Randomized musings...

[silveradept]

No particular point, necessarily, but a coredump from the moral/religious/philosophical sections of my mind, possibly involving other ones in subtler shades. If you're not into that stuff, you can skip this whole entry.

It was easier then. Back when there was only One True Path, and I could be secure in that thought. Back then, since I was surrounded by a bunch of people who thought the same way, and they said that they were True Believers, I didn't entertain the possibility of there being another way. Childlike innocence, perhaps, or more likely a lack of radically different-thinking people.

Exploring the bounds of things in middle school with welah, laforce, and several of the others there, I may have pushed my horizons a bit, but I was looking for differences, things that were not similar. I still thought there was One True Way, but it said that people who believed in the same main ideas were Okay, and that they were worth having as friends. To some degree, it was probably a one-way mirror, because I'm not sure that those people thought of me the same way.

But there was this problematic little idea. It called itself Magic - the whole throwing fireballs and calling down lightning bolts bit. While I still haven't figured that part out, at least not without some serious help from a special effects crew, it exposed me to the idea that there were entire belief systems other than the group that I was used to - a completely foreign conception of the universe and its workings. Where once there was Prayer alone, now the idea of Magic gained an association with it. The two were potentially compatible, in my opinion, and didn't have to do a whole lot to merge.

Then the other shoe dropped. Magic, as I found out, had no place in the One True Way - it was considered to be a construction of The Enemy. Prayer was acceptable, Magic was not. And so I hid, and still do, to some degree, this conception of Magic. I have to say, public schooling at this time was a salvation.

And so I started seeing the two systems at odds with each other. The secure belief that I was following the One True Way shattered. I defected to the other belief system, partly out of spite, partly because I wanted to keep the idea of Magic as a workable idea.

Then came the floodgates. Having opened my brain to the possibility of one alternate system, the thousands arrived, both religious and philosophical, each demanding study as a possibly suitable replacement for my lost Way. And thus have I passed the time, studying systems (although not many of them), even returning to the one that I had started at, but viewing it with a different eye, one looking for wisdom contained in it, instead of dogma to be followed.

Now here I am, out in the sea of belief, hopping from iceberg to iceberg, looking for the shore. Most would say that I'm having a crisis of faith, but I don't think that's true. I have faith in the systems that are presented to me, that they will work for the people they are intended for. I've posited that all people have a religion, even atheists. I still think this is true.

- It's morality that I'm having a crisis of. If I can find a system that holds all the things that I want, and has a higher authority of some sort that I can ascribe blessings and failures to, then I could be secure and know that I am doing Right, following the One True Way. However, I have found that many systems constructed by others have hidden sides, dark flaws, or at the very least have the provisions in them to be able to justify actions totally counter to the ideas they espouse. In that same way, all of my ideas about Right and Wrong have also come under suspicion, and I worry that I cannot stand as an adequate sentinel against my own dark side. That thought is terrifying, paralyzing, causing second guesses about motivations, even if the actions are deemed to be Right.

So then where is the viable option? A constructed system may have shortcomings, a system of my own construction may not have my confidence in it. I cannot find my One True Way anymore, and with only myself to use as authority, I do not believe I can construct a perfect One True Way.

The camp of Discordia, the Taoists, and several others shout "F**k systems! Stop seeing the world and trying to make distinctions. Less This or That, more Not This and Not That." Such a thing appears beyond the grasp of my mind, yet there are others who can achieve it - this I know, with unshakeable conviction. Perhaps I doubt my own abilities to achieve this state. It could be the phenomenon of seeing myself from the inside, and others from the outside - a distinction, yet again. welah has told me before that he is envious of the way that I approach belief and the systems of belief. At the same time, I can tell both him, torakyioshi, and others that I am supremely envious of their conviction that the system they follow is the correct one. Perhaps both of us would like to trade those positives with each other.

So what do I do? I've got wise men to the left of me, and jokers to the right, and here I am - stuck in the middle, but with who?

Comments

Very interesting...

[silveradept]

...in that same sense, though, most of them have ways, be they Prayer or Magic, of doing precisely that. Is this a hypocrisy, or a concession to the screaming masses who all want things their way?

Re: Very interesting...

[starkruzr.livejournal.com]

Not at all. If a religion or even just a philosophical mindset claims that "Way A is better than Way B," it would be rather silly of it to not tell you how to follow Way A.

Re: Very interesting...

[silveradept]

Definitely true. At the same time, utterly ridiculous. It sounds like a contradiction to say the best thing is to leave it into Divinity's hands, and at the same time offer a method of influencing the results.

Re: Very interesting...

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

[Disclaimer: all the below written from a Christian POV. Mentally filter/ignore as desired.]

I think the idea of prayer is supposed to be working with the divinity - you pray, leave it in God's hands as to whether the prayer gets answered, but you're still getting involved in the issue by praying. If putting matters into the divinity's hands stops you from trying to influence the outcome of anything, that's a very bad thing indeed - it means you've become divorced from what's going on around you. Faith, hope and love are absolutely supposed to be active things - it's in our nature to be interdependant, social animals, working to each other's good (or harm, as the case may be) - and it'd be a violation of our nature and an abdication of responsibility, of sorts, to trust in the will of God being done and then adopt an entirely passive attitude because of that.

