Warren Ockrassa wrote:
That's a good point. I'd ask you to think about something else, though -- why do you consider yourself religious? I mean, if you have some kind of faith, *why* do you have that faith?
Well, there's the question. An honest answer has to include, "I don't know." I choose to regard it as an undeserved gift. A self-centered answer is, "I'm happier." A non-rational answer is, "It feels true." A quasi-evidentiary answer is that it has survived the millenia.
An easily countered answer is that so much good has been done in the name of Christ (easily countered with the Crusades, past or current if you wish). Another answer is that most of the people I'm drawn to are also believers, a fact that preceded my own faith.
Perhaps I need to believe there's something beyond death, especially since I've been touched by it in more ways than most people.
In the end, though, I often come back to the mystery of our existence. What the heck am I? I don't expect rationality to answer the question of why I exist, but I have to admit to a real hunger to answer that question. And even if there is no external answer, no God, I believe I have the power to create the answer, that by adopting purpose in my life, I can create some "why" answers. Those include that I'm here to love and create, to be and to do.
Possibly it comes, in part, from wanting the world to be a certain way, to fit one specific pattern of acceptability. Also, perhaps there's a fear of the unknown -- anarchy, chaos, unpredictability. These are facts of reality and many people are not comfortable with them. This could be one of the reasons there's so much open denial of the *fact* of global warming and its impending environmental impact. To deny global warming now is equivalent to denial of plate tectonics in the 1970s or the K/T asteroid in the 1980s.
I suspect that you're onto it, although I tend to believe there's a deeper unpredictability present. For the last 10 years or so, I've grown increasingly convinced that we are living in a time of astonishingly enormous transition. A simple version is that we are learning to move from feedback-based Boolean (there are two competing choices and only one is right) to fuzzy logic (what is right emerges from many interactions) as a source of authority, which echoes what I think happened in western culture five centuries ago, when we moved from dogmatism (there is one choice and you're in or you're out) to our present feedback-based systems of democracy, capitalism, evolution and so forth. Gotta get this into a book one of these days...
Maybe some of it is that we *let* sheltered attitudes persist. We don't do enough reality checking, not enough pimp-slapping. Maybe we need to stop telling our children bullshit stories about easter bunnies, tooth fairies and father christmases, stop telling them that some things are true which we KNOW are not. Maybe we need to stop telling them impossible stories about loaves and fishes or six-day creations or seventy-two eternal virgins.
Sorry, but I can't make it that simple. There is great truth in great fiction. I believe in a God, who as man, told stories that may or not have been actual events, but he was telling truth in his parables.
I was a reporter for many, many years. Today I believe that journalism's focus on "objectivity" is a problem, as it presents the illusion of truth. There can be great lies in non-fiction.
Nick
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