The Double Refuge

Preface

Introductions - Sections - Chapters - Objective & Subjective - Globalism - The Scarlet Pimpernel

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In The Double Refuge I suggest bringing together doubt & belief in a way that allows a free flow from one to the other. I suggest an open theism in which one can believe in any religious or mythic idea and yet also remain open to other ideas. I suggest that this open theism goes well with open agnosticism, which uses doubt not for its own sake, but as an avenue to all ideas and experiences. In this form of agnosticism, doubt also doubts itself, leaving us free to believe. Shelley gets close to this paradox in his poem, “Mont Blanc” (1816):

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be,
But for such faith, with Nature reconciled

My notion is that combining open agnosticism with open theism allows us to explore anything. It also allows us to be free from rigid reasoning on the skeptical side, and from dogma on the religious side.

I suggest that instead of betting in a crap game, we keep the dice in our hand. Instead of betting on a line of materialistic or spiritual thinking — based on such limited knowledge that it might as well be based on chance — we keep ourselves open to what’s around us and within us.

We can roll the dice
to see if Heaven is true or false,
fearing snake-eyes on our way,
or we can keep them in one hand
and with the other spin both beauty and faults
across worlds of wonder and dismay,
while the dice sleep in our hand,
dreaming of sevens and elevens
and oceans and moons in a circular waltz.

If God doesn’t play dice with the universe,
why do we?

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Introductions

The Double Refuge begins with four introductory chapters. In the first chapter, 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim, (starting with Half in Love With Easeful Death), I use wine to suggest the intoxication of open agnosticism and open theism. In the second chapter, 🍏 Agnosticism (starting with Core Beliefs), I highlight the role doubt plays as an intercessor between atheism and theism. In the third chapter, 🐅 Dreamtiger Journal (starting with In the Shadow of Jung), I use an open version of Jungian psychology to navigate the conundrum of dreams. In the fourth chapter, 🧩 Butterflies Landing (starting with Butterfly Landing), I delve into more involved terms and concepts, such as zero-sum philosophy and Keats’ negative capability.

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Sections

The main body of The Double Refuge is made up of two sections: Pathways to Doubt and Currents of Religion. The eight chapters of Pathways to Doubt emphasize the effect of science on religion, especially the way astronomy and natural science dismantled Medieval literalism, and led to Deism, agnosticism, and existentialism. I also look at examples of how existential and religious paradigms can complement each other, and sometimes merge. The nine chapters of Currents of Religion emphasize the diverse history of religion, as well as aspects of mysticism that survive the collapse of certainty. I take a look at the clash between Mesoptamian and Judaic religion, the fusion of doubt and belief in Daoist and Transcendentalist writers, and the clash between secularism and fundamentalism in Rushdie’s early novels. Throughout this section I argue that the double refuge, with its open borders and its lack of doctrine, can act as a conduit between doubt and belief, and can also act as a refuge from the ravages of both.

Throughout The Double Refuge I use historical timelines, yet my arguments are more about the nature of doubt and belief than about the historical development of either. I highlight literature that’s especially relevant to the relation of doubt to belief. For instance, in 🦖 At the Wild & Fog (starting with A Misty Maze, But Not Without a Plan) I look at proto-agnosticism and Christianity in Dickens’ Bleak House, and at Modern agnosticism and mysticism in Forster’s A Passage to India.

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Chapters

The first large section, PATHWAYS TO DOUBT, follows a rough chronological order. I start by looking at the revolutionary impact of astronomy in 🔭 The Sum of All Space (starting with Third Spinning Rock from the Sun), and at the parallel rise of science and skepticism from the 16th to 20th centuries in 🔬 Science & Mystery (starting with Overview) and in ♒️ A River Journey (starting with Mountain Springs). I then look at the skeptical and empirical strains in agnosticism, from the Greeks to the 19th century (❤️ Three Little Words, starting with Critical Distance), after which I look at 17th and 18th century empiricism in light of my personal experience while visiting Guanajuato in the year 2000 (🇲🇽 Señor Locke, starting with The Gringo Takes Stock).

I then look at the shift from pre- to post- Darwinian thinking in Dickens’ England in 🦖 At the Wild & Fog (starting with A Misty Maze, But Not Without a Plan), at the relation between agnosticism and theism in the 20th century French existentialists Sartre and Camus in 🎲 Almost Existential (starting with Poor, Bare, Forked), and at a mystical version of the contemporary existential heroine in the song, “A Lighter Shade of Pale” in 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid: Existential & Then Some (starting with The Heroine).

The second section, CURRENTS OF RELIGION, also follows a rough chronological order, beginning with an overview of religious history in 🌎 Many Tribes (starting with Overview and Six Versions of Infinity). I then look at the influence of Mesopotamian civilization on Judaism & Christianity in ♒️ The Currents of Sumer (starting with Introduction & Overview), at changing religious paradigms in ⏯ Systems (starting with Mere Religion?) and in ✝︎ St. Francis (starting with Rapt Angel), at mysticism in Classical China & Whitman’s 19th Century Transcendentalism in 💫 Believing in the Mystery (starting with Introduction: Daoism & Whitman’s Transcendentalism), at the battle against dogma in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century in 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt (starting with Rise of the Simurg), and at the age-old puzzle of death in ☠️ Ars Moriendi (starting with Teeing Off).

