Do you think you've got God in your pocket? Or are you just happy to see me?
One of the things I like about new agers is that at least they aren't authoritarian. There are worse things than to wander lost in a morass of answer-lessness. Other types of theists believe that their god has spoken to us. A being that gets answers wrong is not god, by definition. Therefore the human follower of a very talkative deity (such as the three major monotheisms) has got all the answers. They don't see it this way, but I would feel compelled to admit this if I were one of them. If Perfection Personified existed, and were to communicate to me and you, then we would indeed have all the answers and should not be shy about it. They would also be precisely the same answers. Therefore if you have a different answer, you are lying about what Perfection Personified has said and should be punished. I'm convinced that a dogmatic regime of authoritarian control and oppression would be the only right and acceptable choice if there did exist Perfection Personified. Fortunately for the human race, there is no such higher power.
I suspect I've discovered one of the major reasons people feel so threatened when the topic of religion is broached. As a social creature, I want to establish relationships. Relationships of any kind involve shared choices. So, I know when I meet a new person that I might have a conflict with them to mediate in the future, or I might wish to interact with them for business, learning or enjoyment; I have to get them to do what I want. There are only four ways: persuasion, coercion, deception and emotional distraction. Many people will want to know if I share their faith in the infallibility of their holy book. I want to know if they are willing to reason. Without a common basis from which to persuade, the only remaining option is violence or deception. Does it come as any surprise that the reaction is fear? The instinctive gut reaction of a bible-inerrantist to an atheist is "is this a sociopath?" because the only valid argument to them is one provided by their god's book, the source of all truth, which the atheist doesn't recognize. Similarly my own instinctive reaction when I hear a new-ager say "what's true for you may not be true for me" is to wonder, ever so briefly in the most primordial part of my brain, if they are criminally insane, because what means would there be to fall back on, with which to resolve conflicting desires, if reason were a farce? All that would be left would be the barrel of a gun.
Of course they're no more criminally-insane sociopaths than I am. For the most part, people only tend to let themselves off the hook of reason when it doesn't hurt anybody.
Comments
matt-arnold on Jun. 21, 2004 10:07 AM
The above post begs for an explanation of what got me thinking about this. Many influences have converged. I've been reading a lot of Greg Egan lately. One of his major themes is his intense fear and loathing of postmodernism. I realized that in this respect he's the transhumanist equivalent of the Christian author Frank Peretti. Peretti is a dogmatist, but he mostly agrees with me about what he terms "the New Age." He agrees with postmodernist new-agers, to believe in the false dilemma that we must either cling to closed-minded dogma or else there is no such thing as reality.
Peretti's stories depict a paranoid "satanic-panic" world of "spiritual warfare" in which demons and angels lurk everywhere and are pulling all the strings. The followers of the demons are covens of secret witches who are conspiring to murder infants and persecute Christians. It reads almost like a Chick tract in its absurdity. The mid-to-late twenty-first century that Greg Egan depicts is one where protests and acts of violence against science are common, academics, literature and art have been destroyed from within, and new-age holistic confidence games are so prevalent they actually cast down real medicine and cost lives. These bogeymen seem just as realistic to me as the witches did ten years ago-- this seems a little paranoid on my part. I have to wonder if there really exist any such postmodernists except for a few college sophomores who are going to think differently in six months. So, I began to wonder about why there is this reaction of fear, and hence the above post.
brendand on Jun. 22, 2004 9:16 AM
All that would be left would be the barrel of a gun.
Murder or suicide? (That is the question.)
matt-arnold on Jun. 22, 2004 10:15 AM — Murder or Suicide? That Is the Question.
Murder or suicide? (That is the question.)
Brendan,
The most famous example I can think of is Al Qaeda. They accept the teachings of Muhammed such as the Quran as infallible. I don't accept that as valid authority. 'Tis nobler in the mind to practice reason, which a biblical-inerrantist regards as a kind of superfluous post-it-note stuck onto revelation. They will usually try to defeat reason and show it to be invalid and useless, as in the book of Muslim apologetics I picked up for free at my local library.
(Until then I didn't know Islam even had apologists. They did a pathetic job compared to the Christians but I am totally confident they'll improve their arguments with time, and I can already think of ways to do so by borrowing from the Christian apologists. But I'm not going to volunteer that information! Thank goodness the competing religions hate reading each other's books!)
Since we would each offer arguments only from a foundation that the other rejects as invalid, the only alternative is what you see today-- those who accept the reason of human minds are in a fight to the death with those who accept divine revelation. If only by taking arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, we could end them-- but I expect it will just go on forever and there's nothing to be done for it.
Well, as for me if somebody aims a gun at me and demands I merely recite passages of the Quran or shuffle off this mortal coil, as we recently saw in the mass murders in Saudi Arabia, I'll generally do what they want, and suffer such slings and arrows of this outrageous fortune until the crisis is over. I admire Galileo's example far more than that of a martyr. But Al-Qaeda's demands involve more than recanting with empty words, because beliefs have consequences in the way people behave, and biblical inerrancy is no exception. The political Islamists demand authoritarian control over the world for the reasons I described at the start of this thread.
But before any Christians start smiling too much while reading this, don't forget how much Christian Supremacism exists in America. The attitude of fundamentalist Christians toward the separation of church and state-- in which the state's laws are answerable to their religion, but the other major faiths are allowed to freely practice in the privacy of their churches-- is indistinguishable from that of modern Iran and the ancient Islamic nations. In fact, over the centuries Muslims have traditionally placed much more emphasis on practices than did the Christians, who emphasized belief in doctrine. As long as you were "rightly guided," meaning public obedience to Sharia law, your private beliefs were often considered your own problem. So ironically, by the standard I'm hearing from Christian Supremacists, these nations qualified as having "religious freedom" before America did.
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