How dumb do you have to be?

part 1: is it possible to be smart and a believer? of anything?

Venus and Saturn, sitting in a tree: Venus and Saturn have been sharing space for a while. Venus is thrilled to be in Pisces, the sign where she is celebrated, carried around in a giant sea shell bed and given gifts and sweet things. Saturn has been here for a while and, though nearing the end of his stay, isn’t quiiiiite in the home stretch. They’ll be sharing a degree tomorrow and Friday, their bond fading out slowly over the coming days.

Saturn and Venus together is a funny combo. Venus is sweet and likes connection. Saturn is not sweet and can be isolating. However, they do have some bonds. Venus’s home of Libra is where Saturn is celebrated, suggesting that perhaps in the most Libran areas of life we need a little bit of both Venus’s care and connection as well as Saturn’s sincerity and commitment. Maybe you can find a little taste of that committed care in the coming days and carry it forward. So many places in the world need it right now.

In this week’s newsletter:

• Kicking off a new series

• Another zine promise lol

• Fun things to go read

When is a cult a cult and when is it just good fun and when is it just stupid?

In the vein of the short series I wrote last year about Venus and gender and gay aesthetics and being perceived online, I wanted to start another short series on the idea of “belief”. This is bigger than the astrological and bigger than the religious and definitely bigger than I can cover in even a really good series of blogs, but I wanted to take a stab at it anyway. This is pretty much the single question that hums throughout anything I write here: what does it mean to believe in something?

Like that last series, I want to kind of take a stab at generating questions and shorter reflections, sketching out in real time how I see the landscape of this idea at least as of now. Inevitably (hopefully) this landscape will look different to me by the next and the next and the next blog, likely being pretty indistinguishable from what I lay out here by the end of the series. That’s how I get clearer on what I think and what I want to see in my life.

Part of how this works best is if you weigh in on the conversation. Leave a comment or shoot me an email response. Tell me where you disagree, where you see it differently, and where you think I should be looking to understand these things. Help me build my syllabus!

Now, onto some good questions…

Is belief anti-intellectual?

This is the inciting question of this series. I cannot for the life of me find this post now, but I was scrolling Instagram and came across a quote tweet turned troll meme that got me thinking.

Grimes (the musician/elf/mother of three of Elon Musk’s twelve children) shared a photo of a picture of some C.S. Lewis book with a caption that started with “It is so monumentally embarrassing that I am finally getting into Christianity because it's the only way I can quit vaping.” She then goes on to explain how she’s waffling in many ways on the tenets of Christianity, but has found the exploration useful and generally found it to be a nice expression of her sense of divinity. That isn’t included in the meme though, which just features the first sentence and then the meta caption that was something along the lines of “now I see how she got conned into having the muskrat’s baby”.

Personally I do think it’s bonkers that Grimes, an otherwise genius creative and once semi-anarchist, chose to link up with Elon Musk. It seemed to start as a bit and maybe was one, considering it resulted in one of the best moments in pop culture in recent decades when Grimes’s frenemy Azealia Banks was trapped in Musk’s compound and live tweeted everything. Whether it was a bit or not, it seemed weird and out of character, and like she may indeed have been “conned”. Still, the implication that “getting into Christianity” is on par with wanting to be physically intimate with Elon Musk feels insane to me. Is it?

Do you have to be unintelligent/gullible/a rube to believe in the divine? What if it’s not in a dominant religious tradition? Does that make it more or less intelligent, considering the social benefits and consequences of any given form of spiritual belief? What about “believing” in something like astrology or feeling a spiritual truth in the Enneagram or reconnecting with historical pagan traditions? Are all these people less intelligent or at least suppressing our intelligence in specific areas of life?

Are “faith” and “belief” different beasts?

For me, faith evokes a specific kind of image. For example, when I think about faith I think about Abraham, poised to kill his son Isaac. I think about a willingness to suffer on behalf of some potential, not in exchange but as a show of commitment. I don’t see this exactly with belief, which feels more capable of being tried on and taken off. More hypothetical or theoretical or tentative.

