Belief

I sometimes write things, then decide if they make sense, or if I mean them.  Sometimes I write things and I’m really not sure where I was going with it.  But sometimes I write things, look at them, and realize it did make sense, even though I wasn’t sure at the time.

I’ve been pondering my post on Belief, about how it connects to experience.  And I have been comparing that to a link someone posted in comments to a new old book by an atheist on using “reason” to proselytize.  You read the comments, and the words reason and rationality occur over and over and over.

Reason is a fetish with these people, not a practice.  What they do is connect emotionally with an abstraction–Reason–and use it as a way to buffer experience, to distance themselves from it.  They have directed their emotional life at a cypher which can mean anything they like, but whose salient benefit is the possibility of being unchanging.  2+2 will always equal four, and they will always be able to carry around a shield of “rationality”.

But here is what I realized: are dedicated religionists any different?  Have they in fact connected with EXPERIENCE, or with ideas about how reality is, which they connect to emotionally with no evidence.  Did God dictate the Koran to Muhammad?  I have no idea, but one must believe this to be a Muslim, and there is little evidence for it, other than the Koran itself, which I am uniformly told is brilliant in Arabic (unreadable in English, in my own experience).

This got me to thinking that perhaps belief disconnects us from experience.  Perhaps it does both.

And it occurred to me there might be benefits to believing two contradictory ideas each morning before breakfast, as I recall Lewis Carroll’s Queen doing.

And I got to thinking of examples, such as black is white.  This, I found, led to interesting ideas.  For example, the property of white is a feature of how blended light is processed by human eyes.  The property of black is that it absorbs all the visible frequencies.  But if you were the surface itself, if you can look at light hitting you from the perspective of the object, the light would be full spectrum, and thus white.  I think this makes sense.

Good is evil.  Think about this.  As I am often writing about, I have been doing a lot of soul searching and inner work, and I see now that most of the worst things done to me were done in the name of the Good, of religion, of making me a better person.  Can we not say that the world is filled with people doing evil in the name of Good?  Can we not say that if you have a compulsive need to “help” people that that fact alone is sooner or later going to lead to you manufacturing ailments you can then fix; that your principle aim is actually to help yourself, but that you are lying about it, to yourself and others?

Blue is green.  Animal eyes work differently than human eyes.  They see different spectrums.  Is it not possible that the frequency we see as green is actually blue for some eyes?  I don’t know, but it is an interesting possibility.

Neurophysiologists tell us that reason and emotion are integrally tied on a hard wiring level.  This means, logically, that to perform logic well you must be emotionally developed.

Few thoughts.  Not sure what I just said, but I’m sure that won’t stop me the next time my fingers get itchy.