End-of-School Reflections Friday, January 23, 2009 at 10:20 pm
I finished with school this past semester, in December, a semester short of the four-year norm. In short order, I will be going up to my beloved city of Seattle to start work in the post-college world. So, what have I learned over the past semester; and from what I know about my own past, what can I know about my future?
I didn’t share this with very many people, but since the past summer I’ve been on a dating ‘freeze.’ I dated very casually (and very briefly) about ten months ago – and nothing since that. My reason was this: I needed to figure out myself and my beliefs a bit more before getting into a relationship with someone else. Otherwise, it would be grossly unfair to him. This is not so much, as my roommate criticized me for, ‘waiting to figure out the mysteries of the universe before dating,’ but rather waiting to figure out what I am comfortable with concerning the mysteries of the universe before dating. Well, maybe he was right, but only by a little bit. In any case, as a result of the past semester I’ve tentatively lifted the ban on dating. Not that I think I’ll find anyone quick: a combination of my moral and religious views makes it virtually certain that there won’t be a very long waiting list.
I don’t think I’ve solved the mysteries of the universe. I’ve ruled out several answers and several bad heuristics to solving them. I’ve discovered what my own priorities are – I am, for example, much more dedicated to truth than to my own comfort, which is an easy and trite thing to say until the truth hurts you like a knife (but that’s when it stops being trite). I’ve also learned a great deal about psychological conditioning – the hard way. The good news is that as I’ve begun to sort all this out, and become more comfortable with sorting all this out, I’ve noticed significant – though gradual – improvements to my overall health (all stress-related issues). And even though I haven’t figured out ‘the mysteries of the universe,’ I think I’ve learned a lot about the process of figuring them out, and what is and is not reasonable, and the gulf between what is reasonable and what is possible. What a wide gulf it is. The details, I suppose, my close friends know.
I’m rather startled how arrogant some believers are (Albert Mohler, or even your typical evangelical), and astonishingly even some nonbelievers (hello, Richard Dawkins). Dawkins, if you’re unfamiliar with him, is a nonbeliever and damned proud of it you ignorant swine! I’m quite happy to let pride and certainty be the territory of the flagrantly religious (not that all religious people necessarily are prideful), and wouldn’t it be nice if instead humility and openness were elevated among the irreligious? Dawkins and his ilk don’t much help with that.
A lot of atheists have given atheists a bad rap. There are some atheists who say ‘There is no god or gods’ and others who say ‘There is no reason to believe in any known human system of god or gods.’ There is a world of difference – and hubris – between statements one and two. One is stating something that can never be actually proven and is therefore unreasonable; two is stating something that can be substantiated with good reasons, and is therefore reasonable. I actually have a half-baked ‘proof’ for the intractability of position one over two in my head. If it ever gets fully baked, I’ll post it. For the reasonable form of atheist, I’d suggest someone like Guy P. Harrison over against someone like Dawkins.
Similarly, a lot of Christians have given Christianity a bad rap. There are Christians who pretend that the (unobserved, unobservable) metaphysical realm is ‘obvious’ and the literary mess of the Bible is ‘clear.’ The interesting thing to me is that those who promote a ‘clear’ way of reading the Bible are generally the furthest away from the beliefs of the early Christians. They believe in things like penal substitutionary atonement and a tortured eschatology that includes the fabrication of the Rapture. I could even go on about original sin, which I can find no trace of in the New Testament, nor in the early church until Augustine invented it. As an alternative to some of the religious crazies (and, like the irreligious, no religious person is perfect), I’d suggest James Alison (my respect for whom has only grown) or even the blogger ‘Poser or Prophet’, or better yet a short list of personal acquaintances – I know, I need more literary points of reference here.
