I’ve been thinking about something that crops up every now and then in discussions about religious traditions.
The atheists, arguing that religious traditions are not needed, state that every rational individual can figure ethics and philosophy on their own, without need for belonging to an organized religion.
The members of organized religions state that nobody can expect to attain salvation without accepting revelation from above, by which they invariably mean their respective religious systems and/or organizations.
I am quite annoyed by both statements.
To respond to the atheist argument first, if figuring out correct ethics is so easy and intuitive, how do they explain the vast difference between the customary ethics of the ancient Rome, and Christian ethics? What, there was a lack of rational people in the Roman empire? I assure you, there were lots of people trying to figure things out, and they were quite smart, and nobody managed to come up with Christian ethics. However, today some atheist like Dawkins or Molyneux thinks he can just pull ethics from the hat, because it’s so intuitive? It’s intuitive to them because they’ve been surrounded by Christians from an early age and everything they’ve experienced had the Christian ethical system beneath it. The problem is, they don’t understand the sources of their ethical feelings and thoughts, they think it’s “reasonable”. Reason has nothing to do with it; they are just stating the basic premises of their upbringing. It’s interesting how they don’t find Buddhist premises intuitive and think anyone could follow pure reason and come up with them. Ibn Tufail thought Islam was so intuitive, you could put a child on a desert island and have it brought up by animals, and it would follow pure reason and end up with mystical Islam. It’s also interesting how atheists think that anyone could come up with a their worldview if only they followed reason and evidence, when they themselves can’t do it – they just copy each other’s stupid arguments, including logical errors and illustrative examples. Diversity of thought among atheists is about the same as in any crazy cult, they just parrot their authorities and no significant thinking is either demonstrated or required. It is obvious that original thinkers, who are capable of creating entire philosophies that are actually innovative and revolutionary, are exceedingly rare, to the point where you can only expect to find a handful of them in a millennium. The expectation that one can follow reason and evidence and come up with a valuable and mature philosophy is therefore incredibly naive. Even the great thinkers usually produced derivative work, with few actual innovations. Jesus, for instance, introduced no significant original ideas; his thoughts were recognized as very much like those of the contemporary scholars, only spoken with the authority of direct knowledge and power. Sankaracarya introduced very little in terms of original thought; for the most part, he isolated the core thought from the Upanisads and made it into a succinct and powerful argument. Teachings of Ramanuja, Madhva and Caitanya essentially elaborate on the Puranas, Upanisads and the Bhagavad-gita. Even the Bhagavata-purana is highly derivative, for the most part explaining the teaching of Vedanta through many different stories, repeating the core thought ad nauseam. How is it, then, that everybody keeps stating that their own religious, ethical or philosophical system is intuitive to the point where every rational individual could discover it anew, if only they followed reason and evidence, when it is obvious that religious philosophies exist as separate and distinct islands of thought, where you have highly derivative thinking on each respective island, and huge and insurmountable differences between the islands? If atheism is so intuitive, how come there were no significant thinkers in the history of the world who were atheists, up until very recently, and now all of the sudden it became some sort of a fashionable “meme”? If humanistic ethics are so intuitive, how come owning slaves and working them to death was the ethical norm throughout the world, across all history? Nobody really figured out Christian ethics before Christianity, that’s why it’s one of the few original ideas in history. Believing that anyone could figure it out now without being exposed to an entire civilization that was built upon it, is just arrogant and stupid. Atheists who keep their Christian ethics but state that you don’t need God for that, are but fools. Of course you do, it’s just that they are too stupid and arrogant to understand where they got it all from. It suffices to see how many things the Christians got right, and how few of those belong to the category of trivial intuitive things anyone would get right; whenever Marxists or some other atheist bunch tried something they considered “reasonable”, “modern” or “obvious”, they produced a disaster. Their disdain for the sanctity of human spirit produced the slaughterhouses of modernity. Their “progressive” ideas about sexuality or human equality resulted in the nightmare that is today’s society. Every time they thought they will make “progress” by opposing the traditional Christianity, they produced a hellish dystopia. Apparently, getting ethics right isn’t something a rational intellectual can reliably do, and there’s a significant difference between thinking you can do something, and actually pulling it off.
