{"id":49,"date":"2021-09-05T19:50:51","date_gmt":"2021-09-05T19:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/?p=49"},"modified":"2022-02-13T19:35:07","modified_gmt":"2022-02-13T19:35:07","slug":"lovecraftian-christianity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/twice-born.com\/?p=49","title":{"rendered":"Lovecraftian Christianity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There is an immortal man in the sky. A wizard, if you like. He created everything, including the laws of physics and the categories of Right and Wrong, Good and Evil. Accordingly, he can tweak these things as he sees fit.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You cannot. You are a rat in a <\/em>Skinner Box<\/em><\/a> the size of all spacetime (the immortal sky-man lives outside of it). You are subject to rules on which you were not consulted ahead of time. You cannot know for certain what these rules are, because you have been offered many different and contradictory theories on the matter, many of which claim to be exclusively correct. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you break the real rules, whatever they are, you will suffer infinitely terrible pain, forever.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While some of these rules make sense, others\u2014particularly the ones governing your body, and what you may or may not do with it\u2014run directly contrary to your deepest wants, your best reasoning, and even, to a certain extent, your own innate sense of right and wrong. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this matters. Again, if you break these rules which you cannot know, you will be punished horribly in unending linear time. This is just the way that it is, and the way that it is is Just, because the immortal sky-man created the category of Justice and has applied it to the rules.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every piece of evidence contravening the rules\u2014historical criticism, the findings of medicine and psychology, dinosaur bones\u2014is a trap. Your own feelings and thoughts are the worst traps of all, because you can\u2019t insulate yourself from them by throwing away your computer and reading only the right books. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The immortal wizard defines what Love is, and has elected to love you very, very much. He will love you straight into Hell, if it comes to that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Greatest Horror Story Ever Told<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We can\u2019t know for certain whether goodness is good because God says so, or whether God says so because it is good<\/a>. In other words, we don\u2019t know whether goodness, truth, and beauty are things that God made\u2014and could, in theory, change\u2014or whether God is bound by categories which are higher, or at least other than, himself. To put it even more bluntly, we can\u2019t really say whether what we call God could commit, or be the source of, what we would call \u201cevil\u201d\u2014and whether that would even matter, if he\u2019s the one making the definitions in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The classical answer to this dilemma\u2014that God can\u2019t or won\u2019t commit evil because goodness is his \u201cnature\u201d<\/a>\u2014doesn\u2019t satisfy. For one thing, such a statement is essentially a pretty re-hashing of the claim that there are certain things an allegedly all-powerful God cannot do. In other words, this argument reproduces one of the dilemma\u2019s horns. Whether God is bound by his intrinsic nature or by extrinsic laws makes little difference\u2014in either case he remains bound. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And while it sounds very nice indeed to say that goodness, truth, beauty, and so on come from God, how on Earth would we know <\/em>that? How can we make claims about the nature of God when everything from revelation to our own experience is at least a little bit suspect?<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The version of the Abrahamic God we absorb through culture\u2014the one that matters\u2014is an omnipotent alien existing outside of space and time, gleefully crafting an unworkable moral code which, taken to its logical conclusion, will funnel the majority of our souls into a place of eternal torment. Such a God is, by any human definition, a monster. What you might call an eldritch abomination<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe blind, idiot god\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, the best description we have of such a God\u2014the one actually experienced by worshippers who don\u2019t fit the normative mold, such as those of us labelled as \u201cintrinsically disordered\u201d<\/a>\u2014comes not from theology, but from weird\/horror fiction. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, if we\u2019re looking for a written account of what it actually feels <\/em>like for most of us to share a universe with God as he is commonly understood, we might do well to skip over the glowing reports of the saints, and instead look to the work of that granddaddy of cosmic horror<\/a> himself, H. P. Lovecraft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all his purple prose and personal shortcomings,<\/a> Lovecraft nevertheless had an uncanny ability to evoke that creeping unease that wells up whenever we think too hard about everything we don\u2019t know <\/em>concerning our own existence. Writing during the heyday of modernism, Lovecraft scared the bejesus out of (some of) his contemporaries by writing stories that questioned the final authority of rationality, science, and dogma\u2014suggesting that these and all other means of producing knowledge are merely idols, walls we put up to protect ourselves from the ultimate incomprehensibility of an indifferent cosmos.