Is there any such thing? Let's investigate—for good or ill. A blog about fiction and literature, philosophy and theology, politics and law, science and culture, the environment and economics, and ethics and language, and any thing else that strikes our fancy. (Apologies to Bertrand Russell)
Showing posts with label Articles of Faith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles of Faith. Show all posts
Imagine this: You are a youngish person in, say, the prime of your life. Your doctor informs you that, through some mysterious, though infallible process he has determined that you have exactly two years to live—no more, no less. This is your certain destiny. There is no escaping this fate. What do you do?
End of life counselors might tell you: (1) to put your affairs in order; (2) to go to your loved ones and ask their forgiveness for whatever indiscretions you might have committed; (3) then to so forgive them; (4) to tell them you love them: (5) to thank them; and (6) to say 'good-bye'. Something like that. All well and good.
Your friends might tell you to come up with some sort of 'bucket list' of things you want to do before you die. Your own personal bucket list might include things like parachuting or climbing Mt. Everest or bedding a supermodel or tracking down and killing bin Laden or reading Proust or making sure your progeny are in good hands.
But beyond that, wouldn't you want to use the time you had left to come up with some sort of project? Something concrete to accomplish before the end arrives?
For example, you might pour your remaining time into finding a remedy for whatever it is that is going to kill you so that others might not suffer the same fate—on the off chance that you might, if successful, find some way of escaping your fate and possibly even save yourself.
It needn't be a positive project either. You might also opt to destroy all your belongings or go on a crime spree or seek revenge against people who've slighted you or create problems that make the lives of your loved ones worse or even devise some fiendish way to destroy your own life sooner.
It depends on who you are.
These are all 'projects', things you might want to do before you croak, but by no means an exhaustive list. Of course, you wouldn't necessarily have to have some sort of 'to do' list. You could just sit around and weep and moan about how unfortunate you are or turn inward and attempt to contemplate the meaning(-lessness) of it all. You could even pretend that you didn't have such a death sentence hanging over your head and just go on living your life the way you always have—purposeless and desperate, as if you're going to live forever. In denial. That wouldn't forestall things—and at some deep level you would know that.
Understanding that this is everyone's predicament, at some level, is what it means to be human. At some level we all know this; we all realize we are each of us mortal and, presumably, our animal friends do not. The attempt to deal with this realization and its accompanying sense of loss—the profound, existential sadness that comes with this blunt realization—was, if you'll recall, the theme I emphasized in my series of literary readings: Ur-story. In fact, it gave us a workable definition for getting at the essence of the works we were examining.
But more than that—more, that is, than the fate of each of us as individuals—this is the predicament of humanity and of life on Earth as we know it. (This was the notion I explored in the earlier posts in this series.)
That leaves us with the question: Do the same rules apply? How do we, as a species, cope with having to say goodbye to life and all that? Is there a 'bucket list' for us as a species? For life itself, for that matter? Something we need to accomplish? Something we were meant to accomplish? Something we want to leave as a legacy? A mark we can make in the vastness of the universe?
"If we look at the rise of our own civilization over the past 100,000 years, since modern humans emerged in Africa, it can be seen a the story of rising energy consumption. Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev has conjectured that the stages in the development of extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe could also be ranked by energy consumption. Using the laws of physics, he grouped the possible civilizations into three types:
1. Type I civilizations: those that harvest planetary power, utilizing all the sunlight that strikes their planet. They can, perhaps, harness the power of volcanoes, manipulate the weather, control earthquakes, and build cities on the ocean. All planetary power is within their control.
2. Type II civilizations: those that can utilize the entire power of their sun, making them 10 billion times more powerful than a Type I civilization. ... A Type II civilization, in a sense, is immortal; nothing known to science, such as ice ages, meteor impacts, or even supernovae, can destroy it. (In case their mother star is about to explode, these beings can move to another star system, or perhaps even move their home planet.)