The rest of my life is not all that interesting – although one or another thing may have been exciting to me. I have been weightlifting with a vengeance. I did not meet my goal of putting on 20 lbs by the start of January. Rather, I had to settle for 13 lbs, but that is still much more than I’ve managed in the past. I’m pretty excited about it! I’m trying to figure out what my next goal should be, as I want to push a little beyond what I’ve been able to achieve so far – I just haven’t set a time-table because I’m in that uncertain time in-between college and post-college, and continuous access to a gym is a bit hard to have when you’re trying to live in two places at once, all while getting ready for the next big thing. But step one is to bulk up, and then somewhere around step four or five is summit Mount Rainier. Then step seven or so is hike Annapurna. I’ve realized that one big life goal of mine is to become some sort of cross between Bear Grylls and Ansel Adams: I don’t want to eat all the gross stuff Bear does, but I want to get off-trail more than Adams. But you will know when I am nearing perfection, because I will look more and more like Bear Grylls and my pictures will look more and more like Ansel Adams’s.
I have thought about this blog and what I want it to be. I have some writings I still want to put up – but more prose and story than out-and-out philosophy, as it’s such a pleasanter and more engaging read. The upside of moving to Seattle is all the hiking (and I am extremely happy about this), and there certainly will be lots of pictures. I have been eying a new camera and will almost immediately in the spring start looking at what gear additions I will need. But it’s come to my attention that when writing for this blog, there are three people I typically think of – one of whom I text my entire life to on an almost daily basis (and who I had the good pleasure of recently spending the weekend with); one of whom I don’t think really reads this (probably because he has a life), but I’ll be co-habiting the Emerald City with him; and one of whom I have managed to make myself a terribly infrequent pen-pal to (I promise to resume when I have an address again). All of these people (along with other friends who are not blog readers) I talk to and share a whole hell of a lot more heart with than I would ever put up here. So what is this place, if not for those pieces that I like and would like to share beyond a circle of good friends, and for photography? So I’d expect more of that, along with the typical infrequency, going forward.
Peace out, folks.
Well, you really can’t go wrong with Alison. I commend from personal experience having had the opportunity to hear him speak at Greenbelt and he happens to be a friend of a friend so I’ve had the privilege of having a long dinner with him in Soho. I’m also a fan of Maggie Dawn and the CoE inclusive crowd — very refreshing.
Good luck on the new journey you’re starting in Seattle. I know a number of lovely people there (including my best mate whom I miss terribly) and love the city. My partner spent much of his formative years there and someday, perhaps, we’ll end up there if not back home in the motherland.
Blessings,
Congratulations on finishing school!
I can understand your dating ‘freeze’. I’ve been on one since, well… 1987 (not counting my “girlfriends” in kindergarten and fourth grade) and the moratorium is still in place. Life has thrown me into some pits and I’ve dug a few holes of my own, so first I’ll get out of them before attending to the long line of guys clamouring to take me out
As for not solving the mysteries of the universe, don’t feel bad – you’re not the first to try and fail. And it’s a wise decision not to make it a prerequisite to dating. For some reason I imagine a Far Side cartoon with the father telling his daughter: “You can date, young lady, once you’ve solved the mysteries of the universe”. Hey, isn’t Gary Larson in Seattle? Or Tacoma or one of those other cities in Washington State that aren’t Seattle? You can go visit him and give him my idea. Perhaps we can get him out of retirement.
Why are you so astonished that some nonbelievers are arrogant? This is a Fox News Alert, Richard Dawkins is a prick. Actually, when I was about 15 and a staunch atheist I admired Dawkins. Perhaps that’s why I now view his style of atheism as so juvenile. I mean, other than the fact that it is juvenile.
Personally I find atheism immensely boring. There’s no there there. Even if you don’t have religion, I don’t see the point of being an atheist – just be irreligious.
The irreligious, like the religious, are not a monolithic block and never will be. Furthermore, atheism has no authority to make any demands or entail any sort of moral system. You can be an atheist and be a “secular humanist” and you can be an atheist and be a Nazi. If you don’t have religion, why would you associate with other people who don’t, as if you had anything else in common with them? Do I go out and seek all the other people who don’t like vegetables and try to make that the basis of a moral system? Yeah, that’s a bad example, but it’s late so it’ll have to do.
Also, many religious people, perhaps even the most religious people are humble and open. I don’t think attributing negative traits to people of faith and positive traits to atheists, or vice versa, is particularly meaningful.
