Gospel & Universe ⏯ Systems
The Scoundrel of Theology
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I have never been a model anything. At times, I suspect that my agnosticism is nothing but a refuge for a theological scoundrel who couldn’t find anywhere else to go.
I tried all the usual escapes. I started with drugs, but these threw me so deep into the rabbit hole that I needed more drugs just to climb back out. I tried ecumenicalism, but it was like going to too many churches. Even though each of the churches said I was free to go to any of the other churches, all the other churches said more or less the same thing. So I tried the more exotic theologies of Daoism and Hinduism.
Initially, I felt like a spider swinging in a void, at the end of my own little thread. I saw Pascal on one side, and Baudelaire on the other. I saw Saint Jerome with a little model of a Church in his hands on one side, and the raging hedonism of Babylon on the other. And then I saw monkeys travelling west, and sadhus with ashes smeared across their foreheads. I saw a trail, ever thinner, leading up to a mountain cave with pangolins and bats and rat temples and a stone lingam which vibrated at the exact centre of the universe. I swung from side to side, wondering if the thread would hold.
Reading more deeply into The Texts of Daoism, I wondered if maybe “the pivot at the centre of the ring of thought” would save me. Yet I had to get to the centre somehow. According to Zhuangzi, the centre was nowhere. Based on this information I reasoned that the pivot was going to be very difficult to find.
Laozi wrote about another circling thing, shrouded in darkness, which he said is an “image of the forefather of God.” As a theological scoundrel I knew this to be a Treasure, perhaps even the image that would lead me out of the void and up a mountain path into the inner sanctum of a temple which vibrated at the centre of the universe. But Laozi also insisted that there was no map and that even thinking about a map was strictly forbidden.
Still, Daoism was a sort of refuge, because even though it was a world religion, it didn’t pronounce on the afterlife, which the theological scoundrel knew was a mystery, no matter what anyone said. But then Zhuangzi added that once the logs of the body were burnt, the heat had to go somewhere.
This led the theological scoundrel to Rg Veda, with its questions about primal heat, about where we come from, and about the million theories about where the soul might go after it leaves the body.
With ecumenicalism there were a million questions but only one answer, and with Hinduism there were a million hypothetical answers to a loaded question. With Daoism there were a million questions but all answers were shunned: watch the logs burn and see for yourself.
The theological scoundrel still wondered, What if the heat from the fire goes up in the air and gets swallowed by the coldness of outer space? Not that I wanted this to be the case, but in the face of the staggering fact about the mystery of death, the possibility couldn’t be ignored.
From deep inside me I felt my stomach churning, like a primordial sea. From across the water, dark as midnight, I heard a single voice, composed of many timbres, saying “Join us.”
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