Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Religion, The Long Reads

We Made It All Up

God exists the way the USA and France and Pakistan exist – the way the Yankees and Lakers and Manchester United exist… the way Apple and Tesla and… well, you get the point.

Nations, sports teams, corporations – any group, class, organization you can think of – all of them exist because we think they do. They aren’t out there in the cosmos waiting for us to recognize their existence. We believe them into existence.

A bunch of guys in powder wigs decide they should have a new country, and they all buy into the idea. They believe it into existence. They write a Declaration of what they have in mind and they all sign it. They follow it with a war, then they write a Constitution, elect a first President and Congress…. 

That’s how institutions come into existence. Somebody gets an idea, a bunch of other somebodies get on board with it, and then they turn their idea into an institution. They give it a legal structure, adopt mission statements and strategic plans, somebody designs a flag for it, somebody else designs and sews uniforms, street vendors start selling swag with its colors, it prints and spends money, takes out loans and buys real estate and puts up buildings, sells things and stages events.… The psychological term for all that is emergence — the invisible idea everybody believes in takes on visible structure — it emerges into existence, becomes a shared reality. You can see, hear, taste. and touch it. It’s a part of things. Before long, it’s been around forever.

All thanks to the human ability to believe in an idea until it becomes a communal reality.

Patriotism and fandom and brand loyalty and religious devotion aren’t out there existing apart from anybody’s opinion on the matter, keeping track of who believes in them and who doesn’t and making a to-be-punished list of people who don’t. They only come into being because of the belief, intention, and follow-through of their believers. Take away belief and emergence and you don’t have a country or a team or a whatever – all you’ve got is a dreamer or a bunch of dreamers making things up that never take shape, never emerge, never become reality.

All you’ve got is a great concept that never gets produced.

Your people and my people never get together.

But keep in touch. We can do lunch.

To my new atheist way of thinking, belief plus emergence is how God, the Bible, Christianity, and all the rest of the God religions came to be.

God emerged into existence.

That’s heresy of course. “Heresy” is what happens when unbelievers think. Unbelievers can’t help but be heretics. If they were believers, their brains wouldn’t process heretical thoughts. But since they’re not, heresy comes naturally – it’s the standard fare, just another day at the office. They root for the Astros instead of the Cubs. They kneel for the National Anthem. They think high school kids shouldn’t have the “freedom” to open carry at school. And on it goes. Heretics all – because they don’t believe.

Believers, on the other hand, can’t be heretics. Belief won’t let them. Belief keeps its onward Christian soldiers marching smartly off to war. There’s no breaking ranks in believing. Heresy requires thinking outside the lines of belief. Galileo had to turn himself in to Rome because there’s no way a believer could think the earth goes around the sun. The Bible has it the other way around—everybody can see that. You can’t go your own way and be a believer at the same time. No getting out of line.

God can’t be a heretic either. God knows who he is, and the idea that he could have doubts about himself is ludicrous. True, some of the stuff God says and does and believes about himself is pretty out there, but God is entitled to be as out there as He wants. He’s God, after all. We believe God into an indescribably unattainable level of existence where all normal rules of behavior are off – including when God does things that would be criminal if we were talking about you and me. God can be as cruel and brutal, contradictory and arbitrary as he wants. God’s got to be tough enough to keep order – just think what humans would do if he let them. If sometimes what he does stretches the bounds of our theology, well, so be it. Besides, it’s useful to let God get away with stuff. Like war. The things that happen in war are crimes. But since God is okay with war – the Bible says his name is “Man of War” – then we can be Men of War as well. Thus the crimes of war are legalized.

How convenient.

When God emerged, we believed him out as far awa y from us as we could– we put him in a dwelling place of his own called Heaven – somewhere way out there beyond the edges of the universe. We decree that He’s sacred and we’re profane. He’s immortal, invisible, God only wise — omnipotent, omniscient, almighty — and we’re none of the above. He’s insanely, incomprehensibly rich and powerful, and he lives forever. We have this funny saying about people being “richer than God” but of course we don’t really mean it. Rich compared to God? Not a chance. Even the nations are a drop in the bucket compared to Him.

We think of God that way because we need God to be that big, that incomprehensible, that unapproachable. We need God’s presence to be so holy and powerful and scary that we have to tie a rope around the priest’s ankle so we can drag him out if he missteps while he’s inside the Holy of Holies and God can’t help himself and just lashes out and wastes him. We need God to dwell in unapproachable light, where there is no shadow or turning, to be right and true and just beyond reproach, no matter how abusive and sadistic and criminal he is in his agitated moments. God is the master of all that is mysterious, all the things that bug us, everything we can’t and never will figure out. God is the monarch of life and death, and all things comprehensible and not. We need to give him lots of space.

So of course we’re not going to venture that we just made the whole thing up – that we made God up. Mess with a God like that? Are you kidding?

But then we stop believing and now the unthinkable becomes possible. We become instant heretics. To our unbelieving way of thinking, the whole emerged reality of God and his religions is free to come a-tumbling down. We bring it down when we stop believing. It all burns up, crashes into the sea, vaporizes. Talk about special effects.

And that horrible God? We can be rid of him, too.

Just like that.

The brains of the human species hold onto beliefs for a long time – centuries and millennia, eras and eons – transferring belief from one generation of brains to the next generation of brains, far beyond the Biblical seventh generation. Thus God lives forever and his religions endure and outlast each faithful generation.

Stop believing, and it all ends.

God ends.

Imagine that kind of world of you can. You probably can’t. You might not want to. You’d have to be a nonbeliever to do it.

“I made it all up” sends everything we’ve ever known about God and his heaven and his creation whirling around the room like a balloon off its tether. Suddenly all those people, all that worship, all those holy lands and holy places, all that cosmology… all of it scattered, broken, discarded, despised, rejected. We created it all by belief. We destroyed it all by unbelief.

These kinds of thoughts are so radical, so extreme, so distant, so… wrong, just plain wrong… that our brains don’t want to go there. But they can, and will, and do…

If we stop believing.

I know, because it happened to me. Going from being a Christian to being a heretic was a turbulent flight for a long time. But then the air got smoother. I got used to my new apostasy. Life without my prior sense of always being under the thumb, under scrutiny, always having to figure it out, reconcile all the contradictions, solve all the conundrums, all that scrambling to explain and justify God… all of it faded away. God vanished – and when He did, the tempest, tumult, and trouble that were always required of believing in God ended. My new ways of thinking weren’t nearly so turbulent. I could just… well, sort of… think.

Imagine that.

Kevin Rhodes Narratives of Self, Purpose, and Meaning, The Long Reads, Uncategorized

We Didn’t See it Coming

And now that it has, we don’t know what to do.

Of course we don’t know what to do. We’ve never been here before, we’ve never done this, we don’t know anybody who has, so how should we know what to do?

