One set of my friends is set on the Christian faith belief set.
Typically, their statements are of two kinds:
“God is good” when their lives are relatively carefree and “Pray for me/family/friends” when their lives are troubled.
I often wonder why they don’t say “Pray for my happiness” and/or “God is good to put these problems in my life.”
Regardless of one’s belief sets, officially organised or not, consistent world/universe view is as important as one’s verbal output, n’est pas?
Are you familiar with Poe’s Law? From wikipedia:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.
The core of Poe’s law is that a parody of something extreme by nature becomes impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism. A corollary of Poe’s law is the reverse phenomenon: sincere fundamentalist beliefs being mistaken for a parody of that belief.
I guess what I’m saying is that I grew up in a community where creationism and the scientific method lived side-by-side.
So did parody and solemnity.
I quickly learned that creationism was not so much about the “reality” of a young universe as it was a set of code words we used to dupe those who made fun of creationism.
While smartypants were talking smack about the dumb creationists and their fundamentalist religion, the creationists were running the factories and businesses in town for whom the smartypants worked.
Creationism was established to delineate the true members of a subculture from the false members and/or outsiders.
The scientific method was as valid a laboratory tool for creationists as it was for noncreationists to create new plastic polymers.
But again, it was the set of code words used during coffee breaks and lunch periods that showed who was willing to suspend their disbelief in order to belong to one group or another.
Code words as ancient as our species.
So, the next time you hear someone debating just how old the universe and our planet are, remember Poe’s Law — you should pay attention to what they’re really saying, not what their words mean on a superficial level.
Outsiders and those without a refined sense of humour will miss the nuanced reasons used by those who espouse creationism as their core belief set.
Do you belong to a particular community?
What would you do to maintain your position in a social setting?
Would you repeat the community’s code words without question or a smidgen of doubt?
Not every subculture uses tattoos, piercings and the breaking of social taboos to define themselves.
Some use words and respect the boundaries that taboos provide.
My mother in-law was a longtime subscriber to National Geographic magazine. My wife and I have enjoyed flipping through recent copies and discovering little gems about the influence upon our “modern” times, such as:
Anyone remember Epictetus, the Greek philosopher who was born a slave?
Well, his insights were ageless then and just as poignant now.
However, let’s all pretend that modern psychologists can justify their lofty professional salaries by polling the people and rewording the writing of ancient Greeks, as if there’s something new to be said:
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power or our will. ”
― Epictetus“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
― Epictetus“First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.”
― Epictetus“Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems”
― Epictetus
Staring at the ceiling, turning the popcorn paint into comical faces and lunar landscapes, I realised for the umpteen millionth time that all around me was a figment of my imagination.
I was at peace. I was wide awake, unable to sleep, no thoughts troubling me or racing through my mental slideshow.
Sitting here with you now, both of us looking at this electronic mumbo-jumbo with an inkling of understanding, interpreting the bits and bytes as if the contrast between lighter and darker pixels implies meaningful symbols representing the usual letters, words and sentences, we share a common configuration, a gentle push, of our imagination we call the [American/Canadian/Australian/x/y/z] English language.
To complete the resolution, the incorporation, the final weaving, the last brick on the edifice in which the cornerstone of my youth was laid while I was an unnamed being in the womb, I look one last time at the joint alignment of our imaginations we call religion, or emotion-based belief set.
We have already examined the definition of “emotion,” have we not?
EMOTION: The flow of chemical/molecular concoctions that flow through our bodies to enhance our experience of the moment, whatever that experience and moment may entail.
Some may use the ruse of religion to define their daily actions, like a horse that needs blinders or a racetrack that uses bumpers/rails to keep vehicles safely on the designated course.
In the realm of me-vs-you, us-vs-them, etc., I always think that others (who probably think the same of me) need blinders or bumpers/rails to keep them oriented in the same general direction that the subculture in which they choose to live is going.
What about those who don’t want blinders or don’t want to stay in the subculture in which they live?
I will not generalise their imaginations actively at work in contrast to or against the subculture in which they find themselves.
Rarely are we living under the influence of one subculture.
Some easily accept, without question, the teachings of their elders and peers.
Some do not.
Why some do and some do not is a study that may start at the DNA level.
When I stared at the ceiling in near-darkness last night, happy with the state of the universe at that moment, I asked myself why I was happy.
What made me, lying in a comfortable, warm bed, unable to sleep, think I was happy?
Happy…hmm…
Where in my imagination — my set of states of energy — is a solid definition of happiness?
Simply the intersection of neuronal states that contain the encyclopedic descriptions of states of happiness throughout history, at the species and personal level?
Both the lack of the flow of fear-based molecular sets and the low flow of euphoria-based molecular sets? A balance of the two? A lack of both?
Long ago, I wrote a small poem that said my religion was based on a form and concluded that everything goes in a circle.
