Natural Community

Puzzle Pieces as they Fit

We all share human needs. If I may be so bold, our greatest needs are not physical, but precisely, inescapably that—human.

Within the church, much is made of man’s spiritual needs. Yet everything that we consider spiritual is expressed through human interaction, and nothing else affects us so viscerally. The joy offered by lifeless objects can never exceed the joy experienced with, or through, others. The threat of pain from nature can never exceed the threat of pain from others.

My interactions with people from all walks of life—however wide or narrow one may judge them to be—have led me to a conclusion that I can only express as a personal experience. My conclusion is that there are few places on earth more conducive to the formation of friendship, community and real human relationship, than the church.

If I had not been raised in the church, I would have never imagined what goes on inside. Indeed, a great deal of what goes on in Sunday morning church is unrelated to what’s really going on (although that’s another story in its own right). To all appearances, people file in and out of dusty buildings on a Sunday, and then they go home and live like everyone else. I couldn’t have suspected that the types of relationships that come out of those buildings—some of them—are unlike any I have ever seen in my life.

I’ve never felt the need to collect all the anecdotes and write them down in one place. They’re in my journal, they’re in my memories, and they’re in the memories of those who were there. The church brings people together who would otherwise never have been in the same place, at the same time. It transcends barriers of age, race, and personality that few other milieus can even attempt to overcome. Together, these people end up playing basketball, singing (in many cases, learning to sing), making side-splitting jokes, and causing a whole lot of unconventional scenes in unconventional places, confusing innocent bystanders so thoroughly that they would never guess the truth.

The so-called memetic critique of Christianity tells us not to be surprised that it is widespread. Such a religion is likely to reproduce copies of itself, since it contains instructions to pass itself on, and it offers things that people have trouble finding in other places. But I don’t have a problem with this, because it’s barely a critique at all. Why should we characterize the natural community of the church as ulterior motivation for religious belief? If the church offered cash incentives to newcomers, that would be one thing. But natural community is hopelessly intertwined with the beliefs of the church—if we find it there, it is not simply an explanation of why people “actually” go to church, as if it were guaranteed to arise in any crowd of people believing any number of things! No, it is evidence (at least some of the time) that what they believe is working.

Good ideas are widespread because they’re good ideas, and equally likely to survive in the minds of those who hear them. The real critique lies in the implication that, in the case of Christianity, the reasons for its prevalence are completely unrelated to the reasons people are expected to believe it. This may be true—but then again, maybe it’s precisely the type of evidence that some people are looking for.

The public does not generally perceive the Christian church in the way that I describe it. However, public perceptions are the product of a relatively narrow collection of sound bytes and newspaper clippings. I’ve found few traces of the fabled church that the public believes in. While the façade may be there, some prodding with a sounding pole reveals that the people within are not governed by these appearances. Some of the church’s problems are very real, and I wouldn’t dream of denying that. But those problems—the alleged intolerance, hypocrisy, and so forth—are more like subplots and overtones. They do exist, but (ironically) primarily in the form of memes, rather than in the form of people. The effect is generated on a macroscopic scale because of the accumulating contributions from individual people, none of whom are aware of the true effect that they are producing. All this is beside the point, however. What matters is that in at least some of these places, amazing things happen. People belong, in ways that they would never have otherwise belonged.

Observers go sour when something works that they feel ought not to work. As a result, religion has often been called a crutch for the weak-minded. Such insight! Could they fail to see that medication is a crutch for the weak-bodied, cars are crutches for the weak-legged, and love letters are a crutch for the weak-hearted? I have never seen a broken man walk without his crutches in order that he might better heal.

When the cold analysis is over, it remains that even if I renounced everything I ever believed, I wouldn’t want to leave the church. They wouldn’t kick me out, and unlike a cult, they wouldn’t make me stay. And that plays a small part in what I believe in the first place.

Why I Believe in God

It is often said that we cannot reason our way to God, because he requires a leap of faith from us. I believe this applies strongly to Christianity, but less so to a belief in God. There are many reasons why I believe in God, where by God, I refer to a being that is responsible for everything that exists, possessing some form of consciousness.

By believing that there is a God, I subscribe to the belief that others “should” believe similarly. However, I do not claim to have the reasons that others may ask for; I have only my own, of which a portion can be put to words.

Instinct

My first instinct is to believe that God exists. All doubt and skepticism follows thereafter.

The Conventional Arguments

The major arguments concerning the existence of God have been carefully catalogued and endlessly debated. I see no reason to repeat them in my own words. The potency of an argument, per se, is not diminished by the number of minds who have pondered it. I find the conventional arguments—the moral argument, the cosmological argument, and so forth—more sound than their counterpoints.

The remaining reasons are those which I have either failed to recognize as conventional, or which I consider sufficiently distinct in my own mind to warrant expression in my own words.