I’m splitting semantic hairs, obviously. I think it’s worthwhile, though, since so much of belief is semantic. For example, we can “suspend our disbelief” and then practice a kind of belief, but we aren’t ever really “suspending our lack of faith”. Faith has more fixity than belief, which feels much more mutable and organic.

“Suspending disbelief” is how it feels a lot of the time with astrology for me. When I am practicing astrology and even when I am engaging with the idea of divinity, it is much more accurate to say that I am suspending disbelief than to say that I “believe” or that I “have faith”. I wouldn’t die on the hill that astrology is “real” because being certain about that feels extremely less valuable to me than being alive. There may not be any beliefs that I’m willing to die for—I’d rather not die at all, but if I’m going to die for something it’ll be for people or for the planet, for something alive.

Have we as a society outgrown belief?

I could take this question so many different ways. I think the answer is solidly “yes” and also solidly “no”.

I think that we have outgrown belief in the sense that we can invoke Marx’s idea of religion (and, some would argue, spirituality) as the opiate of the masses. While I have some quibbles with the idea, I do think that religion and less organized faith as well have both undoubtedly been used as drugs to control and manipulate people. If you can control a person’s beliefs, direct them in certain directions, you can convince them to behave in entirely anti-social ways.

Whether it’s as extreme as the Pope’s influence over the Inquisition as a means to keep control over a nascent Europe or as simple as the rise of Evangelicalism as an easy weapon for Republican leadership to organize their primary voting base, belief in a higher power is entirely capable of being used to mollify and control people.

On the other hand, I think we have room to take our use of our beliefs farther and worry about the ways an atheist¹ perspective can be isolating from connectivity. Clearly, atheism can coexist with belief, as in the case of Humanism which is functionally an organized belief system that has just left behind the idea of divinity or the supernatural.

But this actually reinforces my belief (ha) that we have not outgrown the use of belief systems to support life on this planet. Whether in social movements, religious movements, or artistic/aesthetic movements, I don’t think we are nearly as effective making change without a system of belief. This can be almost anything, but it must be something that, if not equaling religion, at least rhymes with religion.

Does something have to be true to be worth believing in?

Maybe the most important question. I am definitely going to be teasing this question apart at length in its own blog, but I’ll set it up first by referencing a quote I heard from an early teacher I had in the Enneagram tradition.

Ginger Lapid-Bogda would always say that some things are useful, some things are true, and some things are both. I agree with her. I think there are absolutely things, ideas, beliefs, that are useful but not true, just as there are beliefs that are possibly true but not useful. I’m especially curious if you have any ideas of things that are useful but not true and vice versa. Let me know.

Like I said, this is just an initial attempt, paint thrown at the wall for you and I both to react to it. I’m going to unpack these over the coming weeks. Probably no answers, but definitely more questions :)

P.S. I am sending zines this week FOR SURE. Thanks again to those who have shown interest and thanks again for your patience. I’m glad I’ve taken the extra time, it’s made better pieces. I’ll have a couple left over, so if you want to “reserve” your copy, you can do so here.

Some things to read:

1. Party party party! We aren’t partying enough! Venus in Pisces says we all need to party more, even though the Sun will be in Saturnian winter signs for another month or so.

2. On the topic of faith… read Kelsey’s review/reflection on Ethel Cain’s recent release. Much said about faith and religion and bad memories.

3. Please read The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions. It’s delightful and challenging and feels like a good read before Tr*mp takes office next week. Get it from your local library or nightboat books.

Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.

1. I wrestled with how to say this and then decided to just say it this way, throw a caveat in the footer, and hit “send”. Obviously “atheism” ≠ “no beliefs”. I kind of stumble through this clarification in the rest of the paragraph, but I just want to say it here. The reason I stuck with this phrasing is because I think there’s a specific kind of certainty that I’m suspicious of that is exhibited by most atheists I’ve known. That is the specific form of rejecting “belief” that I am concerned by.