So, if it's a contradiction, it's a necessary one. I think it's not really a contradiction, but I can't quite pin down why (what you don't see in this post is how many paragraphs I deleted because they made too little sense... :D). Tentatively, I'd say: with life being, basically, a mess, we should be involved in sorting it out. It's our mess, we're the ones in it. Passively expecting God to take care of it all as he sees best demeans us as social creatures with responsibilities to God, each other and ourselves and makes a mockery of the idea of Love, which is utterly meaningless if it's completely passive. So we pray, as this submits our wills to God and invites feedback and direction (this is kind of implicit even if you don't pray specifically for it; if God is worth talking to, you have to be aware that he might beg to differ); we also pray as it's promised this has effects - although the final decision of the effects are left in the hands of God - and this causes us to engage with whatever it is we pray about, so we're not trying to abdicate our natures as a communal species - so prayer is both submissive to the will of God and active by its very nature.

So perhaps it is a contradiction and I'm arguing in circles without addressing the point; or perhaps it's a hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis combining human need for divine help with human need to actively engage with their own problems. Either way, I'll stop waffling here before I succumb to the temptation to rewrite this entire comment again... ;) I hope it in some small way addresses your comment, though.

(Yeah, I've only defended prayer. Magic, I'm about as qualified to comment on as marine biology.)

Re: Very interesting...

[silveradept]

Well, prayer to me has balways appeared to be a passive thing - a supplication to God to work out some problems that we have. God's subsequent involvement or lack thereof is still seen as a separate entity in relation to the life that continues.

The prayer that you describe, on the other hand, I could confidently call Magical without batting an eye. Yet again, I appear to have been making distinctions, and bad ones at that, where none need apply. Five tons of flax will proceed to fall on my head for being guilty of such an error.

But tell me truthfully, which type of prayer are you more likely to see? The first, or the second?

Re: Very interesting...

[the-entity.livejournal.com]

Hurm. I'm going to have to give a very qualified "the second, sort of" here. The second is what it should be.

Thing is, however passive, prayer is (or should be) valuable because in submission to God, the person doing the praying changes as well - in attitude, in gaining wisdom... it's very, very difficult to pray if you have your heart set on something you know is wrong or unwise... a lot of this is what I'd attribute simply to the presence of God, but I couldn't prove that. Prayer changes both the circumstances and the person praying - there's a similarity with magic there in that it's arguable that it's really only the pray-er/magician's perceptions and capacities being changed by prayer/magic, and it's really only these that are important (I know people argue for that in both cases).

I'd regard magic and prayer as being different though, in that what very little I do know about magic indicates it's the magician's will/desire/intent that powers and directs the magic. Prayer involves and requires the will/desire/intent to be transformed, so from my point of view magic looks like prayer minus some really important bits - the "communication with God" aspect and the change of the heart of the guy doing the praying, which you could perhaps see as developing a better working relationship with God.

What I've written is my understanding of prayer based on praying myself and on the way things were in the church I grew up in - a pentecostal-type place where faith was generally coupled with action. The church I go to here in Würzburg has a more passive attitude but still emphasises prayer as necessary for the spiritual life of the individual - they fall a little more into the first category, I think.

Your distinction is a real distinction you shouldn't apologise for making, and fundamentally boils down to the difference between active and passive approaches to life or faith or whatever. Except that passive submission is one extreme; I'd regard magic (if I understand it correctly) as the other extreme, as an active thing driven by the will of the individual; and I'd regard prayer as being essentially a synthesis - or a tightrope - between the two, by turns both passive and active. This is a topic I could go on (and on, and on) about, if only for the reason that (transplanted to the faith/grace/own efforts issue) it becomes a major headache for me, but I'll stop here before I meander further and completely forget what it was I was supposed to be going on about...

(Dear Lord. I'm turning into Jappus.)

Re: Very interesting...

[silveradept]

I think you might have hit what I was digging at with the original comment - prayer, for the most part, is not constructed as something to be coupled with an action, excepting in a few cases of personal transformation.

You pray to communicate with God, tell him your problems, and ask that he takes care of them, or at least makes them a little less severe. Most people pray and put the onus on God to do something, because they're usually convinced they can't handle it.

On the magic side, they may nor may not use Deific Energy in doing the work, but generally, while it appears easier to work the magic for ill purposes, it is generally held that the consequences lash back heavily.

So I suppose you're right in differentiating the two by saying that in magic, the caster's will is the directing force, as opposed to the prayer where the prayer's will is only involved in that the prayer reaches the intended destination.

If you'd like to talk about this more, I think my Instant Messenger contacts are in my profile.(Either here or on the Forums) As for turning into Jappus, so long as you don't start arbitrarily vehemently disliking things and then pontificating about it any chance you get, I think you'll be fine.