The Separation of Essences

We have not yet unraveled the nature of the universe, but we do know that it is composed of extremely small particles, or even vibrating strings. These building blocks of reality, suspended in space, behave in strange and absurd ways. With increasing complexity at every scale, they produce the universe that we experience—an experience so far removed from its physical nature that one must entertain the possibility that this experience was intended. I should highlight the subtlety that constitutes my point; I recognize that it could be argued that our experience of the universe is apparently fascinating simply because we are a product of it. What I mean to draw attention to is the distance between the fundamental nature of reality, and the reality that we experience. There is indeed a yawning gap between the experiences that make up our lives, and the mechanisms that make them possible. Furthermore, science indicates that if the building blocks of the universe are not all identical, they are certainly far more similar to each other than the variety of experiences available to us in daily life.

The pixels on a digital display are quite simple, projecting red, green and blue. That thousands of them are capable of displaying a coherent image, however, leaves little doubt as to their purpose. The pixel’s very function is to produce the image; its individual properties are unimportant, except inasmuch as they achieve this.

Consider the universe, which can be accessed only through a mind. A mind is the most basic thing that exists which, in turn, can allow us to speak about existence. Yet minds do not exist, so far as we know, in places where the individual properties of particles are similar in form to what is experienced by the mind. The manner in which such a simple foundation has spiraled upwards into things infinitely more complex—things such as love, life, and happiness—is unfathomable. Our lives are redolent of intent; they appear as things that should not exist if natural law did not have them in mind.

Consciousness

In the midst of a universe filled with nebulae and star dust, something exists that is wholly distinct from matter: consciousness. There is no explanation for consciousness, and we are no closer to one than we ever have been in the past. There is no mechanistic reason why there should be an experience underlying some forms of physical matter, rather than others. Even more intriguing, it simply must be a discrete phenomenon: it is absurd to speak of half a consciousness, however confused or dull its experience may be. There will never be a true scientific account of consciousness, because no matter how many correlations are established between phenomena, something so fundamental—the existence of an experience, where one could just as easily lack—cannot be explained mechanistically by outside observers. The only other puzzle that can claim this special status is the existence of the universe itself.

Still more confusing is the fact that I am able to speak about this phenomenon, indicating that some aspect of the secret must exist physically, within my brain. This is indeed strange, and it may be the reason that some materialist philosophers effectively suggest that we, as conscious minds, do not even exist. But upon what ground can we stand, in making such a statement? If we are going to deny this, we had best give up thinking about anything, while we still have a chance.

Atheists may ask what consciousness has to do with God. Some have suggested that the connection is a false one, as if it is based only upon the idea that God (like consciousness) is mysterious. This is a straw man, as the connection is far more profound than that. It would seem that at the beginning of the universe, there was no consciousness–only matter. Furthermore, it seems natural that matter should beget matter, and if we are able to trace matter back to the beginning of all things, we may be satisfied upon reaching the limits of scientific inquiry. However, how shall consciousness—the subjective experience of a sentient entity, and wholly distinct from matter—arise from matter, if no consciousness preceded it?

It is true that we may be at a loss to explain what happens at the end of a causal chain. We may not know how something can have “always been there,” or why. We do know, however, that like begets like. It stands to reason that sentience begets sentience. I cannot accept that we, limited as we are, should represent the highest order of sentience, which is the highest order of all things, in that it contains everything else—that the true antecedent of sentience could be nothing more than physical matter, which itself owes the thingness of its very existence to the perception of a sentient mind.

Reliance upon Appearances

Reality extends beyond the borders of sanity. This much is true. What we regard as sanity relies upon a highly constrained and narrow-minded way of thinking. If ever we allow our thoughts to roam freely, we are set adrift in a world where nothing is comfortable, and nothing has continuity or coherence. This is very troubling. I have no choice but to accept that there is an indefinite number of interpretations that we may give to reality, and that sanity is only a small subspace of the grand realm of thought.

Sanity, however, is not arbitrary. It is reality, cast in the light that is most natural. Where infinitely many interpretations are permissible, I choose the strongly implied one. I choose the interpretation wherein the universe is, in reality, what it most appears to be. This interpretation gives rise to the idea of God, because God is intimately connected to how things appear to be (if he were not, we would not need subtle or complex explanations to explain him away). Only a third party, such as God, can give objective value to the non-physical ideas that naturally appear real to us. Most people would agree with this, for the modern riposte is to suggest that things are not as they appear—that we see a spiritual realm where there is, in fact, nothing.

Yet it is not sensible to deconstruct and demythologize our experience to the point that we must embrace insanity. In order to successfully deconstruct the universe, we would need to deconstruct the presumptions that we have used to deconstruct it in the first place. Science is founded upon appearances, not upon science itself, and the statement that all true knowledge is scientific knowledge is not scientific. If it were shown that everything in my life were “merely” the sum of a great many stochastic nothings, I may lose my sanity. But then, I would only be losing my sanity because I had internalized the gravity of such concepts as “merely,” which are (merely) the same appearances that I hold dear.

