A Quick Question for the Hive
As I’ve discussed in greater detail here, I am a non-believer that has always been drawn toward the idea of faith. As I get longer in the tooth I find it harder and harder not to pick at this yearning.
Because of this I am going through a bit of a journey to see if it’s possible for me to come out on the side of belief. I have just started confirmation classes at my family’s church, and have thoughts about other activities I might try in a probably futile attempt to flex my atrophied muscles of faith. I am considering doing this somewhat out loud, here on the sidebar where it’s not cluttering up the “real” posts. I might want to discuss things such as the scriptures I’m reading, or the texts I have been told to study, or even the day-to-day activities I am trying to use as a springboard to belief. This may or may not be a terrible idea.
On the one hand, I can see having people such as CC, Kyle, Tom, Alex, Bob and others who who know these paths well leading to some revelatory discussions – in fact it is because of my respect for these people and others on this topic that I am considering this idea in the first place. On the other hand, I can also recognize that this might come off as being just about the most extreme version of navel-gazing imaginable.
So I ask you folks, would anyone here have any desire to have me do this exercise, and more to the point to join in? It is the kind of thing I would only do to create a discussion; I have no desire to have it be a simple confessional. And if I did go ahead with it, I would want to be very clear from the outset that mutual respect towards the faith of others would be paramount. I have no desire to turn such an endeavor into a b**ch-slap fest, and would shut it down pretty quickly of it went that route.
Thoughts?
I say go for it! And I wouldn’t call it navel-gazing, if for no other reason than I write a lot about faith myself. 😉Report
One thing that the wife and I have been thinking about in regards to our faith is concept of community, and how best to realize that. Consequently, I think taking this journey open and with others is a wonderful idea, Tod.Report
J – Where is your dog? 🙁Report
I don’t know. Sometimes it disappears here.Report
You might consider a leash.Report
Email address typo.Report
Schroedinger’s Dog.Report
hehReport
I say that while the journey must be your own. As must be your decision about whether to share it with others. If you’re like me (and I know I am) then writing and offering writings about this will be a great aid to your focus and clarity of thought. The subject matter seems eminently appropriate for this site. No one whose opinion is worth consideration would use the vulnerability inherent in such an exercise maliciously.Report
Pardon awkward editing as I comment from my phone.Report
En una noche oscura,
con ansias, en amores inflamada,
¡oh dichosa ventura!,
salí sin ser notada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada;
a escuras y segura
por la secreta escala, disfrazada,
¡oh dichosa ventura!,
a escuras y encelada,
estando ya mi casa sosegada;
en la noche dichosa,
en secreto, que nadie me veía
ni yo miraba cisa,
sin otra luz y guía
sino la que en el corazón ardía.
_______
On a dark night,
with yearnings, in burning love
oh marvelous chance!
I crept out, unseen,
my household at rest.
In the safety of darkness,
On the secret ladder, disguised
oh marvelous chance!
Concealed in the darkness,
my household still at rest.
Into the merry night,
In secret, nobody saw me,
Nor saw I them
With no other light or guide,
Than that which burned in my heart.
_______
St John of the Cross, translation mineReport
Check out The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
from your local library (or pick it up from Amazon!) and give it a read at the same time.
There are a lot of things that will be going on when you will be taking these classes. Many of them are good. I don’t know to what extent overthinking them will result in counter-acting these good things… and, me being me, I’m prone to think that overthinking is something that will help you get rid of the weeds rather than the wheat.
Keep us posted!Report
I’ve read that; it was a great read.Report
What I gleaned from it is that there are a lot of things bubbling under the surface of our accumulated culture and something *IMMENSELY* powerful when it comes to engaging in a tradition that feels hundreds/thousands of years old with “your people”.
