On Feb 1, 2005, at 11:23 AM, Nick Arnett wrote:
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."
For me, it was mostly fear. I just didn't want to think what it would mean to live in a godless, soulless universe.
I feel quite differently now. I wouldn't say there's been an acceptance of personal dissolution that's happened to me, but I'm not as worried any longer about the ideas of permanence, retention of self, etc. Some of that can be attributed to the various religious and philosophical explorations I've done over the years; and some if it is attributable to a personal trauma that got me thinking about life in a radically different way compared to previously.
I choose to regard it as an undeserved gift.
That's interesting.
A self-centered answer is, "I'm happier."
But are you really?
A non-rational answer is, "It feels true."
Ah, but how much of that is it feeling true versus your sense of fair play being appealed to? IOW how much of it is more "I *want* it to be true" than "it feels true"?
A quasi-evidentiary answer is that it has survived the millenia.
Mm. Many things have. ;)
Perhaps I need to believe there's something beyond death, especially since I've been touched by it in more ways than most people.
That's where I'd been coming from, yeah, but not for the same reason. I've said in other contexts that my life got a lot easier after I gave up hope, and it's true really. I don't mean I'm pessimistic -- generally I'm not -- I mean, instead, "hope" in the sense of attachment to a future outcome that might or might not be possible. Acting without that attachment to a desired outcome is a delicate balance but it seems to work. For me anyway.
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.
There isn't a why. Why is a tree? Why are horses? There isn't even a what -- what is the purpose of a horse? It's a meaningless question objectively; for all practical consideration the question exists only in the mind of the interrogator. Certainly foliage and ungulates do not spend much time contemplating the what or why of their existences, however much rumination may be involved. ;)
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.
To the extent that anyone's life is what s/he makes it, yes, I can see that -- but again, what happens if you spend a lifetime striving for something only to discover it was purposeless? (Not saying that's going to happen to you, but what if it did?)
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.
I meant more deep than global warming; that was only meant to be one example of how a mind that fears change reacts to a world that is filled with it on all sides. So yeah, I'm inclined to agree there's much more than the immediately apparent unpredictability. ;)
For the last 10 years or so, I've grown increasingly convinced that we are living in a time of astonishingly enormous transition.
Well, some would say that every generation thinks so -- but in our case it's quite possibly true. Ancient Rome did not have the power, for instance, to render most of the planet's surface uninhabitable. Carl Sagan was fond of pointing this out, this and the famous "star stuff" concept.
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.
And maybe that's part of the trouble too. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that most people aren't comfortable thinking in terms of grey. I mean, surviving in the wild is often pretty polar, I imagine -- predator or not; food or poison; alive or dead. There's precious little room for ambiguity or reflection in a life like that.
Hmm. Hmm. Something almost wants to emerge. A life of extreme leisure -- such as the one most of us in the US lead -- and you get people getting not just bored but actively seeking the polarities that aren't there to be found in civilization ... so maybe boredom is a factor, but not boredom in the intellectual sense. Boredom on a much more organic, visceral level. Boredom that leads (in part) to extreme sports or, in older civilizations, blood sports. And that leads to manufacturing enemies? Hmm...
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.
It's not that simple, but to the degree that promulgating fantasy as truth damages a child's ability to distinguish reality, it's a factor.
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've encountered similar stories from people who didn't claim to be gods. One of them -- which is a little pertinent -- is of Siddhartha Gautama, the alleged Buddha. At one point, the story goes, he was an itinerant teacher and was asked by a woman to bring her dead loved one (son? daughter?) back to life. Gautama was supposed to have told the woman to first find a single house in her village wherein death had not visited, ever, and then he'd do what she asked. She couldn't, of course, so Gautama was off the hook there, and the point was that death is something that *everyone* experiences, that is not unique -- and so the woman was comforted but also rebuked, just a little, for thinking she should get special treatment.
The story could well be apocryphal; it doesn't matter, because it's a good point. What I'm suggesting here is that one does not need to be divinely inspired to dispense wisdom. (Part of me thinks that's good, since divine inspiration is, to my mind, impossible to achieve.)
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.
I don't think most journalists *are* all that objective, at least not any longer. I think they tried to be once but the constant blatting of the phrase "liberal media" has them all skewing right now. Even the NY Times fell into the "war in Iraq" parade.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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