3. Type III civilizations: those that can utilize the power of an entire galaxy. They are 10 billion times more powerful than a Type II civilization. ... They have colonized billions of star systems and can exploit the power of the black hole at the center of their galaxy. They freely roam the space lanes of the galaxy." (145-46)
I'm not interested in science fiction or extraterrestrial civilizations; such creatures may have developed efficiencies that render the Kardashev typology obsolete or, interestingly, not chosen such a materialistic path. This typology can, however, help us understand our own situation because it is based on the model of our own civilization's progress, i.e., energy consumption.
Based on this scale, Kaku and others have postulated that we Earthlings are still a Type 0 civilization—0.72, to be exact. In his earlier book Hyperspace (1994), Kaku states:
our Type 0 civilization is "one that is just beginning to tap planetary resources, but does not have the technology and resources to control them. A Type 0 civilization like ours derives its energy from fossil fuels like oil and coal and, in much of the Third World, from raw human labor. Our largest computers cannot even predict the weather, let alone control it. Viewed from this larger perspective, we as a civilization are like a newborn infant. ... [Yet] [g]iven the rate at which our civilization is growing, we might expect to reach Type I status within a few centuries. ... Our technology is so primitive that we can unleash the power of hydrogen fusion only by detonating a bomb, rather than controlling it in a power generator. However, a simple hurricane generates the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Thus weather control, which is one feature of Type I civilizations, is at least a century away from today's technology." (278)
However, the progress of human civilization is by no means a given. For example, our own nature might be our worst enemy. As a species, human beings may ultimately have a suicidal bent, allowing our fears and prejudices to paralyze us in our struggle for life. As a Type 0 civilization
"we use dead plants, oil and coal, to fuel our machines. We utilize only a tiny fraction of the sun's energy that falls on our planet. ... [But our civilization is] still wracked with the sectarianism, fundamentalism, and racism that typified its rise, and it is not clear whether or not these tribal and religious passions will overwhelm the transition [to a higher order civilization]." (PI 146)
{This raises an interesting question—one I hope to address at some point down the road—as to whether Life itself is necessarily wedded to homo sapiens sapiens or whether we are only a stepping stone for Life to evolve/create a more advanced form of itself. Life, I suspect, has no need of us; we, however, are utterly and abjectly dependent on Life and should constantly bear this in mind.}
Now I am sure that President Obama has weighed the costs and benefits, the risks and rewards of his newly announced policy to allow some off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas—environmental, economic, political, etc.—and made the judgment that the upsides ultimately outweigh the downsides. I do not pretend to be privy to these deliberations nor to the weights assigned to any of the factors that entered into his decision. Nor do I claim to understand his strategic thinking. I feel reasonably safe, though, in assuming that his calculations, unlike those of his predecessor, gave greater consideration to the costs and risks to the coastal and oceanic environments: maybe not as much as I would have wanted, but certainly more than Bush. At least I would hope that it did and that his ultimate goal is to move us toward a more sustainable energy basis, toward an even grander environmental goal.
Solar, tidal, wind, geothermal: these are stepping-stone forms of energy that, when tapped, could raise the present state of our civilization to a higher order. Their prevalence would render obsolete the sorts of destructive resource wars that have plagued us throughout our history. Their abundance would fuel intellectual, creative, and peaceful progress—potentially even evolutionary advances as we find ourselves overcoming some of the struggles for mere survival that have made us so bellicose to begin with. Their cheapness would make such projects as desalination of sea water feasible (even now corporate and state actors are moving to privatize and control potentially potable water resources; there was even a rumor that the Bush family [alongside, apparently, the Sun-Yung Moon enterprise], inveterate oil resource hogs, has bought up 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay on top of the central aquifer for all of the South American continent).
I have long advised my teen-aged children that they are entering a new era, an era where focus on green, sustainable energy technologies will be the path to job security and financial well-being in the future—as well as making this world a better place. My sense is that, as with personal computers in the late '70s, we are at the starting line for an entrepreneurial boom in this area that will not so readily go bust.