You’ve heard the phrase “don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater”, I’d ask you to be mindful when it comes to what you take with you from these classes and this experience… that is, to make sure that your baby:bathwater ratio is appreciably high.Report
I strongly recommend this approach even if you don’t ‘come out on the side of faith’. I went through a stage of attending various ‘introduction to our beliefs’ type classes at friends churches and while at the end I was more convinced that I don’t believe a word of it I still found it very useful in clarifying what I do think about all sorts of issues.Report
I’d love to follow along with this.Report
I would be very glad to hear anything you have to say about your exploration of faith. I only read this site off and on, but I’ll certainly participate in the discussion if I see your posts.Report
I’d be quite interested in reading, should you decide to share. Catechism classes were what started to turn me away from the Church as a teen – some things taught caused me to question the doctrines and authority of the Vatican. From there I never looked back, but I’d be very interested to see the approach for an adult vs. a teen.Report
I am a non-believer that has always been drawn toward the idea of faith. As I get longer in the tooth I find it harder and harder not to pick at this yearning.
For myself, all is the inverse. I was a believer who always struggled with the idea of faith, and as I get longer in the tooth I find it harder and harder to both to believe and to be interested in picking at the yearning.
And yet I remember my belief and my struggle with it vividly; it is a fundamental part of who I am. And so I take seriously, and am interested in, others’ picking at that yearning. So long as troublesome folks like me don’t turn this into an argument about religion, and you’re comfortable discussing your exploration in a public forum, I say go for it. I’m sure we’ll all learn something from it, and from others’ responses to it.Report
Viz getting longer in the tooth. There’s an old saw about why churches are full of old folks who are always praying and studying the bible. The young deacon asks the old minister why this is so and he replies, “They’re cramming for finals!”
May your yearnings be fulfilled. 🙂Report
I’d be interested in reading it and following along.Report
If you want to, I’d say to go ahead — I’d certainly like to follow along and, possibly, pop into the discussions. If nothing else, it would be informative for me — I’m always interested to see how others, and other traditions of belief, position themselves.Report
As a friend of Jason Kuznicki and now an ordained minister, I would totally love to be in conversation with you in this process. Now that being said, I went to a very non-religious university and have a very open mind about matters of faith and religion. It may be a very interesting conversation from a variety of perspectives, not that I need to have a “pony in this race.”Report
As long as you accept the probability that in addition to interesting and poignant commentary you’re going to have to occasionally read snarky or dismissive commentary (not to mention all of us occasionally trying to be funny and blowing it completely), I think this is a great idea.
Bob must feel like he died and went to heaven.Report
I’d certainly be interested in following your explorations. I promise never to be snarky about them (probably won’t comment at all tbh). I’ll be interested to see where you end up.Report
No snark from me on this one. I am truly touched by Tod’s forthrightness. In a sense you’ve rejected or are rejecting the intellectual and spiritual disruptions that define modernity. It is rather amazing since you’ve lived your entire life surrounded/consumed by these distortions (although you’ve mentioned you’ve had some churchin’ up, which may be the memory/anamnetic experience that begins the metaleptic process and thus leads to salvation and redemption?)
The most difficult part is not a belief in Jesus, but the surrender of the self to
God in love and freedom. Modernity worships the self.Report
I view religion essentially as a way of hacking the mind. Sort of like psychiatry, but with teeth.
Which is to say that it can be very, very effective at accomplishing all kinds of goals — when you can hack a mind, you can do amazing things. But there is of course a dark side to it as well.
As to the supernatural, there’s no there there. Still, hack away.
Report
“As to the supernatural, there’s no there there…”
This is an interesting question to me. I often think about it in libertarian terms. Is there a god? I dunno. If there is, is his name Steve? Mitch? Does he wear a robe and a crown? If that’s how we define “there,” I suspect there is not one.
But can we think of it more broadly? Like a market? No, there’s not some guy named Adam Smith or Jesus Christ setting prices for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the prices aren’t randomly assigned, either. There’s an actual thing. or maybe a process, that makes this happen. It’s an important force worth studying. Sometimes, we even humanize the force (Invisible Hand) to make it more comprehensible.
