Sunday, November 25, 2012

Belief

The way that ghosts are treated by movies and books seems mistaken. I would think that if ghosts were possible, then they would be as moderate and mild as we are, since they were once like us. If anything, one would expect amelioration from a ghost, an improvement over what they once were. Did death teach them nothing? Surely it is an effective teacher.

I've never felt contacted by any ghost, I think. Or if so, the entity was mild and gentle, not scary or annoying. I've never had what might be called a supernatural or religious experience that I can recall. I think that is a good thing, because I probably wouldn't understand a universe where the rules could be waved aside, as it were.

Sometimes I do wonder about certain odd coincidences, but then I feel like I'm being silly and unscientific, a superstitious ape that is startled by thunder because he does not know what makes it.


I prayed as a child, but was never in touch and did not understand the first thing. Few of my prayers were answered. My success rate in prayer was below one percent. Maybe I had a few successful prayers concerning something small, such as getting an "A" on a test that I would have gotten an "A" on anyway. Maybe someone recovered from a cold virus quickly and I attributed their recovery to my prayer the night before. The successes were always probable events, and I realized there was a problem giving credit to prayer for them. Prayer didn't have anything to do with anything. Bunch of mumbo-jumbo, it was. Overall, the God described by my Church seemed pretty useless to me. He was a nag at best, or at worst a wimp that never helped out. I felt like I could do better in my choice of friends, so I ditched God for good. Yet even at the most unexpected times, I still do pray on rare occasion by way of deal-making with the abstract Cosmos, thinking only to myself without uttering a word. "If such-and-such may be allowed to happen (such as getting a new job), then I will be able to do good work over in this area as well, you see... So, isn't it better if fortune shines my way? Of course, it is only logical..." I'm pragmatic. If there's a Deity, then let's see what he can do for me.

I think that my belief is primitive and elemental, maybe primordial. I do not think of the Deity because that is something I cannot know, something beyond human capacity, like staring into the Sun. I don't believe any of the religions have got things exactly right, but I don't know either. So, atheist, yes, if the word is to mean a belief in a deity as described by a book. Not an atheist, if the word is to mean something greater than or equal to ourselves that one does not know yet, perhaps not a thing at all but instead a force or even a bit of revelatory knowledge, such as the reason for existence. One finds it enticing to hope that there is a Direction, and one finds it dismal to believe only in Chaos and randomness, a brief life and then darkness. I do prefer to believe in Direction, in order, finding it more appealing. I do not know much more than that. I like to conceptualize God as the Ideal, or what happens according to Absolute Good for the benefit of all. That seems about right to me.

Perhaps it is so that a brief life and then darkness is the human fate. But that is made more bearable if one supposes that there is a continuity of goodness, of the creative genius, that transcends the cycle of life and death. Perhaps death is the annihilation of the individual, as I still believe. I find it very unlikely that individual identity can or should survive death. For one thing, humans are very much alike, so another person often may serve as an adequate replacement, equal if not superior. Our redundancy means there's no real necessity for the soul to be immortal. Why would the souls of Man persist after death, when Man's distant relatives were mere beasts, or going further back, single-celled organisms? At what point in our evolution spanning millions of years would God grant upon this species of ape the precious gift of immortal life? No, I think it is wishful thinking and egotism that makes people cling to the thought of immortality, a clinging to this world and the things and people of this world, which is only natural.

Certainly immortality would be preferable. Perhaps one day scientific advances will create a race that is immortal or at least very long-lived. I'd gladly accept a thousand years, a solid improvement over eighty.
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