mookrakerI want to talk about Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep.
In our next campaign, my character begins as the only member of the party who is not a member of our cult.
My own experience with religion has not been very traumatic, but has not very greatly helped me understand the religious.
Now, one factor of course is that "religion" as such is not one thing. Christianity tries to frame it as a plug and play thing, a simple set of beliefs like a cartridge that you can move from console to console, but religion is ethos, taboos, diet, music, social standing and structure, support networks, medicine, relationship with geography and nationality, folklore, solace, superstitions, even gambling can be religious in that most methods of prognostication are or also have been games of chance on which bets have been placed; I could go on. As a Murrican, obviously religion has that weird abstract Christian quality in most of the surroundings of my life, at least slightly divorced from most of the above; rather, its role in the above is unacknowledged as often as not. And as an implicit atheist whose mother did not raise her indoctrinated into any religion but rather a broad and sometimes specific engagement with a variety of different beliefs, a lot of the above are simply not entangled with religion in my life.
In my attempts to understand religion, this has been my finding: that Christianity, in its effort to become able to be plugged into anybody's life as a matter of individual salvation, has sterilized itself incompletely to make itself more able to be syncretized, and so its baggage is often present but hidden, almost deliberately invisible.
I didn't really come here to say that.
Religion in general is rather alien to me. Between the Christian surroundings, the atheistic upbringing, and my autism and anxiety, my attempts to earnestly engage with religion always make me feel like everyone else knows the steps and I do not, even when I do know them; that everyone else is getting something I'm not getting.
I wonder if, like the replicants in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, I would not be able to benefit from the Empathy Boxes. Not that I think I'm so lacking in empathy per se. The replicants were probably designed with specific disabilities that resemble the person they were modeled after, Pris Frauenzimmer (We Can Build You, a not-quite-prequel, arguably an AU), making them faceblind and unempathic. But the experience of a neurotypical human using the empathy boxes is to be subsumed briefly into the lived experience of Mercer, the setting's post-Christian savior figure, as he goes through his own sort of stations of the cross. When I am at a Christian church, I am surrounded by people who seem to feel and believe that they are in communion, not only with their lord, god and savior, but with each other, as one body. Regardless of the fact that I don't believe that's happening, it certainly isn't something I experience. And the altered state of consciousness that's normal in my mother's neopagan religion, achieved by similar sober means of calling quarters and accepting a place in the circle, defining inside and outside of the ceremony, speaking with the spirits, etc., is likewise lost on me. There is no circle where I have felt the sense of abandon and subsumption that seems to be so common to those more religious and spiritual than myself.
I don't think I want it. Granted these are very specifically western, US-style religious experiences. I don't know if I'd feel differently if it were something different, like Shinto or Yoruba. I still don't think I want it for myself.
But I do think I get closest to understanding it when reading Dick, when Deckard flees into the religious experience of the empathy box to selfishly avoid an argument with his spouse, when he argues with his neighbor about whether it's morally right that his neighbor's horse should be giving birth while his own sheep is a counterfeit, when he has broken himself by (shortly after finding out the empathy box's content is itself counterfeit) killing someone who looks just like Rachael Rosen and now in his state of moral injury has the ecstatic experience of visitation by Mercer and given a revelation. The selfish experience, the status and standing and greed and social jockeying, and the deeper and profound religious experience all are present in Deckard's experience of his religion, and for a brief time as I read it I think I almost get it.
If one of these days I do play a character whose religion is not a profoundly lonely experience of personal conviction, I think I should review Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, and perhaps also Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, for the insights into that way of thinking that come so unnaturally to me.
#do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep #iran-deckard #deckard #rick-deckard #roleplaying #religion #christianity #rant #philip-k-dick #atheism #autism #okay-so-the-autism-is-mostly-implicit-in-this #anxiety #okay-so-the-anxiety-is-mostly-also-implicit-in-this
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