards as an excuse to give people good advice. <i>That</i> really was meant as a con, however benevolent. Hadn't I gone from church to temple to synagogue, week after week, pretending it was a series of sociological field trips. It was all "legal" as long as I didn't take it seriously. You might recall I had a similar attitude towards women once: they were supposed to be stupid beasts that I, exceptional creature that I am, could prey upon for the amusement of those who really mattered (men.) Religion and spirituality were supposed to be areas of pointless and brainless arcana, ritual without purpose - psychological masturbation. Something I could master and laugh at. Yet I found myself curiously defensive, and even while telling people "there's nothing in this," I knew enough about it to teach. (When you're a little older, I'll show you my series of lessons in esoteric Tarot.) The bag I was left holding in the midst of these ruminations was: what sort of person jokes about being a minister? Therefore I determined to go to church. But which church? Have you read the Bible? The god of the Old Testament is sulky and insane, and Jesus is a spectacular attention whore who occasionally says something clever about getting along with other people. Even as allegorical entities I couldn't get started with gods like that; Allah fell under the same purview. Buddhism? Hinduism? Transmigrations and destinies are cool and all but that's... not.... how I feel life should be lived or people should be judged. Why this complex mechanism of divine retribution and reshuffling? Why play head games about desire when you give yourself away by making the rules and roles different for women? Shinto? Asatru? Pretty stories, but they seemed to miss the point; looking further into paganism crystallized <i>why</i>. As much sympathy as I have for the idea of sacred groves and natural spirits, these things fall short. Trees and deer are not the point. The point is that we live in a vast emptiness continuously consumed by entropy, and life is the only argument the universe has ever made against entropy. <i>We the unlikely</i>, beneficiaries of this happy accident, are the only things that turn back the clock and extend willfully into the darkness. I don't believe in a god, at least not in the sense of Sky Dad. I don't believe in souls. I don't think we're ruled by a divine intelligence, nor told what we ought to do by some transcendental authority. Humans are the only game in town as far as <i>improving the lot of humans</i> is concerned. With that said, ceremony and philosophy, and their conjured fruit, religion, are things that have the positive power to enrich some people (myself being foremost in my thoughts at this turn); morality is a lever upon which one might rest enough weight to shift human sympathies and actions. Considering all of this, it seemed to me that life was worth revering and people were worth guiding and protecting, that religion was not empty rite, and that there was no reason to act coy about having spiritual sentiments anymore. Rather than pretend it was all meaningless bullshit, I could take it seriously. It was just a matter of finding a body of likeminded people at that point. Unitarian Universalism is an awkward faith in that one can't point to it and declare its superiority by age, size, political power, or general acceptance; however it was unique in that it required me to make no philosophical compromises. I can see how that would be a deficiency to some people - people who believe religion ought to be about sacrifice and submission - but I find I'm unable to be uncomfortable with it. [/quote]