Unspoke Magazine Issue 9

U N S P O K E M A G A Z I N E

ISSUE NINE NOVEMBER 2017

R E L I G I O N

OUR MAGAZINE: In today’s world, we are faced with conflict and

constantly changing social, political, and economic

issues. These issues are commonly suppressed and are “taboo” subjects of conversation. Our mission is to

expose these topics and get people talking. We want to release the unspoken and shine a light on it.

\

Z

U

THIS ISSUE:

Religion is one of the biggest sources of unity, as

well as division, worldwide. With this issue, we aim to explore the idea of religion, both organized and not, and how it has shaped our society on an individual basis and as a whole.

[

Y

]

VOCABULARY AGNOSTIC

adj./n. out of sight, out of mind

ATHEIST

adj./n. damned if you do, damned if you don’t

DIETY

n. one’s idol (e.g. God, Vishnu, Buddha, Dolly Parton, Allah, etc.)

DOCTRINE

n. literally just someone’s opinion

HOLY BOOK

n. the rule book for any religion (e.g. Bible, Quran, Torah, etc.)

MISSIONARY

n. the toughest sales job in the world

ORGANIZED RELIGION

We All Deserve God’s LoveTM

PILGRIMAGE

n./v. a journey to a holy land (not to be confused with “vacation”)

POLYTHEISM

n. divinity + democracy

PRAYER

n. a habit to provide sanity

REINCARNATION

n. cats have nine lives, what about us?

by REXTON M Let’s face it, there’s a generation of people who find God really unsexy. God might be love, but the inverse probably isn’t true, right? Sunday school really doesn’t do a good job of making God fun or relatable, considering He doesn’t seem to have gotten up to much since the Old Testament.

Then comes the optional next step of watching crazy Christian videos on YouTube and recognizing the capacity of the religious Right to really harm vulnerable communities. God is pushed to the sidelines, forgotten in the dayto-day, and probably as reviled as possible without acknowledging His existence. That can probably get you through most of high school.

But maybe something changes.

There’s something on the periphery, something inexplicable about existence that seems more real than the Real. Maybe not God, but something. Plato may gone a bit too far talking about the immortal soul and ‘recollection’ from past lives, but maybe there’s something more to the self than a slab of meat populated by a whirlwind of momentary fears and anxieties. The Bible, presented as a big book of stories about how, at the end of the day, you can always have a friend in

Jesus, doesn’t seem like enough to handle the problems of modern life. There’s a good reason for that: it’s not. While some people experience the joy of religious community to make up for it, the rest of us spiritual misfits could only get on with our lives, replete with reductive materialism - until now.

If the thought of going to church every Sunday isn’t too appealing, but to be ‘spiritual but not religious’ doesn’t seem like enough, there’s another way.

There’s a rich spiritual world that the Church doesn’t want you to know about, and can set you apart from the flock while still returning to the heart of religious experience. It’s time to bring back heresy.

Heretics have always been ready to answer the tough questions.

The Gnostics utilized a variety of apocryphal texts that call into question some of the most basic tenets of Christianity, many of which feature hidden

McNEILL LAIRD teachings of Jesus himself. What if God possessed a feminine aspect, and was not only God the Father but God the Mother too?

The Manicheans shaped the faith of a young Augustine and considered the spiritual dangers of unchecked materialism. The Cathars introduced women to the clergy in medieval Europe, but were the victims of genocide for their belief system. Spinoza and other pantheists pushed notions of God to their logical conclusions, with implications that many Jews and Christians found uncomfortable.

These religious groups wouldn’t have been persecuted if they weren’t on to something real.

Heresies, in so far as they were a force on the ‘outside’ of conventional religious practice, revealed something suspicious and unsavory about what was going on inside the Church and, if left unchecked, could’ve rocked the moral and political framework of the West to its core. One cannot understand the content of the Bible without considering what

got left out, and consider whose ends the process of canonization served. It’s rather telling that the book called ‘The Gospel of Truth’ didn’t make it into the Bible.

If we really, truly want to make a difference in the world, it’s time to question the moral and religious frameworks that underly our culture and mindset. The very act of rejecting religion isn’t sufficient to escape, but solidifies the object of rejection as morally and spiritually significant. It’s notenough to uphold Nietzsche’s death of God theology, so what if God was back and belonged to the people again?

