"And then I did what all parents dread will happen to their children if they get into the wrong crowd - I started dabbling in philosophy. It all began with the weak, relatively harmless stuff: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. But we all know that's a gateway to harder stuff, and that it inevitably leads to Kant and Heidegger."
- Zoe Markillie, comment on the last post
Hi, I’m Agnonymous, and I have a habit.
Religion isn’t something I do, but I can’t leave it
alone.
If I try to look back and find some precipitate event, all I
see is evidence that I always had this need, this compulsion, to test the edges
of my beliefs in the crucible of other peoples’. I see myself as a child deciding
that I wasn’t going to sing the hymns at my primary school. I wasn’t Christian,
so it wasn’t appropriate - right? Then - a little while later – it occurs to
me that the value of the songs and the fun of singing them might be separate
from their value as theology or a statement of belief. It might be okay for me
to sing - and in any case while I may know what I’m not, it’s not at all clear what I am. It may have been fateful that I got in trouble for this – some
fellow student asked why I was singing again, and for some reason took my “It
was stupid” to refer to the songs and not my unwillingness to sing and thereby felt the
only proper response was to inform The Authorities. One wonders what the teacher
in question made of a nine-year old’s theology as a justification. In any case, I was
still in trouble.
Actually, defining yourself in terms of the negation of the other is handy when your own ideas are still a bit embryonic. Maybe that
explains my rather staunch anti-theist pose in my early teens (even when it
wasn’t indiscriminately anti-religious). This pose was odd, because no-one was
really trying to impose a theistic point of view on me – my family if anything
was possibly Buddhist, and a few jaunty hymns was about as religious as my
school got. But a safely imaginary oppressor is a wonderful thing for a fragile
identity, and it’s easier to explain you are against The Evil Church of Inquisition and Dogma than that nice Dalai Lama man . This can be seen in the fact that
some people I grew up with seemed fairly clear on their Christians, Muslims and
Sikhs, but were less than 100% on the differences between Buddhists, Hare
Krishna’s and Jews.
“Did it hurt when you were circumcised?”
As with any habit, terrible role models and a bad crowd didn’t
help. Among these were The Ascended Master of Rhetoric incarnated in my father, as well as my very good friend who – despite apparently agreeing with me on all the
ways the arguments for theism were
ridiculous – remained stubbornly Muslim. One terrible and two terrific Religious
Education teachers later (Mrs H and Mr H, you’re the latter if you ever happen
to read this), I’m just about ready to accept the idea that I might be less
concerned with the ways in which I disagree with other people’s PoVs and lend
some thought to what I do believe. It’s
probably telling that at this point the one Argument For God I found difficult
to respond to was Pascal’s Wager. The arguments points out - under the assumption of a existing god - the finite
cost but infinite gain of belief (the good place) versus the finite gain but infinite cost of unbelief (the other place). If god doesn't exist, you've lose nothing by belief - its a finite cost for a finite 'benefit'. Given the distribution of
risks and benefits, says the Wager, wouldn't the rational and reasonable man give
that ol’time religion a go? Sure, one can make several responses (Wouldn’t such
disingenuous belief –if it’s even possible – annoy god? Which god are we
talking about, anyway?), but they’re mostly issues with its application, not a problem
with the internal logic of the argument itself (compare this).
So, I come to the point were I’m interested in working out whatI do believe. Theism was never my
thing, but I dabbled in other habit-forming ideas – Wicca, Buddhism, vague-new-age-Spiritualism.
I even spent some time as a lay community member in a Monastery. In fact, it
was probably the latter that put the final nail in the idea that I was ever going
to be a believer with a capital ‘b’. I was fascinated by religion: by the
ritual trappings; the philosophy; the internal psychology of believers. I could
even make use of the spiritual exercises I've learned for my own mental
housekeeping. But a wholesale joiner of the club I was not, and probably never would
be.
So I’m more or less at peace with my obsession,
now. I’m not offended by people’s beliefs or their Beliefs, in fact I’m often
fascinated. On the other hand, I know what I think and what I think I know, and I’ll fight my
intellectual corner if I see the need. One is merely real life. The other is
philosophy. And that’s serious.
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