The Anthropocene epoch arrives perhaps too soon. The paradox of human nature is as yet unresolved. I worry we have not yet shaken off the existential insecurities that accompanied the rise of our civilization over the last 10,000 years. And with those insecurities come the sorts of fears and animosities that drove us into the global wars and genocides and environmental disasters that reached near apotheosis in the last century.
We have to ask whether humanity is essentially Life-affirming, or whether its dark undercurrents will once again surface in this new epoch. I hope and, at base, believe that, though it is not inevitable given human nature, we as a race will ultimately stumble into a solution that works to preserve our environment, ourselves, and, thus, Life itself.
"Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists—including a Nobel prize-winner—who suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time. The Age of Aquarius? Not quite.—It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology ... [T]he Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet."
We teeter, it seems, on a precipice: will this purported new era issue in a new round of environmental degradation and species extinctions (resulting, ultimately, possibly in our own) or is this the necessary next step in the advancement of our civilization and the evolution of life on this planet? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Much, it would seem, depends on us: How attuned are we to environmental concerns? Are we truly pro-Life (with a capital 'L') or, as a species, self-destructive?
One assumption I make is that human life is the expression of something—let's call it DNA, or better Life itself—to survive in the face of an indifferent universe. Do we, as the human race, have the same will to survive or have we been been untrue to our nature?
The jury is out, but I firmly believe it is a question worth asking.
Another way of looking at things: Life itself is part of a complex entropic cooling process. In its simplest form, as sunlight pure heat reaches the earth where it is processed through photosynthesis, the consumption of plants by animals (including us), and the subsequent fertilization of plants by animal waste. Plants and bacteria convert the sun's light into energy, absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen and water in the process
Byproducts of this complex cooling process include the carbon dioxide we exhale and methane gasses in our excrescence. These reheat the atmosphere, but not perfectly. Life serves to cool the planet, converting heat energy into inter alia fecal matter and decaying bodies.
Civilization, on one view, resulted as human beings banded together to make the process of Life more efficient. However, it takes energy to fuel the process of civilization. At this stage of human civilization, we fuel this process mostly through the burning of cellulose- (e.g., wood) and carbon-based (oil, natural gas, etc.) forms of biomass—which, according to the vast majority of reputable scientists, is releasing all stored-up carbon dioxide from the photosynthetic process back into the atmosphere and causing the planet to heat up more than it should.
In other words, we are acting against our human nature—heating the planet instead of cooling it. If the Anthropocene hypothesis is accurate, this is a problem.
Other problems arise, of course, because there is only a finite quantity of biomass, and we will certainly someday run out, thus threatening our civilization and, possibly, life itself with an energy crisis of cosmic proportions.
Today, President Obama announced the U.S. would open up "vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling."
This move addresses a pressing concern: U.S. dependency on oil from the politically unstable and repressive region of the Middle East as the West seeks to convert its economy to a more sustainable energy basis—assuming, of course, this is not simply some short-sighted "Drill, Baby, Drill" political move to placate the entrenched oil industry powers that brought us the last eight nightmarish years of war and global economic collapse and environmental degradation under those inveterate oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their close friends amongst the Saudi royalty.
There must be a delicate balancing act here, and, in this, we must hold this government's feet to the fire. There can be no doubt that in the long run we must look to more sustainable forms of energy to preserve our civilization, our environment, and, indeed, Life itself. In the short term, however, if we continue to let the anti-democratic forces of the corporate and totalitarian oil industry maintain a chokehold on global economic growth and development, we stand to lose even more of our freedoms and wealth. And, to be sure, no one whose power ultimately rests on a platform of controlling the flow of fossil fuels to hopelessly dependent customers is going to willingly allow a sustainable energy industry to take root and grow into a competing factor. It will strangle it in the cradle, so to speak.
So, is Obama's move an attempt to buy time and cover so we in the West can innovate and develop a sustainable energy industry (as he's promised) or merely a caving to entrenched oil interests that have had their grip on power lo these many years? Is this Obama's attempt at a grand strategic solution to the same set of problems that G.W. Bush and his father sought to answer by foolishly and misguidedly invading Iraq? No one can say for sure now; the real political battle is just beginning. But it is the crucial—nay, it is the existential question to ask.
