the shadows still remain

Today is All Saints' Day (and before anyone asks, NO FUCKING WAY) which is as good a time as any to rediscover religion. I went looking for mine this morning, and it turned out to be up in the attic, packed in with a collection of failed hard drives and obsolete video cards in a box marked "unneeded junk."

Back when I used to work weekends at the college library, the portion of my shift that didn't involve playing "roust-a-pervert" or explaining to patrons that "no, this is not Boston University" was spent reading books and journal articles on whatever subject had captured my fancy at the moment. It's amazing how much one can learn from books when one knows there isn't a term paper or final exam at the end of the tunnel, and in terms of my educational development, I certainly came away from the experience with far more than I ended up getting from my actual college curriculum.

As I said, my choice of reading material was entirely whim-based, which led to some places that I would never have gotten to on my own. For example, I spent a couple shifts delving into St. Augustine's City of God, which despite my aggressive atheism turned out to be quite an engrossing read. It was written in the wake of the Visigoths' sack of Rome and is laden with spiritual-versus-earthly dualism (reflecting Augstine's own personal demons more than it does Christ's teachings). I was drawn to City of God by its apocalypticism, but in the end I found myself to be more fascinated by the implications of Augustine's detailed demolition of Roman pantheism, implications which the author himself could not bring himself to acknowledge.

A good-sized portion of the treatise is given over to an extended, almost god by god, refutation of the pagan and animist religious traditions practiced in the Empire at the time. Augustine strikes an almost mocking tone in these passages as he highlights the absurdities of having, for instance, separate deities for doors, frames, and lintels. It's as thorough an argument against irrational superstition as one can find, even if it doesn't entirely jibe with Augustine's intent, which was to posit the superiority of Judeo-Christian monotheism. The problem is that core elements of his arguments against pantheism -- the silliness, the contradictions, the twisted logic underpinning the system of belief -- can just as easily be applied to Augustine's own religious convictions, whose superiority in his mind is that God is more benevolent (which is a matter of practice, in truth), "real," and offers cool perks to His followers in the afterlife.

It's a common enough phenomenon whenever analytical philosophy collides with religious convictions. The same thing occurs in Descartes's Discourse on the Method, where, even when all other criteria for determining "self" are called into question, the existence of God is taken as an unassailable truth. It is as if having walked down to the shoreline of existentialism, Augustine, Descartes, and their philosophical and theological descendents cannot bring themselves to dip their toes in the water.

The Skids - The Saints Are Coming (from Scared to Dance, 1979) - It's a rare accomplishment for a song to survive being transformed into benefit porn by the likes of U2 and Green Day. Fortunately this bit of Scottish punk (co-written by the late Stuart Adamson, a member of The Skids before he went on to form Big Country) has bucked the odds and retained its ability to inspire awe in the listener despite having been used as a post-Katrina anthem and in an embarassingly preachy video.

What amuses me the most about that turn of events is that back in the old days, I used to describe The Skids to people by saying "they're kind of like U2...if U2 didn't suck."

The Saints - This Perfect Day (from Eternally Yours, 1978) - Long-haired Aussies who crashed the 70's British punk party with a ferocious Pop-inspired (Iggy Pop, that is) sound.

Big Sleep - Saints & Scholars (from a 1985 flexi) - DIY indie rock out of scenic paradise that was 80's Belfast. (Correction: The band actually hailed from Newtownards, ten miles east of Belfast.) It's a bit like a John McGahern story boiled down into a two-minute pop song: "This land of saints and scholars/is a land of fools and clowns."