As for the opposing argument from the religious circles, where they argue that it would be dangerous to think independently because of the vast probability of error, stating that it’s much safer to just espouse their respective traditional worldview, what annoys me is the arrogance of assumption that they have the good stuff. Oh really? You are safe from doctrinal error? You are ethically pure, and only the others are in peril? You have God by the balls, so to speak? You have the truth that was revealed from above, and then kept, refined and explained by the tradition of saints? Why, then, if you have it so good, is the light of your truth so incredibly dim? Why is your “truth” always formulated the same way, in almost the same words, if God is the wellspring of creativity and intelligence? When I see most priests, they look stale and boring, like trained actors who fake “inner peace”, “confidence” and “balance”, they try to speak calmly and softly because they know that will make an impression on the impressionable, but anyone who actually experienced something from the direction of God will immediately understand them as poor imitation of a poorly understood phenomenon. Basically, you can’t even fake it properly, because you don’t have even the indirect knowledge of the phenomenon that would help you fake it. Every religious organization I can think of is oozing scandals of the basest kind – scandals that indicate profound spiritual depravity. Don’t you dare talk about ethical purity or safety from ideological error, you conceited buffoons.
What do I recommend then, since those two obviously fallacious alternatives seem to split the world between them? If I argue against trusting yourself and your intellect, and I also argue against putting trust in religious or philosophical traditions, what else is there?
First of all, you need to stop fearing error, as if it were somehow avoidable and, consequently, those committing it are somehow disreputable. The first thing you need to understand is that error is unavoidable, and the second thing is that error can either be a part of the learning process, or something you get stuck in, something akin to getting caught in orbit of a black hole. Error is something that exists as context of every single thought, word and action, where you are either in error, or you just missed it by a hair and you’re on trajectory to overshoot into error on the other side, because “too much” is as bad as “not enough”. There is error in form of insecurity, and error in form of arrogance, and there is the right path somewhere, in missing both Scilla and Charybdis. God is not something you choose once and you’re safe. God is something that has to be found again, and again, when formulating each thought, when you’re trying to linearize thoughts into words, and navigate proper action. That’s probably why Jesus was speaking of the “living God”, because if you’re not in touch with God as a living force of rightness and fullness, you are in error, by default. There’s never a safe haven of infallibility anywhere, regardless of how holy you are. Even if you are so firmly in God that you appear to be perfect and infallible, it means only that you are correcting every deviation from the proper path so quickly, that they are imperceptible by others. In essence, error is nothing to be feared, because the feeling of error allows you to quickly correct yourself until you are back where your inner spiritual compass points back at God.
The next important thing is to trust holy scriptures, persons and traditions, but only to a point. At some point you will have to deviate from traditions and figures of authority and carve your own path, but that won’t be soon, or all at once. I am a very original thinker, if such a thing exists at all, and I followed the recommendations of saints and holy traditions with diligent obedience, until I reached a point where I had to go my own way, which I never did lightly or without profound consideration. Spiritual traditions usually contain wisdom that is far greater than anything a smart, intelligent and educated individual could figure out on their own; in fact, they usually contain wisdom that is beyond what a great saint could do on his/her own. However, there is excess on both ends: in either arrogant assumption that you can do better, or in fear of carving your own path once your personal revelation had matured to the point where it actually exceeds collective historical revelation of others, and either breaks away from it altogether, or merely adds to it. There is a middle path between sinful arrogance and sinful humility, and finding that path is all but easy. If you think you are walking that path of rightness merely by virtue of belonging to a church, you obviously didn’t think about those things enough. There isn’t a trick that can give you safety from the naked blade of reality on which you have to make a choice. Correctness of choice exists only in the state of spirit where God is not only your singular point of focus, but also the way in which you do things. God needs to be the way, truth and life, and you need to be there, in way, truth and life, walking the sharp blade of rightness that separates two wrongs, fearing no error, because in darshan of God, you are that blade. Failing that, everything is error.