For some, their experiences that we and/or they would categorise as religious may be happy and they may be unhappy.
Or, rather, their experience with those who operated under the definition of religion may have been happy or unhappy.
For me, the moments in my influential formative years during religious ceremonies or discussion of religious matters were, for the most part, happy.
I remember a few anxious moments such as times when kids competed for who could quote the most number of Bible verses and I only had one or two full or partial verses ready to recite without looking them up.
Otherwise, my experiences were pleasant so I have no reason to adopt an anti-religious viewpoint because of negative experiences with religion and the people who stand/hide behind religion as a cover for their unpleasant treatment/view/comments about others.
I’m just not much of a person for hierarchy in dealing with others so I’m less inclined to want to clump people into leadership pyramids, regardless of socioeconomic situation.
Your imagination is yours to perpetuate and, if you have delusions of grandeur, don’t expect me to reciprocate. The labels you want to wear, whether on your lapel or in your mannerisms in front of a mirror (including our responses to you), are yours to call your own.
I am happy in my imaginative world where I can pick up just about any set of words and find myself reflected there.
I am not God in the grand sense that I invented the universe before the set of states of energy called me was conceived and grew into this person typing here.
But I am the set of states of energy that reacts to the rest of the universe from a position I can’t help but take from within my imagination, parts of which I share with you through alignment of our imaginations from moment to moment, sometimes feeling like a god who controls his own fate, and thus the universe, while he lives.
I am happy in my thoughts that further build my imagination, no matter where I am, but often perturbed that people interrupt my happy thoughts with their pleas to buy their products/services that put up temporary bumpers/rails/blinders to guide me toward an unnecessary purchase and the inevitable buyer’s remorse.
As a country mouse simplifying his life, how much of the city mouse stuff around me do I really need anymore?
Therefore, by conclusion, violence is positively good for us!
On what you focus is who you are:
A good storyteller gives readers what they want, but not always in the order they expect.
For instance, I walked up to the microwave oven just now and saw a little credit-card sized pocketable inspirational note that has sat there for I don’t know how long and I never really paid much attention to it until today.
What did it say? Basically, this:
Jeremiah 29:11-13 [New International Version (NIV)]
11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. 12 Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
My wife and I don’t keep a household where Bible verses are stamped onto various forms and shapes, hung on the walls, in hallways and nailed onto doors.
However, we have received a few and given/regifted a few as presents to friends and family through the years.
I am one of those people who don’t read the Bible every minute of the day but I do have access to electronic copies, physical books and enough tomes like “Social Aspects of Early Christianity” to keep me as occupied on the subject of religious writing as I desire.
We even have a copy or two of church hymnals containing the song, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
In this parallel storyline, I contemplate two storylines, one in which our species goes to war with itself on a massive scale, using weapons that have never seen battle, millions wiped out in wave after wave of clashes, turning peaceful boroughs all over the planet into scarred battlefields, no place safe; the second in which we continue the merging of multiple subcultures, every situation a win-win one, where we as a species, though in constant disagreement about the details, work out the general outline for thousands of years of thriving, prospering, voluntarily sharing our wealth with each other, reaching out beyond the solar system as our technology progresses sufficiently for low-risk exploration of the cosmos.
Always, always, always, taking into account the benefits and positive contributions of every language, every person, every subculture, no matter what is going on, good or bad, in global socioeconomic headlines.
I am tired of monitoring drug wars, billionaire backyard brawls and political detente for profittaking’s sake.
I am a man in the latter decades of his life who wants to see us, as a species, specific subculture(s) less important, establishing colonies of living beings on nonEarth celestial bodies.
If I end up in one of those colonies, I would feel most comfortable with aspects of my subcultural upbringing brought along.
If someone else ends up in one of the colonies instead of me, I know that person would feel most comfortable with aspects of familiar subcultural upbringing(s) brought along, too.
No matter where the colonies are built and who occupies them, it’s a success for our species and for Earth, especially for those subcultures that look past petty quarrels and set their sights far into the future.
Thirteen point six three five 1,000-day increments to go until we complete one of the major steps.
Over the past couple of years, I have met with people who’ve asked me to reconsider the subcultural training of my youth in what I see as an attempt to keep me in the fold or bring me back in, depending on their views.
I met my wife at a summer church camp when we were 12, we married in her hometown church when we were 24 and, 26+ years later, we’re still married so I haven’t cut ties from my childhood subculture in any hard, abrupt, total sense.
Over the New Year’s Day extended holiday weekend, a good friend, medical doctor by trade, who with colleagues bought a primary school for a church congregation that has expanded from a few people to over 2000 since 2009, loaned me the following books to read:
Before I read them, I shall provide for myself and the reader a snippet of a review of each book.
For recent Christmas gifts, I received two other books:
I contemplate my individual future, compare it to our species’ future, determine where we share goals and plot a true course that benefits us both.
treetrunkdings 