Inevitable Dualities

It would appear that you cannot have anything—not even a piece of crumbly, apple pie—without a separation between what is, and what is not. In the beginning, it is said that there was a division between matter and antimatter. Though we see very little of the antimatter, we are convinced that it’s out there, surrounded as we are by its doppelgänger.

We notice that everything for which we have invented a word can be defined by its opposite, or by its absence. As such, it seems that if the entire universe were bereft of meaning (and I will borrow the words from Lewis, here) we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.

Everything that we know to exist, then, exists only because we recognize its absence, or opposite. How can we suggest that God does not exist because the world contains evil, or because the world is too meaningless? If there were no evil, we would not know of good, and we would not know that we had been spared of evil. If nothing were meaningless, we could not know meaning. On the contrary, meaninglessness allows us to experience meaning, and suggests—as nothing else could—that meaning exists.

Additionally, when we find a separation in the world between some thing and its opposite, we may interpret this as God having intentionally conveyed this knowledge upon us. Not only is it possible to distinguish between something called “good” and “evil,” but we are privy to such distinction, as not all living things are. In and of itself, this is not evidence that God exists, but it is consistent with the assumption that he does. It is hard to imagine why God would introduce evil into the world, but it is less difficult to imagine why the dualities we experience were worth splitting open for us.

Waking Life

We know the difference between dreaming and waking because waking feels more real than dreaming. We can imagine our dreams from the waking world, but we cannot similarly imagine the waking world from our dreams.

The moments that feel most real to me—the moments when my mind is sharp, and my experience seems to have sense and depth—are also the moments when I am most aware of those human experiences that we associate with God.

The Two-Way Mirror

A personal experience of mine (though it hardly qualifies as convincing evidence), is the feeling that my mind is a two-way mirror. It has always seemed to me that someone must listen to my thoughts. I do not know why I feel this way, and even if it is true, I do not know how this truth evidences itself. Perhaps it is because I would find it strange if I could experience a quale without having it stamped and verified by an outside observer. There is no demonstrable proof that there are not infinite sets of interlocking qualia that correspond, harmoniously, with my actions and perceptions. Without an observer in here, where I am, who is there to agree that I experience what I do, rather than some other thing?

The Unexplained

I am averse to the word “supernatural,” as I would prefer to call anything that exists “natural.” If there is a God, and if there are events that defy conventional explanations, we would nonetheless expect some form of mechanism behind them, making them no less natural to us than television would be to the ancients.

In any case, it seems clear that all across the world, there are unexplained incidents that we might call supernatural. Most of them can be debunked, but many resist simple explanations. I have heard innumerable first, second, and third-hand accounts of things that cannot be explained away without resorting to hand-waving of the highest order. The things I would need to assume, in order to explain away all such events by conventional science, are far more fantastical than the simple assumption that something exists beyond our present understanding. Furthermore, it stands to reason that this “something” involves some form of intelligence, or consciousness. I say this because it does not make sense that a firestorm of terribly unlikely events should conspire to create the illusion of a single intentional one. Many unexplained phenomena take place within specific contexts, having specific meanings to those who witness them. It may suffice to connect these phenomena to the human brain, but not to a collection of errant subatomic particles.

I will either be convinced that an incident has a conventional explanation, or I will take it as evidence of God’s existence. I will not take anything as evidence of a strange and unregulated spiritual reality, because I cannot accept a spiritual reality that is arbitrary. If souls are reincarnated, who decides their fate? Who made these souls? What happens to ghosts after they finish their unfinished business? Many of the oft-reported supernatural incidents lack an overarching structure, and I can only assume that they are shadows of something having structure, if I am convinced that any of them have occurred at all.

The Necessarily Existing Thing

I am uncertain if the following is only a re-framing of the ontological argument, but I will proceed with it nonetheless.

When we consider what exists, we consider that its nonexistence is a real possibility. There are many things that we can dream up, yet they do not exist. Why, then, does this particular world exist? We cannot draw upon natural law to explain this, because natural law is only the observation that things continue to exist, following from one another in somewhat predictable patterns. If the universe were to go out of existence in the next moment, we would be at a loss for an explanation. Thus, since not all things exist, there must be something special about the things that do, which gives them their being. It follows that something, wherever it may be, exists absolutely necessarily.

While it is impossible to determine why something should have this quality of necessity, it seems quite arbitrary to suppose that the universe itself might possess this. Why, of all the universes one can imagine, should this one have special treatment? Similarly, we cannot imagine how our minds should have such necessity, for there is evidence of our nonexistence prior to birth. The thing we seek is the thing that, if removed from any of our imagined worlds, would cause them to crumble. The only thing that could possess such a quality, and always have possessed it, is a thing that we would do best to call God. It is the thing that is most closely approximated by our minds upon the mention of the word God.