A lot of just about every X have given X a bad rap. For instance, a lot of rappers have given rap a bad rap. (Have I mentioned it’s late?)
I went to his site. I’d heard of that book before, so I went to Amazon and read the list of 50 reasons. Some of them struck me as so ridiculous that I question whether anyone with even a modicum of intelligence has ever seriously given them as a reason for believing in God. Others, of course are much more common (would you care to wager, Monsieur Pascal?).
Some, such as
are statements which are true or reasonable enough, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that one should believe in God.
Others apply only to certain religions. Not just the obvious (“my god sacrificed his only son for me”) but also: “better safe than sorry”, “I want eternal life”, “I don’t want to go to Hell”. Not all religions prescribe any particular beliefs regarding the afterlife.
What I found interesting is that not one of the 50 appeared to me any reason to believe in God or any religion. And yet, I do struggle with complicated questions of faith. Perhaps that’s the keyword here – faith. I don’t think that was one of the 50 reasons. Of course faith is not subject to empirical investigation, and it’s a very problematic and unsatisfying reason.
I don’t know much about your background but I’d imagine that, apart from dealing with two different religions, our struggles with faith are also different in that I do not come from a religious environment and have only ever examined faith from the outside, trying to see if I could find a way in. I suppose what eventually led me from my staunch atheism to all this soul-searching was the realization that atheists often portray a caricature of religion and that my understanding of it was rather shallow. As a then-atheist I could appreciate Judaism’s vigorous opposition to idolatry and I gradually noticed that the concept of religion I was so opposed to was in fact idolatrous manifestations of it. Rejecting idols is one thing, accepting God is another (even though in the Talmud we find that “he who rejects idolatry is called a Jew”).
It doesn’t help also that my religious views (if they can be called that) were largely shaped by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whose conception of faith is at once so simple and yet so difficult to embrace. And I’m still left with so many questions; questions that, following Leibowitz, are irrelevant to faith.
As for Bear Grylls – he’s cute, even though some of that stuff is staged apparently. I’m off to Britain soon, not exactly Bear Grylls territory, but even staying in a hostel will be a new adventure. You gotta start somewhere.
Ophir,
Well you certainly win the award for ‘longest comment.’ (Well, perhaps, I haven’t gone back and checked the conversations that various ex-gay folk had with me regarding homosexuality, but for argument’s sake, let’s say yours is the longest.)
For the first matter, I most assuredly do not ‘feel bad’ for not solving the mysteries of the universe – I did not (do not, will not) think that I am capable of solving them. The phrase ’solving the mysteries of the universe’ was a (friendly) jab directed at me from my roommate (whom I get along rather well with, if only because we’re both cynical). However, it made me chuckle, and so I included it.
As to atheism, I think your concept of atheism and mine are very different – that is, your suggestion to not be an atheist but just be irreligious strikes me as almost being nonsense – because, no doubt we are defining our terms differently. Let me explain my concept of atheism. Atheism is unbelief – in a specific sense to a particular deity or deities (e.g., I imagine you are an atheist with respect to Thor and Zeus), in general with respect to any deity (that one knows of). Jews and Christians were called ‘atheists’ by the Greeks and Romans. Why? Because they did not believe in the Graeco-Roman gods. What are today’s atheists? Certainly there are those who define themselves by what they reject, but there are others who are atheists not because of their vitriol against the cultural gods (or in our case, God) but because they are without belief in them. If you do not believe in a god (not a theist), you are really an a-theist. This was the point of my attempt to differentiate between ‘hard atheism’ and ’soft atheism’ (which I’m fine calling agnosticism). One can be an irreligious theist easily enough – a good friend of mine falls into this category – but irreligiosity and atheism are two separate planes.
Secondly, your claim that atheism has no authority to make moral claims is technically correct: but then again, neither does theism have authority to make such claims. Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” is an excellent experiment in a world where God exists – and is evil. Saying ‘there is a god’ does not necessarily entail ‘he is to be followed.’ There have been Christian humanists and Christian Nazis, and we can argue endlessly about which were ‘true’ to their faith, but it only goes to prove that claims of goodness and claims of godhood are, again, separate planes.