Perhaps the difference between atheism and deism is similar to the difference between science and literature?Report
HIgher-order levels of organization aren’t supernatural. That might be what God is, but in that case God isn’t supernatural.Report
But it is not merely natural either. Once we start talking about higher levels of organisation, I think it is difficult to say that the kinds of things we are talking about are ntural fcts like length, or charge or something and like mathemathics be part of some set of non-natural set of properties (i.e. the same kind of thing as hypotheticals, counterfactuals and universals) Our common notions of supernaturals of course may still be wrong, but collapsing everything into the natural oversimplifies things to the extent that we leave out certain important nuances in our description.Report
Wrong. Nature can only be a simple quantity like length or charge? Sorry, no.
Higher levels of organization in nature, or even human society, are natural, inasmuch as they arise out of material reality through natural processes. Increasing complexity in nature does not itself comprise an extra-natural fact. It’s just the way that nature is organizing itself. We can certainly posit a supernatural realm, but it’s beyond nature (that’s what the word says), not just the emergent behavior of what we would agree are purely natural-material elements of the composition of the world. Maybe there is a little bit of supernatural in every starling, or maybe somehow something supernatural is being created apart from the actual flock when the starlings swarm, but the purely material fact of the higher-order organization of the starlings over and above the evolved bio-chemical order that makes up each starling – that emergent higher-level order itself within nature – does not not itself comprise the supernatural. To say that the astounding and beautiful things in nature are really “supernatural,” and that nature can only be, by definition, dull and simple matters like length or charge is to, all at once, define terms simply to get the result you want, to deny nature’s evident ability to astound with beauty and complex order, and to set the bar for what is supernatural so low as to make it something no one has any reason to be interested in it to begin with. Complexity and order are things that nature does all on its own – if the supernatural exists, it exists as an additional dimension to what nature itself is fundamentally and manifestly capable of creating, or else exists simply beyond the natural world. To say that the beauty or complexity is nature just simply is the supernatural is to engage in first degree intellectual larceny.Report
Oh yeah: what starlings? These starlings.
Report
I’m not saying its supernatural, only that its non-natural, nor am I saying something which is beautiful must contain within itself a bit of the supernatural (except in a poetic sense).
For example, that some object is a basketball is not a natural fact (simply because basketball-hood is not a natural category). A better example is mathematics. That 2+2=4 is not a fact about the world. Its truth would not change no matter the configuration the world took.
As I’ve said it does not therefore count as supernatural. .It and other abstractions however do pose a problem for a purely materialist wourld view. And I wish to emphasise, it is possible to have a non-materialist world view without thereby positing the supernatural (or at least anything which has tradionally been called the supernatural). Chris can probably do a better job of explaining this than me.Report
Sorry to whatever extent I misunderstood you.
That a basketball is matter arranges as it is (whatever we call it) is indeed a natural fact, and that our word for basketball is basketball is another natural fact, which doesn’t change the fact of what a given basketball physically is once it’s been made and is sitting in our driveway. (Though our ideas about what a basketball should be did in the event affect what basketballs, including this basketball, turned out to be like. That’s a contingent fact; however; our ideas didn’t affect what a starling turned out to be.) It’s not a non-natural fact that we have words for things, and in the sense that you mean it, nothing “is” the word we have for it; it’s just the matter that it is, arranged as it is. The fact that a “basketball” is a “basketball” is also a natural fact; it is electrochemical activity in our brain. And the notion that a basketball (rubber ‘n stuff) is a “basketball” is not a non-natural fact: it’s just not a fact; it’s not the case.
