Another thought on re-watching Buffy

Why is it that we still insist on using a goat's head to represent ultimate evil? OK, I know all the stuff about Christians demonising old pagan gods, but come on, a goat? Goats are silly creatures that go "meh" and eat clothes off washing lines. The worst thing goats have ever done is contribute to desertification by stripping leaves off shrubs. If you were being threatened by some Goat-Headed Evil Thing, a natural response would be "What are you going to do - nibble me?"

Some things I am fairly sure of

Religious practices, spiritual paths, practical philosophies, wisdom traditions … call them what you like, they come in a bewildering variety. Such a variety, in fact that people tend to assume that either (a) only one of them can possibly be valid or (b) they are equally nonsensical. The first option is less like Pascal's wager than putting all your money on a horse in a thousand-horse race: if you're going to believe that the First Reformed Snake-Handling Church has got it right and all the others have got it wrong, you need much stronger evidence than that your daddy handled snakes all his life and was a pretty decent kind of a guy. The second option has a certain elegance, since all you need to do is to show that all of these diverse faiths and practices are based on one or more false assumptions; Dawkins has made a career out of this. On the other hand, it's kind of boring. This leads us to the "perennial [pop] philosophy" approach: deep down, they are all really saying the same thing.

This approach is very appealing, and the only problem with it is that Tibetan lamas, Sufi dervishes, Neo-Stoics, Franciscan monks and Yakut shamans are most definitely not saying the same thing. They're not even doing the same things, unless you think getting drunk on vodka, eating a load of 'shrooms and dancing around wearing a ton of metal and bits of dead animal is "the same thing" as Islamic ritual prayer. Sure, they all (with the possible exception of the Stoics) do things that are a bit unusual and have odd effects on your brain, but we need a little more to go on than that.( Read more... )