We didn’t see it coming. We weren’t prepared. Nobody told us. Nobody told us things really could melt down, that you can really get to a place where the center doesn’t hold. We didn’t know these things could really happen.

But then they did, and here we are. Oh yeah, we heard, we read about them. We entertained ourselves with them. But the real thing? No. Not here, not now, not us. Never us. But now it’s us, and we’re clueless.

All our institutions, all the systems, the programs, the back up plans, all the Plan B’s and contingency plans and escape routes, all the provisions laid up, all the people we thought we could trust, the people in charge, the people who should know, all the paid grownups who take care of boring stuff like how they keep the lights turned on and why the food keeps coming – they all checked out early and now they’re gone where we can’t find them.

They didn’t know either. They just kept using all the same old jargon, reciting the same old lines, pretending things were still the way they used to be, how things used to work — either that or they just made shit up that everybody with any brains knew was shit but people flocked to it anyway, I mean what else was there? They fed the fire instead of putting it out, fed it with the same old burned-out charcoal chunks of what used to be a fire but now is just ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

The other adults – the ones who don’t do stuff, they just explain it, they were frozen. They knew too much, they tried to tell us how things work and what was going to happen if we didn’t so something about it, but nobody listened, nobody thought they were any good for anything. Well, half of us thought so anyway. Half of us thought they had nothing to offer, while the other half thought they were the only ones who could save us, but the first half was louder and more into believing things than knowing things, which is easier because doing your own research means filling up with more fantasy to believe so you can keep faking your way through life.

Until you can’t anymore.

And now, while that half keeps faking it and making shit up and trying to gut the life and substance out of everything, the half that has known all along, has seen it coming, has actually done the research, that half is also stuck in all the ways things used to be, so they keep trotting out all the old ways like decency and discourse, listening and knowing, compromising and collaborating – nice sounding stuff that apparently used to work, but now when they talk about it they sound like a bunch of old codgers trying to assure us the everything is alright, just give it time, things will work out, no need to fear, no cause for panic. They do that so we will stay calm, but we see through them, we know better, we feel what’s going down and we know that our feelings don’t lie.

It’s like everybody who’s talking is lying – one half because they actually believe their own lies and the other half because they’re so blind and stuck and unoriginal that they don’t realize reaching back to the times when things weren’t like this is effectively telling lies about the way things are now.

So now here we are – chaos, crash, crisis… disintegration, destruction, disorder… ruin, rubble, randomness… the poetic thesaurus for how to say that everything has fallen apart and my god this was never supposed to happen, nobody thought it ever would, we thought we could hold things together but we couldn’t and now we can’t so look at it — look at this mess of our own making and it’s our fault because we never thought we would have to clean it up, look at this smoking husk of everything we thought belonged to us but it turns out somebody else had the right to repossess it.

So how does it feel?

The wheels came off. We ran off the rails. Things came loose, everything fell apart. The bottom fell out. The top blew off. The walls caved in. Things went sideways. We drove off a cliff. We hit bottom. We’re in a tailspin. We’re going down. It’s the perfect storm, the perfect flood, the perfect earthquake, tidal wave, tsunami. We’re lost in space, out at sea, out in left field. We lost our bearings. Our foundations shook. Our sea anchor broke loose. We drifted off. We’re sunk. We’re lost. We’re screwed. We’re dizzy, disoriented. We went from unplanned, unpredicted, and unforeseen to unimaginable, uncontrollable, and unrecognizable. There’s that saying about the inmates in charge of the asylum. Now they are. The nut cases’ nutty ideas have gone mainstream. Reality has inverted, flip-flopped, turned inside out. What is, isn’t anymore. What was, will never be again. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

That’s how it feels.

Only worse.

Everything is always worse. The news is always bad. It’s always something. Just when we think it can’t get any worse it gets worse. We go from bad to worse to worst to so-off-the-charts-worst there isn’t a category for it. There’s never a break, never any let up.

Yeah, I get it. Things have been bad before – that’s the lesson of history and blah blah blah. We’re supposed to buck up, tough it out, stay the course, keep our chin up, quit being so negative, keep up a positive mental attitude, stop whining, stop feeling sorry for ourselves, cut with the entitlement already.

Yeah right. Like any of that’s actually going to help when you can’t think straight, can’t hold a coherent useful thought. Maybe this has happened before, but it’s never happened to us, never happened now.

We didn’t see it coming.

I didn’t see it coming.

And now that it has, I don’t know what to do. Of course I don’t know what to do. I’ve never been here before, I’ve never done this, I don’t know anybody who has. So how should I know what to do? How should I have known what this would be like?

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Belief Systems and Culture, Religion, The Long Reads

The Underdog Religion

Christianity is the underdog religion.

Or so it wants you to think.

We love the underdog story — we know what’s coming, but we love it anyway, we can’t get enough. We love the upset, the incredible comeback when the chips are down and there’s no way but then all of a sudden the bigger, stronger, tougher, richer, better equipped opponent gets a comeuppance. History and Hollywood love this story – the Rebel Alliance, La Résistance, the Miracle on Ice, David vs. Goliath… way too many examples to list.

Madison Avenue and Wall Street love this story.

Politicians and voters and world leaders love this story.

Economists and American Dreamers love this story.

Everybody loves this story — it’s embedded in individual and collective brains and culture — a standard narrative, paradigm, metaphor, archetype.

I won’t say the Bible or Christianity invented it, but both are full of it, and their fingerprints are all over western history and culture, which can’t hurt their claim to its patent. Ancient Israel loved the story — Gideon and his 300 soldiers pared down from 32,000, David vs. Goliath, David and his ragtag band of “mighty men” …. Then Jesus came along and perfected it:  the backwater small town kid, the bastard son of an unwed mother and a blue collar dad; the kid with the unexpected religious streak who hung out with a tough crowd, always on the outs with the religious elites.

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” John 1:46 ESV

“And when Jesus had finished these parables, he went away from there, and coming to his hometown he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?’ And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.’ And he did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief.” Matthew 13:53-58 ESV

“And as he reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.’” Mark 2:15-17 ESV

And so it goes.

Anybody who’s ever lived in a backwater small town knows the “who do you think you are?” response Jesus got when he tried to bring his gospel to his hometown.

So he mostly stays away, gathers followers like rabbis are supposed to do, takes his teaching and miracle show on the road. But then he meets a predictable end – pisses off too many people, they make trouble with the law, and he ends up brutally executed.

But then… Resurrection! The ultimate comeback to end all ultimate comebacks!

It was “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (Max von Sydow as Jesus, John Wayne as the Centurion) – and it still is, over and over, in church and out of it – not just the Jesus story but the Rocky story and Star Wars and the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches books… and countless thousands of other variations on the same theme.

