It don't think it's possible to disentangle the cyborg from capitalism or to see it as freeing individuals - with the algorithms centred on ensuring endless consumption and ever-deeper enmeshing of all individuals into the purposes of those who program and own the machinery.
Goddesses and gods are also shaped by relationships of power in culture but because they are embedded in our bodies and in face to face human relationships (sex, love, birth, death, eating, labour), and in relationships with the natural world outside of culture (weather, the seasonal cycle, the facts of aging and decay) they, as we engage with them, are more grounding and empowering. As well, polytheism is not essentialist in nature and it gives multiple images and multiple sources of meaning and power.
Marizio Bettini's "In Praise of Polytheism" translated and published by U California Press in 2023, is one recent book of theology that really impressed me. And, of course, Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow's brilliant joint theological autobiography "Goddess and God in the World; Conversations in Embodied Theology (Fortress Press, 2016).
<<By irony here, we mean an attitude of relentless suspicion toward one’s own vocabulary, manifested in a kind of arrogant aristocratic bum’s detachment that these matters are beneath us (I don’t take myself or anyone or anything else too seriously). It’s evasion masquerading as sophistication—a privileged position—that evades by questioning that there can be any final common vocabulary at all. Where “standing back” from our desires is prerequisite to independent practical reason, “standing back” from a shared vocabulary is standing back from commitment.>>
It don't think it's possible to disentangle the cyborg from capitalism or to see it as freeing individuals - with the algorithms centred on ensuring endless consumption and ever-deeper enmeshing of all individuals into the purposes of those who program and own the machinery.
Goddesses and gods are also shaped by relationships of power in culture but because they are embedded in our bodies and in face to face human relationships (sex, love, birth, death, eating, labour), and in relationships with the natural world outside of culture (weather, the seasonal cycle, the facts of aging and decay) they, as we engage with them, are more grounding and empowering. As well, polytheism is not essentialist in nature and it gives multiple images and multiple sources of meaning and power.
Marizio Bettini's "In Praise of Polytheism" translated and published by U California Press in 2023, is one recent book of theology that really impressed me. And, of course, Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow's brilliant joint theological autobiography "Goddess and God in the World; Conversations in Embodied Theology (Fortress Press, 2016).
Thanks, Bettini’s text sounds interesting. Will check it out!
<<By irony here, we mean an attitude of relentless suspicion toward one’s own vocabulary, manifested in a kind of arrogant aristocratic bum’s detachment that these matters are beneath us (I don’t take myself or anyone or anything else too seriously). It’s evasion masquerading as sophistication—a privileged position—that evades by questioning that there can be any final common vocabulary at all. Where “standing back” from our desires is prerequisite to independent practical reason, “standing back” from a shared vocabulary is standing back from commitment.>>
https://stanleyabner1951gmailcom.substack.com/p/dependent-rational-animals
https://michaelsparks.substack.com/p/for-what-its-worth-the-cultural-origins