Archive for March, 2010

Demystifying and Remystifying

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Recently I realized, as I get older and older, I spend more and more time demystifying things. When someone says they don’t understand how something works or how amazing something is, I jump in to explain it to them – how physics works, how the universe works, how the human body works. I have a personal project, and it is to demystify the world as much as possible.

Mystery is a property of the human experience. “Mystery” isn’t just something that is unknown. Mystery extends into the unknowable, the unbelievable and the incomprehensible. It is the feeling in our guts that something lies beyond us. It’s the feeling that our ancestors used to create all manners of tales about how the world around them worked.

But mystery is worse than that. It is an acceptance of ignorance. It is the label of our reluctance to comprehend.

I spent years studying psychology, for better or worse. I certainly am not a psychologist in the sense that it is not my career. I am certainly a psychologist in how I think and what I know. The same can be said of philosophy – I spent years studying it, but professionally, I am not a philosopher. But conceptually, I don’t think anyone who knows me could describe me for long before “philosophy” became one of the words they used.

Psychology taught me that the human brain is nothing if not lazy. Prejudice is a useful tool, but it causes a lot of error. Mystery is a similar tool. It’s very good that we have a filter which stops us from exploring every single unknown. But much like prejudice and experience lends itself to racism, mystery lends itself to willful ignorance.

I enjoy demystifying things quite a bit. But I have another hobby – remystifying things.

I am taken with how the world is simultaneously starkly credulous and strikingly incredible at the same time. I think everyone lives a bit of this, but they rarely put it together on the same object. A chef might make a delicious steak, but experience complete confusion when they consider for a moment how an mp3 player works. Meanwhile, the computer engineer who made the mp3 player has no clue why the steak he’s eating tastes so good.

But for me, I can speak in boring terms about how life has developed and progressed on Earth as if it doesn’t impress me. In the next breath, however, I can talk poetically about the overwhelming diversity of life, about the arms race of evolution, and about the amazing functionalities of various adaptations of species.

And both of these ideas represent my true feelings. The distinction is not a line of difference, but just a statement of a rotating perspective. If you see one side of a cube, you can’t actually be certain it’s a cube. Rotating it reveals a lot more information, and might confirm some of your suspicions about its shape.

Mystery can be a stance of ignorance. But once we remove that ignorance – once we have some knowledge and understanding of something, and dismiss our fear that it might be unknowable – we can reintroduce the feelings of awe. We can understand how something works but also recognize the sublime brilliance of it.

The real problem is when we see the mysterious as unknowable… and at the same time we see the known as unremarkable.

Posted in Existentialism and Human Drama! | No Comments »

The God You’d Expect

Monday, March 8th, 2010

As I said last time, it’s hard to post, but not because I feel like there’s a lack of things to post about. Part of the problem is that sometimes I feel like I’m just making point most readers will agree with.  Sometimes, I end two sentences in a row with prepositions.

This is a simple point, but an important one in understanding the psychology of a supernatural believer. This is also a point I made in I’m Trying to Think (Episode 29), and I know you all listen to my podcast, so you might find it re-hashed.

Most theists believe in the God they’d expect. God is omnipotent, sure. If you believe that Revelations is divinely-inspired and not just the crazy rantings of John of Patmos, then God is pretty weird sometimes. Despite that strange history, he’s come to be a very modern, sensible guy.

Let’s compare two statements made by a generic Christian person:

Statement A: “I’ve been spending a lot of time alone, and praying for answers. Finally, this week, God spoke to me and told me that it’s time I finally became a writer.”

Statement B: “I’ve been spending a lot of time alone, and praying for answers. Finally, this week, God spoke to me through my toaster oven and told me that it’s time I finally became a writer.”

You, the astute reader, immediately noticed that the statements are the same except for one niggling detail – the bit about the toaster oven. Now, we can all agree that the supposed God could talk through a toaster oven. What would stop him? The question is, what about the phrase makes the second statement sound less credible?

Well, it’s a fairly simple answer. That sounds crazy! Who hears voices from the toaster? We all know that God very quietly and subtly talks to us in our brain. Very, very quietly. God doesn’t need to speak through a toaster, after all! Why would he do that? It’d damage the credibility of your claim. God’s not going to subject you to that.

Except, of course, offering a two-thousand year old text which lacks original source as the supposed proof of his existence. He would do that, but that’s just how he rolls.

It’s this kind of simple conundrum that reinforces my belief that mostly, Christians and other theists don’t really think too hard about what they believe. They believe in religion or God because it is a meme, and a very comforting meme. It is the kind of meme that makes you feel special, that ameliorates the fear of death and that otherwise explains things you don’t want to take the time to wonder about.