\u201c<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Lovecraft\u2019s fiction, and in the larger \u201cMythos\u201d<\/a> surrounding it, the impersonal forces running this random, pointless nightmare are referred to as the \u201cOuter Gods,\u201d<\/a> in the sense that they exist, somehow, outside of space and time. Chief among these is Azathoth, the source and rotten core of all creation\u2014a horrifying parody of the Neoplatonic One, the Father of the Trinity, the Hindu Brahman, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lovecraft describes this twisted ground of being in Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity\u2014the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.\u201d<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And again, in \u201cThe Haunter of the Dark\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUltimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few key phrases stand out. Azathoth exists \u201coutside the ordered universe\u201d and \u201cbeyond time and space.\u201d In other words, Lovecraft\u2019s cosmicism<\/a> posits that there is an outside<\/em> in the first place, which can be contrasted with the fragile, contingent inside <\/em>that is our universe. Moreover, this outer place\u2014greater and perhaps more real than our little home\u2014 is \u201cinconceivable, unlighted,\u201d i.e. unknowable within the limits set by human consciousness. Finally, Azathoth, this \u201cLord of All Things,\u201d is a \u201cblind idiot”\u2014infinite, total power, spewing out arbitrarily from the void and over creation without thought, purpose, or reason. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first glance, Lovecraft\u2019s ontology seems like a simple negation of the popular Christian worldview, which imagines God as the loving, benevolent source of creation and ruler of the universe. But a closer look reveals parallels between the two systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo<\/em><\/a>\u2014creation out of nothing\u2014God brings reality into being out of nothingness, rather than emanating it from himself or creating it within himself. Thus he is always other than <\/em>his creation, which is the object to his eternal, unmoving subject. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Lovecraft\u2019s description of his cosmos and its ruler, an ex nihilo <\/em>account of reality plants the idea that God exists, in some sense, outside<\/em>, and that we are trapped inside.<\/em> Moreover, for every mystic claiming to have had direct knowledge of God, there\u2019s another who contends that God is ultimately unknowable<\/a>, that his home is as \u201cunlighted\u201d for us as are Azathoth\u2019s hellish caverns \u201cat the center of all infinity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, the similarities end for the Christian who can take God\u2019s inherent goodness as a matter of faith, and therefore affirm that he is nothing like Lovecraft\u2019s \u201cblind idiot.\u201d The rest of us are left to struggle in a difficult situation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being stuck in the snow globe that is reality created ex nihilo<\/em>, we have no way of directly knowing who God is or what he wants\u2014meaning that we can\u2019t definitively deny the possibility of a \u201cboundless daemon sultan\u201d at the heart of existence. Nor, for that matter, can we rule out Huitzilopochtli<\/a>, Roko\u2019s Basilisk<\/a>, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster<\/a> as candidates for the underlying principle of things. An omnipotent God, divorced from his creation, wouldn\u2019t necessarily be bothered by human notions of \u201cabsurdity.\u201d He could be as wacky, and as cruel, we can possibly imagine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse\u2014he could be exactly as tradition describes him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo conceivable geometry\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Another well-known trope in the Lovecraft toolbox is the breakdown of Euclidean geometry in the presence of beings from outside our own universe. If a story doesn\u2019t feature panicked WASPs getting nauseous at the sight of a misbehaving shape, it\u2019s hardly a candidate for the Mythos. See, for instance, \u201cThe Thing on the Doorstep,\u201d<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> in which mild-mannered Edward Derby is forced by his wife to make regular astral trips to some other, awful plane of existence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe talked about terrible meetings in lonely places […] of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time […] He [brought back] objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came \u2018from outside\u2019; and his wife knew how to get them.