First, I'd like to thank the folks who commented for their considered responses. (BDR didn't leave a forwarding url, but you can check out his site here)
Second, as much as I care about my loved ones and the condition of their ignorance, I know they have similar feelings: they are probably deep in prayer for the condition of my soul even as I write this. That's the nature of family—or at least ours: agree to disagree, but not disagreeably; which is not a bad way to be after all. I'm sure they believe I'm "lost", though they don't condemn me. They just want for me what they think is best, and by that I think they mean 'most comforting'. What I want for them, apparently, is to remove the consolations of their religion. Is that wrong? Is that bad?
Why should I insist that people confront reality? Of what real value is truth?
What if their way works for them? It firmly ensconces them in a vital tradition. It expresses an authentic, deeply human emotion—that of awe and reverence and a sense of powerlessness in the face of something that is greater than themselves (Step 2, if you're counting). It establishes for them a sense of community with other like-minded believers. It provides structure and, dare I say it, meaning in their lives. It has helped several of them reform and renew their own lives—saved them, if you will, from their own sinful nature (religionists, in general, are often desperately afraid of the evil they know themselves to be capable of). It has provided them with an answer to the age-old question "what is it to live a good life?" It has inculcated (mostly) positive values in them: e.g., self-sacrifice or -abnegation for the sake of one's family and friends and community (i.e., agápē) is the epitome of what it means to be human, in fact, it is as close as we can get to being divine.
I get it.
In the microanalysis, I suppose, this isn't a bad thing. That's my quandary.
I've always been cursed with the ability to see both sides of an issue. That's made me a pretty good lawyer—if you can make your adversary's case better than they can (without straw men and shouting and other rhetorical distractions), then you know how best to make your own strongest case and, as well, confront your own weaknesses. But, in other instances, it renders me ineffectual, paralyzed by my own philosophical bent, alienated from my own passions. I would never be a good pundit (or book reviewer), because, for me (unlike so many others), thoughtfulness and reflection necessarily precedes taking a position or forming an opinion.
But enough about me.
Why should I throw cold water on all the warm fuzzies their religion provides them? That's not a question I can answer directly.
Here's what I believe. Religions attempt to supply solutions to the deepest mysteries of life. Their answers are figurative in nature. Taken too literally, they are misleading at best. The forms, the rituals, the texts, the authoritative figures, the hierarchies, etc, (all of which, by the way, are reflections of the cultures out of which they emerge)—that is to say, the means of communicating the answers—lose their metaphorical or mythic significance and become ends in themselves. And the religionists lose sight of the original questions.
What are those original questions? Something like: 'Why is there something and not nothing?' 'What is the nature of life?' 'What is my life?' 'What is the nature of selfhood or identity?' 'How is it that I am aware of what's going on all around me?' 'What is my place in the overall scheme of things?' 'How should I act with respect to others?' 'Who is my neighbor and who isn't?' 'What does it mean to be "good", "just", "right", "honest"?' 'What is my individual fate?' 'What is the fate of humanity?' 'What is the fate of creation?', etc.
I don't pretend to have pat answers to these questions. And that's the difference between me and most (I stress the word 'most') religionists: they claim to have exclusive, proprietary avenues to arrive at solutions to these and like questions. And they're almost always toll lanes!
I do not believe one has to be a religionist, much less a sectarian, to contemplate the nature of existence and life and consciousness and community and tradition and morality and fate and, yes, eternity. No.
The problem I'm having with my loved ones relates directly to the question of consciousness.
Consciousness is indeed something miraculous. The fact that we can perceive the world around us—get a whiff of a stinking iris or bask in the warmth of a spring sun or savor a crisp, ripe cantaloupe or marvel at the artistry of Glenn Gould as he plays (and hums) the magnificent Bach or witness the deep, star-peppered darkness of a moonless night—is truly miraculous. That we are aware of ourselves processing these sensations and can respond in interestingly useful and conscious ways to them is an unfathomable complexity. "So I've got that going for me. Which is nice."