In the end, God is the God you’d expect him to be. He’s gone silent for two thousand years. If you expect he’d condemn homosexuality, then he does. If you expect he loves everyone and doesn’t care who they have sex with, then that’s what he does. He fits whatever mold you expect, and has whatever opinion (qua judgment) you think he has.

I have yet to hear anyone say, “I believe in God. He condemns homosexuality, but I disagree with him.” No. People adjust God to meet their expectations and their own personal beliefs.

The more distant you get from any belief in God, the more strange and illusive these kinds of ideas become. For me, at this moment, I can’t even force myself to think this way. I’ve never really believed in God, not as far back as I can remember, but there were points when I could put myself into the right brainspace to make this sort of idea make sense. Not anymore. And that’s what makes this post so weird – why am I bothering to say something so obvious?

Blogs need posts. I’m just feeding this one.

Posted in All You Ever Wanted to Know about God | 2 Comments »

The Word “Spiritual”

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

This blog is hard to update, and not because I don’t have things to write about. There are a pile of things for me to write about, but it’s hard to think about where to start and where to go next. Up to this point, I’ve mostly laid my idea out there, but I guess I can always go back and forth between explaining my ideas and discussing other people’s ideas. That will generate more content more quickly!

So, let’s go back to my last post and specifically Donald’s comments about my choice of using the word “spiritual” to describe what he might call “philosophical.” As Donald points out, the word “spiritual” might have a lot of strange connotations that relate to pseudoscience, generic theism, deism, pantheism, panentheism, psychic phenomena, ghosts or any other topic covered in the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series.

But that’s not right. I’m actually not sure why the word “spiritual” has spilled over into those things. Certainly, there is another meaning of the word spirit, such as “evil spirits” or “the holy spirit” or Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” There is another meaning of “spirit” which is “alcohol,” but we don’t assume spiritual people are drunks.

Okay, But Why Do You Use “Spiritual”?

I’ve been thinking about this for a week now.

In the first place, I’ve generally used the word “spiritual” because I felt it described me. But does it? That’s a complicated question. I suppose I feel very comfortable being an iconoclast, so let me explain how I feel.

Firstly, “spiritual” by the textbook definition means “of or relating to the spirit, not tangible or material.” I’m intensely interested in the intangible and the immaterial. I’m spiritual.

Further, “spiritual” can mean “relating to the soul.” Now, I want to address this in its own post, but I believe in a “soul.” Again, I love being an iconoclast – my idea of the “soul” is not eternal, nor does it exist in duo with our physical forms. I believe in the soul as a non-existent (in the sense that it exists only as a concept) concept of personhood which is an undeniable and nearly non-nullifiable psychological construct of the human mind. To me, the soul is a transcendental thing not unlike courage or knowledge. It is easy to laugh at dualists and the concept of an eternal soul, but I think it’s a very important concept when we examine modern dilemmas surrounding identity.

So maybe I am using “spiritual” to reclaim it. Or maybe I just think the word is relevant even if the thinking of spirituality is changing or must change to match what we know.

In the end, I really like preserving what “spirituality” is supposed to be doing for us all while ripping out all the nonsensical and unbelievable parts and injecting good old-fashioned reason and rational thinking.

Together, We Can Bring “Spiritual” into the 21st Century

Personally, I don’t think there are a lot of words which describe my thinking on the immaterial and the intangible. Donald suggests that he might use the word “philosophical,” but that is a similarly loaded and difficult word. Philosophy is often called the pursuit of wisdom, or the pursuit of knowledge, or the pursuit of truth, but the very study of that stuff becomes meta when we ask, “What is wisdom, knowledge or truth?”

Really, I don’t mind Donald describing me as philosophical for the same reasons I describe myself as spiritual. I would call myself philosophical and spiritual. The former refers to my examination of questions about the abstract universe, and the latter refers specifically to my feelings about the human experience regarding identity, existential crises and the like. So, I suppose spirituality thereby becomes a subset of philosophy. I don’t mind that.

Many philosophers have talked extensively about the spirit and spirituality – Hegel wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit, which can also be called The Phenomenology of Mind because the German word “Geist” carries both meanings. Am I just talking about the mind when I say spirituality? Possibly. I think the word “mind” carries as many strange intangible connotations as the word “spirit,” but I prefer “spirit” because of the enormous connotation of “identity” that it often carries.

But that’s about it. I’m not overly attached to the word, but it is a good word for me, in my opinion. As is usually the case, I am perfectly happy to change my mind if someone can show me a better word or a clearer term, and a good reason to ditch the word “spiritual.”

Posted in Spirituality without Spirits | No Comments »