The credible heaviness of non-existence
Aug. 20th, 2002 07:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gurdonarkLately I ponder the big questions--can one overdose on Star Trek: the Next Generation during those Sunday marathons? Would Data have felt more human with a flesh-toned face? Should Buffy really have really let Faith know she was in Faith's apartment before Buffy tried to kill Faith? Is it immoral to miss the Mayor, just a bit, and was the "best" demon he could achieve at ascension a kind of Sinbad film big worm?
But sometimes I do focus on the inessentials, like "books about heavy topics". Lately, I've been reading "The Truing of Christianity", by Canadian theologian John Meagher. It's a good skim, or, more accurately, a good skim/read. This book tackles a topic that interests me. Once one has applied all the science and scholarship to a major world faith, what is left? Theologians long before Meagher posited that a God who exists only in the gaps which science has not disproved becomes a fairly uninteresting God indeed; a sort of God as border magic marker. But the analysis is not that simple, about anything we take as "true" on faith in life.
I tend to see one's "spiritual" or "inner" or "deepest within" life as something which exists beyond any one particular formula for faith or reason, as I find the same search frequently exists for skeptics as for Christians, for Buddhists as for pagans, for fundamentalists as for universalists. It's not that I don't think there are "wrong paths" on some level--I suppose I do think there are "wrong paths". It's that so much of the debate about pathways and ultimate truths is so cultural and situational and divisive. Although Christian thought interests me a great deal, and feels like a "home court" to me, I have had no interest in recent years in trying to argue that it particularly produces people who are "better" than, say, the atheist form of existentialism, Tibetan Buddhists, or wiccan practitioners. I've always had some sympathy, in fact, with the Indigo Girls song about how the less that one thinks of these profundities, the closer one is to fine. But that's not really my approach at all. I just don't think I'm apt to convince anyone about my view of the world, particularly as my view is a bit fluid.
But Meagher's book posits for me once again a question over which I ponder. Granted that our many and diverse great belief traditions, both religious and post-religious, offer many insights into many things, and many threads with which to try to knit together our paths, the melding of faith and modernity remains a key problem. We can leave aside that some folks want to ignore the scientific record altogether on things like evolution, Big Bang Theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Others just get into boring ethnic or geographic controversy disguised as religious or philosophic debate. For many of us, leaving "who is right" aside, the traditions of philosophy and religion are so hard to match up with the harsh mundanities of everyday life.
I'm not really interested in starting a discussion of "who is right" and "who gets closest to the core". That's not really my field nor my interest. But Meagher has focused me on a key issue--it's hard to know how much tradition to save, and how much to discard.
For me, it is important to save as much as possible of the things in which one "believes". For someone else, it is important to discard all but the essentials. But whatever one's thought on this, it's a problem that runs through all life, not just "thick books about religion". One must always choose things to accept without question, things to experiment with, and things to reject outright. This is true not only about Powers that Be or their lack, but about everything.
I think that the real test of contentment may be when one can accept that one has made one's choices, and still live with them. I like that contentment better than the contentment when one views the world as so clear that no real choices arise. But I continually wonder if we shouldn't just view our choices as secondary to how we live our choices. Graham Greene wrote The Power and the Glory, a novel that posits the notion that an ineffectual "whiskey priest" on the run from suppression in revolutionary Mexico is morally superior to an otherwise morally exemplar but wrong headed soldier charged with persecuting the Church. I see a real logic to this, but when the choice is less stark, it gets more complicated.
Do our beliefs, with God, without God, or in between save us? Or is the real baby what we do with our lives, not how we formulate our notions? We've all known closed-mind devotees of "artistic freedom", pitiless advocates of mercy. But at some point don't we have to set aside "what we think and believe" and look at what we really do? This all puzzles me.
But sometimes I do focus on the inessentials, like "books about heavy topics". Lately, I've been reading "The Truing of Christianity", by Canadian theologian John Meagher. It's a good skim, or, more accurately, a good skim/read. This book tackles a topic that interests me. Once one has applied all the science and scholarship to a major world faith, what is left? Theologians long before Meagher posited that a God who exists only in the gaps which science has not disproved becomes a fairly uninteresting God indeed; a sort of God as border magic marker. But the analysis is not that simple, about anything we take as "true" on faith in life.
I tend to see one's "spiritual" or "inner" or "deepest within" life as something which exists beyond any one particular formula for faith or reason, as I find the same search frequently exists for skeptics as for Christians, for Buddhists as for pagans, for fundamentalists as for universalists. It's not that I don't think there are "wrong paths" on some level--I suppose I do think there are "wrong paths". It's that so much of the debate about pathways and ultimate truths is so cultural and situational and divisive. Although Christian thought interests me a great deal, and feels like a "home court" to me, I have had no interest in recent years in trying to argue that it particularly produces people who are "better" than, say, the atheist form of existentialism, Tibetan Buddhists, or wiccan practitioners. I've always had some sympathy, in fact, with the Indigo Girls song about how the less that one thinks of these profundities, the closer one is to fine. But that's not really my approach at all. I just don't think I'm apt to convince anyone about my view of the world, particularly as my view is a bit fluid.
But Meagher's book posits for me once again a question over which I ponder. Granted that our many and diverse great belief traditions, both religious and post-religious, offer many insights into many things, and many threads with which to try to knit together our paths, the melding of faith and modernity remains a key problem. We can leave aside that some folks want to ignore the scientific record altogether on things like evolution, Big Bang Theory and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Others just get into boring ethnic or geographic controversy disguised as religious or philosophic debate. For many of us, leaving "who is right" aside, the traditions of philosophy and religion are so hard to match up with the harsh mundanities of everyday life.