Consciousness just might be the central mystery of human life: how it came to be, what its purpose is, etc. To shut it down is to deny what truly makes us special. A telescope that can see 13 billion years into the past (i.e., perceive light that has traveled 13 billion years) represents an expansion of our consciousness of the vastness of the universe and our own insignificance. To unearth earthly history (human records and fossil records and geological records through archaeology) and investigate the things we find is to expand our consciousness of our environment and who we are within it. To analyze DNA, to follow its development and mutation, is to expand consciousness of who we are and how we got to be the way we are. To create and film subatomic events through cyclotronic explosions is to expand our consciousness of invisible realms never before dreamed of. To theorize about gravity or evolution or big bangs or strings or infinite primes is to expand our consciousness of the way things work. Yes, we have only five basic senses, but we can and have become conscious of so much more. This is science.
Certainly, it is important to question the validity of what we become conscious of. Descartes taught us to doubt perception, but never to doubt that we ARE. Indeed, we might be dreaming all we perceive, or there might be some evil homunculus in our pineal glands tickling the receptors in our brains and trying to trick us into false beliefs with all manner of elaborate fake sensations. Sure, we should ask those questions. But, to the extent there are consistencies and coherence in our picture of the world as it is given to us (our consciousness of it), it makes sense to conclude we are not being intentionally deceived (there is, e.g., no elaborate trickster god trying our faith by making things appear older than the 6,000 years they really are; no Matrix). What doesn't make sense is to relapse back into the dream state of belief—to take the blue pill. Because it is a gift, we have an obligation to consciousness.
So, the issue for me is how to deal with it. These people are my loved ones. My family. Yet, their obstinacy and ignorance in the face of scientific reality disturbs me. And I know theirs is not the end of it. It is pervasive—and not only in our society. Consciousness raising is costly, time-consuming, and often quite painful, especially when dealing with closed, convinced minds. Perhaps futile. If, by being insistent, I am doomed to fail and even alienate them, what is the nature of my obligation to them? To me?
There is a prior question: How sure am I of the rightness of my position? This is the kind of question most religionists—and all absolutists—either fail or are incapable of asking, much less answering. Yet it is a theological question.
Could I be wrong? And if I am wrong, what consequences? Most religionists have the missionary zeal, the evangelical fervor, the certainty (however deluded it might be). I don't.
Maybe that means I don't love them enough to try and wake them from their blissful, though stony sleep. To rouse them from their ignorance. To disabuse them of their delusions. Perhaps that means I just don't care.
Or, perhaps that just means I'm not the Buddha or even a Bodhisattva. Or Neo. Or, for that matter, even Carl Spackler with his pitchfork and pitch-perfect delivery. Just a blogger.
No matter. I'll go on.
"Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain. ... (7)
From time immemorial rumour has it or better still the notion is abroad that there exists a way out. ... (17-18)
So on infinitely until towards the unthinkable end if this notion is maintained a last body of all by feeble fits and starts is searching still. There is nothing at first sight to distinguish him from the others dead still where they stand or sit in abandonment beyond recall. ... (60)
So much roughly speaking for the last state of the cylinder and of this little people of searchers one first of whom if a man in some unthinkable past for the first time bowed his head if this notion is maintained." Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (62-63)
Ignorance is bliss, and in a sense it is. Gray here is speaking of the ignorance of cosseted children, fenced off in paradisal playground, unaware of the realities of the world. To the childishly ignorant, wisdom seems a foolish intrusion.
Gray is not trying to show us the way to live. He is using irony. Ignorance is not bliss. Ignorance masks what I've been calling the 'ur-story': consciousness of our mortality, existential pain, adult melancholy, the sense of loss. Where wisdom is available, where truth can be grasped, ignorance is a refusal of reality. Ignorance is the mask of a deep-seated and unreconciled fearfulness of life.