Why do we love the underdog so much? Psychologists and scientists have their theories (we can relate, they give us hope, etc.) but ultimately it’s about a reversal of power. It’s not just that the weak win out, it’s that the weak win out over the strong. The pecking order gets reversed, for all to see. That’s the part of the Jesus story the Apostle Paul particularly latched onto:

“For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:26-29 ESV

Did you notice that phrase at the end – “so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.” All this putting the rich and famous and educated elites in their places sounds great, but let’s not get carried away. We need to remember who’s at the head of the table.

Once I was hosted at a swanky restaurant that didn’t take reservations by a businessman who ate a three martini business lunch there nearly every day. The line was out the door and down the block. We walked past everyone, he greeted the Maître d’ by name and our party went straight to a table.

Power.

Nice work if you can get it.

We want that. We want to be rich and famous not so much to be rich and famous (which would be nice) but to be powerful. Most of us spend life on the wrong end of the short straw. But not this time, not in the biggest stakes game ever played. This time we win. This time the weak and lowly and not so wise put those uppity elites in their place. When we were kids it was the adults. When we went to school it was the principal. At work it was the boss. And on and on – always somebody with more brass, more money, more creds, more… something, anything to put us down, keep us in our places, slap us with “who do you think you are?”

But not this time. This time it’s our turn. This time we rub their noses in it.

Our motives aren’t always so pure when we get to win.

We’re good sports, but not now, not this time. But we can be forgiven for that. We’ve been ashamed more times than we can count. About time they find out how it feels.

But this is God we’re talking about. Why is He so concerned about people being more powerful than Him? I mean, He’s God. He has a permanent hall pass, a permanent reservation where they don’t take reservations. Take a look at that other phrase — “to bring to nothing things that are.” God, it seems, has a vindictive streak. You think you’re so hot, just you wait – God will knock you down a few notches. Let’s take a look at the passage featured in Handel’s Messiah:

Why do the nations rage
    and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
    and the rulers take counsel together,
    against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
Let us burst their bonds apart
    and cast away their cords from us.”

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
    the Lord holds them in derision.
Then he will speak to them in his wrath,
    and terrify them in his fury, saying,
As for me, I have set my King
    on Zion, my holy hill.”

I will tell of the decree:
The Lord said to me, “You are my Son;
    today I have begotten you.
Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage,
    and the ends of the earth your possession.
You shall break them with a rod of iron
    and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.”

Now therefore, O kings, be wise;
    be warned, O rulers of the earth.
Serve the Lord with fear,
    and rejoice with trembling.
Kiss the Son,
    lest he be angry, and you perish in the way,
    for his wrath is quickly kindled.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Psalm 2 ESV

Read the Bible closely, and God is more like Emperor Palpatine than Jesus meek and mild, and His grip on things is more like Darth Vader keeping the Evil Empire in tow. He’s angry, derisive, vindictive, and vicious. Genocide, infanticide, rape, murder, homophobia, xenophobia… you name it, it’s on God’s rap sheet.

Christians know that – or they would if they would actually read what the Bible says about their God – but they excuse it all. They say that God is “good” and “loving” and “kind” and “merciful” — never mind that he’s got a temper – that “his wrath is quickly kindled,” that His M.O. is to “break them with a rod of iron.” Geez. Seems obvious we’re dealing with a sociopath here, but believers make excuses for God like the abused makes excuses for the abuser. He’s a nice guy when he’s off the bottle, but when he’s not… God is a nice guy when he’s not instructing His people to destroy a city and leave no survivors except the women the soldiers want to rape.

Obviously God is not exempt from “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Same for his closest associates. The story of how Solomon came to power reads just like Michael Corleone tightening his grip on the family. 1 Kings 2 ESV Thus Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, could say of Trump’s Stormy Daniels mess, “We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.’” 

A mulligan. A do-over. The perks of power.

Can you spell “corruption”?

And it all gets sold as an underdog story.

Not in Madison Avenue’s wildest dreams.

That’s the blinding power of belief in action – belief when it has metastasized beyond fundamentalism, even beyond extremism, all the way to its most inexcusable, unspeakable, unthinking form.

I never saw any of that when I was a believer. I thought God’s power was cool. I thought I and my fellow Christians were cool. God’s throne room is the scariest place ever, and we got to go in and stand where it was safe.

No, not safe. Definitely not safe. More like a place of unimaginable shame, if we had known it for what it really is.

For more:

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants: Gladwell, Malcolm

Psychology of the Underdog | Psychology Today

Why Do We Love Underdog Stories? Psychology Weighs In | Psychology Today

The science of why we love to root for underdogs – Vox

Why do we root for the underdog? (bcm.edu)

Kevin Rhodes Uncategorized

Dopamine No More! (I miss it)

I miss dopamine.

I miss the sweet emotion (queue up the song).

Dopamine makes us want to do things. Dopamine inspires and motivates, conveys purpose and meaning, makes us believe that dreams can come true.

Our hairy ancestors apparently needed it. Otherwise life was just too hard, so why bother to survive? Evolution said that won’t do – here, take a shot of this, that’ll get you going.

I was a dopamine junkie. I overdid it. Dopamine fuels belief, belief gets the internal resolve going, which fuels more dopamine which fuels more belief… The more you use, the more you want. The more you use, the more you need. You’re invincible when you’re on it, an anxious slug when you’re not.

The addictive cycle.

Pretty soon you’re out of touch. Your risk-reward regulator goes out of whack. The further out you get, the closer you get to the edge, the more thrilling it is. You’ve gone beyond surviving, now you’re thriving. No normal drudgery life for you. You’re the exception.

So you think.

It’s a lie. And the crazy thing is, people who have their dopamine under control buy the lie with you. They cheer for you, say you’re inspiring. You’re on a Hero’s Journey. You’re living the Redemption story – the Hollywood standard:  get a crazy idea, sacrifice everything, lose everything, everybody turns against you, you crash and burn, all is lost, everything is hopeless…and then… you did it! Happy ending! Hero worship! Glorious sunset! Stirring overture!

I miss all that.

I read an article about “dopamine fasting.” It’s an anti-self-help self-help technique that’s been making the rounds for a few years. I could see that. I’ve been working on it myself for about that long. Once I saw how dopamine had ruined my life, how fraudulent and full of lies and false promises it is, how it would keep ruining my life if I didn’t get it under control, I swore it off. No more periodic crash and burns for the sake of a survival need that started with getting our butts out of the cave to join a Mastodon-clubbing party.

I meant well, but I lapsed now and then. I couldn’t seem to go cold turkey – dopamine was too sneaky. One little hit – one idea that seemed so cool in the moment – and I was back in the cycle. So I needed safeguards, needed to learn not to trust my ideas, how to squelch my hopes, not follow my dreams. Life was still on the edge, but not the fun kind of edge. The new edge was overlooking The Void — an imminent drop into meaningless, purposelessness, despair.

