metapunk

At the risk of writing a minor rant, I wanted to discuss a comment someone made to me recently, which won’t rest until I write it down.

Recently, an atheist friend inquired as to my religious beliefs.  Because I was tired, and because I didn’t want to bore him with all the complicated details of my spirituality, I said I was agnostic.   I regretted it as soon as I said it, because his response was very predictable.

“Oh, I get that,” he said.  “As Richard Dawkins says, you’re just an atheist who hasn’t made up his mind yet.”

I’ve tried not to be annoyed by this because he’s not agnostic, and therefore he doesn’t realize how profoundly ignorant that statement is.  But at the same time: he doesn’t realize how profoundly ignorant that statement is. Like any of Dawkins’ fans, and Dawkins himself, he’s an intelligent guy who has utterly failed to apply his intelligence to the subject at hand.

Agnosticism does not mean sitting on the fence between strong positions of theism and atheism.  It’s not some kind of half-assed, waffling maybe.  It’s a strong position that the entire question of theism versus atheism is a stupid one—that the fence between these poles ought to be torn down (because, despite fears to the contrary, tearing down that fence won’t make those poles identical).  It is the firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs (or non-beliefs, as the case may be).  It is the understanding that the reality of these ideologies, and of the universe, is far more complex and nuanced than this simplistic, either/or debate will allow for.

Many atheists will argue that scientific understanding is impossible unless there’s a clear line separating the world of faith from the world of physical evidence.  But if you follow the evidence, particularly in psychology, it’s clear that:

1. Human rationality is deeply bounded by intractable and inherent limitations in perspective and processing power;
2. Assuming those limitations don’t exist is foolhardy;
3. Spiritual traditions are ultimately just frameworks for dealing with those limitations.

And maybe 4:  Scientific materialism, by itself, is not a viable substitute for such a framework.

Does that mean religions should be followed blindly, or that atheism is an invalid position?  Of course not.  But it does mean that religious traditions have insights to offer if you know where to look, and that a smart person won’t discount religious stories and practices out of hand, simply because he finds them distasteful, or primitive.

So, on the contrary: Agnostics aren’t just atheists who haven’t made up their minds.  They are people who refuse to be limited to a single set of possibilities, or to be told which ideas they can and cannot explore.

I look at people with fixed concepts of God or the lack thereof, and to me they are like people standing in cages arrayed around an open field.  I can move freely around the field and still find my way back home, while they are locked inside prisons of their own making.  They could walk out any time, but they don’t.

So, no thanks.  My intellectual freedom / sovereignty is non-negotiable, and this business of sorting each other into ideological camps and then making war on each other is not for me.

I don’t have time for a full post right now, but I thought I would share a couple of quotes from some of the books I’ve been reading recently, which illustrate what I mean by holodoxy.

The first is from When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger.  The main character, Marid Audran, is narrating his experience in listening to the rumours in his community, the Budayeen:

“The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.”

I think that fairly neatly summarizes the holodox notion of Perspective—the way you kind of have to tease out the truth by listening to as many perspectives as possible.  The “Truth” in such a circumstance, is thus always a little bit fluid, and you have to keep up by always questioning what you think you know for certain.

The second quote is from American Gods, by Neil Gaiman; from a young man in the back of a limo:

“…Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality.  Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system…”

Indeed, we do live in a programmed (social) reality.  Every day our economic, political, and legal systems; our culture, really, tells us what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.  It tells us what we’re supposed to do, and what we’re supposed to want, because we worship gods (or icons / symbols / ideals) of various sorts without even realizing it.

I don’t know if language is a virus, but religion is certainly an operating system.  In fact, you could make that your definition of religion: the cultural operating system underlying your thoughts and behaviour.  It’s something very difficult to escape or even examine, because it embodies everything you take for granted.  Everything you do or say is built on this in layers so deep you can’t even see the foundation.

But religion is also the mystical enterprise: questioning reality—or rather plumbing through these layers to find that foundation and understand it, see it for what it is, and look beyond it to whatever is truly real: the world beyond our beliefs and assumptions.

Well, anyway, it’s an interesting metaphor, well worth contemplating.

Until next time…