This is a very personal post—perhaps the most personal post I've yet written. This weekend, we entertained people from out of town—three generations aged roughly 75, 45, and 15. These are people I love. Yet, they aren't curious about the world, about reality. Like the school children in Gray's Ode, they exist in a comfortable psychological world where their beliefs are a bulwark against knowledge. They don't want to know; don't want to understand. They have what Paul in his Letter to the Phillippians called "the peace...that passes all understanding." Thirteen billion year old universes, 47 million year old fossils: these things threaten them.
They are worried about where to send their youngest, the 15 year old, to college. They believe that academics are hostile to them, that science is a threat to them, that universities persecute them. They don't want to expose her to such things as cosmology, evolution, homosexuality, mixed race couples, etc. Apparently, there are colleges out there that will allow them to maintain their ignorance unchallenged.
Ignorance, in general, bothers me. Their ignorance pains me. That there is nothing I can do to enlighten or educate or awaken them vexes me. That such "colleges" exist angers me.
Now, these are not stupid people. These are people with high IQs. Two of them have post-graduate degrees. Some of them voted for Obama. They are capable of learning, but, when discussions of certain things arise, they shut down, retreat into their biblical cocoons, and refuse to entertain new ideas. I have learned from painful experience not to broach these topics with them. Their ignorance is stubbornly willful.
If they were open-minded, logical, it would be simple to disabuse them of certain epistemological lacunae. For example, I've heard them say something like "I don't believe in the theory of evolution." To me, this is something like Gilbert Ryle's 'category mistake.'
It is a mistake to ascribe belief (certainly in the sense they intend) to a scientific theory. For example, one doesn't believe in the theory of gravity: one observes a ball or an apple fall to the ground; one jumps out of a tree and promptly falls to the ground; in fact, one observes that everything that has no independent form of propulsion falls to the ground. The theory of gravity is proven inductively, that is by the accretion of consistent examples. I don't have to believe it. I've learned it from a combination of observation and experience. I understand it. The theory works: its explains all these phenomena. Most importantly, I know that the next time I jump from some place high off the ground, I'm going to fall to earth unless I can come up with some adequate means of propulsion to keep me up. And I can warn others of the same thing.
But, if I am an ignorant religionist observing the same phenomena, I might postulate that since I can't see (or hear, smell, touch, or taste) gravity, gravity is a mere theory; it hasn't been proven conclusively (or at least to my stubborn satisfaction). Further, I can then postulate that there must be some god living under the earth who commands everything to come to him, and he holds the moon, the sun, and all the stars in his thrall. This all-attracting god alone is real. If anyone challenges my belief in the attractive god, they are persecuting me personally.
I can't prove to these true believers that there isn't some invisible all-powerful deity down there, and as long as I ignore the fact that the earth (and I) is not the center of the universe, then that belief is at least a plausible explanation of the facts. But once I start looking at facts—the known facts about the origins of the universe or the positioning of the earth relative to the sun, moon, planets, and stars—I realize I have to really work hard to maintain this silly, ignorant superstition.
The clincher, though, is not proof; the clincher has to do with actual thought. I may never be able to prove gravity, in the sense of observing it directly. But I can imagine what it might take to disprove the theory of gravity. I know that if an apple ever falls up or if I ever leap out of a tree and simply float around in the sky, it will disprove my current theory of gravitation, and I will have to either refine it or junk it and come up with some newer, better explanation. This is the condition of its falsification. I know what it will take to make the theory false.
With the attractive deity (invisible, all-powerful, etc.), I do not know what evidence or what facts will prove her existence false. I don't know what it will take to falsify this superstition. Belief is not subject to truth conditions or to falsification. If something falls up, the believer can simply say "the god willed it to test my faith" or "my belief and faith in the all-attracting god was so strong she suspended her thrall and let me fly" or some such. True belief always trumps the facts.
A theory can be falsified. It doesn't demand belief, it demands understanding. A religion commands absolute belief. To its adherents, it can never be falsified.
This is the caliber of ignorance we in the 21st century America have to face. Ignorance reinforced by religion. People afraid to send their children to college because they fear their beliefs will be challenged. College-educated people who obstinately cling to their ignorance.