To bring God back from the conceptual grave requires recognizing the limitations of theology as it has been practiced, and truly exploring what it means to believe in something.

We live in a time when there’s no risk of being burned for heresy. God works in mysterious ways, and as a result, will probably be experienced in fascinating and subjective manners. Read some heretical texts. Summon a demon. Sacrifice to Moloch. Own your spiritual side.

F F F

Bless me father for i have sinned.

In second grade I wore a Tim Burton t-shirt to school.

The girl with the Hello-Kitty tshirt responded: “You’re going to hell” I stubbed my toe against a bed corner and loudly yelled, “Fuck” I swore and that swear damned me to hell.

I talked back to my mother when I didn’t get what I wanted.

Then I ran into the wall.

“God is punishing you” she says “Great” I say.

In sixth grade I copied that entire paper from the internet.

I got caught.

The fiery wrath of my teacher might as well of been the inferno.

I snuck out of class in the 8th grade to kiss a boy.

I missed the slip-stitch lesson in home-ec because of it.

My sophomore year of high school I stared down at a bottle of vodka and drank.

I felt the sin drip down my throat.

The hangover the next day was my purgatory.

I had premarital sex more than once.

Each time secured me a spot in that place of fire and brimstone.

“I was baptized and you weren’t” “Oh?” “That means you’re going to hell.”

“Ok” The underworld opened it’s arms wide to me when I lit up that joint.

It’s ok.

I’ll go smoke with Hades.

I changed my mind once and slept with a girl.

Two vaginas together; Uh oh Eternal damnation.

Next guy, asks me to suck his cock.

“No” I say “Go to Hell Bitch” he says Ok I’ll see you there.

by CARSEN SCHROEDER

T

t

by AARON PERLES

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

In these words, French polymath and philosopher Blaise Pascal elucidated the greatest crux of human nature: our sociality, and all of the consequences that stem from it. Our fortune to have been born into the great species Homo sapiens carries with it the cumbersome constraint that, despite our best efforts to be self-sufficient, we will always be dependent on the presence of our fellow hominids. We crave love and nurture from our families. We long for the company of our friends. We strive for validation from our peers and mentors. The most striking feature of human life, undocumented in any other species on Earth, is our desire for meaningful interpersonal connection in endless forms. It is a dependence rooted deep in our psychology, developed over

200,000 years of human evolution. In our prehistoric

environment, our best strategy for survival and reproduction was cooperation and mutual aid; after two-hundred millennia of passing on genetic predispositions to these kinds of behaviors, our brains have become hardwired to be instinctively social. Without social behavior, we

fall into psychological despair, and for our evolutionary ancestors, a lack of social behavior coul d have been fatal. For them, it was imperative to keep their societies from unraveling, to maintain social cohesion.

t

For a long time, we kept our societies bound together through religion. 200,000 years ago, there were no Abrahamic faiths, no mention of Olympus or Asgard, no devotion to the many-armed deities of South Asia—but the fundamental behaviors that we observe in all of these religions have existed since the beginning of human history, and are, in fact, the primary mechanism by which we maintain a cohesive, cooperative society. A religion is marked by three fundamental behaviors: first, a society identifies an object upon which to fixate. Second, the society makes that object sacred, or beyond reproach. And finally, the society collectively rallies behind the sacred object, engaging in communal worship of it. This pattern has been around for as long as we have, which we can see through the many forms the “sacred object” has

taken over the course of our long run on this planet: the sun and the rain in the earliest human societies, the idols and icons of the ancient civilizations, the deities of Mesopotamia and Greece and the Indian subcontinent, and the God of Abraham from which sprang the three great monotheisms. And by worshipping that object as a community, our ancestors created the glue that would hold their societies together as singular, cohesive units. When a community revolves around one thing that everyone can rally behind and agree upon together—an object, a god, a principle—it creates a social landscape in which belief in the sacred object indicates a willingness to contribute to the community, fostering cooperation among believers. And after 200,000 years of nature selecting for this cooperative behavior, the end result is a species with an intrinsic psychological need to contribute to something greater than ourselves: to the sacred object, but more importantly, to the community. We yearn to reach out to those around us. We want, more than anything, to be part of the group.

