(no subject)
Nov. 23rd, 2007 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckI'm not certain I can make this more coherent, so I'm giving up and posting it as is. Otherwise, it's going to sit in an open Word document for weeks, making me feel guilty every time I notice it.
I've been thinking a bit about my personal theology recently. Some of it was inspired by property stamping a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit in Delia's pre-school's library. I hate the book. It traumatized me as a child because it made me feel that I was horrifically guilty of sins of omission with regard to my toys. I found the idea that they were all aware and hoping desperately for salvation from me appalling, especially when I considered all of the toys that I didn't own and would never encounter.
Still, The Velveteen Rabbit combined with a lot of other books to give me the feeling that the inanimate might be alive in a spiritual sense even if it weren't in the biological sense. That makes me, to some degree, an animist. I lean more toward pantheism in that I believe that the soul in everything is a piece of the divine (I still don't have a good word for it. I'm not quite comfortable using 'god,' but I don't have an alternative that works for me without feeling either pretentious or wrong). Still, everything has a soul.
That means that I never feel any difficulty over the question of whether or not a sentient robot or other self-aware AI would have a soul. Of course they would. Everything does. I think that awareness and learning add something to the soul and to the whole of which the soul is part. I also feel hugely uncomfortable with mythologies that present, for example, elves as soul-less. It conflicts with my basic cosmology. I can accept soul with out consciousness but can't accept consciousness without soul.
And 'soul' may not actually be the right word. I'm not sure what the right word is. I'm including both self and fragment of divinity, both personal energy and universal energy. I'm not sure that looking at them as separate makes any sense even though they're not quite the same thing. When I read about belief systems that divide the soul up into pieces, I find myself quite uncomfortable because I instinctively reject them.
I feel a certain attraction to the idea of reincarnation because the conservation of energy involved appeals to me. The notion of reincarnation also repels me, however, because of the other associated notions. I don't like the notion that people deserve the bad things that happen to them, that things they did or didn't do in a past life require payment in the form of becoming a victim. I'm not so much bothered by the idea that someone might need to learn such a lesson, but I object to the lesson coming in answer to something that the person doesn't remember and to the lesson being something that the person won't remember later. I also object to the fact that many of these supposedly deserved or necessary bad things require that some other person choose to do harm and thereby incur a debt to be paid by later suffering. It feeds too much into various sin theories of disability, poverty, sexual orientation, etc., and those enrage me. It's also a justification for treating the problems of very young children as deserved, again something that enrages me.
I don't call myself a Christian because I can't accept Original Sin and can't accept a singular path to salvation. I do believe that people sin by hurting each other and by hurting the world around them. Even with the best intentions, paying careful attention to everything one does and making no mistakes, one will always cause some harm. I also believe that we need to be aware of those harms in order to heal ourselves. Doing evil, even unintentionally, damages the person doing it. Having a mechanism for repentance, atonement and forgiveness is thus massively useful.
I'm not very comfortable with religion as a community enterprise. Some of that is agoraphobia. Some of it is distrust of the way that people tend to operate in groups. Some of it, though, is a feeling that each person's relationship with the divine is extremely intimate and that one should at least have the option of keeping it private.
I've been thinking a bit about my personal theology recently. Some of it was inspired by property stamping a copy of The Velveteen Rabbit in Delia's pre-school's library. I hate the book. It traumatized me as a child because it made me feel that I was horrifically guilty of sins of omission with regard to my toys. I found the idea that they were all aware and hoping desperately for salvation from me appalling, especially when I considered all of the toys that I didn't own and would never encounter.
Still, The Velveteen Rabbit combined with a lot of other books to give me the feeling that the inanimate might be alive in a spiritual sense even if it weren't in the biological sense. That makes me, to some degree, an animist. I lean more toward pantheism in that I believe that the soul in everything is a piece of the divine (I still don't have a good word for it. I'm not quite comfortable using 'god,' but I don't have an alternative that works for me without feeling either pretentious or wrong). Still, everything has a soul.
That means that I never feel any difficulty over the question of whether or not a sentient robot or other self-aware AI would have a soul. Of course they would. Everything does. I think that awareness and learning add something to the soul and to the whole of which the soul is part. I also feel hugely uncomfortable with mythologies that present, for example, elves as soul-less. It conflicts with my basic cosmology. I can accept soul with out consciousness but can't accept consciousness without soul.
And 'soul' may not actually be the right word. I'm not sure what the right word is. I'm including both self and fragment of divinity, both personal energy and universal energy. I'm not sure that looking at them as separate makes any sense even though they're not quite the same thing. When I read about belief systems that divide the soul up into pieces, I find myself quite uncomfortable because I instinctively reject them.
I feel a certain attraction to the idea of reincarnation because the conservation of energy involved appeals to me. The notion of reincarnation also repels me, however, because of the other associated notions. I don't like the notion that people deserve the bad things that happen to them, that things they did or didn't do in a past life require payment in the form of becoming a victim. I'm not so much bothered by the idea that someone might need to learn such a lesson, but I object to the lesson coming in answer to something that the person doesn't remember and to the lesson being something that the person won't remember later. I also object to the fact that many of these supposedly deserved or necessary bad things require that some other person choose to do harm and thereby incur a debt to be paid by later suffering. It feeds too much into various sin theories of disability, poverty, sexual orientation, etc., and those enrage me. It's also a justification for treating the problems of very young children as deserved, again something that enrages me.
I don't call myself a Christian because I can't accept Original Sin and can't accept a singular path to salvation. I do believe that people sin by hurting each other and by hurting the world around them. Even with the best intentions, paying careful attention to everything one does and making no mistakes, one will always cause some harm. I also believe that we need to be aware of those harms in order to heal ourselves. Doing evil, even unintentionally, damages the person doing it. Having a mechanism for repentance, atonement and forgiveness is thus massively useful.
I'm not very comfortable with religion as a community enterprise. Some of that is agoraphobia. Some of it is distrust of the way that people tend to operate in groups. Some of it, though, is a feeling that each person's relationship with the divine is extremely intimate and that one should at least have the option of keeping it private.
