The Fable
So I classify myself as an "atheist". I classify myself as "agnostic". (I'd like to think I'm not prone to being pigeonholed, but such is life.) Some people think this is a contradiction. I don't. Here's how it goes down. Assuming for a second we know what the hell we mean by God (or G-d, YHWH, Jehovah, Allah, Atman, The Ordering Principle, Fate, Cronos, The Creator, ya dig?), my views run like this: regarding God-knowledge--I don't know, and you don't know either. If you say you do, you're lying. If you've had first-person experience of something numinous, something transcendent (for example Ginsberg's finding "God" in Blake's voice), good for you. But it can't be what you mean by God. We have drugs that induce these experiences. There is a neuroscientist in Sudbury who can induce these with finely-patterned magnetic pulses to specific cortical association areas. Anyway, there's the agnosticism. But it you really press me, I may get cranky and I'll make my probabilistic argument: the likelihood is astronomically small, especially with your personal God. Keep your red herring off my table; we've got bigger problems. Shit, algal blooms are more relevant.
If you ask me, ever since the emergence of monotheism, religious practice has been overextended. The most likely gods to exist are things like polytheistic pantheons. Except I would put them somewhere in my limbic system, or as properties of hard-wired organization of human consciousness. These gods are jealous; they fight and cheat on each other and tell stories and keep secrets. That's the most likely thing that's going on beneath our conscious surface. Sometimes I feel Apollonian, sometimes Dionysian; sometimes Mercurial, sometimes Jovial or Saturnine. Sometimes I am Cronos eating my children. I get seized by moods. I can dig that explanation. But it's always an "as if" explanation.
Pretty far from the god we "had in mind", eh? Except I'd argue we didn't have the concept to begin with. So why, then, do people rage and kill and whip children over Old Testament stories, but not Aesop's fables. Here some people say we absolutely need religion for meaning in our lives. I agree with the "we need meaning in our lives" part. In many ways, the humanities killed the religions. I don't need Jesus if I have Camus' Etranger. Odin has nothing on Optimus Prime. Nietzsche could take on at least half a dozen apostles and St. Paul, to boot. If it came to that, Hafiz would show Mohammed what's what. And the Dharma Bums can hold their own against the gurus of the Pacific Islands.
Let me say this: I wil noy begrudge anyone their myths. But myths must be seen as myths. And I don't mean myth in the belittling sense. Most of our lives are spent in myth. They are framed by myth. As a child said: "myths are stories that are not true on the outside, but are true on the inside". That's what myths can do. What they can't do is furnish the contents of immediate experience. That is the hinge of the other great facility of the human mind.
Consider: "When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous."
If you ask me, ever since the emergence of monotheism, religious practice has been overextended. The most likely gods to exist are things like polytheistic pantheons. Except I would put them somewhere in my limbic system, or as properties of hard-wired organization of human consciousness. These gods are jealous; they fight and cheat on each other and tell stories and keep secrets. That's the most likely thing that's going on beneath our conscious surface. Sometimes I feel Apollonian, sometimes Dionysian; sometimes Mercurial, sometimes Jovial or Saturnine. Sometimes I am Cronos eating my children. I get seized by moods. I can dig that explanation. But it's always an "as if" explanation.
Pretty far from the god we "had in mind", eh? Except I'd argue we didn't have the concept to begin with. So why, then, do people rage and kill and whip children over Old Testament stories, but not Aesop's fables. Here some people say we absolutely need religion for meaning in our lives. I agree with the "we need meaning in our lives" part. In many ways, the humanities killed the religions. I don't need Jesus if I have Camus' Etranger. Odin has nothing on Optimus Prime. Nietzsche could take on at least half a dozen apostles and St. Paul, to boot. If it came to that, Hafiz would show Mohammed what's what. And the Dharma Bums can hold their own against the gurus of the Pacific Islands.
Let me say this: I wil noy begrudge anyone their myths. But myths must be seen as myths. And I don't mean myth in the belittling sense. Most of our lives are spent in myth. They are framed by myth. As a child said: "myths are stories that are not true on the outside, but are true on the inside". That's what myths can do. What they can't do is furnish the contents of immediate experience. That is the hinge of the other great facility of the human mind.
Consider: "When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous."
posted by A. D. at 12:58 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home