It helped that I was overtaken by a dopamine-impairing neuro-muscular disease. It advanced slowly at first, didn’t get diagnosed for a few years. By the time I got diagnosed, it was like somebody else said – “I got diagnosed, and 6 months later I had aged 15 years.” It also helped that I became poor. Old, impaired, and poor – three things I thought I’d never be, and now I was. All three hammered my dopamine supply. Crazy ideas need lots of energy and money. If you’re old and impaired, you don’t have the energy. If you’re poor you don’t have the money. It helps.

No, I don’t sit around whining. I’ve learned to do things without feeling like it, learned to live without motivation and inspiration, without hope and joy. Don’t be disgusted at my crappy attitude. I’m not wallowing. I’m living an experiment. How do you live without all that good stuff? How do you rise above slug level when your brain doesn’t have the chemical it needs to keep you squirming along?

I can’t tell you, but I do it every day.

Truth is, there’s still some dopamine flowing up there, or I’d be done. Enough to keep me surviving, although sometimes I wonder. Enough that I still lapse now and then. My routine now is treat it like an annoying child – stop what you’re doing, give it attention, hear it out. And then, once it’s feeling better, go away and wait. That might be enough.

If it comes up again, try to find out why. What’s the hook? Soothe the idea, make it feel better at the source. You can’t do anything about it anyway – you’re too old, infirm, and poor, remember? No, it doesn’t want to hear that. It’s a child – it doesn’t process adult limitations like affordability or mobility challenges. It just wants to play. So go ahead – after awhile you’ll want to sit down and rest. Maybe it will pester you again, maybe not. It might go away right away, maybe overnight, maybe a couple days. Usually no more.

Dopamine episode solved.

You’re safe until your dopamine idea-maker fires off another one.

Rewind, repeat.

I’ve learned to deal, but I miss it. I miss believing, hoping, trusting. I miss having dreams and visions, feeling like I can do cool stuff. Life was more fun when it was full of magical thinking and delusion.

I sometimes think how easy it would be to get on meds — instant chemical relief for crappiness and despair. But then I think I’ve had quite enough magical thinking and delusion for one lifetime. When Nietzsche recognized that God had died, he worried that people wouldn’t be able to live without the sense of meaning and purpose that God had given them. His solution was to invent Superman.

It takes a lot of dopamine to be Superman. Lots of testosterone, too – another survival drug.

Superman was a disaster. Thanks anyway Friedrich, but we’ll sit this one out. No Superman for me.

And for now at least, no meds either. I’m more interested in finding out if you can actually live on the edge of The Void. I know, I know… it’s just another version of my old living of the edge – kind of a pathetic version at that. But despair is what I’ve got right now, so I’m working with it. I work out, do my learning and reflecting and reading, create my artwork. I do it because I do it. I do what I do because that’s what I do. No Hero’s Journey, no Hollywood, no motivational speaker self-help guru fame and fortune. Just getting stuff done whether I feel like it or not.

It’s probably a phase – another fit my inner child is throwing. I’d like to be a child again. I miss that, too. I never wanted to grow up. All the magic, delusion, dopamine highs.

But no. Here’s to survival! To the Void! To despair! To the nothingness Nietzsche was worried about!

And all that other adult shit.

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief, Religion, The Long Reads

The Trouble is, We Believe

Belief is something humans do.

Beliefism is belief metastasized — belief unmoored, unhinged, runaway, with no object but its own self-referenced purification.

Every belief carries the seed of beliefism– the potential to grow into something toxic, with no purpose but to propagate more of itself.

Which is why…

Belief is a clear and present danger.

Belief should come with a warning — “Handle With Care.” But it doesn’t, and so we don’t — we just go around believing things like it’s no big deal. What we believe is a big deal. We should be more careful.

We’re probably careless because belief makes life feel better. It provides purpose and meaning and mission, lays out incentives and rewards, hypes us into feeling inspired and enthusiastic, fired up to do great things.

Belief is how we get to act like God.

Belief is how we create worlds, build civilizations, found nations. Belief anchors us in collective and individual identity, defines who’s us and who’s them, carves out space for us in the world. Our brains are wired to value those things.

Our brains are wired to believe.

Belief is indiscriminate. It doesn’t care what’s believed, what’s fact or fake. As far as belief is concerned, all reality is alternate reality. Our brains have a bad case of “whatever.” If we want to believe it, they’re good with it.

Belief isn’t choosy.

Belief doesn’t distinguish fact from fiction, truth from madness, clarity from delusion. It’s amoral, indiscriminate, undiscerning. Belief only makes self-referential judgments — what conforms to the thing believed and what doesn’t, what to encourage and promote vs. what to punish and ban.

Our brains don’t discriminate.

Our brains readily swap belief in this for belief in that — religion, science, humanism, capitalism, fascism, extraterrestrials, self-help, past lives… they’re all the same.

Belief is fun.

Beliefism is about getting inspired, believing impossible dreams, going for it, realizing your unique calling, becoming your authentic self – all those things that make Hollywood and self-helpers and entrepreneurial heroes rich and famous.

Sound familiar?

Belief has been king in the New World for 400 years. The New World brought it from the Old World, where it was king for millennia. Belief is America’s root religion. It gave us the Puritans. Now it gives us the self-helpers, alternative healers, life coaches, and evangelizing Christians and atheists. We do belief in the USA. We’re belief experts. We got it down.

But there’s more:  belief morphs into beliefism.

Beliefism is when belief goes public. It’s the Unicorn IPO, the blockbuster premiered. In psychological terms, beliefism is when belief emerges – moves beyond internal subjectivity and takes on form and substance in external human reality, becomes ideology, builds institutions, develops its own mythology and metaphors, becomes law and economics, dictates cultural norms.

Beliefism turns what’s believed into knowledge.

Beliefism is evident in a street evangelist’s pitch for Creationism. “The universe is way too complicated for me to understand,” he said, “so there must be a God who does.” He could have understood but he didn’t. He took a shortcut – he believed instead of knowing. Then he reversed the order:  his belief became knowledge — he knew what he believed.

Beliefism is unethical.

Belief creates worldview, worldview creates reality, and reality is whatever belief makes it. Beliefism has no ethics – it runs in a circle; there’s no outside reference, no checks and balances, nothing to keep it honest, nothing to validate it. Belief is unaccountable, therefore unethical.

Beliefism polarizes.

Beliefism separates who belongs and who doesn’t, who’s friend and who’s foe. It manages entrances and exits, reinforces conformity, and punishes dissent.

Beliefism radicalizes.

Once it’s got a cause, beliefism takes it to an extreme. Belief becomes fundamentalism. If you’re not with us you’re against us. No neutrality. You go to the edge or you suffer and die.

