God's Plenty and Different Gods

Currently reading God's Plenty by William Closson James and Raymond Breton's Different Gods. 

1966, following the Holocaust:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The difficulty of our time is speaking of God in an age of no religion.

Rabbi Richard Rubenstein: Our problem is how to speak of religion in an age of no God.

Lines in the sky.

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.”
~Buddha

Purity Culture and my Religious Freedom.

Alexis de Toqueville writes in 1835:
“In the United States it is not only mores that are controlled by religion, but its sway extends over reason… So Christianity reigns without obstacles by universal consent.  Thus while the law allows the American people to do everything, there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to become.  Religion, which never interferes directly in the government of American society should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions."
 
The UN Human Rights Committee notes that Article 18 (on religious freedom) “protects theistic, non-theistic, and atheistic beliefs, as well as the right not to profess any religion or belief.”

Freedom of religion also means my right to be free from religion.  This seems to be addressed in the UNHRC comment above, but as Toqueville describes, the matter is thorny when the systemic principles embedded in our institutions are pre-disposed to accept the moral authority of a particular religion.  For example, the influence of medieval Christian purity culture on North American notions of sexuality and the control of women have directly resulted in the stigmatization of birth control, which seems to be a ‘secular’ issue when presented under the purview of healthcare but is actually directly an infringement on my freedom from religion, since its roots are religious in nature.  

To give you a specific example, I have a pocket-sized computerized gadget that tells me every morning if I am fertile that day.  With greater accuracy than the effectiveness of a condom, I can know which 6 days per month not to have sex.  What a revelation.  I had to order this from Germany, because my supposedly ‘secular’ public government doesn’t understand how to objectively examine its archaic underpinnings and let me choose how to regulate my own body by my fragile little female self.

Can we please have the courage to step away from the oppressive aspects of our religious institutions to create a more just society?  If you truly have love and faith in your religion, then allow it to be the best it can be. 

Divine Terminology.

In framing my discussion of divinities in my thesis text, I will structure my terminology thus:

When referring to the Jewish god I will say G-d, the Muslim god, Allah, the Christian one, God.  When describing the Hindu conceptualization of manifest destiny, Ultimate Reality, all that animates life on Earth, the beings inhabiting an infinite number of hellish and heavenly realms and dimensions in time and space, I will say Atman/Brahman.  This indicates the importance of the relationship between the lone self (Atman) and it's connection (yoke, yog, yoga) to Everything (Brahman).  Another term that can be used is Oneness, but it may perhaps imply a more western interpretation of Hinduism, or a neo-Hindu western religion.  In regards to Buddhism, I will say śūnyatā, which means 'nothingness', emptiness, the nonexistence of self (an-atman, when compared to the Hindu context it came from).

When speaking in general terms, I will simply say god or gods.  This will not indicate any specific notion of 'divinity', but will refer to various systems of selfhood.

Stutter.

My work-in-progress novel (nothing to do with my thesis, but where my mind happens to be at right now) is in a bit of stutter.  I'm agonizing over the terminology of my magic people.  I've always called them 'mages', but my editors think that's too prozaic.  I guess it is, but I've been calling them that for so long that I'm okay with it. 
I've been suggested rune-speaker (meh), and I'm considering rishi... I love the Vedic influence but in this context it might not work.  It might mean changing lots of other things...

Work... in... progress...

sigh.