Check out the rest of this story here on Pork MemoirsAs far as the world was concerned, we adherents of the Worldwide Church of God were neither Christians nor Jews. Branded heretics by some and idolaters by others, we kept approximately the same liturgical and dietary traditions as the Karaite Jews, including the avoidance of pork. Though unlike the Karaites, we embraced Christ as the Messiah. I was born and raised in this group, with no exposure to any other religion for the first twenty years of my life.
Then “the changes” came. Our leader decided he wanted to become an Evangelical Christian. Instead of going alone and leaving the faithful in peace, he decided to try to force the rest of his church to bend to his will. My family was one of the casualties of this force-feeding; however, my parents, who were once secular Christians, had no issues in transitioning into what we would have once considered a purely secular lifestyle—one that I had never could have imagined.
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"There I was, alone, in a faceless city, missing my faith in a God who I had believed had failed me, with no friends or family, nor even a like-minded community I could turn to for support.
Though my income was meager, my crisis was not at all financial. I truly felt a complete and crushing poverty of faith."
Well, I still can't bring myself to eat pork or shellfish, the latter of which I cannot stand the smell of. Maybe I'm just not poor enough, who knows. But I know what it is like to feel alone after your belief in God has pivoted into a belief that, whether or not there is a God or not, He isn't there for you. I know the loneliness of this poverty of faith. Some might think that this is freedom, but for me, it makes me neither more nor less free, it just makes me a castaway, adrift after the equivalent of an entire continent has entirely sunk beneath my feet.
What does one tell a child entering this world? What sort of a place would you tell him that he has come to? And how would you explain the reason why he has come? Once I believed I knew the answer, which, no matter how true or false that belief might have been, was stabilizing. Now I know that no one knows, even though some, like I used to be, continue to feel sure. It seems that, if you consider the pro's and con's, regardless of what happens after you die, the religious are actually better off for the stability that comes of feeling sure. Still, now it just feels wrong to believe in something that might be a lie, even if there might be a benefit from deciding to believe it.
Today, people seem to feel that either there is an afterlife, or else there is no God. But maybe this is too simple. For example, Benjamin Franklin was a deist, who believed that God created the universe, but then abandoned it, and all of us along with it.
Why do people think that just because we have the intellect to indulge in such philosophy as religion necessarily is, that humans are therefore destined for an afterlife any more than a chimp, or a goldfish, or a bacterium? I am in the same position upon this planet as a goldfish. I even share some of the same genetic code. Just because I CAN think, Why SHOULD I think that I am any more special than any other form of life on this planet? I don't have a good answer for that.
On the other hand, I also don't have a good answer for why a creature without a purpose should possess the cognitive abilities reflect upon his own meaning, and in the absence of evidence for it, perhaps his own meaninglessness. If one were to suppose that human cognition were simply an outcome of random chance and Darwinian selection, then we certainly aren't the pinnacle of evolution; we are so unstable, and so volatile because of it. With thermonuclear weapons, we still might end what could be an evolutionary experiment once and for all. Meaningless cognition is merely a recipe for madness, and surely, as a species, we are all drunk with the madness of our own meaninglessness.
Although I think it's meaningless whether I eat pork or not, it is simply an experience that I think would be worse than not eating it. But then, I'm completely insane, you know.
watched a little kid the other day go over the pork section , "feet, ears, hocks, steaks, chops...man, everything on a pig is pork!"
@Andrew I read an interesting quote from "Toxic Spirituality" by Eric W. Gritsch. "Fundamentalism, whether Protestant bibliolotry or Catholic traditionalism represents a drive for intellectual security, for a "religion of the head" (over against a "religion of the heart" as exemplified by anti-intellectual revivalists).
Armstrongism is fundamentalism towards the extreme end of the spectrum.
In it we had that "intellectual security", which is why there were so many who felt starved for the religion of the heart and eagerly embraced some of the more emotional aspects of the changes.
However, I think that though some of us could dispense with the HWA ideology, changing patterns of thought and comfortable ways of reasoning about things are not so easily altered. Especially when they've been a part of you for the majority of your life.
Though I still count myself in the Christian faith, I find myself struggling with that need to know ahead of time that everything will be okay.
All those years of worrying about whether I would be able to ready for the future predicted by HWA, made it very difficult for me to live in the present. Unfortunately, fear of that kind tends to have a paralyzing effect on me.
What I find though is that as I release the need to be certain and deliberately embrace the fact that life is uncertain and there will be a lot more grey than black and white is that I do feel more free. But like everything else, it is a process. No flipping of switches involved.
I believe that continuing to wrestle with the discomfort is worth it. That you will find your path. maybe lose it and find it several times but that discoveries along the way are more than worth it.
Andrew, you mention "I also don't have a good answer for why a creature without a purpose should possess the cognitive abilities reflect upon his own meaning . . . ."
I have wondered about this a great deal myself, and if it's any consolation to you, we are by no means alone. Nearly all human beings feel the kind of angst you describe at least part of the time. Writers have depicted these feelings in characters such as Oedipus, Job, Hamlet, Gregor Samsa, Jason Compson, Willy Loman, and on and on. Philosophers have pondered the question of why we ponder questions as far back as written records go, but perhaps the most explicit examinations of the conundrum were articulated by a sequence of Europeans from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Camus, given the collective title of existentialists even though they differ significantly among themselves.