Beliefism trends to fundamentalism

Fundamentalism decrees doctrine, prescribes ritual; banishes and punishes discourse, doubt, and dissent. It builds silos and hunkers down; lobs bombs at them. Fundamentalism can be religious or secular – same dynamics either way.

Beliefism practices mind control.

Beliefism runs on brain conformity – for the sake of personal identity and survival, for group cohesiveness. Cults are built on mind control. Every belief-fueled cause is a cult in the making. Nations, corporations, religions, academic disciplines, societal institutions… they’re all built on mind control. None of them exist if we don’t believe them into existence. The process of entering and sustaining membership is the same no matter what.

Beliefism lives in our blind spots.

Beliefism runs in stealth mode. Like a friend of mine used to say, “The trouble with blind spots is you can’t see them.” We don’t notice or examine what beliefism is doing to our perspective, worldview, reality — we just know the reality that emerges from it.

Beliefism promotes delusional thinking.

Beliefism removes belief from examination and critical thinking. Unmoored belief trends to delusion. You become a danger to yourself and others. Your risk/return matrix warps. You drink the Kool-Aid. You storm the Capitol. You flock to super spreader events.

There’s good neuroscience behind beliefism.

Beliefism works because we’re biological beings. We’re powered by hormones, chemicals, electrical charges. We believe from the inside out — our bodies and brains construct our reality from what’s around us, including how other people are constructing reality. We share perspective with each other and a shared reality emerges. We build things together to support and perpetuate that reality — institutions, architecture, art, economics, law, government, religion, norms and customs, rituals and practices, metaphors and icons. The “higher” portions of our brains dream all this up, the “lower” portions keep it rolling.

That warning label idea is no joke.

Beliefism has hurt a lot a people for a long time. It still does. It hurt me. It might be hurting you.

Maybe we should talk about it.

Kevin Rhodes Atheism, Religion, The Long Reads

I Don’t Love You Like I Loved You Yesterday

When you go
Would you even turn to say
I don’t love you
Like I did
Yesterday
My Chemical Romance

I’ve been waiting to hear those words. I’m not going to, and I finally know why. I won’t hear them because there’s nobody there to say them. Which means there’s nothing to end, no good-byes to make, no reasons to give.

I couldn’t think how to write about it. No longer being a Christian, becoming an atheist – lots of people write about that. I have, too. But this time was different – what I discovered was bigger than “once I believed this and now I believe that.” It was about how my faith kept me lost in an artificial childhood. I never grew up. I stayed a child because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you believe. And I paid for it.

Here’s where the idea of remaining childlike came from:

“And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’” Matthew 18:2-4 ESV

That sounds deep, and it gets a lot of mileage. It took it at face value, as I did with all my Bible reading. It worked great in the realm of belief, but in adult life… not so much. How to write about that? Then the idea came to me:  write to the Jesus who said that. So here goes….

* * *

The whole thing started with me feeling like a zero, screwing everything up. I needed help, and you would help me, dust me off and get me pointed in a better direction, make me into somebody I didn’t dislike, somebody useful. You would do all that because you wanted to– not only could you, but you would. It was easy for you, it’s what you were for.

All I had to do was believe in you, trust you, throw it all in for you. I did, and you came smiling into my life – strong, kind, generous. You were invincible – with you around, there was never anything to be afraid of, nothing was ever out of control (including me). You were the best of friends, the best of times, the best of company. You could keep everybody and everything together just by walking into the room. You were the big brother everybody should have but nobody does. You made things right. You straightened life out. You straightened me out — gave me what I lacked, filled in the blanks, the holes, the empty spaces. You gave me everything to believe in – a cause, a calling, a purpose. You made me strong, like you.

Now, after all those years, I finally see that there was no you and me, no you doing all that for me. Instead, I made you up like an imaginary friend, to be everything I wasn’t, to do everything I couldn’t. I didn’t trust myself, didn’t believe in myself, so I made you up to be someone I could trust and believe in – someone outside of me, out of reach of me, someone I could never be, who could do what I would never be able to do. You were the me I wanted to be but could never be on my own.

Or so I thought.

* * *

I was 17, 18, 19 when I reached out to you — in late adolescence, when children differentiate into their young adult selves. I never did — I differentiated into you. So did all my new friends that were joining the faith at the time – all of us wannabe Hippies who became Jesus Freaks instead. We were all Lost Boys. We became adults intending to be just like you. You were our highest and greatest selves – the best we could be. Better to turn ourselves over to you than keep going it alone, making a mess of things. It’s dangerous out there, everybody needs somebody like you – crazy thing is, not everybody knows it, so we have to tell them.

Or so we thought.

Children can be arrogant, too.

In your shadow I could stay a Lost Boy forever. True, according to the faith I had technically become “found,” but I was still a boy, still a child, and still lost – or on the verge of it. You encouraged us to think that way so that’s what we Lost Boys did. Plus, you told us about your father (who never made an appearance, we only had your word about him, which turned out to be way off base, but that revelation only came much later), and you said he would be ours, too. He would be the too-kind, too-generous, too-indulgent, too-loving father (yes, with a mean streak when he got angry, but that’s how grownups are and we could dance around it) who was rich and wise beyond measure, and who had our backs for good, just like you did. We were family now – we could count on that. There was nothing stupid we could do that you and your dad wouldn’t forgive, no need we could have that the two of you wouldn’t meet.

With all that, why grow up?

Children know a good deal when they see it.

* * *

One day decades later I snuck away from my law practice one afternoon to go to the movies. I’d heard about people doing that – I thought it was so out of line it was just plain immoral — and then I did it myself. The movie was Hook. I sat in a matinee with all the moms and kids and cried all the way through. I was Robin Williams’ character Peter Banning – maybe not quite as blatantly obnoxious, but just as lost. I looked good on the outside, my life looked good, but I had broken faith. I had meant to never grow up, but had done my best to do so anyway.

I was an adult on the outside, a kid on the inside, and had a life to match.

I left Hook and did what kids do when the adults doing something that doesn’t make sense:  I assumed it was all my fault, took the blame, vowed to do better, to make it right. I returned to my childlike ways. Never mind that others in the “family” were living by the creed of “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” 1 Corinthians 13:11 ESV Obviously they had sold out, like Peter Banning. They’d become adults. They didn’t trust and believe. They weren’t childlike anymore. They were still nominally part of the family, but it wasn’t just that they’d forgotten how to fly, they didn’t even want to anymore. Not me. I was still eager to please.

I got back to work on my flying.

