Straw Dogs: You're Not Special

In a recent Reddit discussion, I came across someone who claimed that East Asians perceive the gods as cruel, and therefore East Asians don't pray to them. Most of the people in the thread were understandably perplexed at this person's assertion. But having studied Taoism, I think he may have been referring to Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, which opens by telling us that heaven and earth treat all things as "straw dogs" — which is to say sacrificial objects. In ancient China, dogs made of straw were built for a specific ritual purpose, lit on fire, and cast aside when the ritual was complete.

I guess you could take that to mean that the gods are cruel. Certain interpretations of the Tao Te Ching certainly don't help: "Heaven and earth are not benevolent," reads one translation. "Heaven and earth are ruthless," reads another. 

The problem here is that it's hard to narrow in on the specific meaning of ancient Chinese, especially in a poetic text like the Tao Te Ching that's ripe with mystical overtones. But my gut tells me that we're not supposed to think that the universe is hostile, any more than we're supposed to think that it's benevolent. The universe just is. Nature just is. When a tornado rips through a community and uproots trees, levels homes, and leaves death and destruction in its wake, nature isn't being mean. It's just doing what nature does. Some will be quick to attribute the storm to some kind of karmic response, others to God's wrath. But what if it's just a storm? Likewise when a child develops a terminal illness: We can twist ourselves in knots wondering why a loving God would allow an innocent person to suffer, or we might surmise that the gods — if they even exist — just don't care.

I think that's what Taoism attempts to teach us. If "shit happens" ever summed up a religious/spiritual philosophy, it's Taoism. Maybe gods exist; maybe they don't. Either way, if we take our emotions and desires out of it, we can find no tangible evidence that, if deities do exist, they don't really seem to care about us one way or another. We're straw dogs. We're born, we live, we die. That's our only discernible purpose. It's only our egos that persuade us to think that we humans hold some special, privileged place in the universe. That we're made in the image of God, and that God is love. Nice sentiment, but entirely unprovable outside of philosophical abstractions.       

Nor should we have any reason to think we could ever bend the gods to our will. Prayers and offerings to the gods are ultimately for us, to bring us closer through reverent ritual actions to the ideals that the gods represent. We can imitate their characteristics as recorded in scripture and lore, but they can't be bribed to get us the job, or let us win the lottery, or heal little Jimmy. The gods aren't that weak, and we're not that powerful. They don't need us. And, again, this is assuming they even exist.

I'm not trying to make an argument for atheism, if that's what it sounds like. I happen to think there is some kind of creative force out there, and I think quantum mechanics might hint at what it looks like, if we entertain the admittedly far-out idea that consciousness is a building block of the universe — which points toward concepts of divinity that look more like Brahman, or Neoplatonism's One, or, indeed, the Tao itself, than anything that has to do with an old man on a cloud judging us by an arbitrary book of rules. 

I also believe a spirit world exists, even if I can't pretend to know much about it. And I admit that the idea of karma and rebirth makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of things, at least as a belief in my mind. But that's all it is: an unsubstantiated belief.

The point I'm trying to make is a very simple one: We're not special. 

Being humans, we have the capacity to fill our lives with meaning and purpose, build relationships with other people, pursue our hobbies and interests, and try to leave behind a positive influence. But we can easily confuse these things with the idea that our existence holds any inherent purpose beyond simply existing for 70 or 80 years. We're sentient beings on one tiny little planet in the vast ocean of space. That's it. Yet we devote an incredible amount of time and energy on this little speck of dust — this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan so wonderfully put it — trying so desperately to be noticed and acclaimed, as if we're actually something more than the insignificant and transitory blobs of flesh and bone that we are. These days we go so far as to create false identities for ourselves, complete with their own accompanying garish little flags, in the hopes that by remaking ourselves in our own image, someone will notice and applaud our fragile egos for a few fleeting seconds. 

But none of that changes the reality that the overwhelming majority of us will be forgotten within a few short generations, a name on a headstone that a stranger might momentarily ponder while passing by in the cemetery, maybe wondering what the person lying in the ground under his feet was like, and then never thinking about it again. Even many of the once great and powerful will eventually be reduced to a footnote, like Shelley's Ozymandias. "Look on my works and despair," indeed.

