nicolas stagliano

// adept jibber-jabberer //

 
 


Baseless Dogma

Nicolas Stagliano | January 14th, 2022

Where the rising ape meets the falling angel. A perfect phrase, from a movie where Death (the reaper) has to fill in for Santa and deliver gifts in his absence, and Santa’s off doing god-knows-what. Who knows what the origin of the phrase is; if that is the origin or if it’s somewhere else. I’m sure someone knows. Terry Pratchett has a lot of good quotes from Discworld, and the movie is based on some Terry Pratchett book. Of course it is.

I’ve heard conceited pedagogues and Sunday preachers prattle baseless dogma about how Creation (their oh-so-special word for the universe) exists solely for the amusement of the human; the dogmatic idea that God created the universe exclusively for us. Like giving a child a toy. Here’s your Universe, Timmy. It was stuffed it in your stocking, if you don’t like it I can return it and get you a different one.

I hate Sunday preachers.

What a person believes about God strictly dictates the way they see every aspect of their existence; life, death, humankind, cosmology, the universe, all of it. I find myself disgusted with the typical dogmatic prattle of priests and their lot.

They scream, “God is saying such-and-so because this is what seems reasonable. No, I did not go and read the original manuscripts, cultural and historic context, historic interpretations, how it would have been interpreted in the past. I am conceited, and in my deific wisdom I just read the words in my translation and tell hundreds of people what God believes.”

Disgusting. I’d almost rather people didn’t go to church, than listen to them. Emphasis on almost.

There are fundamental axioms. There are things that are not fundamental axioms. There is useful and appropriate dogma, and there is baseless or restrictive dogma. It’s not difficult to comprehend, but these people seem to practice strategic incompetence. They live for it. It makes them feel powerful, important. They are “People Of God” because they dictate their perception of God to be truth. They believe it, too. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I don’t think I could do it. Regardless of how much I dissected a supposedly-inspired text, of how much I distilled it to its most basic elements, I don’t know if I would be able to find the boundary between human subjection and the divine, the inspiration. The human that the divinity was sieved through weighs heavily on the text. Fundamentalists, those Christians who preach inerrancy, the heavy hand of the lesser god that they have chosen to worship, of the human whom the given text was sieved through, it weighs on them; it weighs heavy.

My cognitive dissonance seems to swell with each passing day, gnawing at the seams of my worldview, feeding on my angst like a parasite. Laying in bed, staring into absolutely nothing at all, suffering the side effects of introspection.

I don’t really know why I’m writing this. Misery loves company, I guess.

01.14.2022



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