gods who shit

Part of Becker's line of reasoning was that we are these absolutely vast thinkers who shit. We cannot reconcile the fact that we shit with our ability to contemplate the universe and God. We can think about infinity but then we are reduced to this dying disgusting worm who is just shitting and eating and pissing away its life. The incongruity of our situation drives us insane. And we don't even clearly know what is bothering us because we are too repressed. We are giving our rationale for some insane behavior and it never occurs to us to consider that we don't even need this whole trip we've gotten into. We can just relax and be mortal and be happy. We are going to die. So unresist that, unrepress that and get in touch with the fact of our mortality our inability to achieve the greatness we contemplate and direct our energy elsewhere.

This is the beauty and genius of Islam. Aside from the endless regulations that help us have something concerete to obsess about , like is that najasa how much filth is in a pool that a donkey falls into if it is 300 gallons it's polluted but if it's 1000 gallons it's still clean in part allows us to contain our anxiety about our own craven nature and put some boundaries around it. It is an entire system that gives us the ability to contemplate our own limits and the infinity of God and cope and transcend. Look at Islamic art. Or as I recently discovered the nasheeds.

So you get insane evil like you see in the modern world because there are no structures left to contain the anxiety or help us to deal with the anxiety about our own death. We can't cope.

I think it is relevant to say that Muslims seem to me at this point to have spent a lot of time dealing in part with our own mortality by opressing women. Whether this was adopted from Christianity which I think in part it was, absorbed from cultures on the Arabian peninsula, or actually the Sunna I can't clearly tell, and there seems to be both a reluctance to identify it either way among Islamic feminists. Leila Ahmed seems more inclined to attribute it to surrounding culture and Chrsitianity, but I think Fatima Mernissi sees it basically as the Sunnah. Mernissi seems to me to be much more inclined to challenge the Islamic tradition rather than explain it.

So what then about feminism? If Muslims are going to really transcend our own sexism, as many people are talking about doing, then we need something from feminism. Perhaps this is an absolute commitment to the full human rights of women. But, perhaps the post-freudian obsessions of feminists in teh West (Europe, North America) would be relevant as well. A more post freudian analysis, which I was recently more sceptical about could be really helpful in explaining the psychology behind why Muslims are still repressed and sexist in spite of our full knowledge that women should have equal rights to men because it is oppression to deny women rights.

The whole thing about not looking at najasa. Filth. Don't look at your poop. This makes sense if we want to make it easier to contemplate God but it is a health issue. You can't know as much about your health without looking at your poop.

If sexism is just a neurotic attempt to deny the grave how awful. Aren't we supposed to meditate on the grave? The whole denial of women's right to be included in public space (not that true at this point in practice in North America because of people like Dr. Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America)

Anyhow.

It is relevant to Buddhism as well that we deny our own death. But the Four Noble Truth's of Lord Buddha seem to have totally gotten over this. They describe a life style that both deals with death, and creates a structure for sublimation.

This is of course equally true if not more true of Islam because it is so much more accessible and nobody but the Buddha has attained enlightenement that we know of. So basically good buddhists go to heaven. And good Muslims have lives full of peace and love and goodness free from any repressed fear of death.

The point is that the repressed energy that we create avoiding our own death because it is so scary creates evil.