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A Note: While I do believe in Something, this entry will attempt to maintain an agnostic discourse for the sake of inclusion.
Something be with you,
-E.I
***
Talking about God is difficult. Until now, the author has tried to avoid the subject as much as possible. When asked point blank, "Do you believe in God?" I panic worse than Peter. It is a polarizing term. It is alienating. The term means something different to everyone. When speaking to twenty-something, middle-class, liberally-raised people these days, they don't like to say "God." It is muttered in hushed tones, and associated with the disgusting and vile actions of murderers, crusaders and kid-diddlers. However, at the same time, so many of us resort to a form of prayer without calling it prayer. We talk to God, without calling it God. Instead, we ask "The Universe," for strength. We thank "That-From-Which-We-Came" for giving us the courage to be a better person. When we make mistakes, we not only ask forgiveness of the ones we've wronged, but of that little nagging voice inside ourselves that let's us know when we're on the right track or not.
That little voice has been made into a Disney cartoon cricket. It has been called the superego by Freud, and the noble horse by the Greeks. Our parents told us the word for it is our conscience, and for those of us raised under the teachings of the Trinity, it has also been named The Holy Spirit.
There are many experiences that we all share as humans, that cannot be photographed or quantified in an objective manner; these invisible qualities that we create analogies for in an attempt to point at the shadows of a reality we know to be true. Love is my favorite example. Poets use words, three-dimensional descriptors, and attempt to recreate a four-dimensional experience. Musicians attempt to incorporate the medium of sound to evoke that indescribable feeling. Visual arts attempt to imbue their persona, or exaggerate those facets of physical forms in reality which indicate the greater truths they seek to point out. Love is something so beyond our minds, and so overwhelming, that most of us resort to cries of joy and squeezing one another with our appendages. If the positive aspect of that feeling of love has not graced your life, then perhaps the negative - the tragedy of grief, equal in its gravity - may be more relatable. (The negative is also most commonly expressed by wailing and squeezing one another with our appendages.) We carry other ideals that hold no physical, definite form: truth, justice, grace and mercy.
It is saddening to realize that many of us have yet to experience a great love, a moral awakening, or a visceral encounter with [The Universe] (Input whatever makes you comfortable). As there are no words to describe many of those experiences, it is often a lonely period of failed explanations, and feeling as though no one understands what you've been through. There are those people who know, but they are equally incapable of satisfactory expression. Think of an ant who has just walked across your iPhone, and must now, through pheromone excretions, describe their impressions from a limited perspective of Gangnam Style to the Queen.
And so we come up with our analogies. Those analogies that are so easy to pick apart, because they are hashed together, futile, shadows of the thing we are actually trying to talk about. For people who have yet to experience those things which we can only feel, they only have a poorly constructed analogy to operate and engage with. They shine their light on the shadow, and reveal that there is nothing there. To borrow from the great philosopher Bruce Lee, they focus on the finger, pointing away to the moon, missing all the heavenly glory.
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It is becoming increasingly difficult in a capitalistic society in which we must nurture greed and selfish competition, to find any rational, objective justification for altruistic behavior. We, as Americans, live in a system that does not tend to reward charitable behavior. It is you against every other person who is passionate enough about a trade/practice to start a business around it. It is your business against every other business who wants that kid's allowance, that family's Christmas bonus, and that corporate sponsor.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to adhere to moral systems that are becoming more and more antiquated and ridiculous in light of today's scientific findings. It is incredibly hard for today's twenty-something year olds to take life advice from someone who believes the Earth is four thousand years old, that Jews and Satan collectively buried dinosaur bones to fool humanity, and that natural selection is either a theory, or another brain child of Satan and the Jews. (Dibs on the sweetest Polka band name ever)
That being said, we are also entering a time in human history where we cannot afford to abandon a strong moral stance. When we look inside of ourselves, and acknowledge that irrational beast that wishes to hoard and consume every luxury and pleasure for ourselves at the expense of others - that entirely base and ridiculous idea that the individual from which our experience takes place is for some reason different, or better than any one else - and acknowledge that this conditioning has been set into us on a level, a nearly global scale, that will require a momentous amount of energy to reverse, then we must realize that it will require the aid of a force greater than ourselves, greater than that beast within us, and greater than the collective system which has created and coddled this behavior on a global scale, to undo these lesser desires.
