Many are commenting upon the seismic novelty of Obama’s election as President of the United States. There are many dimensions to this, some easily overlooked. Among the more significant perhaps is that this marks the first time that a black family has been asked to move into a formerly white residence with the expectation of raising property values!
It now appears that this novel outcome was brought about not only by a historic turnout among young voters and minority voters but also by a drop in turnout by white voters. Apparently, this demographic of confused voters was trapped between the objective failure of a dogma previously embraced and a prejudice precluding acceptance of a rational alternative and stayed home. Minds it would seem, accustomed to surrendering reason to belief have a hard time resorting to reason even when belief has plainly failed them. This raises a question, do people choose to be believers or are they born that way? Do they believe because they can’t think or just choose not to? What an irony that would be?! Perhaps thinkers should put together an initiated act to prevent believers from marrying. It might trigger an interesting debate.
12 comments:
The answer is that though some people can choose to be believers most are born that way. Many both believe and think but belief trumps thinking. Your suggestion might trigger an interesting debate about whether non-believers should be allowed to exist at all or might trigger a new Inquisition. Believers are in the majority in this country and some would kill you to save your soul.
Can you find someone to move into my house?
anonymous;
If the mortgage payment is the same, I probably can.
In this case I think the Obamas only had to agree to pick up the payments!
Virgil;
I think it is manifestly obvious that believing precludes thinking. You can't do both as they occupy the same function. Now you can say you believe and actually think, but that is a different matter all together and of course describes the bulk of "believers" the bulk of the time. The problems arise when people really believe they believe and start acting like it.
Just take the belief in "free markets". As long as that is a platitude no harm, but when people start trying to run the world on it you get what we got now - things so screwed up the country feels it has to elect a black man president to clean up the mess.
If you pick up an economics 101 text you will learn about all the known flaws in a free market. A totally free market is a place for frauds, ponzie schemes, thumbs on the scales. Free markets are bipolar and as unstable as a car wheel without shocks. In a totally free market speculators can and will plunder investors and all manner of false information will be generated. The only thing a market it good for it providing real time information and if that information is colored by speculation and fraud it is worse than useless.
Witness oil markets of late, a primariy reason we are entering this global recession, along with the houseing bubble, another duzzy from an excessively free market. Both expression of speculative euphoria and speculative manipulation.
Then there is the dot.com bubble, the S&L crisis (another houseing bubble itself) in the late eighties, the enron energy shortage fraud, just to name a few of the more recent free market success stories. People act like free markets are a flawless decision machine, they "believe in free markets".
We know for a fact that efficient markets (markets free enough to reflect fundamentals but regulated to avoid the perils) are what work best. It has been proven for over sixty years over the entire globe. Free markets are emotional creatures notoriously short sighted - about six months and blind to any reality beyond that time horizon, yet we entrust our energy future to them and our climate! What nonsence.
To appreciate the value of an efficient market and the flaws of a free one you have to think, you can't just believe.
Likewise we can understand gays as just another version of humanity or we can believe that it is a choosen life style and not believe in gay marriage. We can not believe in evolution, keep it out of school but have prayer instead. We can believe minorities are inferior an not educate them, and in my country right or wrong, and wage unecessary wars. We can believe in the flag and not understand the constitution, while not believing in global warming or peak oil. In short we can believe ourselves into the mess we are in. Now someone has to start think us out of it.
Hopefully the believing/ignorance party is out of power, at least until we can regain prosperity. Then I am afraid it will start over again. As Mark Twain said, "Thinking is the hardest kind of work there is and that is the reason so few people engage in it."
Believing is easier.
