WATERMARK

This post is an experiment — and a risky one.  As some of you
know, I take sleeping pills (among others) as part of my medical
treatment.  Usually these knock me out for the entire night, but
occasionally my mind races and I get up in the night and do odd
things, some of which I remember.  Last night, I got up and
recorded a long ramble about the thinking I’ve been doing on religion
and values, subsequent to the election. 

As you will see/ hear, I’ve been thinking about these issues a great
deal, questioning my own values and beliefs.  This has brought me
to the conclusion that, I’ll be damned (at least many people will think
so) — I’m a pagan. 

So here is the recording.  I’ve transcribed it below,
eliminating the umm’s but otherwise staying fairly close to the
original.

For weeks now, I’ve been reading about religion and values.  I
understand that Reverend Dobson Bob Jones III wrote a letter to the President,
encouraging him to follow the direction of his evangelical followers,
and stating further that it was essential to stop the pagan
agenda.

[Note:  I have tried to find this letter on the internet, without
luck — though I remember reading it.  Do I have the wrong writer?  If anyone can provide a link, I’d appreciate it.]

Now my first response to this pagan agenda was that once again I had
been left off of the memo list, although I have never really claimed that
title [pagan] for myself.  But further exploration taught me a great deal.

Reading some of the
evangelical literature, I come to see that they and I do in fact have
extremely different — cavernously different — ideas about the
universe, and my place in it.  The first difference, perhaps, being that
I am not sure that I think they have a right to decide what my place
is in the universe.

In any case, one of the most significant things that I noticed
was our different conceptions of animals, and  this, of course, is
part of the whole struggle around evolution.  I always understood that
the fundamentalists believed that, indeed, the entire world had been
made in seven days, and that science — scientific proofs to the otherwise were
irrelevant to that belief.  And I thought that was the core issue for
the evolution argument; that evolution had to be wrong because it
hadn’t been accomplished in seven days.

But then I came to realize that there is another critical issue — that
being whether I, a human being, a homo sapien, am in fact an animal. 
Everything in my experience, my experience of the world, my experience being in the world, my
experience in my own body, tells me that I am
an animal; and everything in science, in evolutionary biology, in biology, in human biology, tells me that I am an animal.

But this belief, this conviction, based on evidence or not, is clearly
a blow to the evangelical, fundamentalist view of the world,
which sees human beings as most especially not animals; that
human beings are not even an animal set apart, or an animal set above,
but simply and absolutely not an animal, and that to believe otherwise
is blasphemous, and rebellious, and perhaps, even, evil.

So that was one shock in my reading.

I had always understood, or have for some time, anyway, that the
fundamentalist Christians  believe that the only way — they
believe  that there is a heaven and a hell, and that the only way
to get to
heaven is to accept Jesus Christ as your savior, and that this is a very
— it’s not metaphorical for them in any way — it’s a very specific
requirement to enter heaven, and apparently the
only one.   Behavior in life seems to be beside the point, as
long
as you accept Jesus Christ as your savior.

I’ve always known that I wasn’t a Christian, even as a child, and even
being raised by a beloved, kind, loving, Christian, grandmother.  It just
didn’t make sense to me.  I seem to be one of those who requires a
certain logic and rationality in the world around me, or at least in my
ability to understand the world around me.

Most of my reading about religion and faith has been about
Buddhism.  I’ve read hundreds of books about Buddhism.
I do not
claim to be a Buddhist, because I recognize that Buddhism is a
practice, not an idea, not a fantasy about how things work, but is a
day- to- day,  moment- to- moment practice that I have not
engaged in, at least not above the moment- to- moment for brief periods
level.  So I can’t claim that for myself, although many of the
points of view that some Buddhists believe resonate with me very
strongly.

In spending time on the Internet and looking for this amorphous
pagan agenda, I actually found one.   It was by a
writer that I recognize, Starhawk.  It was written in the
mid-nineties as I recall, I don’t have it in front of me at the moment. 
Everything that they speak of
in this agenda, this five-point agenda, are things that I agree with.

The values of family and diversity.  The value of the earth
that sustains us.  The recognition and the valuing of the other
animals.  The recognition that we are ourselves other
animals.  The recognition of the whole, and the interconnections
among us all.

Somehow I had always thought that paganism was animism or idol worship,
or whatever, and it’s clear that from the Christian point of view that
it is idolatry —  it’s idolatry to love the universe, instead of god; it’s
idolatry to not separate them out.  It’s not acceptable to see the sacred, the divine, in a
hummingbird, or a mountain, or a pet cat, or each other because
that’s — blasphemous.

Only god is god, and the rest is, I don’t know, a playground?
a research laboratory? I really am not clear on that point .

But I am drugged, and I’m tired, and I’m probably not making a lot of sense; so I think I will turn this off now. 

***************************************************************************

UPDATE:  Jennifer (who has two blogs, both of which I read daily) tells me via email that I misremembered — it was Bob Jones III who wrote the letter to the President.  She sent me a copy of the letter, which was previously at the URL http://www.bju.edu/letter but has been removed.  I have put the letter in the comments to this post.  Thanks, Jennifer.

ADDED 29 November 02004:  Another view, via allied — I am a Christian, too