Accepting this, however, provides only a vague picture of a largely unknown God that even weak atheism may be comfortable with.

Beauty and Intuition

I am not much for seeking relics of God’s existence in the sand. I do not overturn rocks, looking for his signature, and I do not hope that science will discover something so thoroughly odd that it simply must be ascribed to God, as opposed to the plain old universe we live in. I recognize that there is no universe to compare with our own, in order that we might discuss how strongly our universe implies the existence of a God. Sometimes, however, I will entertain a little of the thinking that sparks such thoughts.

One may say that flowers are only beautiful because we have evolved in such a way as to find them beautiful. I am not certain it’s so simple. Though I cannot prove it, I believe we are able to reach beyond our moorings and make statements about the true beauty of things. There are many objects of beauty that we were never exposed to until technology, exploration or abstraction granted us permission. We do not stand in awe of all these things solely because of their intrinsic similarity to flowers or rainbows, which we have been exposed to since the beginning. In fact, there is no compelling reason why we should have developed a true appreciation for flowers, rainbows or beauty at all—if there were, however, we would still be forced to recognize that the appreciation extends beyond a mere affinity, and into the realm of higher thought. Such thoughts of beauty cannot be divorced from our ability to think higher thoughts in general, which have produced all the conclusions we have ever made. Therefore, it is not so difficult to believe that the beauty is actually there. And, as beauty is useless without a beholder, it is not so difficult for me to believe that God is responsible for it, unappreciated as it was until now.

Schatten des Zeitgeists

The Dark Corners of the Age

People are not aware that they are living in a particular historical period, having particular qualities. This is how I remember the words of my professor on that blustery fall day. He was a historian, this was my free elective, and the subject was technology and war.

As I descended the stairwell of Victoria College, I reflected on this. The professor had intended to help students understand the mindset of people who lived in the past. At that moment, however, I was struck by the implications that it had for my actions in the present. Everything that I was experiencing would one day be recreated in writing, theatre and cinema. A university student, just after the turn of the millennium, descends a stairwell with books in hand. He wears blue jeans and a red sweater. He carries no electronic devices, which, even for his time, is strange.

When looking back on our time, we might speculate as to how future historians will view our technology (and our wars). I believe, however, that we do not ask ourselves often enough how they will view the Zeitgeist. We do not think of ourselves as westerners living just after the turn of the millennium, because the future is not available to us. Furthermore, we view the past as inferior to the present, imagining that things have only changed for the better. As a result, the Zeitgeist is largely unchallenged; the predilections and biases of the time reign supreme. The assumptions ingrained in our present-day thinking are the finest that have ever existed—we soon forget that they were ever assumed.

Throughout our lives, we challenge many ideas before we accept them. There are, however, times when we encounter an idea that is so universally accepted that we do not make a fuss. We presume that it must have been properly challenged at some point in the past. Some of these ideas are demonstrable and self-evident; others are simply universally accepted. These latter ideas are the assumptions of the age.

It is not impossible for a modern observer to notice the quirks of our culture. In example, many have identified the damaging and widespread trends of consumerism. I believe that this, however, is tied to an underlying attitude that is far more pervasive. It is the only attitude that I wish to write about at the moment—the belief that the individual has an inviolable right, even an obligation, to fulfill, and freely pursue, his or her personal desires.

Whether or not we individually accept this in private, it shows in our actions as a society. We have been destroying the environment, but we are not likely to change the public behaviour by asking them to voluntarily exercise restraint. Our best hope is to point out that we will soon be depriving ourselves. The divorce rate is extraordinarily high, with “irreconcilable differences” frequently cited. The cause, however, is often the possibility of somebody else who appears more reconcilable. The birth rate has plummeted, but it is not because we are concerned about overpopulation; it is because children do not always make a net positive contribution to the happiness (and freedom) of the individual. We make tongue-in-cheek movies about punching the boss or burning down the office, but we really would like to do some of these things, if they were not punished. Whether our satisfaction is commensurate with the long-term impact on the boss is irrelevant. If it feels good, do it, even if you shouldn’t—don’t let people mess you around.

Religion will fall out of fashion in any society in which the aforementioned assumption prevails. If it is already falling out of fashion, it will fall out of fashion more quickly. The Christian faith has nothing but bad news for an individual who lives this way, much less sees it as a moral obligation. Worse than requiring its adherents to abandon such attitudes, it asks that that they freely abandon it, as if the choice is theirs. How many of us, in this part of the world, and at this time in history, have retained any concept of sacrifice that has not been forced upon us? At best, we may be willing to make major sacrifices that accomplish something heroic (the kind you see in the movies). At worst, we may be willing to make insignificant sacrifices that we are properly recognized for.

