"Problems that remain persistently insolvable should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."
- Alan Watts
This is what I think is all too often missing from the question of god and religion. Only for believers is the existence of god viable, and they already have the answer. To look at the subject reasonably means asking a different question. What does this belief say about us as human beings? How does religion benefit, or hinder, a society, or humans as a species?
To expound endlessly on the nature of god is to count angels on pinheads or analyze the dreams of Sasquatch. Mysticism is an aspect of human thought, a way to continually push back the darkness, control the eternal chaos, so we can find a cozy chair as the storm rages outside. Answering the question accurately is far less important than formulating the question in the first place.
And I'm fine with the ineffable being left un-F-ed with.
Woke up remembering one of the most disturbing books I've ever read, by a people with a radically different way of seeing the world, and how the mysterious is conceptualized. Bury Me Standing chipped away any last vestiges of any possibility of faith. I'd always thought religion to be culture-bound, this was as alien as I'd ever seen. Unformalized superstitions.
Western Christianity strove for sense, with the odd leap of faith. Skipping over the math, the hard bits, the tl;dr. But trying to reconcile science with god, so god was studied along with chemicals and electricity, biology and geology. We'd break through, realize we were dangling in the air, and grasp the church in fear. While others kept chipping away. Other religions, in other cultures, have different purposes - unseen by devotees of course. Like placebos - works best when you don't look too closely. Or like taoism, that doesn't even have the conception of a godhead.
We want the world to make sense, we want someone in charge, frightened children crying for our parents. Even if the parent is neglectful and abusive, we dream of assurance and comfort. If absent, we imagine them trying to reach us. Perhaps getting past that fear is when we take our greatest leap of faith.
5 comments:
Well put.
Zhoen: Following on from the Alan Watts quote, it may be that the correct question is unfathomable. You say that only for believers is the existence of God viable. The question here is surely, "What is God?" It seems to me that all too often a God that is undefinable is nevertheless "defined" as that in which one would like to believe. It's a closed loop, like defining a word in terms of the word itself.
This post deserves many more answering posts to stand any chance of being answered satisfactorily. But, yes, one of the first things I was taught in science was, "If I can correctly formulate the question, I'll be halfway to the answer."
Tom,
42.
And, obviously, I disagree that it matters what god is, because no one can agree in any way that is verifiable. It becomes philoso-babble. I think the only approach is to examine what this idea expresses about us as a species, and how it works, or fails to work as a concept, and how it changes.
great post.
That pun on 'ineffable' has long been hanging around the edge of my mind unformed, very satisfying. Except you got there first.
Post a Comment