Religion and Philosophy
Jan. 18th, 2019 09:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
warriorinsideI'm blowing two holidays before the end of the fiscal year, so I took yesterday and today off, giving me a lovely five-day weekend with which to do as I please. Some of that please is what I need to do, and I'm okay with that. Welcome to adulting. It is what it is, and as long as you don't pour your whole life into it, responsibility is good.
But it also gives me some extra time to slow down and think. When I think, I sometimes journal, and this particular topic is worth noting down for the ages. This particular topic came out of a breakfast conversation with my dad yesterday morning. He is agnostic, and although I have dabbled in various religions, I adhere to none of them and come back to agnosticism.
Why?
Because I believe that the greatest truth is that the truth about the Divine is greater than all human comprehension. It's far beyond the ability of our conscious minds to grasp, to break down, to analyze, to understand. It's bigger than that. At some level, we understand and appreciate that it exists, and it may well be that what we term "Divine" is simply the collective soul of all of us, that ever has been and will ever be.
Organized religion -- all organized religion -- taps into this greater truth, and attempts to break it down using symbols into a thing that our conscious animal minds can understand. In the process of that breaking down, parts of the truth are lost, and it is up to the creators of the symbols what truths are kept as most important, and which ones are let go as unimportant. To say that any of them are unimportant is a fallacy, because they're all pieces of the puzzle that is the Divine.
Dogma is the result of these divine symbols being used to herd a population into compliance with societal requirements. These societal requirements are often benign, and many really are required for the survival of the society (e.g. racial propagation, ensuring that the population can be appropriately fed and provided for, preventing the spread of disease, etc.). Dogma gets silly when the requirement that engendered it no longer exists, and gets dangerous when it is intended to benefit one or a few instead of the society as a whole. The latter case, especially when adherents are not permitted to leave, becomes a cult, which I believe to be a corruption of the Divine.
I bet you're thinking, is it really fair or right to herd a population into compliance with societal requirements? My answer is this: it's not fair, but it is right because it is necessary for racial survival. Humans are not naturally equipped to survive on their own, but they do tend to be wired towards selfishness at the animal level - individual survival over racial survival. Left to our own devices, we tend to do what is best for ourselves and never mind everyone else. Child-rearing really is a pain in the you-know-what for humans, it's a commitment of approximately one-quarter of our lifespans. Given our choices and our educations, many of our best and brightest decide they'd rather do something else. This creates smaller populations in the future generations, with its attendant lack of genetic diversity, and with the fights over resources that break out when one person is acting solely in his own self-interest, eventually the population will become too small to sustain itself and will die out.
So, I do not subscribe to any one religion, because I do not subscribe to any one sect or philosophy having a corner on the truth. As my dad puts it, it's like the fable of the six blind wise men and the elephant. They all touch the same thing, but because they only interact with one part of it, they disagree on what it is. Each is simply a construct that attempts to describe a greater truth, and all of them fall short because the greater truth is beyond human ability to accurately represent or grasp. I do, however, subscribe to the idea that a greater truth does exist, and that if we want to survive as a society, we'd better start being nice to each other again.
But it also gives me some extra time to slow down and think. When I think, I sometimes journal, and this particular topic is worth noting down for the ages. This particular topic came out of a breakfast conversation with my dad yesterday morning. He is agnostic, and although I have dabbled in various religions, I adhere to none of them and come back to agnosticism.
Why?
Because I believe that the greatest truth is that the truth about the Divine is greater than all human comprehension. It's far beyond the ability of our conscious minds to grasp, to break down, to analyze, to understand. It's bigger than that. At some level, we understand and appreciate that it exists, and it may well be that what we term "Divine" is simply the collective soul of all of us, that ever has been and will ever be.
Organized religion -- all organized religion -- taps into this greater truth, and attempts to break it down using symbols into a thing that our conscious animal minds can understand. In the process of that breaking down, parts of the truth are lost, and it is up to the creators of the symbols what truths are kept as most important, and which ones are let go as unimportant. To say that any of them are unimportant is a fallacy, because they're all pieces of the puzzle that is the Divine.
Dogma is the result of these divine symbols being used to herd a population into compliance with societal requirements. These societal requirements are often benign, and many really are required for the survival of the society (e.g. racial propagation, ensuring that the population can be appropriately fed and provided for, preventing the spread of disease, etc.). Dogma gets silly when the requirement that engendered it no longer exists, and gets dangerous when it is intended to benefit one or a few instead of the society as a whole. The latter case, especially when adherents are not permitted to leave, becomes a cult, which I believe to be a corruption of the Divine.
I bet you're thinking, is it really fair or right to herd a population into compliance with societal requirements? My answer is this: it's not fair, but it is right because it is necessary for racial survival. Humans are not naturally equipped to survive on their own, but they do tend to be wired towards selfishness at the animal level - individual survival over racial survival. Left to our own devices, we tend to do what is best for ourselves and never mind everyone else. Child-rearing really is a pain in the you-know-what for humans, it's a commitment of approximately one-quarter of our lifespans. Given our choices and our educations, many of our best and brightest decide they'd rather do something else. This creates smaller populations in the future generations, with its attendant lack of genetic diversity, and with the fights over resources that break out when one person is acting solely in his own self-interest, eventually the population will become too small to sustain itself and will die out.
So, I do not subscribe to any one religion, because I do not subscribe to any one sect or philosophy having a corner on the truth. As my dad puts it, it's like the fable of the six blind wise men and the elephant. They all touch the same thing, but because they only interact with one part of it, they disagree on what it is. Each is simply a construct that attempts to describe a greater truth, and all of them fall short because the greater truth is beyond human ability to accurately represent or grasp. I do, however, subscribe to the idea that a greater truth does exist, and that if we want to survive as a society, we'd better start being nice to each other again.