I once learned of a simple paradox: in a place where there are two roads running between two places, it is theoretically possible to build a third road between these same two places, with the result that everyone goes slower. Of course, this is not really a paradox—it occurs because each individual person travels the quickest route, until all the routes have the same travel time (thus eliminating the need to switch routes). There is no guarantee that adding a road will reduce this universal travel time. In order for the entire system to run at peak efficiency, it would be necessary for some cars to travel suboptimal routes. Of course, this would work out in the long run, since the people traveling suboptimal routes would be regular users of the same system that they are optimizing. Yet in the absence of social pressure, who will willingly choose a disadvantaged route? In my view, selfishness is only one of many crimes committed on behalf of today’s Zeitgeist—but it is no small matter. Even our efforts to be unselfish have become self-centred. Their chief aim is the preservation of self-righteousness, rather than the benefit of others.

One might assume that I have written this in order to posit God as a solution to human selfishness. This would be oversimplified; I do not believe in God merely because it is a pragmatic thing to do. Indeed, it is hard to define pragmatics without first ascribing absolute value to something. Nonetheless, I have always been impressed by the apparent pragmatic value of the Christian faith, according to the values that many humans share, and the extent to which its principles are independent of the Zeitgeist. This is one of the reasons that I find faith compelling.

The Fallibility of the Learned

Trusting the Experts

We, as a culture, are obsessed with the experts. They are celebrities; they are the gatekeepers of human knowledge. This does not stop us, however, from having our own opinions about things. There are experts in all of the areas in which we possess opinions, and hence, on many occasions throughout are lives, we are faced with a familiar decision: do we trust the experts, or not?

I, personally, have never been inclined to accept the opinion of an expert simply because he or she is an expert. This holds true even when the experts generally agree with each other, as I expect that they will also supply me with the evidence that has led them to their conclusions. Nonetheless, we are often unable to judge the data for ourselves, ignorant as we are of the subject matter. As such, we must decide when—and when not—to trust an expert.

I have concluded that the learned are fallible. This may seem obvious, but we do not always behave as if they are. Along these lines, there are two trends that strike me as troubling. First, I believe that we afford experts a measure of respect for their titles that either greatly exceeds (or greatly falls short of) that which they are due, because we fail to ask ourselves whether their expertise would allow them to say what they do. Second, I believe that we—especially if we fancy ourselves intellectual—flatter ourselves with the outrageous idea that we can entirely free ourselves from our most basic human biases.

As to the first of these points, I have surprised even myself with the conclusion that I’ve come to. I’ve concluded that no amount of understanding in one field of knowledge necessarily conveys upon you the understanding of a schoolchild in another. Anyone who truly disagrees with this has likely forgotten the examples. It may seem counterintuitive that a brilliant physicist could hold philosophical views inferior to those of a layman, but experience indicates that this is not impossible—the fragmentation of knowledge has subdivided the intellect beyond repair. Whatever extent physicists have mature philosophical views, I imagine they have developed them from scratch, having intentionally turned their intellect towards philosophy for the requisite amount of time.

It is not difficult to think of people who, in spite of their academic training, have severely underdeveloped views on a great many topics. Furthermore, academic training has done little more than to endow them with the confidence and the tone of an expert. This trend is no more prevalent among the irreligious than the religious, and it is in fact more obvious in the latter. Whether or not we recognize these shortcomings in ourselves, we should be discerning when weighing the value of a person’s experience. Would this experience equip such a person to answer the question? Might it even make their opinion even less valuable than that of a common person?

Far stronger than selective ignorance, however, is human bias. Despite the tremendous intellectual snobbery that is wielded against this point, it remains true. No amount of disciplined thinking can raise us so high that we are able to speak in a detached manner about life, death, faith and meaning. We cannot remain entirely neutral on these issues, because our biases on these subjects are the fundamental driving forces that have caused us to take up learning in the first place.

The complex intellect, like a tool, can be used to serve the most basic intentions. Consider a criminal genius—by way of his superior mind, he better fulfills his most basic desires. An electrical engineer builds a secret dungeon in his basement, sealed off by complex locking mechanisms, all so that he can impregnate his daughter and imprison her for twenty-four years. A bright law student perfectly arranges the deaths of dozens of victims. The very intellect that allows such a criminal to carry out his crimes could advise him against committing them, but it does not. It is no more difficult to believe that a man may write an excellent essay, however sound, driven solely by his basic desires.

Of course, few people are driven so completely by their desires, but this does not eliminate the existence of bias. We will always remain more open—however slightly—to those things that we wish to be true. Furthermore, we will not always be aware of what we wish to be true. We cannot think properly on life without thinking of our own life. We cannot think properly on death without thinking of our own death. We cannot think without thinking of ourselves.

