What's Your Problem?

[Golden Applesauce]

This is an idea that's been percolating in the back of my mind for a while, and I'm just now starting to write it out.  Last semester, I took a World Religions course, and the author of the textbook we used had an interesting approach to religion.  Each religion, he felt, tried to address one or more perceived problems with the human condition.  Buddhism, (if I'm understanding that tradition correctly), tries to deal with suffering, shallowness, and a preoccupation with the self (which Buddhism insists is only illusionary anyway.)  Christianity, among other things, is incredibly concerned with how people are to know what the moral thing to do is, given humans' propensity towards error.  To a Christian, a religion that doesn't come with a complete set of moral guides is pointless; as a major goal of their religion is to show them how to live their lives.

Discordianism radically different from other religions in that it makes the claim that order is not inherently preferable to chaos.  This is perhaps most visible in the creation myths of other religions; the Greeks said that before Gaea was born, their was only teeming darkness and confusion called Chaos.  The Egyptians put it even more bluntly.  Amon-Ra arose out of the dark, watery chaos of Num and with the help of his children got around to creating the world, much like every other creation myth.  Only to the Egyptians, Chaos was still out there.  At night, the Sun Chariot had to journey through the land of chaos on its way back to the east; furthermore, the gods had to continously struggle against the enroaching chaos, lest it overcome the world and destroy the glorious order of civilization.  Amon-Ra, the greatest of dieties, was directly responsible for keeping order in the world; without his work, and the work of his his agents, the Pharoahs, society would crumble into chaos.  Confucianism was also a big fan of ordered society, with every cog in the machine doing its best to support the cogs above it and lead the cogs below it.  Chinese folklore even had Heaven to be a beauracracy, modeled on the Emperorship, with attendent spirits and gods each being responsible for keeping a specific part of the world working in an orderly fashion.  Hammurabi is remembered and respected just for being the first person to write down his legal code.  The laws themselves are horrible by today's standards, but we appreciate the gesture.  Law, the bedrock of society, were now fixed, unwavering, onto giant stone columns.  In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic mindset, prophets are the Lawbringers, bringing order straight from its source, God.  Human interpetation of these laws, especially in Christianity, is not a good thing.  Catholics allow their bishops and popes to be divinely inspired and say what God really meant, while the more fundamentalist types insist that they are "just letting the Bible interpret itself."  Islam explicity says that the Koran is not to be translated into other languages, which would obscure God's own speech.

Discordianism goes the opposite direction.  Order is nothing more than pockets of chaos that our pareidological minds can spin into something that makes sense to us.  Earth is an asylum being run by the lunatics, who insist on constructing convoluted social rules for themselves to follow.  Society doesn't need a bedrock; either way, underneath that last turtle is chaos.  What Discordianism seeks to cure, then, is the notion that life is meant to be taken seriously, that rules are there to be followed, that society should be upheld for the good of society.  Life simply is, make of it what you will.  Rules are a social fiction, existing only in the minds of those who keep them.  Society is nothing more then an endless parade of painted animals, walking upright only because two feet good, four feet bad, dressed in clothes and living a grotesque affectation of how they think men ought to act.  Among them, only the Joker isn't wearing makeup, isn't pretending, and he's ahead of the curve.

[Cramulus]

[Triple Zero]

generic

and

underneath that last turtle is chaos

and, out of curiosity, what problems did your teacher say Islam is addressing? (especially contrasted to Christianity)

[Golden Applesauce]

I got rid of the textbook after the class, and most of the class was spent discussing generic religious issues, like the Argument from Evil, etc.  So I couldn't tell you.  I'll be back at school in a few weeks; they might still have a copy of the text in the bookstore.


It occurs to me that the BIP/GSP/Huge Battlefield Composed Entirely of Shrapnel line of thinking, while building on Discordianism, seems to be addressing slightly different problems.  More focused on freeing the individual from others' rules and shrapnel than on the value of light-heartedness and taking things less seriously.  In fact, the BIP reads as a pretty serious document.

[Voodoo]

 

I thought Christianity WAS the problem Islam was created to address...jk

[Iason Ouabache]

  Fucking awesome.

Also:

Your search - pareidological - did not match any documents.

Did you mean: pteridological 

[Vene]

Very good, but I have something I want to add:

From what I understand the problem that Discordianism seeks to solve is not just an over reliance on order, but against arbitrary authority.  That is why we are all popes, that is why we are told not to believe what we read.  This is a sharp contrast to various other religion which rely on a single individual's authority (be it the Catholic pope, a Baptist minister, the Koran, or a dead science fiction writer).  We are our own masters and our own leader.  We decide for ourselves if somebody is worthy of being a figure of authority, a title that can easily be rescinded if need arises.  And we try to recognize that no matter what the problem is, the easy solution just isn't going to work.  Blindly following another is just asking to be led off a cliff.

[Reginald Ret]

also: I vehemently protest against your attack on easy solutions! don't dogmatically outlaw easy solutions.

PS. I too want to know what the islam is supposed to cure. throw hinduism in to while you're at it.

[Cain]

I believe pre-Islamic Arabia was an even more brutal place than it was under Islamic rule, and Islam responded to the temporal weakness of both Persia and the Byzantine Empire to institute its own legal and moral system.  Because of the war, there were also large migrations of population, food shortages and widespread banditry on the peninsula.  Christianity was too assosciated with Byzantium, Zoroastrianism with the Sassanid Empire.  Anyone setting out to carve an empire for themselves from the squabbling idiots above would need to create a new constituency entirely, and not ally with either of the above parties.

[Requia ☣]

Islam is meant to solve the problem of uppity women 

(Apologies to anyone who finds the above joke offensive, unless you're a sexist pig, in which case you can go fuck yourself.)

[nurbldoff]

Interesting take. Do the different cultures giving rise to different religions have different sets of basic problems, or just different ways of looking at them?

How about: Discordianism is a solution to the problem of Religion. It's often referred to as a joke-religion, but maybe it's more of a meta-religion?

[Requia ☣]

Discordianism isn't really anti religion (for me anyway, YMMV), just anti-dogma.

[nurbldoff]

Not so much anti religion as trying to fix the problems of religion, then. Of course, dogma is not a problem exclusive to organized religion.

[Vene]

Not so much anti religion as trying to fix the problems of religion, then. Of course, dogma is not a problem exclusive to organized religion.

I can't argue with that.

[M.K]

Using Mortal Kombat terms: SUPERB.