Would two and two be four if we had never come up with the ideas of two and four? I can’t say, but two and four and their relation are ideas we came up with (relating to reality or otherwise); they exist as electrochemical impulses in our head; they are natural facts as well in that sense. Whether two marbles sitting on a table constitute a real instantiation in nature of the concept of two, or whether they don’t because that idea is only a projection of our minds onto the world, whatever the fact of the matter is, that, too, is a natural fact. Either there’s really some twoness on the table there, or there isn’t – whatever the fact there being a natural fact – but either way there is electrochemical activity in our brains that feels like the idea of two (or two marbles, or whatever it feels like that we’re contemplating), and that activity is also a natural fact.
Point being, you’re selling the bounds of what is natural vastly short, absent an argument that I don’t see you making.Report
…’setting’ the bounds would probably have been closer to the idiomatic phrase there. 😉Report
it’s just the matter that it is, arranged as it is
Its more than that. There are possible worlds where the atoms could be arranged the same way, but that wouldnt be a basketball. Maybe because the game of basketball is not played in that world. Or maybe because the game of basketball would use a different ball.
But agreed, basketball is a bad example.
With respect to maths, the answer to the question of whether 2+2=4 or there are finite primes would be the same even if there was no one to think about it.
As to whether I have set the bounds of what constitutes a natural fact too narrowly, I dont think so. There are important differences between the kind of fact about whether there are finite primes and the kind of fact about whether I am 6 ft 3″ And treating them like the same kind of facts does not do justice to their differences.Report
One can say they are both natural facts while still saying they are different kinds of facts. If you are saying that one is a natural fact and another is not, then that is what you are saying, but if you are merely saying that they are different kinds of facts, then my saying that they are both natural facts needn’t be inconsistent with that. They could be different kinds of facts in another respect while both being natural facts.Report
Let me put this another way. When we think and talk about the natural world, the way we often use the word natural conjures up a picture in our head that in such a way that facts about math or morality doesnt fit easily with (if the fit at all). One way of cashing out the difference is that natural facts are appehended perceptually (i.e. we perceive them with our senses).
At the bottom, I may just be following philosophical convention when it comes to how I use natural and non-natural. But I do think that using the term natural to describe maths begs the question against a certain kind of platonic intuition. (This would be the case even if the intuition is ultimately unfounded)
The reason abstractions arent natural is because we commonly think natural facts are facts about things. But an abstraction is not a thing per se. Rather, an abstraction is very obviously a non-thing.Report
Yes, I’m with you here. I guess I think that either maths are true in a material way in the world (and, actually that they are something of a special case), or else maths aren’t constituted by facts at all, beyond their being electrochemical impulses in our brain. And I think it’s the latter – that maths aren’t facts except in that latter sense; that the facts are things that, we think, behave in ways that resemble the maths we’ve developed; there’s the stuff in the world, and we have our ideas, and those are all material things, but that mathematical “truths” aren’t facts as I understand facts, except just inasmuch as they are a patter of actual things behaving a certain way. “x=x” isn’t a fact; it’s just an idea that makes sense to us. So to the extent we have a semantic problem, I actually think it’s more around the word fact than natural.Report
So my distinction would be that facts necessarily have a degree of contingency, and indeed are necessarily material, whereas truths are simply true, whether because they are contingent but happen to be the case, or are necessary truths. My position is that I am agnostic about whether correct maths are true beyond the systems in which they’ve been developed, but that the abstract part of them are not “facts.”Report
I’d love to hear more views on this, however, in particular, Pat C.’s.Report
Michael, just read up on Godel. That should answer your questions about maths.Report
WS,
If all we do is read up on this or that, then there’s hardly any fun or interesting stuff to do here, is there? Let’s not be monks; let’s not even be scholars; let’s be bullshitters. Gödel had some ideas, but his aren’t the only ideas. What are your thoughts?Report
“HIgher-order levels of organization aren’t supernatural. That might be what God is, but in that case God isn’t supernatural.”
Maybe. But that depends on how we define supernatural. Again, if you are taking it to mean a dude in a robe and a crown, agreed. But it’s quite possible that some of these higher levels of organization are so complex as to be beyond human understanding and/or control. The reaction to that might be to create a field of study at a university to explore the limits. Another reaction might be to approach it from a literary point of view and name things differently.