There's a spoken-word poem on Chicago's third album whose second stanza goes as follows:

When all the great galactic systems
Sigh to a frozen halt in space,
Do you think there will be some remnant
Of the beauty of the human race?
Do you think there will be a vestige,
Or a sniffle, or a cosmic tear?
Do you think a greater thinking thing
Will give a damn that man was here?

That's us. The straw dogs. 

But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and give up. Do you have to be made in the image of God for your existence to mean something? Do you need to believe you go to heaven when you die for your earthly existence to have any value? Can you not provide your own meaning and value, independent of what else may or may not go on in the universe? 

Be the best straw dog you can be. And let that be enough.

New Season, New Thoughts

And so let it begin, here on Summer Solstice 2025: the first day of this latest twist in my long and winding spiritual journey. 

"Owl and raven" is a nod to Athena and Odin. The fearless warrior in pursuit of strategic, practical wisdom and the elusive wanderer ever thirsting for knowledge. Just for fun, I asked an AI chatbot what would be a suitable deity for someone with an INTP disposition. Two of the recommendations were Athena and Odin. The INTP is notorious for his desire for knowledge, and Athena and Odin represent that tendency, but in markedly different ways. Athena, echoing the Sophia of the Old Testament, would have us cultivate our wisdom in order to bring about social betterment, spiritual growth, and self-improvement. Odin would simply have us accumulate knowledge for its own sake. Maybe he'll put it to practical use someday, or maybe not. The knowledge is an end in itself. In this sense, I'm more Odin than Athena, though I strive to be more like Athena. 

INTPs can have a lot of trouble getting out of their own heads. When this comes to applying knowledge, it can manifest by sticking us in an eternal state of knowledge acquisition without ever actually doing anything constructive with that knowledge. I joke that I'm an endless source of useless trivia, and it's not wrong, because I'll research things to death when I take an interest in them.

Spiritually speaking, I was born into the Catholic church, but I've always struggled with literal belief. I love the rituals of the Catholic church. I love the internal logic and wisdom of its catechism, which I think you can apply to your life without needing to hold to a literal view of Christianity's theological claims. At its best, Catholicism uses goodness, truth, and beauty -- those wonderful Platonic transcendentals -- to point us toward the divine. And if we're doing it right, that orientation toward the divine gets us out of ourselves and orients us in a humbling way. We know that we inherently possess worth and meaning, yet we're a part of something far bigger than ourselves. That's what I strive toward, however imperfectly. 

Yet sometimes the Catholicism doesn't seem like enough. And in some ways it feels limiting. I don't really have anything against it, and if you're a product of Western civilization, you couldn't escape its historical influence even if you wanted to. But I started on my own spiritual quest a good 25 to 30 years ago, to try to find answers to questions no one seemed interested in addressing, outside of resorting to tired dogma. Surely the spiritual life is about more than dogma. That's one of the things that sent me on my personal quest in the first place. And I've spent a lot of years whipsawing from one spiritual perspective to another, I think maybe because I needed one view of the world to be the correct one. And in my mind, that meant trying to justify or rationalize one way of looking in the world while pushing opposing views away. But that's exactly what the dogmatists do, isn't it?

So in starting this journal, I'm not going into it with the intention of pushing things away. I'm just trying to synthesize my eclectic spiritual worldview into something that can sustain the many influences I've taken in over the years without a need for having one view vie for dominance with another. Spiritual syncretism is all the rage these days, I guess, but that's not really what I'm going for. Syncretism is ultimately borne of egotism. If you don't like how one religion does something, then just take the parts of different religions you like and mix them together into something self-affirming. That's the basis of the whole "my truth" business, as if there can ever be more than one truth. This approach leads nowhere good. It also flattens important distinctions between religious traditions, distinctions that deserve to be preserved and honored. Salad bars are nice at a restaurant, but they're not a very good source of spiritual nutrition.

