In any case, atheism must be railed against as much as anything else, in order to test the strength of it as a viable worldview. Its a task many atheists do without, seeing railing as a product of religious conformity upon an individual's will, rather than the purest aspect of the human condition. This "railing", in my mind, is exactly the aforementioned notion of playing with the ideas as opposed to being played by them.
I think this is really important. I’m so used to seeing people being run by their belief systems as though they’re stuck in some kind of feedback loop. It takes a brave person to step out of the loop and recognise that it takes a believer to believe in the belief system, and that this realisation places the individual on a higher level than their beliefs (of course in practise things are a lot more complex). Often the process of “railing” against a belief is an important aspect of this realisation.
It’s probably evidence of my thorough absorption of Gregory Bateson’s Neurological Levels model, but these days I always tend to look at the individual at this higher level, above their beliefs. Where religion makes this difficult is that it presupposes that a person’s spiritual dimension is at a higher level than their status as an individual, thus making it incredibly difficult for a person to change their spiritual beliefs. What they perceive to be their very context and purpose is called into question, which can seem terrifying.
In practise we can only know ourselves through what we believe about ourselves, which makes Bateson’s model just another map of the world which (a map which happens to be extremely useful on occasion). I guess in a way belief functions like language: just as language exists in a state of infinitely deferred meaning (you can only describe the meaning of a word using other words), what we believe about our beliefs could also go on forever (I believe about this belief about this belief about this belief… ad infinitum).
So my ideal state is that my beliefs exist in service of this unknowable entity I call “I.” The vast majority of my beliefs exist outside of my immediate conscious awareness and often seem contradictory to a casual observer, and so life is a constant process of noticing one’s potentially harmful beliefs (although some beliefs may only be harmful in some contexts), drawing them into consciousness, working to integrate them more harmoniously, and letting them sink back into unconsciousness.
It’s common in NLP to call one’s identity a trance in which beliefs act as hypnotic suggestions. Make of that what you will. Is this threadrot? I’m not sure. To paraphrase one of my friends, I’m becoming increasingly wary of feeding people more content to their belief systems and psychotheologies, because it has a tendency to remove people from their direct visceral experience of the world.
That doesn’t change the fact that the question of God is an amazing philosophical, mystical riddle to play around with and interact with in various ways, because it’s a macrocosmic unknowable that mirrors each of our own individual, personal unknowns. That’s one of the things I like about God: the usefulness of that mirroring quality.
For example, we absorb so much information every second that it’s impossible to pay attention to all of it. Only the tiniest fragment can be noticed consciously, the rest is processed at an unconscious level. At some basic level we all have a conception of our own limitations, which limits our insights into the world and ourselves. However, our beliefs concerning our personal limitations may be set somewhat lower than they are in actuality. The God-shaped mirror is like one of those funny things you encounter in fairgrounds, it reflects your image back at you in strange and interesting ways. Imagine your unconscious contents reflected back from a mirror that has inherent within it the qualities of an omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent and wise God: it allows you that much more access to things that you don’t know that you know, things that you didn’t realise you noticed at the time. This may be a part of how a lot of divination works, including being part of the Charismatic Christian spiritual gift of Prophecy that I’ve been trained in for most of my life.
But again, all of this is just playing around with ideas, fitting them together in new ways. It stops being fun and useful the instant that it becomes relied upon for one’s identity and sense of purpose, as soon as it becomes more important than the person, as soon as we become stranded within dogma.
The only word I use to define myself these days is Seth. I even resist supposed compliments like being termed a lefty-libertarian (left/right, libertarian/authoritarian being yet more dualisms that don’t accurately describe me or my beliefs. They’re poor, inadequate maps of something hugely complex). Seth will do fine for now. Might change my mind in future, and people sometimes tend to act awkwardly around people who can’t be easily categorised, but I consider that’s more a function of their limiting beliefs than it is a problem with me. My compassion means I’ll try to communicate using their terms, but I always try to make it clear that I’m only borrowing their terminology, not keeping it for myself.
Am I rambling, or is this useful to anyone? |
and give me money.