Dogma is Fun!

[This post has been dictated to me by the angel Gehubriel. He doesn't type well, so he came to me. I may have taken some liberties with his divine words. May God strike me down in a fiery blast if anything I have typed is not in accordance with His Divine Will. A{wo}men.]

The Church of the Cough.

Some time ago I read the following:

"From some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy would transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, 'Cthulhu fhtagn'." --H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Now, there are numerous discussions on the internet, discussions which go back to the days before the internet, to the time when such correspondence was actually done through physical correspondence. Ie. with pen and paper. Discussions about how to properly pronounce Cthulhu. I won't go into them now, but you can Google it and get a pretty good idea of what's going on.

Anyways, the phenomenon here seems to be more related to the stumbling around of history and archaeology students through ancient languages. Lovecraft gave his stories a pretty blatant supernatural angle, but there is obviously a kernel of linguistic and cultural studies which provides the genesis of the musings on how this alien language is spoken. Lovecraft's idea is that there are creatures "out there" that have really different physiologies from human beings, and that therefore it is only natural that they should have different languages made up of the different sounds they are able to make. But as for examples of really alien languages, well, we don't yet have any, and naturally this makes them hard to describe in a written format.

Heck, even spoken language is often hard enough to learn. I was trying to learn some words in Arabic. I wanted to learn how to give the Arabic greeting, but I gave up on trying to make it sound perfect, because to be honest, you'd think that Arabs were from another planet, the sounds they take as phonemes! They sound more like coughs and grunts than vowels or consonants. And this, I think, is the only place that Lovecraft could take analogy. Since he throws in a professor of Semitic language studies as a character in the story, he's obviously at least somewhat familiar with the fact that these people make languages out of some pretty weird sounds.

Enough of that, what is this blog post really about? Some time ago I was reading about the ancient Jews. I can't be bothered at the moment to look up the exact period and details, but that's not important right now. The important thing is the impression it made on me, and the connection that I believe I fabricated out of thin air, but that seems to fit the facts surprisingly well. Anyways, the item in question is the fact that the ancient Jews believed that the name of God was unpronounceable. There were a whole lot of interpretations of this, and the mainstream one is an explanation that you need to be reverent when talking about God, and to even speak his name could invoke his wrath. Something like that. Anyways, this is why we have the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter word that no one knows how to pronounce. "YHWH." All consonants. Except for sometimes Y. Because they didn't believe people should be going around pronouncing the name of God, or perhaps because they didn't believe that mortals could ever get it right, and would risk offending God if they got it wrong, they came up with this shorthand, reverent version when they wanted to talk about God.

Later, people stretched the name out, added some vowels, and came up with "Jehovah."

YHWH
YeHoWaH
Yehowah
Jehowah
Jehovah

I don't know though, because I seem to recall that there is some debate among scholars as to which came first, the tetragrammaton, or the fully pronounced name of Jehovah. I actually prefer the view that the real name of God was lost, or never existed to begin with, and Jehovah was only invented later to fill in the gap that earlier prophets had failed to fill in.

In all likelihood, because languages tend to change and have funny things like vowel shifts, we almost certainly don't know exactly how they would have pronounced it. And for all we know, some of the sounds they used might not exist in any language today. Which is what connects this to the Cthulhu story.

See, an alien language from another planet is sort of like an ancient language. To the unaccustomed ear, they sound like coughs and gurgles. Cthulhu, Jehovah. They have their modern accepted spellings, but they go back to some pretty strange origins [albeit quite fictional in Cthulhu's case]. And both of them could have come out in very different ways, via the evolution of language.

What does this have to do with dogma, you ask? Well, I just wanted to say that I'm creating my own dogma, or system of beliefs, regarding God. And one of the first is that God's name isn't known. In fact, God's name was never known, and can never be known. Most religious people deal with this in a standard way: they make up a name. Okay, we don't know his real name, so we'll call him "God." "Jehovah." "Yahweh." Over time, the name gets standardized, and some iconography gets added. He becomes male; he grows a beard, he throws lightning bolts. And before you know it, he's coming down to earth, seducing virgins, getting drunk, and causing all kinds of trouble, being anything but the regal and majestic and dignified creator of the universe.

This is why I say when we name God, we need to give him a different name every time we speak of him. And this is why I propose the foundation of the Church of the Cough. See, instead of praying, "Oh God, our Father, give us our daily bread." we should pray, "dear [make a coughing noise here], give us today our daily bread."

In addition, we shouldn't get in the habit of spelling his name the same way over and over again. We need to come up with a handful of variants that we can use, and we need to be making new spellings for God all the time. We should not be nailing him down with our words. Here's a quick list of names you can start using:

Goob
Tjallbg
Tiorbk
Pefodfgu
Fwqwhgds
Howie

For inspiration, just look at the word "cough". There's no "F" in cough, so why do we pronounce it? Equally, Tiorbkjh needs stranger, less coherent pronunciations in His name. Feel free to use as many gurgles, grunts, wheezes, and quick breaths as possible when you pray. The pronunciation doesn't need to resemble the written word, since the written word is going to change every time it is copied anyways. Try to pronounce his name with confidence. He is your friend after all.

Next, I'm going to try and ween myself away from the male pronoun for God. Personally, I'm a big fan of Futurama's suggestion for the gender-neutral pronouns shklee and shklim.

Finally, why is this blog titled "Fun with Dogma" [or whatever I called it, I don't remember]? Well, because this is what all the great dogmatists love to do. They love to create coherent systems and claim that this is the right way to do it. I would be thrilled if everyone started using my system, but I can't claim that it's the best way to do things. In fact, it's probably inconvenient for worship; which is kind of the point. Put a little effort back into praying and worshiping, and thinking about who this God person really is anyways, is a good thing, in my opinion.

But that aside, my point is that I see no dogmatic point as obviously correct. Besides the fact that the angel Gehubriel [Gabriel's annoying cousin] personally came down to my apartment and dictated the previous blog post to me. He just left, so I can type whatever I want now: Tjallbg! Was he ever annoying! People who come up with big coherent dogmatic systems are just setting themselves up for a fight with other people who have also come up with massive dogmatic systems. They think if they're all in the same church, they all have to believe the same thing. But for me, I can't be held down. I can read and understand a dogmatic treatise, but ask me to subscribe to it, to believe in it, and I can do it for a while, but when something new comes along, I'll just go ahead and believe that. [Not so much on the big issues, but on stuff like predestination, I sway back and forth with the winds.] I can even do some of my own thinking on why we should have certain dogmas, and I'd like to think I've created my own little piece of dogma in this post.

So there's really no guarantee that I'll adhere to the dogma I just received through divine inspiration. There's no guarantee that I'll adhere to any dogma. I can entertain any dogma for a while, but eventually it will be undercut. The only dogma that isn't (yet) undercut is the dogma of self interest. I do and believe the things that are in my interest, and that seems to be the extent of my fidelity. I've never stopped believing in God or Jesus, but I've never had a compelling reason to go either way. And I don't see myself giving up the faith anytime soon, but the dogma changes all the time.

And that's all I feel like typing now.