What I find interesting to consider is just how much of today’s Christian theology is a direct consequence of Jesus’ competence, or how much a matter of competence of a European white male.
This is not to take away anything from Jesus’ actual power, but let’s be realistic here. Guy was born in the middle of nowhere among fishermen and farmers. His teachings were solutions applied to primitive problems, something like “don’t rape your neighbour’s wife, don’t kill your own brother over a piece of land and please stop behaving like animals and try to act nice to each other”. That’s pretty much it. If you try to find anything technical and elaborate in a manner of Indians, you probably won’t find any.
And yet, if you look at the Christianity as a whole, it looks like much more than that. That’s probably because it has not so much to do with actual Jesus, but instead it was built, upgraded, refined and improved for centuries by many generations of European clerics and intellectuals.
And those same people, European white males, built not just Christianity but the whole world as we know it the same process too. They invented philosophy, science and technology, and over time became so absurdly powerful that they easily conquered the whole world.
Or, let’s put it this way. If Jesus was born in any other part of the world, would anyone today be able to witness any of Christian teachings?
In fact, he wasn’t even born in Europe, Jesus is an African-Asian. And if we take a look at how things are looking around there today, it doesn’t generally look especially developed or peaceful. But he was born just close enough to the actually smart and competent people, and those are the Europeans, where the thing got traction.
But one can’t stop to wonder just how much of Christian civilization is built upon the actual Jesus’ teaching, and how much it was just an impetus in the hands of the competent people who can build something advanced from a starting point of basically nothing. Or am I underestimating the base he provided?
It’s a valid point; also, if we go on, and peel more layers from that onion, how much would Jesus’ contribution be worth if he didn’t have an entire Jewish theology and tradition to rely on? It just reiterates my point, that the sum of theological knowledge is much more than even an enlightened genius can figure out on their own, in a single lifetime. The prophets are building upon Moses, Jesus is building upon both, Paul is building upon Jesus, Augustine is building upon Paul, Theresa of Avilla is building upon Augustine etc. In Hinduism you have shastra, sadhu and guru as the “holy trinity” of spirituality – there are the scriptures as the basis, there is the collective agreed upon interpretation and spiritual practice of the community, and there’s your guru who tells you how that specifically applies to you, and there can’t be a significant discrepancy between the three. In Buddhism, you have Buddha and sanga. I don’t think all the traditions agree that the later contributions are actually improving the teaching of the founder himself; some think those are merely commentary that makes the teaching more understandable and adapted to the times; depending on the spiritual standing of the founder himself, the later commentary can be either silly and inferior, or in fact a significant improvement; for instance, Buddhist commentary on Buddha is for the most part stupid and ignorant because they didn’t actually get what he meant, but Sufis are a significant improvement on Islam.
Also, I wouldn’t want to fall into the trap set by those neomarxist morons who want to set every discussion in terms of race and gender, like the Nazis who set everything in terms of aryan vs. Jewish race, or Marxists in terms of economic exploitation. Christianity was built by both male and female saints, and by common efforts of Jews, North-African Berbers, and White europeans.
Nah, I wasn’t even completely serious about it, that part was just intentional trolling. 🙂
Originally, I wanted to mention “white heterosexual male” but I figured that would be plain obvious trolling, so I toned it down a notch to “white European male”. 🙂
The thing is, we can see that phrase way too often as a supposed definition of absolutely everything that’s wrong with the world; i.e. if you’re a white heterosexual male, you should feel guilty because you’re not dead.
So I took that premise, inverted it, and use it casually around for trolling purposes, because it usually provokes a lot of fuss and angry comments. And what’s best, you could even make some sort of argument that it’s not even completely wrong.