I have concluded that an expert, when speaking about the specific thing that he or she has experience with, is probably more correct than I am able to imagine (provided the amount of controversy surrounding the topic is low). Beyond this, we are not obligated to regard words as having any more value than they, themselves, contain.

Sex and Compatibility

How Things Go Together

“What guys basically want is sex,” said the speaker to his teenage crowd. “Even the old married dudes won’t deny it.” He imitated the conceding, shrugging motion that old married dudes make when asked to comment on the matter.

“Now you girls may be thinking, ‘Oh nooo, not my boyfriend. He’s a good little Christian boy.’ Well yes, he is. And he wants good little Christian sex.”

I laughed, but there are controversial implications underneath this comment: that it’s possible—or even a good idea—to want good little Christian sex, and keep on behaving like a good little Christian boy. Many people may think that religion has nothing useful to say about sex. The word “fornication” is an antique. To any extent that the church gets involved, it is seen either as repression, or the idealism of bygone Victorian values. But I have something to say about this.

The Christian (particularly evangelical) approach to sex and relationships is just one example of an entire set of behaviours that I mean to highlight. It is the type of principle that has utilitarian value, yet it is adopted by adherents primarily because it follows from their most basic beliefs.

In example, there is significant utilitarian value to full monogamy, however much the local culture may deny it. It does not have significant adverse effects, but it avoids many. Its advantages can be greater than those of the alternative. It (or something like it) has been a common theme throughout human civilization. Nonetheless, it still does not follow that one should behave this way simply because it can be useful.

Quite simply, there is only one real reason to ascribe to an outdated, socially conservative principle. It is not because it has universal utilitarian value, but because it is the most consistent way to live, assuming that your assumptions about faith are true. This way of living is not necessarily something you can demand of others, if they do not share these assumptions. People live this way because they have a reason to—not because everyone else has a reason to.

The church is often perceived as an entity that preaches morality to the outside world. This is unfortunate, because people within the church are only living according to moral principles that make good sense, when all other things are considered. In speaking to the world at large, the church should speak chiefly about matters of faith. It may be necessary, when the stakes are high, to invoke the language of ethics and morality. However, it is ultimately senseless to preach objective morality apart from faith, because it does not exist.

Pixie Dust Sh_t

On Divergent Norms

Smoke trailed from the cigarette that dangled from Seamus’s fingers. Our crew sat on the slope of the hillside, buried in the wild grass. The drop bag, filled with seismic equipment, sat off to the left. It was a sunny day in the mountains near Grande Cache, where for a short time in my life, the morning consisted of cream cheese bagels, safety meetings, and helicopter rides.

Seamus was an Irishman. He was largely shameless, unabashedly dirty-minded, and full of stories that were far from my own life experience. At his previous job, he had defecated in the boot of a friend (who didn’t notice until he had put the boot on) simply for amusement. He had escaped from prison, been sent back to prison, been pepper-sprayed multiple times, and gotten a beating from Owen Hart in an alley behind a bar.

Seamus knew that the three of us, who had come out there together, were Christian. It was the subject of numerous jokes. He and his longtime friend Jason repeatedly tried to offer us some of their high-quality pot, which they were certain we would eventually take, and which we always declined. For the most part, this was a subplot that occasionally infiltrated our daily conversations. It was only that day, on the hill, that we really discussed it.

Despite his apparent affinity for debauchery, however, Seamus was self-aware. He understood a great deal about life. As for his religious background, he had been raised as a Catholic in Ireland. He told us that on one occasion the priest had seen him look over at his sister and nudge her during the service. In order to recapture his attention, the priest had immediately marched up the aisle and punched him in the face.

When we talked about the church, Seamus shook his head.

“I came from a country that was in the middle of a holy war,” he said. “Not this pixie dust sh_t you’ve got going on here.”

It was a statement I would not forget. It was true; my experience with church had nothing to do with fists and priests. It had everything to do with being nice and censoring expletives.

Inasmuch as we have access to the truth, we have limited access to the truth. Inasmuch as Christians agree on the truth we claim to have access to, we still allow for only so many differences before we fragment into sects and denominations. How many of these differences have to do with truth, I cannot say. But what Seamus had drawn my attention to was the alarming amount of subculture that has become undistinguishable from religion; the frightening possibility (for evangelicals) that being especially polite was no more essential to Christianity than punching children on a Sunday morning.

This brings two concerns to my mind. The first is that we may find it difficult to properly assess people who have similar beliefs, but come from different backgrounds.  It is commonly said that God’s dealings with mankind are subject to change, whereas God himself is not. One must wonder, however, about our dealings with ourselves. The norms of conduct in other faith traditions and cultures are so divergent, at times, that it may be difficult to find a common denominator. Yet we can learn something from other faith traditions. It is permissible to criticize behaviours and norms that are heavily ingrained in other cultures, but it is not necessary—once this is recognized—to do so indiscriminately. I write this because it seems, to me, that many people fear a slippery slope when accepting (or criticizing) such differences.

