Strangely, although my dad is rabidly anti-Christian today, growing up we didn't really talk about religion. My mom was (and still is) Christian in name only. This is the kind of Christian that doesn't subscribe to most of the ideas, but likes the idea of a benevolent Santa-God rewarding the good and punishing the bad (and everyone gets into Heaven, except maybe Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer). Naturally, it didn't take me long to notice that God didn't seem to be very good at his work, at least not on this planet.My schools always had Christians and some of them were close friends... others hated enemies, but both fun to talk to. As a child, I believed in the Christian conception of God... probably for no other reason than so many others were certain of it. However, that idea went with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I could never reconcile the idea that good people working for a good lord would produce the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the slaughter of the Native American people (amongst other things, but I only had a fifth grade education). When I found out that Christianity and Islam were just off-shoots of Judaism, that settled it. No just God would create a belief that could be splintered into such divergent conflicting beliefs. And if such a God did exist, He was certainly not insuring that His church was acting in His name. AND if I was still wrong and God existed and supported His church (which was the Protestant church, as far as my young self knew), I could not feel morally comfortable blindly supporting a God who acted with such cruelty.
Now, I believe that almost everything in life comes down to a decision. You aren't born a Republican, a Democrat, a Socialist, an atheist, an agnostic, a Christian, a Muslim, or what have you. At some point you choose to believe in a set of values and ideas while rejecting others. The thoughtful person constantly questions his or her own beliefs no matter how well-founded. To ignore other ideas is to admit that your own ideas cannot withstand scrutiny. This is the root of the word "ignorance." Christianity (and many other religions, I imagine) champions the idea of faith. But what is faith other than ignorance? It is the willful decision to ignore conflicting information to preserve the pre-existing idea.
If I were a Christian, would I have faith in God, the Bible, or the church? To have faith in the church, I would have to accept either that every act of church-sponsored atrocity is good and necessary... or I would have to show foundation why the Protestant church is more likely to be the church of God than the Roman Catholic church (although Manifest Destiny was a product of the Protestant church). To have faith in the Bible, I would have to accept the literal truth of every word, but as Joe Rogan pointed out, Noah's Ark doesn't even make sense to kids. Add to that the fact that the Bible is virtually unreadable, there are thousands of different translations, and they were meant to be read in Ancient Hebrew which no longer exists. I could have faith in God (the way my mother seems to), but once you have divorced God from the church and the Bible, God can be whoever or whatever you want it to be.So I decided that God, at least as I was told about him, did not exist leading me to the number one philosophical condition afflicting teenagers: existential angst. Does the universe have an order? Does life have a purpose? Is there life after death? If so, what kind of life? If not, why bother doing anything? How we face this question says a lot about us and there are just as many ways to face it as their are people on this Earth. For the religiously devout, there is ignorfaith - the decision to view conflicting ideas as the work of an evil trickster who is trying to remove ideas of comfort. In other words, they don't face this question.
Have you ever had a Christian say to you "If you don't believe in Heaven and Hell, why don't you just kill someone?" What this says to me as that the only reason these people have decided to be "good" is for fear of punishment. These are people who think that morality is about obeying rules and law. I have always found that morality is doing what you believe in despite rules, laws, punishment, or reward.And then there is nihilism, often associated with Nietzsche, goths, and generally depressed people. This is the idea that there is no God, no meaning, no morality, no order, and no purpose. Anyone who thinks there is meaning is deluding themselves. I call this the pit of nihilism because people either get trapped in it or avoid it altogether. Although it's hard to argue with the rationality of this statement, I've never found it particularly useful. Add to this the fact that I have met far too many nihilists who use their "beyond good and evil" philosophy to justify being a total asshole.
It is clear to me why so many prefer faith to nihilism. I spent a good deal of time in existential angst living a life of purposelessness and depression. I used to fantasize every single day about killing myself, even though that was just as pointless as living. This consumed my life for pretty much all of my teenage years. It was very much like the Christian concept of Hell, but by this point, I could not simply fool myself with ignorfaith to escape. I didn't know if this self-inflicted hell would end. As far as I concerned, people just didn't notice or didn't care, but no one had any answers.Unwilling to escape the same way I had came in, I tried to find a way to get past nihilism through education desperately searching for scraps of wisdom in a world which ignored the foundation of reason itself. Tumbling through nihilism, nothing is certain. It feels like you are falling and twisting in a dark abyss from which there is no escape. You reach for every possible handhold and it all dissolves through your fingers. The first thing which didn't dissolve, my first stepping stone in an uncertain world, was the Tao Te Ching (pronounced, and sometimes spelled, "dao de jing").
