Articles of Faith: "twenty centuries of stony sleep"

This is a continuation of the thoughts from my previous post.

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)

Gunga la gunga.

Articles of Faith: SSSSayyyy FFFFear Is a Maaaan's Besssst FFFFriend

where ignorance is bliss,/'Tis folly to be wise.
Thomas Gray, Ode On A Distant Prospect Of Eton College (1742)

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?

[to be continued]