We are burdened with, as Pascal said, an “inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

It is also that very inability that creates the double-edged sword of our religious nature. If our subconscious mind’s desire for group behavior and a guiding, unifying principle is so voracious that we have built entire civilizations around it, then we will accept anything to satisfy that need. In the wake of the Enlightenment of the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution of the 19th, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche stated, “God is dead.

God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This was not a statement of victory, no celebration of all that humanity had achieved in its modern age, but a warning of what consequences that achievement would bring. Nietzsche posited that our rationality, our increased understanding of the natural universe, and our material progress had allowed us to shed ourselves of our dependence on religion as the force shaping our societies and informing our behavior. We would lose our guiding principles; we would destroy that project greater than ourselves. But as a species whose soundness of mind hinges on our need to contribute to that

very project, the death of God would leave a great rift in our psyche, a void of nihilism waiting to be filled by the next compelling ideology or authoritative figure to come along. In this author’s view, Nietzsche’s predictions proved true, not just in the decades immediately following his declaration, but up to the very present. The death of God is what spurred the adoption of the “secular religions” of the 19th and early 20th centuries, each with its own sacred object: the nation to nationalism, class consciousness to socialism, and democracy to the affirmation of republicanism. It is what allows the rise and quasideification of powerful men and women, swaying the public with their appearances of strength and their promises to guide their citizens through difficult times: not just a Stalin or a Hitler or a Mussolini, but also an Obama, a Clinton, or a Trump. It is what drives a wedge through the American political spectrum and makes religious tribes out of ideological positions: the identitarian power politics of the left, and the white nationalism of the right, with no cross-talk as each side increasingly clings to its own beliefs. And it is what fuels bigotry in all its forms: an unwillingness to understand, communicate with, or afford dignity to those who do not partake in the behavior of our immediate group, to ostracize “the other” in whatever capacity they may be so.

The greatest achievements of modernity are also its greatest irony. We have become more knowledgable, more scientific, and more secular—and yet we are more religious than ever before.

& GOD IS DEAD

DEAD IS GOD

NOOS

by NATALIE DA

us and lead

our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come

no

t i nto temptat i

thy will be done

on

forever

on earth as it is in heaven give

us this day our daily

and

forgive us our tres

as

we forgive our tres but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power

and the glory

bread passes passers

x

I ate out the Devil last night, steamy in the back room of a spa.

There were bloated worms at our feet, all in unison, praying to god.

And I think I am filled with something holy, like divine light that bites on my nerves.

Now some thick soup slowly fills up my belly, cooking my flesh into cannibal hors d’oeuvres.

And Around me I can smell things about to die, as it gently rains semen from the sky.

x

x xxxx

by MAXIMILIAN TORTI

x

xxx

C R E D I T S Natalie Day FoUnDeR, EdItOR Natalie is currently entering her second year at Columbia College Chicago where she is studying acting and journalism. She is originally from Omaha, Nebraska.

She is so happy to be a part of providing a platform to discuss issues that aren’t always talked about in daily life and hopes that the words of this magazine affect at least someone. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @nat__day.

Lili MAC DeSIGN EditOr Lili Mac is proudly from New Orleans, LA and is currently a sophomore at Columbia College Chicago studying musical theatre and a bunch of other stuff. She’s not a real designer, but we’re not gonna talk about that. She loves exploring the uninhabited spaces of art, performance, and other people.

Shameful plug! @lilimac866

CARSEN SCHROEDER Marketing and Business Manager Carsen is from Overland Park, Kansas. She is currently a sophomore at Columbia College Chicago as an acting major.

Carsen has also been a dancer for many years and loves anything to do with the stage. She has always been a storyteller and has been writing as a hobby for many years. She is very happy to provide an outlet for people to tell their stories and discuss these important topics that we avoid so much.

CONTRIBUTOrS Natalie Day Rexton McNeill Laird Lili Mac Aaron Perles Carsen Schroeder Maximilian Torti

Cover: Lili Mac

NEXT ISSUE: MONEY!