The Tao is not a religion. It is a philosophy. It translates as the "way" or the "path" without any pretensions. Unlike the Bible, the Tao Te Ching is only 38 pages written in short, simple phrases meant to be contemplated, but not accepted. Unlike the Bible, it does not say that it is true. In fact, the first phrase is "The Tao that can be written is not the eternal Tao." It even says that you should learn it, embody it, and then forget it. The writer, Lao Tzu, was smart enough to know that any belief can be taken out of context and used to support any belief no matter how contradictory it runs to the original intention.
And it is upon this foundation that I continue to build my belief system. Not on a shaky foundation of faith straddling the pit of nihilism, but within nihilism itself and reaching outward, from absolute skepticism toward what seems to be becoming an acceptance of everything. I quickly embraced some transcendentalist ideas, particularly the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which taught meaning not from the purification of the soul, but by the establishment of one's own values and character based on their own experiences. This existed neither in compliment or in contradiction to the idea of a spiritual universe and, in fact, left that for the individual to decide. Furthermore, it suggested that one should encourage the development of individual personal beliefs in others regardless of whether or not those ideas were the same as yours since their beliefs had to be true to their experiences.
René Decartes was a philosopher most famous for his solution to existential angst. He doubted everything, even the idea that the sun would rise in the morning. He did not accept the idea that, just because something had always happened, it always would. He also knew that reality could be incredibly deceptive and everyone's conception of reality was at least a little skewed, his own included. If he could not trust himself, who could he trust? His most famous breakthrough was "Cogito ergo sum" - "I think, therefore, I am." The idea behind this simple phrase is that although one can question the existence of god, life after death, and reality as a whole, one could not question thought because to do so requires the act of thinking. And if thought was being had, someone had to have it, therefore, he reasoned, he could be certain of his own existence. Although that doesn't seem like much, in the suffering of existential angst, it's enough.
As for where my philosophy and beliefs are now, I currently subscribe to a way of thought called subjectivism (which stands in contrast to Ayn Rand's deplorable objectivism). The essential idea is that while there may be such a thing as objective truth, since we live as very, very limited subjective beings we cannot ever know objective truth. We can only develop subjective truth. Knowing that our reality is subjective makes it much easier to reconcile other beliefs. It is basically an awareness that we are all equally ignorant and an acknowledgment that our beliefs are based on our individual experiences.
As someone who has had experiences that I would call supernatural, my subjective experience does not support atheism and that, in large part, is why I am writing this blog. My two best friends are atheists and I have been listening to some prominent atheists recently including Richard Dawkins, Bill Mahr, and Penn Jillette. And while I am 95-99% in support of what they say, I feel like they lump spirituality in with religion a bit too easily and are not humble in front of the vastness of the unknown. As Shakespeare once said, "There is more in heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy," and I think that's just as true today as it was then.This post also serves to illustrate where my conception of modern socialism differs from Marxism. Karl Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses. I would agree with that (although I'd add spectator sports to it). But while talking with the Dalai Lama of Tibet, General Mao expressed this bigotry toward the Dalai Lama's beliefs. Like many Communists before him, he put his own beliefs before others and as a consequence, another beautiful culture is being wiped off of the Earth.
I recently read a book about Tibetan views on the ability of the mind to influence reality which I found fascinating. Whether true or not, the idea made me think of thought in new ways. Did you know Sir Isaac Newton was an alchemist? Unlike conventional science, alchemy believed in the influence of invisible forces which could act on the material world. Now this idea is not only common place, but we have managed to harness the power of invisible energy fields to send complex information across the globe instantly. To declare spirituality pointless is to strike at the very heart of imagination and creativity... at least for me.To me, Christianity is religious, but not spiritual. I realized this while talking to a Christian friend when he said that Christianity holds that the individual is not divine. The individual is a sinner. They are freed from sin by the divinity of God (or Jesus, same diff). But in my experience, spirituality is about forming a connection between yourself and the universe. It is about exploring the universe by exploring yourself. The opposite is true as well. By learning about the universe, you learn how you came to exist and how the world around you functions. The Tao teaches that you should follow the way of the universe, and what better way to learn what is and is not in tune with the universe than to study science and history? By denying their own divinity, Christians deny an exploration into their self and the universe, but perhaps more importantly, they deny their place as a natural part of the universe. This can be harmful in the development of the individual and destructive to their environment.
Maybe spirituality isn't necessary. Maybe completely rational atheism is a better belief system, but science and reason have yet to explain many of the things which make life worth living: things like love, art, and beauty. Science may provide great insight, but where it does, it is called "soft" sciences like psychology, sociology, and philosophy.So what do I advocate? Well, to borrow a phrase from Star Trek: "Infinite diversity in infinite combinations." I believe that all people should explore their spiritual selves and come to their own conclusions. I think we should value those who have different beliefs than our own, but I also believe that those beliefs should be tested. Faith is no more than ignorance. Enlightenment comes from a lifetime spent changing and refining your ideas. And science, for all of its broad applications, does not have the monopoly on wisdom.
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