Postures

Kneel, bend, prostrate, straighten the spine, cross the legs, rest the hands palms up on knees, lift the head, open the eyes, close the eyes, bow, clasp entwined fingers, press fingers against each other, whirl, open the arms to a wide mottled sky.

These are postures of piety.  These poses comprise a grammar of religious movement.

Two questions arise:

One. Why have these postures been ubiquitous the world over?  Why were they in evidence in ancient Assyria and in medieval Meso-America and modern-day anywhere?  Is it a matter of cultural contagion, of ancient elemental mimicry that repeated itself through the centuries? Or, do the similarities have to do with a second query?

Two.  Are there automatic mental dispositions that are caused by certain bodily poses?  Does bowing naturally elicit a feeling of respect? Do closed eyes intensify thoughts? Do clasped hands trigger reflection in a way that tapping our fingers does not?  If all these were the case, then religious sensibility may have utilized these postures after a series of trials and errors: these poses seemed to do something to people, and so people repeated the postures for the desired effect.

There is an even more interesting angle suggested here.

If a body's posture affects mental dispositions, why not entertain the notion that the posture itself precedes and creates mental dispositions entirely? And if this were the case, why not regard posture as a cause of religious feeling?

No one knows the origin of the religious sensibility, though there have been numerous theories by scholars of religion. Suppose the origin of religious feeling lies in the body itself—feelings supernaturally or naturally emplaced.

Suppose that in prehistoric times a few of our bent-over ancestors first recognized a religious disposition within themselves immediately upon intertwining their fingers and placing those digital offerings on mouths and chins beneath closed eyes? Suppose posture was the kernel of all that is now religious feeling.

Suppose pose is the parent of piety.

Quarkism

In the fifth century before the common era, a Greek man named Democritus speculated that matter was composed of particles he called atoms, a Greek word meaning un-cuttable, that is to say, indivisible. Democritus thought an atom was the smallest un-dividable part of existent things.

Democritus would be astonished to learn that modern physicists discovered the atom was cuttable and reducible to even smaller, sub-atomic particles, such as:

Axions, Baryons, Bosons, Electrons, Exitons, Fermions, Gluinos, Gravitinos, Gravitons, Hadros, Magnons, Molecules, Mesons, Neutralinos, Photinos, Photons, Plarons, Pomerons, Positrons, Protons, Quarks, Sleptons, Squarks, Tauons.

Quarkism is a twenty-first century theistic theory named after the presumed lowest of all subatomic particles, the quark, a word pinched from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by physicist Murray Gell-Man.

In contra-distinction to ancient traditional theisms that invoke height in reference to the deity (the God On High and the Most High God), Quarkism speaks of the God On Low and the Most Low God.

By this view, God is not the highest, biggest thing there is in the universe but the lowest, smallest thing there is.

Just as physicists say that quarks are the glue of existence, so too do Quarkites say that God is the bond of all things.

Just as physicists say that quarks are not in one single location but occupy all existence, so too do Quarkites say that God inhabits no specific place but is everywhere all at the same time.

In devotional practice, Quarkites tend to lower their gaze: they look downward and do not stare at the heavens in prayer or raise their hands as if God is high up.

Quarkite hymnists have composed songs of worship with titles like "Low, Low, Low" and "Beneath Perception" and "Little Deity" and "Just a Tiny Walk With Thee."

Quarkism is open to instruction from the sciences, and it professes deep embarrassment about the Galileo fiasco of the seventeenth-century.

Since Quarkism believes in what it calls deep consonance between theology and science, Quarkite theologians often earn doctoral degrees in the natural sciences in addition to the D.D. (Doctor of Divinity).

The town of Kleinengott, Germany is the site of the first Quarkist seminary.

As with the origins of so many other renovating theologies of the modern West, this town is smack dab at the center of the olden, yet ever-freshly bejeweled, Black Forest.

(This is the only fake term and fake definition on offer, though it refers to very real neo-theological experiments.)

Revelation

A datum concealed, once revealed, is revelation.

Several religions (ancient-dead, and currently-living) make the claim that the information they have on offer in holy books is revelatory, having been disclosed by God or, in the case of the Hindu Vedas, by human conduits of ideas and words that have no beginning at all but are eternally existent.

Revelation is sometimes construed as divine dictation without human interference in the message, as if God whispers into the ears of human stenographers and waits patiently as quills scrape words onto crisp ivory vellum. One problem with a dictation model of revelation is disagreement among multiple sacred stenographers. Go look at, say, Sunday-morning resurrection stories of the four Christian gospels and explain why God dictated discordant facts. Note: contradiction is not a problem for the revelation of Islam: in the Qu'ran, which is a collection of divine revelations spanning some twenty years of Muhammad's life, God contradicts earlier dictations and calls it abrogation, a repealing of an earlier ruling, a changing of the divine mind.

Revelation has also been interpreted not as divine dictation but as divine inspiration, which permits human interference with the message, wherein God arouses sacred writers to write but allows each personality its turn of phrase and individual biases.

Two problems for any model of revelation may be stated as questions.

Question one. What if the revealed information was not formerly concealed? Some revealed messages, like portions of the Ten Commandments, were widely known and practiced all over the world for millennia before the revelation on Mt. Sinai.  Is something properly said to be revealed that was not formerly concealed?

Question two. What if original texts were lost and copiers did not reliably transmit the original revealed message during the long ages of manu-scripts (hand-written copying)?  No original text exists of any ancient message, except cuneiform debossed into kiln-baked clay by Mesopotamians. All the other original documents, penned on reed, animal skins, and paper, dissolved through exposure. As to reliability of transmission of the original message, of many thousands of extant copies of ancient sacred texts (including copies of the Bible), not a single ancient or medieval copy of a given book is identical to another copy. And all modern copies are composites of various ancient and medieval copies.  So, the original messages were not 100% reliably transmitted.

A theist would have to conclude that God is not terribly bothered by this, as if the revealed message of heaven is a secondary or tertiary concern for God. After all, God did not make arrangements for the preservation of the original revealed documents of holy texts, and God must have known that hand-written copies penned by fallible and sleepy scribes would contain errors in transmission. God was apparently okay with all this.

Perhaps God worried that, if a perfectly accurate version of God's words existed, people would deify the document and  equate it with God, and thereby spiral into a toxic, rigid, chapter-and-verse, veneratory, bookish idolatry.

Dr. Joseph McKenna has been teaching religious studies as a Senior Lecturer at UC Irvine since 1999.