I'm not really interested in starting a discussion of "who is right" and "who gets closest to the core". That's not really my field nor my interest. But Meagher has focused me on a key issue--it's hard to know how much tradition to save, and how much to discard.
For me, it is important to save as much as possible of the things in which one "believes". For someone else, it is important to discard all but the essentials. But whatever one's thought on this, it's a problem that runs through all life, not just "thick books about religion". One must always choose things to accept without question, things to experiment with, and things to reject outright. This is true not only about Powers that Be or their lack, but about everything.
I think that the real test of contentment may be when one can accept that one has made one's choices, and still live with them. I like that contentment better than the contentment when one views the world as so clear that no real choices arise. But I continually wonder if we shouldn't just view our choices as secondary to how we live our choices. Graham Greene wrote The Power and the Glory, a novel that posits the notion that an ineffectual "whiskey priest" on the run from suppression in revolutionary Mexico is morally superior to an otherwise morally exemplar but wrong headed soldier charged with persecuting the Church. I see a real logic to this, but when the choice is less stark, it gets more complicated.
Do our beliefs, with God, without God, or in between save us? Or is the real baby what we do with our lives, not how we formulate our notions? We've all known closed-mind devotees of "artistic freedom", pitiless advocates of mercy. But at some point don't we have to set aside "what we think and believe" and look at what we really do? This all puzzles me.
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no subject
Date: 2002-08-20 06:55 pm (UTC)maybe i have reached a milestone in my life, but recently i have been questioning the meaning and worth of my life. i have never been a "believer", so i have never been a member of any of the support communities believers have. for the most part it hasn't mattered to me until recently.
i have no children, so my connection to the future is tenuous at best. i honestly don't care if my art lives on after i die. so i am reduced to the mundane task of making myself happy. that doesn't seem such a great purpose in life, but i have found that being kind to my world and the people in it, reducing my footprint and getting back to a simpler view do indeed seem to move me towards happiness.
i have yet to rediscover the carefree joy in simple things i remember from my youth, but that is my goal. i envy people capable of faith, because for them the unanswerable is answered. for me it never will be.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 08:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-20 07:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-20 07:55 pm (UTC)Do our beliefs, with God, without God, or in between save us?
In a word, no.
Or is the real baby what we do with our lives, not how we formulate them?
Yes. This, for me, is not a 'belief' however. It is something I know to be 'True'.
The great books, great thinkers, can point to that path within ourselves which is best for us at that moment. What we do in that moment, how we use those insights, that knowledge, is up to us. Everything is there for us to 'use' and enjoy. A bunch of atoms to play with. God has given it to us. *God being whatever you would like to call 'it'. The 'it' that binds all together. God is the space between the atoms, the electrons. God is indeed, love. It is the glue which holds everything together.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 08:58 am (UTC)from the notebook of an existentialist...
Date: 2002-08-20 08:55 pm (UTC)-nietzsche, unpublished note from 1873
Re: from the notebook of an existentialist...
Date: 2002-08-21 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 09:26 am (UTC)I'm reminded of the quest of Copernicus, and later Gallileo, when modeling the Universe (actually they were modeling the solar system, which they took to be the same thing) and their attachment to the Platonic belief that the shape of the universe must be based on perfect forms. This, despite the fact that nothing in nature conformed to Plato's concept of "perfection" as the ideal to which all things tend. But perfection was a hypnotic spell, and one not easy to snap out of. The role of tradition here was to "doctor" the results, to stray away from the perfection in order to model what was actually observed. Countless "epicycles" were fabricated, each based on its own small perfect circle form, to explain the retrograde movements of the planets. It was only when tradition was broken, not just by placing the Sun in the center of the universe [solar system] but by breaking with the tradition of the perfect circle. That is when Kepler was free to discover the actual form of the solar system, the eliptical orbits of the planets relative to the Sun.
The knowing of which ideas to keep, which to throw away, was based ultimately on one thing. That which worked.
The explanation that actually conformed to the observable facts was true. We see often every age the working definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Caring not so much for the result, as a belief that somehow the execution of the flawed strategy, if executed perfectly, will produce perfect results.
The epitomy of this error of twisted logic was advanced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose character Sherlock Home spoke: "If the logic of the argument is flawless, then the result, however unlikely, must be true." As both a programmer and an artist I can tell you this is crap! It presumes that the logic of the argument is the driver, instead of the undeniable reality of the result. Instead I believe: "If the result is untenable, it is because your premises, however perfect they appear, are flawed."
So the test of what to keep and what to discard becomes a test: "How does this belief further the cause to which it is dedicated?"
no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 09:37 am (UTC)dinosaur bones do not reflect a non-literal-Genesis origin of the species, but instead were planted by Satan to damn scientists and doubters.
I think that there is still a place for faith, and that we need not, in the words of an old song "hang with the angels on the gallows of science". But faith must be more than belief in flawed cosmologies, and, you're right, surely part of it is accepting convincing theories and facts for what they are instead of trying to explain them away based on non-scientific texts.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 12:15 pm (UTC)I believe so as well, but I believe equally that we often confuse the support of dogma with reliance on faith (that we of course wouldn't apply to either you or me
As for Satan's trickery, it's more likely he planted "The Anna Nichole Smith Show" for his evil ends
no subject
Date: 2002-08-21 12:18 pm (UTC)Otherwise, I think I agree with you, and I'm impressed you can HTML the LJ faces right into your comment.