The second concern is, of course, that people may become convinced that the subculture surrounding their particular faith tradition is the essence of the faith itself. The problem here is not (as one might assume) the unwarranted criticism that you will heap on people who “do things differently.” The problem is that you will waste a great deal of your life working on the decorations and trimmings of a faith that you don’t even have.

Middle Ground

Suspicious Recurring Themes

At first glance, religion seems to have a great deal in common with politics. At second glance, it becomes clear that a great deal of what is called “religion” is actually pure, unadulterated politics.

I don’t mean to confine this observation to the United States, or the mixing of religion and politics. I’m referring to the way in which religious ideas are framed, explained, and made palatable. I am referring to the means by which religious ideas are “reconciled” with other facts. Among these techniques, I have noticed one that appears too often to ignore: the middle ground.

I would appear that for every pair of diametrically opposed viewpoints, there is a perfect solution that lies right in the middle. On every occasion that I have witnessed a fierce debate, I have been told by commentators that I need not feel conflicted. I do not need to pick sides, because both sides have some things right, and both sides have some things wrong. Who would have thought! Once I realize this, I can have my cake and eat it too.

It’s a matter of some irony that I am conflicted about this, in and of itself. I have always been attracted to the distilling of clouded jargon into trenchant, pithy statements. My intuition tells me that people muddle the truth because they cannot handle it. It tells me that they paint over dissonance with an epoxy coating of blanket statements that bemoan the complexity of the issue. Yet despite finding them so unattractive, I have accepted the dogma of complexity and “balance” as a solution to many issues.

No, I do not wish to slander the middle ground; I wish only to explain how something having real merit can appear so contrived.

While it is expected that people will be uncomfortable with cold hard truths, it is also expected that viewpoints will dissociate into their most basic elements—the most visible opinions are the ones with clear definitions, and the most definable things are often the most basic. It’s our common experience that most healthy, sound ideas we come across in life are winding roads that run between two unhealthy (yet highly visible) extremes.

The middle ground bears all the marks of an evasion. It sympathizes with both sides of an argument; it sides with neither. It avoids conflict, and it presents itself as a fresh solution, rather than something familiar. It is true that copouts may take this form—but so do legitimate answers. If the answer lay solely with one side of a debate, should the debate not have been resolved? Some examples may come to mind, but they may cease to be so glaring and incredible when both sides are fully understood.

The suggestion that a solution lies in the middle ground is not, in itself, a solution. The hand-waving and the peacemaking, that’s the easy part; the part that arouses our suspicions. It is the description of how the extremes are to be properly combined—the complete detailing of the truth—that legitimizes the suggestion.

I have not listed any examples of all this, because for the reader who is familiar with the issue, they have already come to mind.

At first glance, religion seems to have a great deal in common with politics. At second glance, it becomes clear that a great deal of what is called “religion” is actually pure, unadulterated politics.

I don’t mean to confine this observation to the United States, or the mixing of religion and politics. I’m referring to the way in which religious ideas are framed, explained, and made palatable. I am referring to the means by which religious ideas are “reconciled” with other facts. Among these techniques, I have noticed one that appears too often to ignore: the middle ground.

I would appear that for every pair of diametrically opposed viewpoints, there is a perfect solution that lies right in the middle. On every occasion that I have witnessed a fierce debate, I have been told by commentators that I need not feel conflicted. I do not need to pick sides, because both sides have some things right, and both sides have some things wrong. Who would have thought! Once I realize this, I can have my cake and eat it too.

It’s a matter of some irony that I am conflicted about this, in and of itself. I have always been attracted to the distilling of clouded jargon into trenchant, pithy statements. My intuition tells me that people muddle the truth because they cannot handle it. It tells me that they paint over dissonance with an epoxy coating of blanket statements that bemoan the complexity of the issue. Yet despite finding them so unattractive, I have accepted the dogma of complexity and “balance” as a solution to many issues.

No, I do not wish to slander the middle ground; I wish only to explain how something having real merit can appear so contrived.

While it is expected that people will be uncomfortable with cold hard truths, it is also expected that viewpoints will dissociate into their most basic elements—the most visible opinions are the ones with clear definitions, and the most definable things are often the most basic. It’s our common experience that most healthy, sound ideas we come across in life are winding roads that run between two unhealthy (yet highly visible) extremes.

The middle ground bears all the marks of an evasion. It sympathizes with both sides of an argument; it sides with neither. It avoids conflict, and it presents itself as a fresh solution, rather than something familiar. It is true that copouts may take this form—but so do legitimate answers. If the answer lay solely with one side of a debate, should the debate not have been resolved? Some examples may come to mind, but they may cease to be so glaring and incredible when both sides are fully understood.