For a list of contents for each page of each chapter, see Detailed Contents.

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Objective & Subjective

For the sake of convenience, one might divide the chapters into two types: non-fiction which aims at objectivity and fiction which stresses subjectivity.

First, there’s the non-fiction of history, geography, natural science, astronomy, philology, politics, and philosophy. For instance, in 🔭 The Sum of All Space and 🔬 Science & Mystery I look at how astronomy and science approach the notions of doubt and infinity. In 🔬 Three Little Words I look at the development of skepticism, focusing on Montaigne’s three little words, which aren’t I love you, but What know I? or Que sais-je? In 🌎 Many Tribes and ♒️ The Currents of Sumer I look at the history of religion, and at how Judaeo-Christianity has borrowed from, and, all too often, belittled other philosophies and cultures, including the Mesopotamian civilizations from which it largely derived.

While much of The Double Refuge is focused on non-fiction, I also bring in creative writing, literary criticism, and autobiography. In particular, I use literary criticism in four chapters. In 🦖 At the Wild & Fog I argue that Charles Dickens is a sort of proto-agnostic, and that his novel Bleak House is a powerful reflection of the years immediately prior to Huxley’s coining of the term agnosticism. In 🧜🏽‍♀️ The Mermaid: Existential & Then Some I explore the mix of existentialism and mysticism in the lyric “A Lighter Shade of Pale.” In 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt and 💫 Believing in the Mystery I look at how the mysticism of Whitman and Zhuangzi includes doubt, and at how the skepticism of Rushdie includes mysticism.

I also use autobiography on many pages, such as Family, Man’s Best Friend, and The Scoundrels of Theology. In the chapter ☠️ Ars Moriendi I reflect on the death of my father and brother, and in⛱ Señor Locke I borrow Locke’s empirical theory of the mind to illustrate the relation between belief, doubt, and sense impressions. Drinking coffee in a colourful square in Guanajuato, I wonder how unbiased my thinking about religion can ever be, having been abused by a counsellor at a so-called ‘Christian’ camp. I also wonder if I can ever be free from fear, having been robbed at knifepoint in Mexico City and held captive briefly in Istanbul. Have such experiences made me less open to belief, or more willing to try new forms of belief?

This fictional and autobiographical veering away from exposition & argument is in keeping with my notion that while agnosticism and theism have abstract philosophical dimensions, they are based in personal experience.

This is especially true for agnosticism: at its heart it isn’t as much a system or doctrine as it is an open mode of operating and being. It urges us to think and feel critically, openly, and eclectically. Of course, religion can work in this open, critical way too, which is why I think of open agnosticism and open theism as the double refuge. Christian ecumenicalism goes some way in this, yet it often remains within the sphere of Christianity rather than becoming part of a global religious sensibility. Notable exceptions to this can be found in the writings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Merton, Raimundo Panikkar, Bede Griffiths, or, more recently, Richard Rohr.

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Globalism

The following poem I wrote exemplifies what I mean by a global religious sensibility. In it I try to combine this sensibility with the desire to burn away the chaff, that is, to remove whatever stops us from connecting more broadly, from exploring and empathizing, from loving and forgiving, from reaching the grain or valuable substance which is protected yet also hidden by the chaff. In my poem the names of God are many. God thus becomes Shiva, the God of destruction and creation, as well as Christ, the God who is killed and resurrected. In both agnostic and mystical thought, it doesn’t matter what the name is; it’s the principle of improvement and the experience of reconstruction that counts:

By and large religion is dominated by those who tend to think in exclusive terms, often promulgating the notion that their religion is the best. They set Christ against Krishna, Mary against Mahakali. Personal experience too often gets subsumed by the doctrine of a particular church, sect, or school — just as it does by the atheist doctrine of positivism, which argues that the only verification we can rely on comes from the scientific method. Agnostics, by the very nature of their philosophy, are loathe to make such claims to exclusivity and superiority. It’s why agnostics aren’t bothered in the least if an agnostic embraces faith or leaves it altogether — that is, if they stop being an agnostic and become a theist or an atheist. It’s the sincerity of the search and the honesty of the appraisal that counts.

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The Scarlet Pimpernel

While The Double Refuge has themes and threads, I have a laissez-faire attitude in the pages themselves, taking tangents wherever I think they might yield some insight. A certain amount of latitude seems appropriate in exploring the relation between poetic agnosticism and mystical theism, since both are rather sliding, floating endeavours. It may be that if you’re willing to explore everything, you’re likely to keep shifting your bearings, and at times quite abruptly. Even to include humour, as when I see God as the Scarlet Pimpernel. I see this as having fun with rather than making fun of what’s so often seen as exclusive, serious, and generally out-of-bounds:

In my exploration of doubt & belief I follow timelines and threads, but beyond these there are other trajectories and fabrics. Much as beyond Miró’s blue blob there’s a galaxy of gold and black lines with hints of stars and justice, of upside-down smiles and beings on faraway planets.

The lines we type onto the page or Internet stretch so far from us that eventually they become other, our scheme intersecting with other schemes, until we suspect that the universe is full of patterns and schemes. To impose a pattern or gospel on the universe says more about us than it does about the cosmos.

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Next: 🍷 Bubbles Winking at the Brim - Half in Love With Easeful Death

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Contents - Detailed Contents - Core Beliefs - Overview