Concatenation

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

But the cats didn’t like this, as this was too patriarchal for their tastes. So they arranged a Conference, and held long Committee meetings, and heard numerous Consultations and the reports of Commissions, and engaged in some serious Creative writing, couched in the first person plural but (rather not like the Divinity) invariably framed in the passive voice.

So the cats, conferring and consulting, and creatively commissioning, said:

As it has come to our attention that there is a frequently experienced phenomenon known as (but not limited to, as there are other understandings) “existence” or “life,”* we hereby affirm our commitment to our firmly-held conviction that this condition either has always been as we have experienced it, or it has developed over time and in different understandings (all of which are of equal incredibly unique and important value**) to become, incrementally and in seamless transition, what we have been in the here and now.

We courageously affirm the importance of our conviction that the embracing of this metanarrative, this understanding of understandings, has enabled us to experience richly the possibilities of “community-based ontologies” – that is, sociologically-conditioned theories of reality – rather than the outmoded and limited prejudicial theories (i.e., of only one “reality” and one “time”) that have produced regrettable notions of “rightness” and “wrongness.”

We are excited about the infinitely-varied and wide range of possibilities that have become available to our communal and individual consciousness. As together, in a community of freely-inclusive and self-committed individuals, we affirm a “phenomenal consensus,” and in that affirmation we have experienced a richer range of evaluative alternatives that can generate more effective affirmations of lifestyle choices (by re-framing them as extensions of individual psychologies and inevitabilities), we embrace the mandate of electing an ethic for every possible endeavor. We revel in the tapestry of multifaceted ethics, in which each one articulates a new narrative of consciousness, liberation, commitment and free decision-making.

We value and greatly respect the treasuries of past understandings, and freely and inclusively embrace the legacies of sectarian traditions, each of which apprehended its own particular affirmations of totality. We, however, have sought a more affirmative and wider understanding of the present and the future. We believe that it is more effective to model our own experience upon our convictions, rather than “react” to paternalistic possibilities of “creation.” These negative possibilities inflict an undue burden upon the potentialities of future narratives, and restrict the range of future decision-making. This paternalistic pattern has even gone so far as to consign some valid potentialities or choices to the biased and hate-speeched modalities of “wrongness” and “sin.”

We reject these stereotypes that stem from obsolete ethical theories, and we gratefully remind ourselves that we have been privileged to reframe the ethical enterprise into a consensus-based, democratically-conditioned endeavor. We have benefited from the new, hopeful possibilities – an “eschatological narrative of hope” – of the enjoyment of “committee” over the confining prejudices of “creator-ism,” “truth/goodness-ism,” and “morality-ism.” Now that we have identified the implicit narratives of liberation and consciousness underlying the God-myth of more provincial traditions, we have courageously accepted the responsibility of defining our future by the identification and extrapolation of our psychologies and sociology. By this, we have transitioned the outmoded theories of “metaphysics” into more scientifically-acceptable tasks of cost-benefit analyses, management-by-objectives, and economic mobility.

But despite all this, God said “Let there be light”; and there was light, despite the concatenation of feline opinion. He said there is truth, despite the catastrophic, felonious multiplicity of theological ("all philosophy is theology"***) theories and ethical pronouncements. He said there is living water in one place, in spirit and in truth, despite the denominational, "narrative" impulse of cats.

And He said, of His Creation, that it was good.

But for cats there is no creation, only narrative, only ethics, and ontology by committee.

And that, even for a cat, is not too good.

* Cats love scare-quotes, as they cannot call anything anything: they can only "so-call"

** Only cat prose can come up with something like the abominable phrase "important value"

***This is true, and doubting it is the beginning of felinism

Comments

[guesswho]

what do you have against cats?