The suggestion that a solution lies in the middle ground is not, in itself, a solution. The hand-waving and the peacemaking, that’s the easy part; the part that arouses our suspicions. It is the description of how the extremes are to be properly combined—the complete detailing of the truth—that legitimizes the suggestion.

I have not listed any examples of all this, because for the reader who is familiar with the issue, they have already come to mind.

Fundamentalist Christians and militant atheists both point the finger at moderate Christians for attempting to reconcile where reconciliation seems silly and disingenuous. In some matters, I am comfortable siding with one of these groups.

Evangelical Hero

The Disinterested Mind

Blank Space Between the Lines

When I emerge from a dream, there is a moment where the waking world and its cares are suspended, as if by a thread, and weighed against those of the dream. All at once, the contest tips in reality’s favour, and the sense of urgency, which just then was palpable, has altogether vanished. I am left only with a trace of the paradigm that consumed me throughout the night; a paradigm in which the strangest things were important, and the strangest things were true.

To have faith, I must believe that the things of my waking paradigm are both important and true. I must believe that this paradigm is equally shared among us. Yet I fear that my waking world may be as a dream world to others, and vice versa. I question whether faith involves ideas so foreign to some people, that they could not be expected to care for them.

I have noticed that many find the implications of God, or any higher truth, simply unimportant—yet not in the way that one is indifferent to parental warnings, but in the way that one is indifferent to dreams. The human mind can generate the most obtuse and bizarre priorities. Some live only to study physical curiosities with little concern for human affairs. No concept of morality can be demonstrated to a mind that has no interest in receiving it, even if this mind is a minority of one. All this reminds me of the subjective nature of the human paradigm; that some ideas are so esoteric and far off from us, at different times, that we might be said to have a “disinterested mind” with respect to them. This one observation is foremost among the difficulties that plague me: that it is possible to remain oblivious to the very idea God. I never felt that, if such a thing were true, I should be capable of living a life so thoroughly ignorant of it.

The truths that I refer to are not scientific truths. Even if we go through life completely unaware of the mechanical workings of the universe, we are still subject to them. No one has ever subverted natural law by ignoring it. Religious faith and moral beliefs are uniquely human conditions of the mind, and they are contingent upon the interpretation of experiences that may vary wildly from person to person, and in some people, lack altogether.

Faith has implications for relationships, morality, ethics, love, and human nature. While it claims to provide some answers about the physical world, it has only implications for the aforementioned things—and what of the people who drift through life with only a vague awareness of them? Consider an eccentric man, who spends all his days in isolation studying the most obscure mathematical patterns. Orthodox religion might regard him as someone who has rejected God. But it is difficult to imagine how he has rejected God, when his mind has not dealt in the things of God.

God interrupts perfunctory tasks in a way that no person, and no event, can. I am required to step into a different paradigm when I think about God, re-casting every detail of my life in a new light. It requires no such energy to get through a normal business day. For this reason, simply staring blankly at an object on my desk—with my mind bereft of higher thoughts—makes me wonder how any greater truth can exist than the truth that has implications for me in that moment. Materialists may say that this I am right to think this way, since they have decided that all truth is, in fact, manifest there.

My belief in God requires me to believe that there is a human experience that we are intended to have, and that our response to God has implications for this experience. But in real life we are so surprisingly unrestrained, and everything is so silent. The states of mind that give meaning to faith, and that faith gives meaning to, occur only at certain times and places. Furthermore, they occur differently for others than they do for me, and I am unable to discern by how much. At the very least, I am convinced of how my own life ought to be lived, and my own thoughts resolved. Although I may hold that God requires a commensurate response from others, as I write this I am more diffident than ever in specifying what that entails.

Militant atheists do not frighten me, for they speak of faith with familiarity. Disinterested minds frighten me, for they do not speak of faith at all.

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I once had a dream that involved Jesus (a very rare event). The dream made absolutely no sense, and when I woke up I remember thinking that if Christianity were true, it shouldn’t be the sort of thing that could be dreamt about in that way. At first glance, this could be dismissed as silly, since it’s possible to have absurd dreams about any other thing that is true. But in contrast to materialism, religious faith insists not on particular truths, but on an additional type of truth, which I did not imagine should have that quality—that is, that the paradigm that validates it could be completely abandoned by such a simple shift in my state of consciousness. I strongly believe that much can be accomplished by thought experiments, and at that time, it felt as if I had performed one that invalidated what I believed.

Meaning

In the Mind of the Beholder

You may say that things are too meaningless for there to be a God, but you are one of those things. I cannot imagine how we might deny greater meaning without, in the same breath, embodying it.