Something that it has taken me a long time to learn is the truth that, if two people hold strong, yet diametrically opposed worldviews, the one will never change the other’s point of view. For me to convince you to embrace my philosophy, or vice versa, is as unlikely as convincing a socialist to become a conservative, an environmentalist to become a strip-miner, or a pacifist to become a warmonger.
These truths are the cornerstone of who I am:
I do not believe in the existence of the divine in any form. I accept the completeness of nature as it is. Any worldview that I now hold I am willing to change upon the production of fact based evidence, peer-reviewed, and tested under various conditions.
I do not respect any religion, as I feel it is based upon primal superstition, and our desire to give meaning and purpose to what is, essentially, a chaotic and random universe that follows certain rules, none of which are orchestrated by a prime mover.
I do, however, respect the right of any individual to hold whatever belief that they wish, no matter how absurd it may appear to me, as long as that belief/religion does not impact on my person or my freedom in any way.
I do accept that there are religious people who do good and contribute to a better world.
It bothers me deeply that four out of five of the world population spend more time and money worrying about what happens to them when they die than making positive changes in the world today, and contributing to a better tomorrow here and now.
I will defend, to the death, the right of anyone to believe as they wish, as long as the caveats above are noted.
It is not that your gods have failed us, as they are non-existant. The concept of a god is a human invention as an attempt in ancient and darker times to make sense, and apply order, to that which we did not understand. Certain men soon saw that they could use this credibility to their own ends, and did, and continue to do so as a form of social control and power. So yes, it was, and is, not the imaginary gods that failed us, but we ourselves for creating them in the first place, and then empowering every charlatan and opportunist that comes along claiming to speak for such gods.
The so-called holy books are not “revealed” wisdom, but collections of folk tales and myths from the dark ages, and are of little historic interest and very slight verifiable fact.
I see our journey as being random and seredipitous, and completely in line with all I know about free will, chaos, and determinism. If I had done anything differently, at any point, I might well have turned out a different person, but with some of the genetic/conditioned characteristics that I have today. For me, that is simply the way it is: that is what experience, genetics, childhood conditioning, and information processing and acquisition does. There is nothing spiritual or supernatural about it. This is the way things work for me. All that we gained or lost along the way has brought us here today.
In short, no deity is responsible for who or what we are. We are the masters of our own fates, and I am sad to say that, as long as we embrace superstition and pass responsibility for our actions on to some invisible being, we shall continue to live lives that are so much less than they could be.
Reality, Religion, and the New Renaissance
Reality is a very personal perspective, with each individual viewing his/her own universe in an egocentric manner. One’s intellect, or intellectual capacity, varies from person to person, and, I submit, is exactly at the level that the individual needs to cope with his/her perception of reality. For some people, faith plays a major role in filling in the grey areas at the edge of perception: for others, logic is the keystone, with the unknown remaining unknown, and the logician accepting that the grey areas are indeed grey areas. Hence each accepts the individual reality of his/her individual universe on individually designed terms.
Over the ages of our evolutionary development, Mankind, in order to survive, has had to hone and balance the growth of physical skills together with those of the intellect in order to more effectively respond to environmental and societal crises. This uniquely human symbiotic relationship of body and mind has been so wildly successful that we have extended our lifespan substantially, have been able to kill others at the push of a button, while completely ignoring the fact of millions of our fellow humans live in penury and intolerable squalor, decimated by petty wars, archaic prejudices, starvation, have no sanitation and not even the most basic medicine.
The more complex our lives have become, the more we feel the need to understand who we are, why we are, and where we are going. The dichotomy between SUVs, plasma TVs, the consumer mystique, and the refugees of Darfur, and displaced Palestinians, is apparent to all but the most socially insensitive.
Growth industries have sprung up to service our need to understand. Established religions, New Age philosophies, Eastern mysticism, and Zen meditational techniques, are all enjoying a Renaissance.
Sacred texts, be they religious texts or peer-reviewed scientific journals, have come to be viewed by their various target audiences as the sole and only key to understanding that which we are not able to understand. Reliance on any one viewpoint, while closing the mind to different interpretations, is unworthy of our level of sophistication. What seems to be the key to some may appear as a facile crutch to others.
What is purported to be the word of an absolute god is, in fact, only the writer’s perception of what he believes his god is saying. His divine inspiration may have been caused by lead poisoning, the ingestion of psychotropic substances, hunger, or simply impending madness or an attempt at social manipulation. On the other hand, what is said to be the absolute scientific proof of theory X, is, in fact, only the conclusions drawn from a set of tests that may, or may not, be later determined to be invalid.
The thinking individual will attempt to process all forms of Truth, or Proof, through the filter of cynicism and, if extremely lucky, be able to glean at least a glimpse of one small portion of what may be a universal Truth, but will, of course, bear in mid that such Truth is valid only in his egocentric view of such things, coloured necessarily by cultural, religious, and possibly genetic bias.
All major religious texts agree on some form of continuation. The Torah, the Koran, the Bible, the Vedic texts, the works of Zoroaster, and various Buddhist sutras all agree on two things. The first is the continuation of the spirit, either through reincarnation, Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, or the catch-all “higher level of existence.” The second point of convergence is the acknowledgment of the cosmic and ongoing battle between good and evil: parables of Chaos and Order struggling to tip or maintain a universal balance.
So what conclusions can a person, setting aside faith, draw from these two common lines of agreement? Only that man feels a sense of anticlimax from his existence: a feeling, a hope, that there must be more to it than this. There must be more than just the now, more than the wars, more than the pain, the heartache. Fertile ground indeed for a growth industry selling a message of hope and immortality. One must, however, remember that words are only words, and, in an egocentric universe, only subjective experience is acceptable.
John Lennon wrote “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right, it’s all right.” Given our basic human need to shine light into the darkness, Mr. Lennon may well be right, with the caveat that your “whatever” doesn’t impact negatively on one’s neighbour. And it is here that the problems begin.
Not content to huddle together in shelter from the unknowable cosmic mystery, man tends to split into diverse groups, each of which claims an exclusive key to the unknowable. Further, if you do not accept their key as the only key, you are outcast and excluded from their group. Rather than accepting a global community united against the common darkness, as would appear logical behaviour under such threatening and untenable mystery, we tend to form tribes, with each tribe claiming exclusivity and stature as sole arbiter of the Truth. Until we lose the bazaar hawker mentality, with each sad salesman selling his own ticket to the unknown, we are destined never to reach the social renaissance of which we are capable.
Given the foregoing, it behooves us all to seek, to learn, to listen. We must seek any knowledge that may ameliorate our condition. We must learn from our collective wealth of experience. We must listen to all points of view.
Standing at the pinnacle of human development, we all have our individual and unique strengths and talents. It is how we utilize these talents, and what we do with acquired knowledge that is the true measure of intellect.