My personal dilemma is whether and how to tell my loved ones they are ignorant, how to educate them, how to enlighten them, how to awaken them from their blissful state. Can this be done in a loving manner? Can this be done gently? What are the risks (to me, to them, to the rest of my friends and relations)? What are the benefits? Is it a project I should even consider? Is it my place to even try?
Long-time readers will have noted a thread, motif, or even theme related to the topic of 'theology'. This has been a lifelong interest of mine. I've thought a lot about it, reflected on it, even meditated, and at times prayed—all this on top of post-grad studies. It is sure to annoy and even alienate some readers, just as my political and economic posts most likely annoy my literary readers. I apologize in advance; however, I will not be doing apologetics for any sort of doctrine. If you want to avoid reading these particular types of post, I will label them (as I've done by heading my review/critical essays "Ur-story...") "Articles of Faith."
You will not get religious ideas in any form you've probably ever encountered them. From my earliest posts, I have staked out my stance as agnostic. That's from the Greek for 'not knowing'. My position, though, might better be called 'questioning' or even 'questing'. That is to say, these posts will be exploratory in nature. You are welcome to come along for the ride.
First of all, however, don't look to me for answers. I don't have all the answers, and I will not claim to. This may be the one and only bit of dogma you get from me. I long ago rejected dogma and dogmatics and their necessary entailment: dogmatism. And that includes, as I've argued here and elsewhere, the dogmatisms of BOTH the religionists AND the atheists.
As a corollary: I am not trying to preach or evangelize anyone. I'm really not concerned whether anyone else agrees with me. Or not. On the other hand, open-minded dialogue is always welcome.
Here's a premise: Myth and religion serve a basic function in human society—or at least they have throughout the long history of civilization. Traditionally, they have helped explain the cosmos and humanity's (both corporate and individual) place in it in terms coincident with the contemporary state of corporate human knowledge. Thus, they have served a consolatory function as well. In a sense, they are a sort of pre-scientific science. That is why, I believe, there is always going to be a conflict between true religion and true science; when scientific knowledge progresses, it threatens, supplants, and often destroys religious beliefs. For example, in the Bible there are several accounts of humans physically ascending to heaven: Elijah (2 Kings 2:11) and Jesus (Luke 14:36-43, 50, 51), e.g. (And possibly Enoch, Gen. 5:24) The Roman catholic church, likewise, teaches that Mary, the mother of Jesus, physically ascended as well, i.e., the Assumption (Pope Pius XII Munificentissimus Deus of November 1st, 1950). Of course, science teaches us that the velocity of light is the cosmic speed limit for physical matter, and even then mass is necessarily transformed into energy. Thus, at something less than the speed of light (to preserve their bodily integrity), Jesus's and Mary's bodies are traveling somewhere in space less than 2000 light years from earth. Most likely, they haven't gotten out of the Milky Way. Of course, if, like Elijah and Jesus, they are supposed to return physically to earth someday, then they must've turned around at some point and to head back. Either way, they haven't ascended to any kind of heaven outside the physical plane of the material universe as we now understand it.
Of course, this is reductio ad absurdum. But it dramatizes the point. These religious and mythic beliefs (and there are many, many more) are grounded in abject scientific ignorance (as we moderns understand things). Religion is a habit that dies hard, and holding to these beliefs today is atavistic. Yet, adherents derive some benefit, some consolation, from them, and they become prickly and even hostile when confronted with reasoned views contrary or contradictory to their own. I hope to explore both these consolations and these insecurities as part of this series. But I hope to do more.
Now that we live in a high-tech, scientifically sophisticated era in which we have fairly precise, verifiable views of the cosmos and an emerging sense of our place in it (how small we really are), what role do the superstitions and myths (or their contemporary substitutes) that religions traditionally provided humanity play today? Are we on the way to becoming post-religious? Is that necessarily a bad thing? Is that necessarily a good thing? Taking into account the current state of knowledge, what sort of thing is human spirituality? Is it necessarily a quarrelsome thing?
I ventured a few early posts relative to this topic. If you're interested, you can find them by clicking on some of the self-refererential links above.