I believe.....I'm confused! (But then again, I think I've all ready let everyone know that via post: http://sallyisnotsnoddy.blogspot.com/2008/11/unwell-im-not-crazyjust-little-impaired.html
James T.:
Eric Hoffer in “The True Believer” opined that objects of belief were interchangeable to those who were inclined to believe. It mattered not whether they believed in Jesus, free markets, patriotism, or Communism, and often went from one belief to another. They have a need to believe in something. Evidence and reason will not shake their beliefs. These people have little tolerance for doubt or uncertainty. James Dobson, Pat Robertson, George W. Bush, and a substantial part of the electorate are in this category. Your post and comment are correct when referring to this kind of belief. You are right to fear that it will start over again because it is easier than staring into the abyss. The religious belief, or faith, that some people have, which embraces the ambiguities and which changes when shown to be wrong is more puzzling. There are Christians, Jews, and Muslims who don’t embrace the dogma and may not even believe in God. Some Buddhists readily abandon ancient scripture when it is shown to be wrong. Do these people have the belief gene? If so, are they more evolved versions of Bush variety? Is their faith a force for good, or does the structure drag them down and hamper their openness?
Gosh, y'all...great posts! and I, like Sally, may be confused but I really liked the part about faith that embraces the ambiguities. It's like living in the questions. It's where I spend alot of time....
Virg, is there a "belief gene"?Is faith a force for good?
I don't know alot but I do believe that we're all connected and that there are values that transcend race, culture, and gender.
It seems to me that thinking and believing are done diffently...that believing tries to arrive not so much at truths but at an understanding of the world.
Do we choose to believe what we believe or do we learn it? What impact does experience and tradition have on what we think and believe?
Virg rhetorically asks;
Whether religious belief, or faith that “embraces the ambiguities” is a “force for good” or does such structure represent “a drag and hamper openness”? To some extent this begs the question. If faith yields in the face of reality is that faith? Are people whose beliefs’ are supple in the face of reality “believers”? Not of the types that have been an affirmative drag on human progress or a source of conflict. These are not the types that commit mass suicide, blow themselves up in crowds, hold up in armed compounds, take their neighbor’s land in the name of god or try and use the power of the state to force their moral views on others. These are the outcomes of fundamentalism, which places belief over reality and studiously pursue ignorance of the real world.
Faith/mythology/religion (beliefs) that merely embraces the ambiguities, are by comparison harmless error. Sally Couger Snoddy’s subsequent post illustrates how the human spirit, an undeniable subjective reality, can form itself around a belief structure and find expression and fulfillment in it. The same fulfillment of the spirit, however, can and has been attained around any number of different beliefs. That a given belief can feed the soul therefore means nothing about the truth of it. The same substance of poetry would be fulfilling to Snoddy regardless of her belief system, which is essentially a cultural inheritance, not a reality. The main differences between mythologies are not in the core substance, all being the creation of the same species to fulfill the same needs and hence largely similar. The differences are in the superficial trappings of the faith, the story and ceremony that form the exoskeleton.
Fundamentalist take such details and justify irrational behavior to the detriment of themselves and others. For everyone else religion is a cultural issue, nothing more, evidenced by how easily people move from one to the other in response to social convenience arising from such as marriage or relocation or economic or political advantage.
Yet even so we have reached a point when even supple believers are a “drag and hamper openness”. What the world needs now is a reason based approach to embracing the ambiguities, an approach which takes away mythology and replaces it with philosophy. Buddhism is a prototype for this. It is more philosophy than religion, at least in its original form. Buddha never purported to speak for god or even to know whether there was one. His view was rational, that the occurrence of god was an unanswerable question and hence a waste of time to consider. Rather he sought a more practical insight, how to achieve happiness. (It is not clear that Jesus did not project more of a philosophy than a religion as well, one subsequently corrupted by the church in pursuit of the corporate imperative.)
Religions were not the hindrance in the pass they have become today because so much was ambiguous and so little known and human power and influence over the environment and our bodies so limited that it did not much matter. In fact to the extent that religion plays a role in defining us vs. they social structures it is native to Human socialization. Now, however, we are no longer a part of our environment but the unwilling managers of it, we increasingly can delay death and likely soon effect gene selection in future generation. While knowledge solves problems it also brings new ones. These have to be approached rationally. Religion though short circuits rational problem solving by blocking assimilation of knowledge among large portions of the world’s populations. There are not an insignificant number of people in the world today that view continued violence in the Middle East as a necessary precondition to the filament of their beliefs for example. Clearly such views are not helpful. Traditional religious beliefs, however in harmony with man’s relatively powerless natural state, are worse than uninformative. Collectively they are instead a repository of disinformation.