* * *

Thinking that way, I committed the same crime against myself that I had at the beginning:  I robbed myself of ever knowing the adult I might have become. I never found out who I could be. Instead, the Lost Boy in me ran to your side once again, hid behind you, tried to wear your mask, tried to look and sound like you. The outcome of my new Lost Boy life was predictable – a drunkard’s random walk from this to that – always after the newest spiritual insight, the latest religious fad, the next way to prove my allegiance to the idea of you. Meanwhile I remained the afraid child who was doing it wrong, if it went bad it was my fault, who had to take the blame for what the adults did.

* * *

And then something happened that was never supposed to happen but did anyway. It’s not that you just up and left, that you didn’t come around much anymore, that you had other things to do, other friends. No, nothing like that. It was more like you started to fade – like you were dematerializing, losing substance, fading from view, getting farther away, turning into a ghost, your voice muffled, muted, softened, distanced. You lost presence. You became like a really great book that once had moved me, that meant so much to me that I kept it on the shelf to remember that feeling but never opened it again. You became a memory, an experience I once had.

I had been so practiced at generating the energy of your presence that it took me a long time to realize I had been the one doing the generating. It had been my job to make sure you kept walking into the room. You never came on our own. And now, you never came at all. I wondered at first why you didn’t seem so real as you did at first. I worried that I might have left you, wondered if you might have left me. I felt you far more in the loss of you than I ever had in the thought of your presence.

And then you were gone — faded from view. And your father too.

The Lost Boy had lost the one who found him.

* * *

In the midst of your disappearing came the beginning of growth, of self-awareness, of letting the child go and telling the adolescent it is safe to grow up, to finally differentiate after all that deferral, to become human – to recognize that no Lost Boy can be found by losing himself.

The final realization was that I had never gotten the help I needed so desperately at the beginning – not because you wouldn’t or couldn’t or didn’t, but because you weren’t. You never had been. I made you up, then lived in service to the you I created – the surrogate for the authentic version I was afraid to create. You couldn’t help me because I didn’t take on the one job we must all do, we are all unqualified to do, we can never do to the satisfaction of the rules and forms and laws we invent, but we all must do anyway:  the job of creating ourselves in the wide world. After all those years, I was finally taking it on — the inevitable, inescapable job of learning to be human, of engaging fully in this thing we call “life” as if it was something apart from us, but it is not, it never can be, it is simply us, living.

Until we don’t anymore.

* * *

And now you were gone – without the decency to tell me you were leaving. Handling it that way made you a coward and a cheat. I shocked myself, calling you that, but your leaving without a good-bye made me mad.

When you go
Would you have the guts to say
I don’t love you
Like I loved you yesterday

I mourned, felt discarded, abandoned. I felt the crush and the pierce of your neglect. And then it came to me:  you would never turn to say you didn’t love me anymore – not because you wouldn’t but because you couldn’t. How could you? You didn’t exist, you never had. You were the fabrication of my Lost Boy self’s need of you, my misguided need to be found to the point where I lost myself in you. And now I was the one who was ready to let you go. I didn’t need you to tell me why you were going. You couldn’t anyway.

* * *

For years as a Christian I heard sermons about the following passage and feared I would come out on the wrong end of it:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” Matthew 7:21-23 ESV

Ironically, even though you said it would be to no avail, we had all done our best to prophesy and cast out demons and do mighty works. Hedging our bets, I guess – unable to believe you would actually say that, after all we did to try to please you. Now, I am appalled that some depth of me had a need to appease you, like the abused tries to appease the abuser, making excuses for the smoldering rage that lashes out, wounds and kills. In this, I have come to see that, despite all your likeability, you were unavoidably a chip off the old block – just like the father you kept so carefully hidden behind you, who I came to understand was not the good Father you said he was, but the horrible God of the Bible — the brutal, blood-lusting, war-mongering, hyper-nationalist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, totalitarian, authoritarian despot who has committed himself to the final destruction of the world and the eternal tormenting of its people. And you? You appeased him, too – all the way to your own death by torture.

Some family I had been adopted into.

I had made that father my own, as I made you my own. And now, thankfully, he is gone too – has also faded from my view – until I no longer need either of you to turn and tell me that you don’t love me anymore, not like you used to.

Because you never did anyway.

But now I’m the one who has something to say to you as I do the leaving.

Just this:

Depart from me – I never knew you.

Kevin Rhodes Consciousness and the Self

Zombies and the Consciousness Hard Problem

              night of the living dead                   Walking Dead

                      Poster from the 1968 movie     https://comicbook.com/thewalkingdead

Philosophers and psychologists call human traits like feelings, conscience, and self- awareness “qualia,” and believe that, if zombies can lack them but still look and act like us (on a really bad day), then locating consciousness entirely in human biology (“physicalism”) can’t be right.

“Physicalism allows us to imagine a world without consciousness, a ‘Zombie world’ that looks exactly like our own, peopled with beings who act exactly like us but aren’t conscious. Such Zombies have no feelings, emotions or subjective experience; they live lives without qualia. As [philosopher David Chalmers][1] has noted, there is literally nothing it is like to be Zombie. And if Zombies can exist in the physicalist account of the world, then, according to Chalmers, that account can’t be a complete description of our world, where feelings do  exist: something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience.”

I Feel Therefore I Am, Aeon Magazine Dec. 1, 2015

To physicalists, says the article, “those are fighting words, and some scientists are fighting back”:

“In the frontline are the neuroscientists who, with increasing frequency, are proposing theories for how subjective experience might emerge from a matrix of neurons and brain chemistry. A slew of books over the past two decades have proffered solutions to the ‘problem’ of consciousness. Among the best known are Christof Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (2004); Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman’s A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (2000); Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999); and the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s bluntly titled Consciousness Explained (1991).”

Of particular interest in that battery of academic firepower is Daniel Dennett, who has a unique take on Zombies and the consciousness “hard problem”:

“Not everybody agrees there is a Hard Problem to begin with – making the whole debate kickstarted by Chalmers an exercise in pointlessness. Daniel Dennett, the high-profile atheist and professor at Tufts University outside Boston, argues that consciousness, as we think of it, is an illusion: there just isn’t anything in addition to the spongy stuff of the brain, and that spongy stuff doesn’t actually give rise to something called consciousness.

“Common sense may tell us there’s a subjective world of inner experience – but then common sense told us that the sun orbits the Earth, and that the world was flat. Consciousness, according to Dennett’s theory, is like a conjuring trick: the normal functioning of the brain just makes it look as if there is something non-physical going on.

“To look for a real, substantive thing called consciousness, Dennett argues, is as silly as insisting that characters in novels, such as Sherlock Holmes or Harry Potter, must be made up of a peculiar substance named “fictoplasm”; the idea is absurd and unnecessary, since the characters do not exist to begin with.

“This is the point at which the debate tends to collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking: neither camp can quite believe what the other is saying. To Dennett’s opponents, he is simply denying the existence of something everyone knows for certain: their inner experience of sights, smells, emotions and the rest. (Chalmers has speculated, largely in jest, that Dennett himself might be a Zombie.)