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though Daniel Upton, the narrator, is doubtful at first, he eventually comes to believe his friend\u2019s wild stories, to the point where he experiences \u201cthe same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness\u201d<\/em> that drives poor Edward to the ever-popular Arkham sanitarium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In theory, the basic story underlying popular Christianity ought to be comforting: a wise, benevolent being wants you to spend eternity in bliss, and has provided you with a convenient checklist of to-dos that will help you get there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In practice, for many of us, even the most positive version of this framework is more of a burden than a help. If one\u2019s inclinations don\u2019t line up with the set of prescribed behaviors and associated rewards\u2014if one is queer, for instance, or doesn\u2019t want <\/em>to live forever in the first place<\/a>\u2014then God\u2019s rules are experienced less as a shepherd\u2019s gentle guidance for his flock, and more as a senseless, vicious twisting of observed reality that leaves us sick, afraid, and half-insane in our efforts to keep up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the risk of making Catholic sexual teaching into an easy punching bag, this is one area where the conflict between lived reality and imposed rules is particularly obvious. To over-simplify, the Church claims that every human is called either to celibacy or to lifelong, monogamous marriage focused mainly on child-rearing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For many, spending ten minutes in an adult human body is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of this claim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assuming that the call to a vocation is experienced in our minds, hearts, and bodies\u2014and where else would we experience such a thing?\u2014then some of us are in fact \u201ccalled\u201d to an infinite variety of sexual expressions: to both deeply involved and casual encounters with multiple partners; to sex acts which have nothing to do with procreation; to intimacy with people of our own sex; and so on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A queer person knows as much by the time they\u2019re thirteen. But they might also realize\u2014with the willing help of their pastor\u2014that just because a thing is absurd does not necessarily <\/em>mean that it is untrue. The very idea that an anthropomorphic God would make you with the capacity and overwhelming urge to have sex\u2014only to forbid you from doing so on pain of eternal separation and burning\u2014is the stuff of a Monty Python sketch<\/a>. Laughable. Stupid. Downright insane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But given that you can\u2019t exactly phone him up to check, how would you prove that God is not <\/em>insane?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so begins the process of trying to adjust oneself to the \u201ccomplex angles\u201d of traditional Catholic teachings on sex. The Catholic who is paying attention quickly notices that these rules\u2014put together over centuries by groups of celibate men, working off of poorly translated copies of allegedly inspired religious texts\u2014do not line up with what is going on in his mind, his body, and his heart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unbothered by this inconsistency, upon reaching this point the vast majority of lay Catholics simply ignore these teachings<\/a> as outdated and irrelevant, and get on with living decent lives. The remainder are split between those who actually like <\/em>the rules, and the rest of us\u2014the ones who desperately want it all to make some kind of sense<\/em>, and so line up again and again to be kicked in the teeth by the Magisterium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once we have absorbed the notion that we can\u2019t trust our own adult intuitions on matters of morality, ethics, and Spirit, we spend our lives walking around like protagonists in a Lovecraft story, subject to a \u201cdim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.\u201d We nurse a constant migraine, heartache, and nausea brought on by the mental squinting we have to do to make the \u201cinsane curves and surfaces\u201d of Church teaching look like the reassuring right angles we\u2019ve been promised<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where our thoughts don\u2019t line up with dogma, we straighten them. When our hearts pull us in unsanctioned directions, we break them. And when our bodies want the wrong things, we destroy them<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And maybe this is indeed our life\u2019s purpose\u2014to maim ourselves every day. To grind ourselves down until there\u2019s nothing human left to question a set of rules with \u201cno conceivable purpose\u201d in this world. Given what we have to work with, we probably can\u2019t know for sure either way. All we can really do is look back over the last two thousand years of accumulated trauma, and the effect it has had on people<\/a>\u2014and wonder when the nice men in white coats will come for us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00e4, I\u00e4. Cthulhu fhtagn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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