It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
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My Flaws Offered in Support of Your God-Realization
To be a "know-it-all" is a very unfortunate thing, and I should know, as this is a flaw which I have on many occasions exhibited. This should come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog, if there are any. What is harmful in this? Many things! I would like to draw particular attention to its role as an obstacle to overcoming ignorance - that is, to learning and growth. One must empty a cup of water before one pours tea into it, or one ends up, at best, with very weak tea, which is rather nasty.
Let us consider prejudice, for example. Racial prejudice, for example (leaving aside racism, which is a partially separate issue, involving emotional as well as cognitive features) prevents one from seeing the actuality of the person before one because of knowledge one supposedly already has about what that person is like. Here, not only learning and personal growith, but also meaningful relations with this actual person are prevented. "Knowing it all" about a person prevents one from aproaching the person from a stance of open ignorance and curiosity, and thereby learning who and what they really are.
Or, suppose one has many firmly fixed notions about economics - say, that unregulated free markets always lead to optimal results, due to the operations of the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith. Believing this may cause one to be uninterested in looking at the actual evidence available of how economic processes work, which may cause one to fail to observe mechanisms (such as the formation of monopolies, or the role of government in the national economy) which would be useful to understand, and ignorance of which may cause one to do great damage to the nation's political and economic life. "Knowing it all" about the economy prevents one from having the constructive sense of ignorance that would compel one to observe, to investigate, and in this way to determine what is actually going on. Even if the final result is that Adam Smith was right after all, one can hardly compare the position of one who knows this from independent and skeptical research to that of one who accepts it on faith and a priori argument. And one is bound to have learned something useful along the way.
Or, consider the notion of God. If one has a firmly fixed notion of what this word means, then one will never enjoy the privilege of undergoing the process of longing, questing, uncertainty, and doubt whereby one interrogates the world and the self to find out what the nature of the Ultimate Ground of Being actually is. One has to be able to ask, from one's blood and marrow, "What the Hell is going on?" before an answer like "God" can have any meaning. If, as some have suggested, the UGB is beyond the categories of human thought, and therefore directly contradicted by any definite characterization, then having a fixed conception of God would actually prevent one from ever coming to grips with God in any meaningful way. (Head small; world big!) And God help us if the notion of an UGB is, itself, incoherent!
Looking at most folks, it appears that God could knock at their door, and all they would say would be "Ah, yes, God - I know all about you!" And from such an encounter, nothing good can come - or at least, not without great trauma.
But whether God (or the UGB) turns out to be matter/energy, or a transcendent triphanic personal spirit, or a red herring after all, the significance of the answer is much deeper and much more richly understood for not having been held tightly - and in the form of a crude cartoon! - prior to the inquiry. And of course, if one was wrong to begin with...
And so, one might say that belief in God is the greatest imaginable obstacle to coming to know God. In the meanwhile, we can only agree that the end of our pursuits - the final answer to the final question - remains the Greatest of all Mysteries.
radicaldawg February 9, 2008 08:12 PM PST I got a white supremacist in one of my classes who whacked a kid across the back with a meter stick hard enough to raise welts and he only got three days. He and his toadies managed to convince the administration that the kid was asking for a whacking. I don’t know why they talked to his friends and not any of the friends of the black kid.
J f Z February 4, 2008 10:07 AM PST When I was a kid, I was a Mormon. It came about because the family I lived with most of the time was Mormon.
Each school year for four years, kids wake up early and go to an hour long class at the local church (ward) for religious studies. I think it starts around 8th grade. I can't remember.
One whole year is devoted to each text: old testament, new testament, book of mormon, and then doctrine and covenants. I stopped going to church at all when I was 15 or 16, so I didn't go the last year.
From what I've been told by Catholics, it's similar to a catechism school? Maybe a little more involved, I think. I know my public school teachers liked it because I was usually the only alert student in their first hour classes. What the hell, I'd been awake since 5am. Heh.
jeremiadist February 4, 2008 04:41 AM PST Wait - did you say "Mormon seminary"? Do tell!
jeremiadist February 4, 2008 04:40 AM PST JfZ - Great contribution, as usual. I may have coined "triphanic". It is not illegal, yet, to take charge of the language. I was referring to the Holy Trinity, seen as a unity of three theophanies - manifestations or self-revelations of God. So "triphanic" would mean "having three manifestations"...
I wouldn't wish a "McGod" on the Muslims; rather I would worry that what they often has is, in effect, a "McGod" of their own. Those tranistional steps you mention are indeed difficult - they took many generations of bitter struggle in the west, and have only partially succeeded here. Certainly, there have been Voltaires and Spinozas in the Islamic world, but they are mostly forgotten, suppressed, and demonized. But there are scattered glimpses of hope here and there. The current state of affairs is clearly making it worse, though, by promoting a siege mentality, which makes it easy to identify colonialism with modernization... Precarious times, these are.
J f Z January 31, 2008 03:53 PM PST Great article. I have to go look up "triphanic" -- although I have a sense of what that must mean in the Catholic godhead tradition. And my Mormon seminary taught of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
I just like new words though. Like, just now -- remembering the Mars rebels bar scene in the Paul Voehoeven movie, Total Recall, with Arnold Swartzenegger and Sharon Stone, the midget prostitute was trimammory.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100802/
What was I saying? Oh. God.
Yeah. It is interesting to compare the notion of being spoon-fed a concept of God since birth from your parents with simply striking out on that metaphysical void of self-discovery.
In current events, I think that's why Muslims are so touchy about depictions of Allah or their prophet, learning the Qu'ran in arabic, and clinging violently to the past -- or the origins of their faith.
They don't want a transformed and modernized McGod despite being the 3rd Abrahamic religion to come out of the Middle East.
Unfortunately, it is very uncommon for an individual person to empty their religious or spiritual glass handed down to them by their parents from any of the major religions that have been inculcated into the ethnic, social, and legal systems operating within the different nations all over the planet.
The challenge now is finding the transitional steps that will take place over the next few generations, if our species on the planet is to have some hope of survival.
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