“More than one critic of Dennett’s most famous book, Consciousness Explained, has joked that its title ought to be Consciousness Explained Away  Dennett’s reply is characteristically breezy: explaining things away, he insists, is exactly what scientists do… However hard it feels to accept, we should concede that consciousness is just the physical brain, doing what brains do.”

Why Can’t The World’s Greatest Minds Solve The Mystery Of Consciousness? The Guardian (Jan. 21, 2015)

Zombies also appear in another current scientific inquiry:  whether artificially intelligent machines can be conscious. “Who’s to say machines don’t already have minds?” asks this article.[2] If they do, then “we need a better way to define and test for consciousness,” but formulating one means you “still face what you might call the Zombie problem.” (Oh great — so a machine could be a Zombie, too, as if there weren’t already enough of them already.)

Suppose you create a test to detect human qualia in machines, and weed out the Zombies, but who’s going to believe it if it comes back positive?

“Suppose a test finds that a thermostat is conscious. If you’re inclined to think a thermostat is conscious, you will feel vindicated. If sentient thermostats strike you as silly, you will reject the verdict. In that case, why bother conducting the test at all?”

Consciousness Creep

And if conscious thermostats aren’t enough to make you “collapse into incredulous laughter and head-shaking,” then how about finding consciousness in … insects? Turns out, they, too, have a Zombie problem, according to this article, co-written by a biologist and a philosopher.[3]

What happened to science that it’s tackling these issues, and with a straight face? I promised last time we’d look into that. We’ll do that next.

[1] As we saw last time, David Chalmers defined the “easy” and “hard” problems of consciousness.

[2] Consciousness Creep:  Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. Aeon Magazine, February 25, 2016

[3] Bee-Brained;  Are Insects ‘Philosophical Zombies’ With No Inner Life? Close attention to their behaviours and moods suggests otherwise, Aeon Magazine (Sept. 27, 2018)

Kevin Rhodes Belief Systems and Culture, Consciousness and the Self, Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief

Knowledge, Conviction, and Belief [3]: Dualism – Reality A and Reality B

Janus

We’ve been talking about dualistic thinking — the kind that leads us to think we live simultaneously in two realities.

Reality A is “life in the flesh” — bound by space and time and all the imperfections of what it means to be human. It is life carried on in our physical bodies, where our impressive but ultimately limited brains are in charge.

Reality B is “life in the spirit” — the eternal, perfect, transcendent, idealized, supernatural, original source that informs, explains, and guides its poorer counterpart.

This dualistic thinking says there’s more to life than meets the eye, that humans are an “eternal soul having a worldly existence.” The dualism set ups a cascade of derivative beliefs, for example:

There’s a difference between the Reality A identity and experience we actually have and the Reality B identity and experience we would have if we could rise above Reality A and live up to the idealized version of Reality B.

Every now and then, somebody gets lucky or gets saved or called, and gets to live out their Reality B destiny, which gives them and their lives a heightened sense of purpose and meaning.

But those are the chosen few, and they’re rare. For most of us, our ordinary selves and mundane lives are only a shadow of our “higher selves” and “greater potential.”

The chosen few can — and often do — provide guidance as to how we can do better, and we do well to find some compatible relation with one of more of them, but sometimes, in the right setting and circumstance, we might discover that we have receptors of our own that can receive signals from Reality B. We call this “enlightenment” or “conversion” or “salvation” or something like that, and it’s wonderful, blissful, and euphoric.

But most of the time, for the vast majority of us, Reality A is guided by a mostly one-way communication with Reality B — a sort of moment-by-moment data upload from A to B, where everything about us and our lives — every conscious and subconscious intent, motive, thought, word, and deed — gets stored in a failsafe beyond-time data bank. When our Reality A lives end, those records determine what happens next — they inform our next trip through Reality A, or set the stage for Reality B existence we’re really going to like or we’re really going to suffer.

Everybody pretty much agrees it’s useful to have good communication with or awareness of Reality B, because that helps us live better, truer, happier, more productive lives in Reality A, and because it creates a better data record when our Reality A existence ends and we pass over to Reality B.

And on it goes. No, we don’t express any of it that way:  our cultural belief systems and institutions — religious doctrines, moral norms, legal codes, academic fields of study, etc. — offer better- dressed versions. But it’s remarkable how some version of those beliefs finds its way into common notions about  how life works.

At the heart of it all is our conviction — not knowledge — that this thing we consciously know as “me” is an independent self that remains intact and apart from the biological messiness of human life, able to choose its own beliefs, make its own decisions, and execute its own actions. In other words, we believe in consciousness, free will, and personal responsibility for what we are and do — and what we aren’t and don’t do — during what is only a sojourn — a short-term stay — on Earth.

Those beliefs explain why, for example,  it bothers us so much when someone we thought we knew departs from their beginnings and instead displays a changed inner and outer expression of who they were when we thought we knew them. “Look who’s in the big town,” we say. Or we pity them and knock wood and declare thank goodness we’ve been lucky. Or we put them on the prayer chain or call them before the Inquisition… anything but entertain the idea that maybe Reality B isn’t there– along with all the belief it takes to create it — and that instead all we have is Reality A — we’re nothing but flesh and bone.

It’s almost impossible to think that way. To go there, we have to lay aside conviction and embrace knowledge.

Almost impossible.

Almost.

We’ll give it a try in the coming weeks.

Kevin Rhodes Consciousness and the Self, Religion

Who’s In Charge Here?

Edelweiss mit Blüten,Wallis, Schweiz. © Michael Peuckert

Edelweiss, edelweiss
Every morning you greet me

Small and white
Clean and bright
You look happy to meet me

(A little exercise in anthropomorphism
from The Sound of Music)

This hierarchy of consciousness we looked at last time — ours is higher than the rest of creation, angels’ is higher than ours, God’s is highest — is an exercise in what philosophy calls teleology:   “the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve.” Teleology is about cause and effect — it looks for design and purpose, and its holy grail is what psychologists call agency:  who or what is causing things we can’t control or explain.

“This agency-detection system is so deeply ingrained that it causes us to attribute agency in all kinds of natural phenomena, such as anger in a thunderclap or voices in the wind, resulting in our universal tendency for anthropomorphism.

“Stewart Guthrie, author of Faces in the Clouds:  A New Theory of Religion, argues that ‘anthropomorphism may best be explained as the result of an attempt to see not what we want to see or what is easy to see, but what is important to see:  what may affect us, for better or worse.’ Because of our powerful anthropomorphic tendency, ‘we search everywhere, involuntarily and unknowingly, for human form and results of human action, and often seem to find them where they do not exist.’”

