That's a reference to something Yuri Gagarin said from space, by the way, presumably on orders from his government.
Thoughts upon religion, much of it related to SF and fantasy.
- There is a quote somewhere about the Peyote Church (as it's known where I live) to the effect that, "The white man goes in his church on Sunday and hears about Jesus, and the Indian goes in his tepee and meets Jesus."
To which one might be tempted to add, "And the Mexican goes in his church on Sunday and eats the flesh and drinks the blood of Jesus, the act without which there is no life in you (John 6:53). I'm sorry, cabrón, were you trying to make a point?" - Remember how I said I learned about Taoism from East Asian folk-religion? Yes, well, where I learned about Buddhism—whose philosophy I can coherently discuss, a faculty that seems almost unique to me—is just plain weird. Namely, from writing fight scenes with ninjas in them.
See, I wanted the mantras that go with those hand-signs ninjas make. I found out that a book on Shingon Buddhist iconography had the mantras that go with each hand-sign; it also had an in-depth discussion of Buddhist eschatology, cosmology, and soteriology. I think it's also where I first encountered the allegory of the cart, which explains the teaching of anatman (Buddhist atomism), and the Mahayana commentary on it (atomism leads to infinite regress) that leads to the Mahayana version of advaita, non-duality (the Monad is the only existent thing).
Then I got Yagyû Munenori's "Family Martial Technique Record", often referred to in the West by the title of one of its chapters, "The Life-Giving Sword": because I wanted ninja sword-techniques, and Munenori's father-in-law was an Iga ninja. Munenori was also a Zen intellectual, and he uses the technical terms of Zen metaphysics. E.g., "essence vs. function": basically Zen only has two Causes in the Aristotelian sense, essence being formal (though only with provisional reality, please remember the doctrine of anatman) and function encompassing material, final, and efficient. - Eywa, in Avatar (Ewoks, not Aang), is really a very laughable nature mother-goddess; as several reviewers have pointed out, why do people who live on, basically, the island from Cage of Eden, conceive of their nature-goddess as omnibenevolent? That jungle is full of hypercarnivores, and at least some of them probably pursue the "kill as many prey animals as I can, whenever I can" strategy pursued by foxes. And some of them also probably eat Na'vi, despite their Overfiend tentacle mindlink; it's tough to get your mindlink-tentacle into an animal while it's eating your viscera.
What's most irksome is, Pandora is just a bad knockoff of Perelandra crossed with Malacandra. Eywa's its orissa, and the Na'vi are Tor and Tinidril. They even have Adam's authority over animals. Only instead of being deliberate Eden-analogy, with huge swaths of shoutout to Milton, Avatar was trying to be neo-pagan. Only, like most neo-paganism, it only succeeds in being Liberal Protestantism. Eywa's omnibenevolence is the omnibenevolence of the Christian God, who, as Supreme Being, is also the Monad, the Form of the Good. No pagan god is omnibenevolent, because pagan gods can be hurt, therefore they must protect themselves—Zeus strikes down hubristic mortals (remembering his own usurpation of Chronos), Spider Woman spirits away weavers who show signs of becoming better than her. - And seriously, no pagan gods are omnibenevolent; the Hindu gods (some of whom are described that way) are not purely pagan gods. Hinduism is not paganism, it is a pagan pantheon (the one described in the Rg Veda) being identified with the Supreme Being, usually either pantheistically or monistically.
Say what you will about India, but they got a better answer than the Greeks or Romans did, to the cosmological yearnings paganism, by necessity, leaves unaddressed. The Greeks and Romans generally tended to the Stoic or Epicurean answers, neither of which is really an answer—both are really methods for dodging the question, just like Neo-Confucianism and the various "Enlightenment" attempts to discuss theological questions without reference to Christianity. - This is an interesting article about primitivism and the "Noble Savage" idea, though I think I dispute her using "shaman" to mean "hunter-gatherers' priests" (I prefer the usage where "shaman" means "priests of the Eurasian shaman-complex who are primarily spirit-channelers", i.e. "the kind of person we get the word from"). But it has a very interesting point about how Westerners approach "shamanism" as a spiritual technology.
Now, there actually is a technological element to that sort of religion—they're called "medicine men" for a reason—but the difference between a Navajo medicine man and an MD is, the MD doesn't have to be on good terms with anyone but a pharmacist and the medical association to effect his cures (and he doesn't even need that second one if he doesn't mind becoming a black-market physician). A Navajo medicine man's cures are effected by beings both he and his patient must be on good terms with—or they die, as both the medicine man and the patient (and one of the dancers) did when they let the Night Chant be filmed all the way through, in 1963. - There is often used, by Christian writers too numerous to name, the analogy of Creation as a work of fiction and God as its author. Now, the analogy isn't perfect—fictional characters do not have free will, they do what their author makes them do (though, like God, a good author does not force them to act as they would not)—but it is certainly not without its value as a model.
However, has anyone, using that analogy, noticed what a testament it is to the awesomeness of God? Namely, his self-insert character, who shows up people who disagree with him, has a cool secret parentage, and dies and returns from the dead, is excellent, not a Mary Sue at all. - Boy, it's really too bad self-aware computer programs are logically impossible, and all. Got a patron saint picked out for 'em and everything. Well, okay, so there was a saint who was alleged, in the 1373 Rosario della Vita by Matteo Corsini, to have made a mechanical man, along with all the other kooky alchemical stuff he was supposed to have gotten up to.
I refer, of course, to Albertus Magnus, the practice-grandfather of all Thomists, as he was the teacher of our own master (what, like a kung fu analogy don't belong in Scholasticism?). And to think, Anthony Boucher was so close. - I know I said St. Barbara was the patron saint of hard SF, but as it turns out, Maximilian Kolbe was a rocket scientist, who designed and tried to patent a reusable space-plane.
And not the most zealous of reductive demythologizers can deny Kolbe existed. So let's take him as the patron saint of hard SF writers. Interestingly, his Nagasaki monastery, that was famously spared the bombing, was apparently on land that was cheap because it was on the northeast side of the mountain—the inauspicious direction known in Onmyôdô geomancy (think Japanese feng shui) as the "kimon", or "ogre gate".
The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.
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