From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Tue Apr 16 2002 - 09:34:38 MDT
> Hi, Arcadia, and welcome! I'm an atheist pagan
> myself, and also find magick and memetics to be so
> closely intermingled as to be indistinguishable in the
> middle.
>
> --Eva
>
This makes sense. R.A. Wilson talks about a radio on a table. You turn it
on, and it talks and sings. You turn it off, and it stops. The question
is, are the voices in the radio? Or do they come from somewhere else?
Well, further examination shows there are no little people inside the radio,
at least not that you can see. Of course, maybe they are only there when
it's on, and you can't take it apart when it's on... (or at least you are
not _supposed_ to... risk of electric shock and all that.) As a second
experiment, you try to get the voices from something besides the radio: coat
hanger, toaster, light bulb, potted plant, meditation. Nope. It all comes
down to that radio, and looking inside reveals nothing. A mystery... So
what you really want to know is, where are the switches, and how do you
change the channel?
Sometimes I believe the gods and goddesses have an existence totally
independent of what I or any other human has thought or believed, ever.
Other times I think they are entirely the product of human belief. In
between, there's the idea that they archtypes, potentialities, waiting to be
filled up with human belief energy, transform the world, and be transformed
by it. Even that begs the question, though of whether these
'potentialities' existed before people imagined them. I can accept this as
a mystery, as 'I don't know,' along with the other 99.999999% of things I
don't know.
Matt
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