I am wary of being bamboozled by European philosophers, especially French ones, so I tackled the question independently from the evolutionary perspective you brought up. It seems to me the nagging feeling that one has not done enough, has not quite got it right could actually be the key to our burgeoning dominance of the planet. Individuals who lie awake at night worrying about the void inside are probably going to try to fill it the next morning, and many of them will do it with action. Some of them will plant more seed; others will reinforce the fence around their compound or perform other deeds that ensure that they will produce grandchildren.
Others will fill the void by thinking, and if they come up with a more accurate calendar or a better way to move and set building stones, they they too will promote the survival of their dependents.
The same may be true of inventing more cohesive social structures, which are often promoted by faith in invisible beings and structures. Hence even abstractions--or maybe especially abstraction--help us thrive as a species.
This is not to say that all our attempts to fill our individual voids have survival value. Many of them make us unhappy, and some actually keep us from thriving or even get us killed. But on the whole, a species with many members who suffer the nagging feeling that they should be doing more than the minimum to get by is likely to prevail.
Mickey-
What I write is not so much based on the REJECTION of anything, but rather the ACCEPTANCE of some rather basic, if overlooked truths. Overlooked, I believe, not so much because of ideology, but perhaps because our culture, which is embedded with so many ancient ideologies that we don't even recognize anymore. Our culture has yet to catch up with science, which debunks so many of these ancient ancient concepts.
Once you've reworked your foundation, some of the more recent ideologies literally begin to separate into distinct layers. Christianity is literally spread on top of an older foundation of "western" "pagan" culture, and Armstrongism is an overlay top of that. However, these additional layers only work with the foundations they were designed for. So, once you've reworked your foundation, Armstrongism doesn't really work. In fact, Christianity itself doesn't really work, and the bible doesn't really make so much sense if you're reading it as the infallible word of God. What's worse is that the God described in the bible does not seem to be the full adult, in control and masterful. No, he appears like an adolescent who doesn't even understand the people He's supposedly created.
So then, you take one look around you at the unvarnished truth, and you can see that the holy spirit is a nice idea, but is rather along the lines of Santa Claus being a nice idea. People are not being healed, my prayers are not being answered, etc. Suddenly I begin to hear the voice of reality, which has always been there I suppose, even though I was never able to listen before, telling me that there is nothing special going on here.
At that point, after giving Christianity such a good faith effort since my childhood really, but also with two decades of being "baptized," I have to tell the truth that very BASIC things here have proven themselves to NOT be true, simply because they don't work! I have to begin to wonder whether the original apostles were no better than Mr. Armstrong was, and maybe Christianity itself is merely a 2,000 year old scheme to enrich 13 Jewish schmucks.
But that's beside the point. The point is, what truth is borne out in the real world? So I am not at all concerned with "religion of the head" vs. "religion of the heart." Get to the truth and all such details will sort themselves out. Nor am I concerned about statistical certainty vs. uncertainty, which is obviously the type of uncertainty you're referring to. No, I am concerned with the basic conflict that the world doesn't now appear to make sense WITH an afterlife, and it also doesn't appear to make sense WITHOUT God, either. The real-world evidence seems to be contradictory, and THAT is unsettling.
So, anyway, the point is about meaning and purpose. And what it might mean that humans were created in such a way that bacon smells so good, must be a corollary to the truth about our meaning and purpose.
Retired Prof-
Yes, everything you say makes a lot of sense. Helen Fischer, the researcher of the physiology behind psychology, has said, "We're not wired to be happy, we're wired to survive." I have yet to draw a conclusion about whether or not she is right, but I am starting to think that she is right. What I hear you saying is that you have beat me down these paths and have concluded that she is right.
When we're born, we're pretty much a blank slate. We soon learn where our comfort and sustenance come from and start to absorb the basics of our born-into society. That society sets the pattern that is usually hard to reject and turn away from. Altering it to conform to some new emotional mindset is much easier than complete rejection.
I, as most of you, were born into a christianized society. It set the basic tone for our thinking. There was that book everyone just accepted but didn't really read or comprehend all that much. It just infected us with the baptized mithraism that Constantine and his civil and religious cohorts saddled the Western world with.
Along came a bombastic and hynotizing orator like Armstrong who grabbed and held our imagination long enough to make unquestioning believers out of us. The process is repeated every day all over the world. What each individual believes and is willing to dedicate their lives and fortunes to depends on the happenstance of where they were born and what they happen to hear and pay attention to later.
It took decades for me to cast off the fetters that bound my mind. It's only in the last few years that I could completely discard the bonds of theism and all of its cognitive and behavioral limitations.
Much of what we do in life is based on emotions which are in turn based on what we have been taught and by habitual practice.`I took up new practices when I accepted armstrongism and those became deeply engrained in my psyche. I'm not sure all of them are completely eradicated, even today. It was fairly easy to see and cast off the inane dietary limitations, but some of the subtler elements go much more slowly.
As usual when I try to make my point in a self referential manner it ends up being obscured:)
My thoughts around the quote were not whether someone should be religious in either way but the fact that we "trained" (for lack of a better word) to see the world with certain patterns and designs. We had a certain assurance in this black and white way of seeing the world.
Loss of that feeling of those view points along with the corresponding assurance does leave us feeling adrift. But I think that is until we begin to embrace that fact that uncertainty does exist and that there are many shades of grey in the world and great possibility is also in it.
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