In the name of awe

Ryan Bell is an ex-Seventh Day Adventist pastor who went godless a year; he found an entity called “god” no longer necessary in his life nor as an explanation of the way life is. “I’d just say that the existence of God seems like an extra layer of complexity that isn’t necessary. The world makes more sense to me as it is, without postulating a divine being who is somehow in charge of things,” he said.

He is called an atheist, a misnomer as he is not against god as he is for the meaninglessness of the use of “god” to define self and explain the nature of existence.

I am reminded of the academic arguments whether Ptolemy was wrong and Copernicus was right, or Newtonian physics to Einstein’s, or in White America vs. BH Obama! These subjects involve different metaphors used at different times, some helpful to some as it is destructive to others.

Today’s metaphors are at war. There are those who pit their picture of reality against those of others. Islam is getting the butt of the negative vibes as the actions of their most radical brothers are ascribed as applicable to all.

The “row” between Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling and Rupert Murdock on his comments on the responsibility of all Muslims for the action of its radical elements is instructive. Rowling tweeted back, (hilariously, I think) that, being born Christian, and Rupert Murdock her responsibility, she’d auto-excommunicate. The “tweet” where kneejerk actions and responses are the rule was the medium of exchange.

Half of those that saw Murdock’s comments supported a blanket chastisement of Muslims. I share the position that lumping all Muslims, also, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, agnostics and atheists, as one, is unhelpful.

Germany’s Cologne Roman Catholic cathedral turned off its traditional lights in protest of an anti-Muslim demonstration that would have benefited from its brightness.

In the French kosher shop where a Muslim gunman summarily executed four Jews, a Muslim worker hid customers in the basement cellar to protect them from assault. Christians in Egypt protected Muslims in prayer by keeping a human chain to cordon the space away from hostile Christian doing the faithful harm.

The attack on the editor and staff of a French magazine that ran a cartoon ridiculing the prophet Mohammed saw vengeance in the raw, lethal and fatal. One is hard put to understand any justification but if one was to decipher the underlying motivation, the French magazine had the right to ridicule a figure solemnly revered to a fault by many within France but reaped consequences of a global net from those whose solemn allegiance had been violated.

A Saipan taxi driver acquaintance was a member of Falun Gong/Falun Dafa that got its start in Dong Bei where I am now (I recently got a book from them left on my doorstep which I quickly shredded before it became a political liability; besides, I do not read Hanzi) before it became a scourge on Beijing’s back. He joined knowing US INS indulgence but he traded in methamphetamines, got indicted, and deported a felon. 

Downstairs of the FG/FD office was a Shenyang lady I assisted to get out of the “madam” business. The Falun Gong was watch by U.S. officials. The “madam” was pulled in and served time at the Danforth penal facility in Connecticut for human trafficking. 

My Chinese wife who nursed a client in the CK building was friend of one of the watchdogs, and not long after she asked for a divorce. I braced myself for this eventuality as a natural consequence of our age difference but she pulled a fast one; she appropriated the role of separation as her purview to call.

The image of FG/FD as a persecuted lot in China serves the not-so-dormant anti-Chinese sentiments of the West. Metaphors hold images that determine our behavior; change the image and we change the behavior. 

Such is the function of the word “god.” Before it became a word referring to an external supernatural deity, it was a pious way of describing the experience of the awe and the awesome in our daily existence, expressed in the metaphors of substance before “process” got us the field of energy in physics. Folks shared the same metaphor and gathered as the awed ones (Ekklesia, the household of God) and developed rites and rituals to remind them of who they are. Wondered what CK cathedral is about?

Trained in theology, I was schooled when the “god-is-dead” and “religion-less Christianity” notions came to fore. As the word “god” got more meaningless across the planetary religious board, we focused on the “selfie” human wonder of consciousness on the endless, bottomless, and expansive breath of awe in human life.

Quickly, the existential insight was grabbed by academics in the new “awe-ism” trend in spiritual literature, and “awe” is dissected like a frog in the laboratory rather than simply a term to remind us of the limits of what we know of the self we live with so closely and dearly.

Got me 86 years worth of awe. That’s enough for me!