I don’t believe in Zeus. But I think that Homer did a much better job of explaining and even predicting human behavior than many modern psychology textbooks do.
You might say, well, OK, but the idea that some god swept in and forced Achilles to do this is preposterous. There is no such thing as Mt. Olympus. As the basic premise is false, there is no there there.
I could counter, well, the basic assumptions of economics simplify to a preposterous degree. There is no such thing as the free market. As such, economics is false and there is no there there.
Of course, most basic econ courses begin with the demand for a leap of faith: Assumue the free market.
Assume the…
It’s the basic premise of any attempt to explain complex things.Report
There is no such thing as Mt. Olympus.
Then why does a google search give me tourist guides to it?
Yes I know what you mean but I’m in a particularly pedantic moodReport
Hacking the mind…
Actually that does seem like a good reason to take up religion. Of course we have to be careful about which religion we want to take up. We want to hack our minds in just the right kinds of ways.Report
I wouldn’t say religion can hack the mind. At best, religion just a framework upon which we can hang other important considerations. A person can be religious with no faith in God.
The mind is an illusion. It’s like pointing to the flame as if it didn’t emerge from the oxidation chemistry of the coals below. The sage points at the moon, the idiot looks at his finger. The mind is just a working construct, terribly imprecise, a sort of dashboard with terse symbols derived from staggering amounts of sensory input. If the mind is anything, it’s a set of bandpass filters to assist our decision making process, most of which happens below the level of conscious thought.
If you were a dog, say, with an olfactory sense roughly 100 times better than what you have now, your mind would reflect that additional input. Not only does the mind throw out most of the sensory input it’s given, there’s loads more information of which we’re unaware and can only approach through scientific instruments.
Our belief in God is an admission we’re a species in its infancy. What we’d consider human beings emerged a hundred thousand years ago. Five thousand years ago, we started in on culture and a thousand years ago, most people didn’t live long enough to know their grandchildren. A hundred years ago we worked out the theory of continental drift, ten years ago the International Criminal Court was established. Moore’s Law seems to apply to more than computers: it applies to this species. We’re progressing exponentially, not linearly.
And we still don’t know much about ourselves.
The search for God starts within yourself. Belief in God doesn’t mean you have to believe in spooks or the Big Guy Hurling Thunderbolts, Roasting the Asses of the Wicked in the Lake o’ Fire. Nature is super enough without the supernatural. As we have no explanations for ourselves, least of all our minds and their limitations, it seems a bit childish to carry on about religion as if it’s a disassembler for the programs of the brain. There are no programs beyond the active sites in our DNA and those seem to be a bit perverse, what with evolution and all that.Report
Roasting the Asses of the Wicked in the Lake o’ Fire
Why would God roast the asses instead if the wicked themselves. What did the ass do other than be a dumb if rather stubborn beast of burden? *grin*Report
A very good question. The wisdom of the Almighty is admittedly inscrutable. Thankfully, we have the likes of John Hagee and his brood of bigots to clarify matters somewhat on the subject of who God loves and who he doesn’t.Report
“I view religion essentially as a way of hacking the mind. Sort of like psychiatry, but with teeth.”
I really like this description, btw.Report
Oakland = No There there = The Supernatural
Calling Harold Camping, Calling Harold Camping . . .Report
I’d be very interested in this. I sort of feel similarly, in that I wish I had faith but don’t. I should say, though, that I’m one of those people who had some kind of religious belief until he started attending confirmation classes. By the time it came to the end of the course, what there had been was gone.Report
Tod, I’d say you have your answer by this point. I’m looking forward to your posts on the topic of religion.Report
CC – I’m actually working on it now. My hope is to do them on Saturdays, after having thought about what I learned the previous Sunday, and post them late Saturday or Sunday morning. I can’t tell you why, but having these be weekend posts seems important.Report