Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.

The full essay is at "Love as God Loves Us."

A Hindu Goddess Destroying and Recreating Other Hindu Deities: Contrasting the Christian Trinity

The Saundarya Lahari characterizes the Hindu goddess, Devi, as being the power behind the proverbial throne—meaning the thrones of the three main deities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. Without Devi bestowing her power on those (and all other) gods, they would “return to their primal, dormant state” until revived by the power that Devi wields as signified visually by the weapons that she holds.[1] Are those deities merely dormant, however, or are they destroyed when Devi withholds her power? For there is an appreciable difference between being rendered impotent or inactive, and being zerstört (i.e., destroyed). In Greek mythology, one thing that distinguishes the gods from morals is that of the two, only the gods cannot die. In Christianity, Jesus Christ survives the death of his corporeal body, which is transformed in the bodily resurrection on Easter in a way that would have perplexed Plato. Indeed, it is interesting to compare the Trinity with the relation of the foundational goddess Devi to the three main gods in the Saundarya Lahari, a poem doubtlessly written by a devotee of the goddess.

1. The quoted text is from Francis X. Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother: Hindu Goddesses and the Virgin Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 160.

The full essay is at "A Hindu Goddess vs. the Christian Trinity."

October 12th: Happy Vikings Day!

I contend that the ideological war being waged in the United States by the 2010s over whether October 12^th should be “Indigenous People’s” Day or Columbus Day became real in 2021 when President Biden issued a proclamation commemorating “Indigenous People’s” Day not coincidentally to fall on the same day as Columbus Day. Similarly, though only unofficially, the United American Indians of New England have labeled Thanksgiving Day as “The National Day of Mourning” since 1970. The de facto hegemony of ideology in changing official U.S. holidays, including in the refusal of some people and even businesses to say “Christmas” even on Christmas Eve Day, has proceeded without the premise that ideology should play such a role being debated in public discourse. Instead, the onslaught has been enabled by the vehemence of the conquerors in insisting that their decisions be recognized and not contradicted. Once I went to a Unitarian “church” on a Thanksgiving expecting a spirit of gratefulness, as per President Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the date of the holiday after two years of brutal war between the CSA and USA. The sermon was instead on the need for sorrow instead. I walked out, shaking my head in utter disbelief. Perhaps some Americans might one day insist that a similar mood be preached in churches on Christmas Day. Both the need and insistence come with a tone of passive aggression, and are indeed power-grabs based in resentment, which Nietzsche argued is a major indication of weakness rather than strength, and thus self-confidence. Perhaps the manufactured dialectics, such as the one centered on October 12^th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.

The full essay is at "October 12th: Happy Vikings Day."