The Patterning Instinct:  A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, Jeremy Lent (2017)

Teleological thinking is a characteristic feature of religious, magical, and supernatural thinking:

“Academic research shows that religious and supernatural thinking leads people to believe that almost no big life events are accidental or random. As the authors of some recent cognitive-science studies at Yale put it, ‘Individuals’ explicit religious and paranormal beliefs are the best predictors of their perception of purpose in life events’—their tendency ‘to view the world in terms of agency, purpose, and design.”

How American Lost its Mind, The Atlantic (Sept. 2017)

Psychology prof Clay Routledge describes how science debunks teleology, but also acknowledges why it’s a comfortable way of thinking:

“From a scientific point of view, we were not created or designed but instead are the product of evolution. The natural events that shaped our world and our own existence were not purposeful. In other words, life is objectively meaningless. From this perspective, the only way to find meaning is to create your own, because the universe has no meaning or purpose. The universe just is. Though there are certainly a small percentage of people who appear to accept this notion, much of the world’s population rejects it.

“For most humans, the idea that life is inherently meaningless simply will not do.

“Instead, people latch onto what I call teleological thinking. Teleological thinking is when people perceive phenomena in terms of purpose. When applied to natural phenomena, this type of thinking is generally considered to be flawed because it imposes design where there is no evidence for it.  To impose purpose and design where there is none is what researchers refer to as a teleological error.”

Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World, Clay Routledge (2018)

It’s one thing to recognize “teleological error,” it’s another to resist it — even for those who pride themselves on their rationality:

“Even atheists who reject the supernatural and scientists who are trained not to rely on teleological explanations of the world do, in fact, engage in teleological thinking.

“Many people who reject the supernatural do so through thoughtful reasoning. … However, when these people are making teleological judgments, they are not fully deploying their rational thinking abilities.

“Teleological meaning comes more from an intuitive feeling than it does from a rational decision-making process.”

Supernatural: Death, Meaning, and the Power of the Invisible World

Teleological thinking may be understandable, but scientist and medical doctor Paul Singh comes down hard on the side of science as the only way to truly “know” something:

“All scientists know that the methods we use to prove or disprove theories are the only dependable methods of understanding our universe. All other methodologies of learning, while appropriate to employ in situations when science cannot guide us, are inherently flawed. Reasoning alone — even the reasoning of great intellects — is not enough. It must be combined with the scientific method if it is to yield genuine knowledge about the universe.”

The Great Illusion:  The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self, Paul Singh (2016)

After admitting that “evidence shows that the human brain is universally delusional in many ways,” Singh makes his case that “the use of logic and scientific skepticism is a skill that can be used to overcome the limitations of our own brains.”

Next time, we’ll look more into the differences in how science and religion “know” things to be “true.”

Kevin Rhodes Consciousness and the Self, Religion

“Fearfully and Wonderfully Made”

da vinci

We are starting this series on Consciousness and the Self by looking at some of the religious and secular foundations of the belief that humans are a dualist entity consisting of body and soul, and the associated belief that the two elements are best understood by different forms of inquiry — religion and the humanities for the soul, and science for the body. As we’ll see, current neuro-biological thinking defies these beliefs and threatens their ancient intellectual, cultural, and historical dominance.

This article[1] is typical in its conclusion that one of the things that makes human beings unique is our “higher consciousness.”

“[Home sapiens] sits on top of the food chain, has extended its habitats to the entire planet, and in recent centuries, experienced an explosion of technological, societal, and artistic advancements.

“The very fact that we as human beings can write and read articles like this one and contemplate the unique nature of our mental abilities is awe-inspiring.

“Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran said it best: ‘Here is this three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand…it can contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating the meaning of infinity.’

“Such self-reflective consciousness or ‘meta-wondering’ boosts our ability for self-transformation, both as individuals and as a species. It contributes to our abilities for self-monitoring, self-recognition and self-identification.”

The author of the following Biblical passage agrees, and affirms that his “soul knows it very well” — i.e., not only does he know he’s special, but he knows that he knows it:

For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
    my soul knows it very well.

Psalm 139: 13-16 (ESV)

Judging from worldwide religious practice, the “I” that is “fearfully and wonderfully made” is limited to the soul, not the body:  the former feels the love, while the latter is assaulted with unrelenting, vicious, sometimes horrific verbal and physical abuse. “Mortification of the flesh” indeed –as if the body needs help being mortal.

Science apparently concurs with this dismal assessment. The following is from the book blurb for Through a Glass Brightly:  Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are, by evolutionary biologist and psychologist David P. Barash (2018):

“In Through a Glass Brightly, noted scientist David P. Barash explores the process by which science has, throughout time, cut humanity ‘down to size,’ and how humanity has responded. A good paradigm is a tough thing to lose, especially when its replacement leaves us feeling more vulnerable and less special. And yet, as science has progressed, we find ourselves–like it or not–bereft of many of our most cherished beliefs, confronting an array of paradigms lost.

“Barash models his argument around a set of “old” and “new” paradigms that define humanity’s place in the universe. This new set of paradigms [includes] provocative revelations [such as] whether human beings are well designed… Rather than seeing ourselves through a glass darkly, science enables us to perceive our strengths and weaknesses brightly and accurately at last, so that paradigms lost becomes wisdom gained. The result is a bracing, remarkably hopeful view of who we really are.”

Barash’s old and new paradigms about the body are as follows:

“Old paradigm:  The human body is a wonderfully well constructed thing, testimony to the wisdom of an intelligent designer.

“New paradigm:  Although there is much in our anatomy and physiology to admire, we are in fact jerry-rigged and imperfect, testimony to the limitations of a process that is nothing but natural and that in no way reflects supernatural wisdom or benevolence.”

Okay, so maybe the body has issues, but the old paradigm belief that human-level consciousness justifies lording it over the rest of creation is as old as the first chapter of the Bible:

And God blessed them. And God said to them,
“Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it
and have dominion over the fish of the sea
 and over the birds of the heavens
 and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Genesis 1:28  (ESV)

The Biblical mandate to “subdue” the earth explains a lot about how we approach the rest of creation — something people seem to be questioning more and more these days. Psychiatrist, essayist, and Oxford Fellow Neel Burton includes our superiority complex in his list of self-deceptions:

“Most people see themselves in a much more positive light than others do them, and possess an unduly rose-tinted perspective on their attributes, circumstances, and possibilities. Such positive illusions, as they are called, are of three broad kinds, an inflated sense of one’s qualities and abilities, an illusion of control over things that are mostly or entirely out of one’s control, and an unrealistic optimism about the future.” [2]

Humans as the apex of creation? More on that next time.

[1] What is it That Makes Humans Unique? Singularity Hub, Dec. 28, 2017.

[2] Hide and Seek:  The Psychology of Self-Deception (Acheron Press, 2012).