Instead, I'm looking for something more holistic. Something that can incorporate my love of the Sermon on the Mount, the deep wisdom of the Tao Te Ching, the contemplative spirit of the Quakers and Carmelite mystics, the esoteric appeal of Shingon Buddhism, the mind-bending assertions of the Heart Sutra, and the penetrating insights of the Bhagavad-Gita, while still honoring the origins of these things. At one time I was bent on creating my own religion. I even had my sights set on being ordained through an online seminary. In one of those "who knows what's good or bad" moments, the head of the seminary sort of flaked out on me, and I threw in the towel on that idea. I'd already "earned" my Th.D. through writing a thesis paper and paying the required amount for the degree, and that had to be good enough. Turns out it was probably for the best, because this whole "my truth" and "your truth" stuff just grates on me terribly. Our world has decided that immutable truths are subjective, and the last thing I want to do is contribute to that mindset. It's enough for me to pursue the wisdom of the world's religious traditions and do my best to put their lessons to work in my life. 

Wisdom never gets enough credit. Most people want the comfort and certainty of dogma. But wisdom scares people off because it goes deeper. It doesn't just give us a list of things to do and believe. It challenges our perceptions. It encourages us to ask why we believe what we do, and to live out our beliefs in a way that goes beyond a hamfisted application of shalts and shalt-nots. There's a reason Sophia characterizes herself as hiding in plain sight in the Old Testament. She opens her arms to all who seek her out, and yet most don't. In a way it's fitting that Old Testament Sophia is today mostly ignored and forgotten. At best, she lives on through the person of Christ. But when is the last time a Christian voice encouraged anyone to specifically seek her out? 

This speaks to a related problem within Christianity: the invisibility of the feminine within the framework of an all-male trinity. A balance is needed, and it's not being addressed in any meaningful way. Catholics have Mary, and in fact I have a very close relationship with her. But even she's hemmed in by dogma. Even though the ways Catholics honor her make her seem like a goddess, the church will be quick to remind us that she isn't to be seen that way. And so she's reduced to her role as a submissive figure. The one who said yes and didn't ask questions. And I don't think that's fair to her. To me, she's always been something like the tender, compassionate mother I never had in real life, and I think that the kind of compassion she represents can only come from a place of inner strength and unshakable conviction, the very things that the church tends to downplay about her. After all, the Magnificat, with its call to raise up the lowly and send the rich away hungry, isn't exactly something you'd expect to hear from a shrinking violet. It's a call to action, to be a voice for those who have none. 

Anyway, the point is that Mary has filled an important need in my spiritual life, one that has skewed sharply in favor of the Sacred Feminine. And she will continue to fill a need. But sometimes you need more than just a nurturing mother figure. You need to find archetypes of things that can lead to greater wisdom and growth. For me, I needed a yin and yang that could form a basis for greater spiritual balance and could stand in as symbols of the masculine and feminine that didn't exclude other influences. I wanted something that would allow me the clarity to see that it doesn't have to be Mary or some other icon of the Sacred Feminine, Taoism or Catholicism, and so on. I was actually working on putting together a personal devotion to the Sacred Feminine that would have involved thirteen different figures. And it occurred to me just how confusing and exhausting it would be to try to maintain a devotion to so many figures. That's when I turned to AI for some insights. And to my surprise, AI helped me organize my thoughts in a way that brought some much-needed clarity to the situation. Instead of thirteen goddesses, why not just one that can represent all? And why not add a balancing complementary male figure to the mix?

I might post some of my AI interactions. I found them insightful. As I write this, I'm carrying on a conversation that might bring even further insights into focus. But I think having Athena and Odin as INTP-friendly deities, ones that maybe better reflect where I am right now on my journey, can help me do something useful and productive with my spiritual life. The AI suggested getting into a reading discipline to mirror Athena, and a journaling discipline to mirror Odin. The Odin part is this blog, and I intend to treat it very much like a stream-of-consciousness journal written in permanent ink, which will help me resist my usual urge to go back and make edit after tedious edit until I'm finally happy with the result. The reading part will probably delve into Greek mythology along with some Anglo-Saxon readings like Beowulf. I know Odin is Norse and not Anglo-Saxon, but the Anglo-Saxons had Woden, a figure who was cut from the same cloth but whose comparative mystery adds to his appeal for me. Plus, Wednesday was named for Woden. And I like Beowulf, and the Anglo-Saxon philosophy of Wyrd. More on that another time -- along with how Gandalf deepened my interest in Odin (and Woden).