On to Guy Harrison: it is rather unfair to judge his book by reading the table of contents on Amazon. As he describes in the opening, these are the 50 commonest responses he’s received from discussions with religious peoples of varying backgrounds. Some are specific to certain religions – but so what? It is not a high-falootin’ attempt at philosophy. In my experience, Harrison is very close to dead-on about the responses people give. Even the most intellectual religious people I know, in conversations about the nitty-gritty empirical claims of their religion, typically retreat to one or more of the reasons that Harrison lists. Harrison does address Pascal’s wager in the chapter on ‘I don’t lose anything by believing in my god’ – and I agree with him, Pascal’s wager is far from high philosophy and far from reasonable. (Thankfully, I don’t hear it given often by religious adherents.) And he does address the concept of faith, as well, in piecemeal across the book, because it underlies most of the 50 responses given. Harrison does non disprove the existence of any god – he manifestly says he cannot, but also claims there is no reason to believe in them. I think you’ve unfairly judged the man and his literature based off a page on Amazon, without attempting to truly engage his point-of-view, but only to respond against him. Maybe I misread you – the internet is easy for doing that sort of thing.
In conclusion, I think our ’struggles with faith’ (though I dislike that phrase) are indeed quite different: I am an empiricist, and if religion makes claims about the nature of universe, these claims, or at least some of them, ought to be validated before the religion is accepted. Some atheists do portray a caricature of religion; and so do some theists portray a caricature of atheism. Crazy people abound in the world. But there is reasonable and unreasonable faith, and I believe that truth-claims can and ought to be tested against reality.
PS: I hope I don’t come across as harsh. I just tend to be direct in online communication.
I just spent a great deal of time writing and thinking-out a response to many of the points you made, only to encounter an error message when I previewed and then when I went back – all the content lost.
This, clearly, is a sign that there is no God.
First off, don’t be afraid of being direct with Ophir. I believe he’s pretty direct himself.
I hope he won’t mind me saying so.
I very much enjoyed this post and I do hope that the transition to the Emerald City goes well (of course, you have already lived there twice so it’s not as big a deal as it could be). Good luck on your goals. I am very impressed with the 13 pounds! I may just be inspired enough to go to the gym myself. This coming from the guy that just formed a chocolate club at work. I sincerely hope that Annapurna is a joke. Please don’t die on a mountain.
Ditto on the dating freeze. While I am now open to the possibility of a relationship I was not seeking one until I hashed things out for myself. Like you, I am at a place where I know my stance on some things, but that has made the list of potentials almost non-existent.
Yes, I can be a bit direct at times. But I enjoy discussion and healthy argument, so I don’t mind strong words.
I’m assuming you’re the Joseph I think you are. Who else would form a chocolate club at work?
Hey, guess what I’ll be having when I’m in England. Lots and lots of Cadbury’s. I love Cadbury’s!
One quibble — Original Sin isn’t really all that clear a term. I used to think it referred to one specific idea, but recently I’ve realized that people seem to use it for just about *every* result of Adam’s sin, or for the notion that humans are inherently flawed and sinful beings (ex: the famous quote about Original Sin being the only Christian doctrine that can be empirically proven, and yet the one most frequently denied.) Obviously Augustine invented the idea that a newborn baby is guilty of sin thanks to Adam, and I’m sure that one ranks really high on the list of stupidest doctrines ever, but would you say that the rest of it was also new?
Hope you have a great time in Seattle!
Abigail: I didn’t realize Original Sin covered everything else, too. No, I’d say the rest of it, or at least much of the rest of the results of ‘the Fall’ (death entering mankind from Adam’s sin, for example) was not new – just Augustine’s invention of sin from inception. Thanks for clearing that up; I didn’t realize the term had a range of meanings.
These are some great thoughts. Congrats on the weight lifting and the weight gain. I have to admit, though, that it’s almost weird to hear someone who has a goal of gaining weight. Most of us are trying to go in the other direction.