There may be no physical evidence of a great altrustic force, beyond a subjective perception, but mankind has proved time and time again, that when it needs something, it will be realized. This great entity has been perceived, loosely defined, and imagined many times by many peoples. This is a force which we cannot paint an exact picture of, or measure in grams, but every culture from every corner of the Earth has come away with a vague impression of the shadow it casts, and gifts us with a metaphoric finger, pointing to the sky. There is the Tree of Life, from which all things came, the Tao which allowed for everything, the ebb and flow of Yin and Yang, the cycles of creation and destruction from Vishna and Shiva, and of course Unkulunkulu, the Zulu creation deity.
These are all crude metaphors, that try to simplify things for our human minds. It may be multiple components, a myriad of things, combined and funneled towards a common goal. It could all be one thing, ever changing. It could be a Legends-of-Zelda-like Tri-Force, if you will. A great entity that created us, a children - a we - to act on its behalf, and an unseen ghost to Jiminy our Crickets' back on the right track.
Yet while we may create prettier analogies to match the times, there is still the inherent irrationality in believing that a higher order being of pure altruistic intent could allow the great quantities and densities of tragedy that befall us on a daily basis. There is still the inherent irrationality that must accompany faith, as defined as belief accompanied by a lack of hard, physical evidence. There is an inherent irrationality in making decisions based on an intuition for goodness, which lacks objective definition in living action, and that no one else can perceive.
However, if we do not aspire to some irrational, presently unachievable ideal of altruistic goodness, how can we ever improve? How would the townsfolk react, if we went back in time one hundred years and said, "One day, we will all carry tiny rectangles that can allow us to talk and send messages to any individual on the planet in an instant. We can use them to take and send photographs and movies. They can be used as musical instruments. They can give you directions to any location you want. They can tell you how much every gas station in your area is charging for a gallon. They can provide you with lifetimes of porn. You can send money to your family. You can trade stocks. You can receive alerts from the White House, and check the latest news at any time. It is an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a botany reference book, a medical guide, and there's also this thing called Chat Roulette, which I have a hard time explaining." We would be burned at the stake, or sent to the mad house. However, because enough people saw the need for a device like this, it evolved out of the realms of imagination and science-fiction and into reality. We once thought of holograms as being impossible. Hologram Tupac begs to differ.
But it is understandable, in light of the evidence, that many feel so cynically towards humankind. I spoke to a man about the homeless population in Berkeley, California who said, "I noticed they are all younger these days, and they all have dogs. If I went into a Walgreens and bought them a bag of dog food, would that make me a bad person?" We don't have to scan the news for too long before we find a tale of corruption, or indecency, and all the feel-good pieces seem to be about goats saving baby pigs, or cheetahs looking after antelope; charitable actions don't make great news. (That's not to say it doesn't happen. One news story spoke of a Canadian coffee shop in which people bought the coffee of the person behind them for a full three hours before the chain of charity stopped. Similar events have occurred in America in regards to the purchasing of gasoline.)
If enough people can collectively believe in some radical notion of altruism, then not only can a community be built upon that belief, but that community will act in accordance with that belief. The dangers lie in diverting from the original message of goodness, and adhering to a communal accordance with the bizarre rituals that become associated with the community, not the idea. The tragedies lie in petty disagreements between communities saying the same thing, slightly differently. But, flawed as the metaphors and analogies may be, if they produce the desired effect of the initial concepts - being good, kind, charitable and forgiving to our fellow human beings - then the logical inconsistencies created by those metaphors should be, not excused completely, but tolerated in light of the end produced.
If, in order for a base and selfish individual to believe in a greater tomorrow, and a perfect future for the next generations, he or she must take an irrational leap and believe in a magic old man in the sky that controls everything, then by all means, let that individual believe in the magic old man in the sky. If, to keep from stealing a gun, shooting his neighbor, and raping his neighbor's wife, he must believe that when he dies, a winged, androgynous being will count up all his bad deeds on some sort of point system, and sentence him to a pit of fire where a demon will sodomize his mouth for all eternity - let him believe it. Conversely, if you have to believe that there is nothing but chaos, randomness, tragedy and death, but that while we are here we should regard our fellow human beings as fellow sufferers of this awful fate of age and death, and that in light of this bleak upcoming nothingness we should love, cherish and look after one another - believe it.
We have all been fed, and on one level or another accepted, the lie that having an iPhone, an iPad, an iPod, and an iMac will make us cooler, more fashionable and happier. What that proves is that we are capable of believing in truly amazing, outlandish things. Let's try believing in the innate goodness of ourselves, by any means necessary.
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