Thinking “believers” of course try to make traditional religions “relevant” which is to say aligned with reality. The enlightenment only occurred because christianity and particularly mainline protestant religions were remade in such a way. God gave us brains and the power to understand and therefore our minds are a path to god was the essence of the novation. But fundamentalism has dug in its heels and one can see the resulting chaos, death, destruction and distraction from real solutions to real problems readily enough and even the reality conforming religions serve as a distraction from forming a more informative and shared human philosophy.
The protest against humanism is that reality is too sterile to feed the human soul and that people need a god to behave. But a reality based philosophy need not be sterile. Humanity is the only known consciousness the universe has of itself! Therein lies all the justification for existence and meaning for life anyone needs, collective or individual. What we know now, that was not known when all present day major religions were formed, is that the human mind has the ability over time, bit by bit to shrink the ambiguity of the universe, as well as to understand self. This is a fascinating adventure that humanity is collectively on and all can, if they choose to recognize it, play a part and share the experience. To absorb the marvel of it takes some reflection and some study but that is true of anything that is rewarding. (One of the things all the successful religions have in common is selling an instant potato version of the founder’s philosophy, just follow a magic formula and a donation of course and you are there happiness, eternal life and salvation. Such nonsense of course comes at the expense of the founder’s more insightful and sublime but demanding message is a betrayal of the nominal insight and the church’s nominal mission to spread it. Its sole value is it grows the church, the original large-cap multinational corporation.)
Absorbing the reality of the human journey and making it part of an individual life and community philosophy can fulfill all the purposes served by religion only better; better because it is reality. On a micro scale humanity temporarily experienced this during the Apollo program and the moon landing. Simply being alive and a part of the human race at the moment meant one was involved in transcendent occurrence, so pregnant with implication and meaning that you could not get your mind around it all. It was a collectively shared emotional and spiritual experience. Obama’s election was a similar occurrence, unless your soul was poisoned with bigotry or fear one had to share the significance of that event, pride that human intellect could overcome base instinctive impulses originating in the us vs. they gene. Human progress was collectively palpable and felt in the soul, it feed the spirit. People were moved by it who voted against him. You can move the human spirit perhaps by handling snakes but it is also moved by human achievement.
In a rational humanist philosophy every scripture is equally inspiring because all capture core elements of the human spirit, facilitate self quest and provide insights into different times in the evolution of human thought and understandings and views of wisdoms. Every religion is an equally valid statement of culture, a testament to tradition and a window into a people and us individually. Every composition of music, every poem is a shared creation in the joint venture of humanity.
A rational humanist view ties everything together, everything human and everything natural into a single reality based view of purpose and perspective that makes every life at least potentially worth living. All one need do to justify existence is to be consciously a part of the collective journey, to be a witness and a net contributor in some way, to experience one’s on being and marvel at your own emotions, pleasures and pains realizing they are the manifestation of a biological program refined over a thousand generations of human refinement that you have the challenge of making work for you and those around you. Who needs a religion when you have such a reality?
Compare that to the total sense of chaos and emptiness that is the human condition in the world today, with its Babylon of phony faiths. What is man’s purpose? What are our lives about? To consume more is the only common answer. Any curiosity about the universe and our selves is divorced of any philosophical or spiritual foundation in most minds and souls, only a practical process in the quest to consume more. In part this is because antiquated religious mythologies, spewing conflict among us and rolling erroneous logs of faith in the way of reason are, by filling the relevant ambiguities blocking the emergence of a unified reality based humanist philosophy, a philosophy that can provide sound timeless direction for every human question, individual or community and that manifestly is biased toward truth not error.