But yeah, I guess it’s completely misguided here. This is not a place where you’re likely to meet huge number of leftists, but I guess sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to scratch my trolling itch.
Nah, I wasn’t even completely serious about that – that part was just intentional trolling. 🙂
Originally, I wanted to mention “white heterosexual male” but I figured that would be plain obvious trolling, so I toned it down a notch to “white European male”. 🙂
The thing is, we can see that phrase way too often as a supposed definition of absolutely everything that’s wrong with the world; i.e. if you’re a white heterosexual male, you should feel guilty because you’re not dead.
So I took that premise, inverted it, and use it casually around for trolling purposes, because it usually provokes a lot of fuss and angry comments. And what’s best, you could even make some sort of argument that it’s not even completely wrong.
But yeah, I guess it’s completely misguided here. This is not a place where you’re likely to meet huge number of leftists, but I guess sometimes I just can’t help myself and I have to scratch my trolling itch.
I know it’s tempting; they are incredibly annoying and wrong, and it’s tempting to behave as if everything opposite to them must be true and good. However, they are even more useless than that; they are so chaotic and insane you can’t just invert their statements and get something that’s good and useful. They need to be discarded completely, like useless garbage that can’t be repurposed in any way or form. You can’t invert ravings of a lunatic and end up with a holy scripture.
Well of course not, that’s why it’s called trolling.
Is it just me or did the level of anger in the global field somehow strongly increased in the course of the last few days/weeks?
I woudn’t know, I’m actively trying to not give a fuck and have a vacation. 🙂
Now that you’ve mentioned that, I think you might be right, I’ve felt it too, but I thought that it was just me feeling that way because of intermittent fasting, LOL.
There is Danijel’s comment to which I actually wanted to reply with my last comment, and it looks something like “I can almost taste blood”, but shitty disqus didn’t let me find it since it’s older than a year. It’s a pretty good summary.
I was just sitting on balcony on Lastovo minding my own business at near sunset when in the house next to the one I am staying in the woman started screaming and cursing the guy just like that, on a click. Incredible level of violence (for a woman at least) from absolute zero; I’ve witnesses such things only a few times in my life. I’d say these islanders on a small island live in their tiny bubbles and if a bit of nasty astral “wind” comes to them, it completely overwhelms them. And that “wind” can easily come from incredible levels of violence and hatred in America, but also about what is happening with “migrants” in Europe (for example “migrants” just set a camp on Lesbos on fire, with direct help of some German NGOs, so that they must be sent to Europe; they were fully packed and didn’t loose a thing in the fire, of course). I sense a lot of hate from normal Europeans who despise what is going on and feel helpless, and on the other side from leftists who do such things as helping the “migrants” come over here, and who would kill all those who oppose them in the name of “progress”. So I’d say you are right.
Obviously I’m not old enough to remember it myself, but I would imagine that this is how it looked like just before the last world war. Everyone feeling itchy to slaughter each other. Tension before release. Heavy cloud before the downpour.
There might be a difference: this time everybody is quite ready to fight someone, but I’m not sure anybody has any positive idea they are fighting for. They all think some positive goal will magically appear once they kill the other side.
That’s the main reason why I’m strongly against the idea of having children. It just doesn’t make any sense to invest significant amount of time and effort trying to prolong your line of existence in a world that’s slowly crumbling to pieces.
https://www.index.hr/mobile/clanak.aspx?category=vijesti&id=2218794
Welp, seems like a tried-and-true tactic. 🙂
It makes me wonder, does it affect all complex biological lifeforms or just humans. I’d be inclined to assume that a lot of wildlife have a similar astral structure to most of the humans.
https://www.foxnews.com/science/scientists-baffled-reports-orca-attacks.amp
I would expect most animals to be too “present in the moment” and involved with their instincts and senses to react to anything astral. If a species is wired enough to the astral, and uses it for at least some of its normal behavior, then yes, I would expect it to be more prone to this.