https://www.jamesreeves.co/return-of-the-gods/

Do you believe in god or any spiritual dimension to the universe?

“I guess the real question is: Does God believe in Himself? I prefer a God who isn’t really sure if He exists or not. In all the best religious experiences, nobody’s certain about what’s going on, including and especially God.”

“When God showed up in a whirlwind and upbraided Job about how he wasn’t there at the foundation of the Universe, God starts talking about those weird and heady creatio ex nihilo times all cool like were you there when Deep calls to Deep? and this sounds badass, but then God gets lost in rambling about Behemoth and Leviathan and stuff that nobody’s sure why He made or what exactly they even are—but God wanted to seem like He was in more control than He actually was.”

“God reveals His unconscious in this diatribe when He disavows His part in the evil that Job is suffering. Jung interpreted God’s “shadow self” as His repudiation of His relation to His son Satan—which is to deny that if you are the author of everything, then you are also the instigator of evil.”

“For me, God’s shadow is ambiguity, which is His inability to determine all there is of the Universe. In other words, God has an unconscious just like the rest of us. He can’t be omnibenevolent because of His part in the evils of the world. But this lack of at-oneness, this lack of control, allows for whatever cool but incomprehensible stuff might follow from this impotence.”

“My favorite Talmudic passage depicts rabbis arguing about the Oven of Akhani, which was a dispute about the purity of said oven for kosher cooking. God shows up to settle the controversy because it’s His law after all. But Rabbi Joshua tells God that He doesn’t have a say in the matter since the Torah is in their hands now.”

“The gift of ambiguity is better than clarity because it is always open to
further interpretation, and the joy of humanity is the community of interlocutors that indeterminacy gifts to us. Belief as a test of faith was a huge mistake. Religion took a wrong turn when it started to lift up psychosis as its preferred position. Psychosis is fine and has its place, but neurotic doubt is an undeniable salve for too much belief.”

“I’m whatever religion they were at Gobekli Tepe. Religious practice should be a celebration of irreducible ambiguity. I was so excited when they uncovered Gobekli Tepe in Southern Turkey and Klaus Schmidt was like, “What the hell was going on here?” and decided it was a prehistoric zoo. Here was a city almost twelve thousand years old, built not for sedentary and hierarchical people but for the sacred practices of hunter-gathers who came together uncoerced to celebrate holy mysteries with ambiguous trickster gods in liminal spaces designed for music, dancing, stories, feasting, and shit-tons of carved animals doing stuff, like a vulture presenting an orb to a man without a head but with a prominent phallus, and the sublime wonderment of a submerged room with benches along the walls and loads of giant stone penises in the middle for some reason.”

“Schmidt and countless others have speculated on what these people thought that they were doing there. I for one, perhaps naively, hope they didn’t precisely know what they were doing there. Hegel famously pondered the “mysteries of the Ancient Egyptian religions,” to which Žižek postulated that “the mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians too.””

“Amen.”

https://www.martinessig.com

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co for the intro and outro music of most episodes, I mix the mixtapes that I post here.