As for the need for god and morals, the answer is simple. Man made god in his own image. Our morals are part of our evolved instincts, native to us. They have evolved because we are social beings. People who are sociopaths are people who do not posses these behavioral instincts. They are biologically flawed not godless. None of us are perfect precisely because we are evolved not created; sociopaths are but one form of an extreme outlier flaw. A rational approach to life offers a perfectly sound means to guide individual behavior that serves both the collective and the individual interest far better than the typical rigid, one size fits all situations code book, typical of religious doctrines. Take a single example: “Thou shall not kill.” Hum? By denying reasoned flexibility and preempting understanding and insight with judgmental rigidity and phony concepts of morality, religion objectively and necessary will produce less rewarding guidance for individual behavior than a rational approach. But all that is another topic. Suffice it to say that it seems obvious that trying to rigidly adhere to a moral code when reason would direct another path in personal behavior is not good, while cleaving to reason instead will bring guilt to the faithful which is no better.
Someone said we know there is no god because no esthetically endowed sentient being would combine the sex organs with the urinary tract. If we were created by the source of everything in its image and not evolved from what simply is, then why are we corporeal, flawed, and as yet clearly imperfect biological mechanisms? Would not something more sublime that did not eat, defecate, grow ill, die and rot seem more in accord? Why does everything everywhere run on the same rule book of physics and every organism draw on the same chemical processes? Was the creator just too busy to construct more than one system? Indeed why a system at all? Reality is undeniable to an open mind, yet so many claim not to accept it. Conformance, another programmed social impulse is the answer.
It’s time to get over it, time to absorb and assimilate what we have learned to bring our approach to the “ambiguities” in line with reality.
There is one thing in the way and that involves the conundrum of a church to spread the word but we know where that can lead. That is also another topic.
We are taught to believe by parents, society, etc. But I think it began with preliterate ancestors making assumptions about the causes of events that seemed incomprehensible to them: tornadoes, lightning, etc. That pattern continued to the present day and manifests most notably in our beliefs about god and the cause for our existence. Many people who are willing to rely on science for some answers (particularly when it is to their advantage) abdicate all reasoning when it comes to religion and race and gender and sexual preference.
Virg, "I Believe" in unintentional intolerance AND the idea that many folks will fight to the death for "their reality", even after they find out they're wrong. Anxiety and stress can cause people to pull back to "what they know". Thanks for helping us think.
Science, in the immediate, produces knowledge and, indirectly, means of action. It leads to methodical action if definite goals are set up in advance. For the function of setting up goals and passing statements of value transcends its domain. While it is true that science, to the extent of its grasp of causative connections, may reach important conclusions as to the compatibility and incompatibility of goals and evaluations, the independent and fundamental definitions regarding goals and values remain beyond science's reach.
As regards religion, on the other hand, one is generally agreed that it deals with goals and evaluations and, in general, with the emotional foundation of human thinking and acting, as far as these are not predetermined by the inalterable hereditary disposition of the human species. Religion is concerned with man's attitude toward nature at large, with the establishing of ideals for the individual and communal life, and with mutual human relationship. These ideals religion attempts to attain by exerting an educational influence on tradition and through the development and promulgation of certain easily accessible thoughts and narratives (epics and myths) which are apt to influence evaluation and action along the lines of the accepted ideals.
It is this mythical, or rather this symbolic, content of the religious traditions which is likely to come into conflict with science. This occurs whenever this religious stock of ideas contains dogmatically fixed statements on subjects which belong in the domain of science. Thus, it is of vital importance for the preservation of true religion that such conflicts be avoided when they arise from subjects which, in fact, are not really essential for the pursuance of the religious aims.
The moral attitudes of a people that is supported by religion need always aim at preserving and promoting the sanity and vitality of the community and its individuals, since otherwise this community is bound to perish. A people that were to honor falsehood, defamation, fraud, and murder would be unable, indeed, to subsist for very long.
The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.
While religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear of rejection.
There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that religious teachings are Utopian ideals and unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs. The study of the social patterns in certain so-called primitive cultures, however, seems to have made it sufficiently evident that such a defeatist view is wholly unwarranted.
While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.
The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.
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