God and Dog

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What is a faith, what is religion, what is a consolatory rite? You appeal to meaning, supporting you in hardship, allaying anguish, fear, above everything else, a connection with what we hope to be life. Is it life?
Are you establishing a connection with life in religion? Perhaps, but there is no communication, communication is a two way business. The only answer of religious faith is inside oneself, in the fable, myth, rite you have learned. It’s like masturbation (nothing here against masturbation, it may be a healthy practice).

But where can you find an external answer? Life is also internal: cells are life, but you cannot connect with cells generally (the immunity system may be an exception, if you don't care for life anymore, your immunity system may stop to defend you).

The only other way is otherness in living beings.
Of course one would think of humans. But humans have characteristics that make communication very difficult – impossible for ASD people (Kafka’s The Burrow) difficult anyway because there are always problems of decrypting. Expression of self from others is polluted by culture, good (or bad ) manners, calculus, maneuvering, reticence, habit, attitudes or prejudice towards the interlocutor (I don’t know what Sartre meant saying “hell is the others”), preventive self defense, habits of outright lying .

What remains to establish is a communications-communication with life (Life? God?) Coleridge, Gregory Bateson, together with many others, answered: “religion, art, animals”.

Art (poetry, painting, music). Here we are again in the realm of the noble business of masturbating. There is no fleshy, living muse behind the arts, there are only your own cells and neurons, and internal memories, and human past expression. Past arts, past paintings, past music on which we can embroider some new variations and very little more.
Religion + art is mostly kitsch now. Can you cite a contemporary church which is not horrible kitsch? Perhaps Gaudi was the last visionary religious artist.

Animals remain. In a sense animals are the last traces of God on this planet. If God is somewhere it is in the unadulterated life of animals . Adulterations of animals has its limits,
meets resistance. For us the cat and the dog are the only doors to God if God is somewhere .
God is some form of shorthand expression used by humans to mean Life.

It is my experience of loss of an animal. It makes me feel that every corner of the house was inhabited by the creature and somehow by a sacred presence.

Dog or Cat or Goat, Coleridge’s Albatross are the only epiphanies of divine life.
The ones who wrote the Book of Job and the Chuang Tzu knew these things.

I don't know what you mean by comtemporary and kitsch is in the eye of the beholder.
The shrine of the Bab on Mount Carmel in Akka, the 9 terraces and each terrace is in the center very symmetrical, ordered and maintained, as they move outward they become less so until they are left wild. In my opinion I wouldn't call that kitsch.

Perhaps there are other things besides Gaudi. I haven't seen Akka. In the romanic era, later in the Gothic era there are wonders of religious architecture every where: in small Italian and French cities you may find thousands of marvels. But now? I know what is old and what is new in Florence. San Miniato, SMNovella, San Lorenzo Michelangelo's Church and hundred of others: At that time there was some form of community. But now? In the periphery of the city there is only kitsch and camp. The new is only camp and kitsch.

As for onanism I answer only with this, for now. When there is not the real thing, you have to live on fantasies.