For the great honor that is Religion

Will silence follow?

Published on August 8, 2004 By OckhamsRazor In Philosophy

This is just a quote, but the idea of offering it up here came to me while wading through several blogs. I wish I could write so clearly, but that this was even written at all is enough for me. I hope you enjoy it.

"You, who have lost the concept of the difference, you who claim that fear and joy are incentives of equal power--and secretly add that fear is the more 'practical'--you do not wish to live, and only fear of death still holds you to the existence you have damned. You dart in panic through the trap of your days, looking for the exit you have closed, running from a pursuer you dare not name to a terror you dare not acknowledge, and the greater your terror the greater your dread of the only act that could save you: thinking. The purpose of your struggle is not to know, not to grasp or name or hear the thing I shall now state to your hearing: that yours is the Morality of Death.

"Death is the standard of your values, death is your chosen goal, and you have to keep running, since there is no escape from the pursuer who is out to destroy you or from the knowledge that the pursuer is yourself. Stop running, for once--stand naked, as you dread to stand, but as I see you, and take a look at what you dared to call a moral code.

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means, and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him--it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligble debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.

"The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can neither be good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice, and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from the state they considered perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge--he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil--he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by labor--he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire--he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy--all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was--that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love--he was not man.

"Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.

"No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain--and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack with the two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to the supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth--and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that glorious jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost--yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is nonexistent, that only the unknowable exists.

"Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man's mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations--he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone."

(and later...)

"Make no mistake about the character of mystics. To undercut your consciousness has always been their only purpose throughout the ages--and power, the power to rule you by force, has always been their only lust.

"From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries--to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn--to the seedy little smiling professor who assures you that your brain has no capacity to think, that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force: Society--all of it is the same performance for the same and only purpose: to reduce you to the kind of pulp that has surrendered the validity of its consciousness.

"But it cannot be done without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it."

If you're curious who the speaker of this excerpt is, I can only honestly answer "Who is John Galt?"

Comments

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 08, 2004

Excerpt from "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

Abe Cubbage

on Aug 15, 2004

I read that book when I was a young teen. I think that I am going to read it again.

Ock, have you read anything by Tim O'Brien?

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 16, 2004

I think you need to tell me all your favorite authors at once, Abe

I'm writing it down, but it's gonna have to wait in line

Pearlcaster

on Aug 16, 2004

As a consequence of reading this post I have begun reading your other articles. You are an interesting person.

~~DivasRule~~

Abe Cubbage

on Aug 17, 2004

Try "The Things They Carried". It's the only book I have read by him and it changed how I look at writting more than any other work I have read.

AndyBaker

on Aug 17, 2004

That's quite an antiquated interpretation of original sin. It's very bitter and negative. There's room for growth, I think.

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 17, 2004

That's quite an antiquated interpretation of original sin. It's very bitter and negative. There's room for growth, I think.

I'd be interested in hearing your supporting arguments, Andy. How is it "antiquated" and why do you see it as bitter and negative? I see it as objective - neither positive or negative.

When you say "there is room for growth," is that a generic philosophical statement that applies to everything, or do you mean that there is room for growth in that particular idea? If the latter, tell us where the growth lies.

Try "The Things They Carried".

I will seek this out on my next trip to B&N. Normally, I'd wait, but you made such a hit with Tom Robbins, how could I resist?

As a consequence of reading this post I have begun reading your other articles. You are an interesting person.

I will be optimistic and take that in a positive way. Hehe. Welcome to my blog and thanks for stopping by

Just wanted to let you know i was here

There are only a few people on this site that could make me smile by saying that, and you're definitely one of them, Whip. Thanks.

AndyBaker

on Aug 18, 2004

I'd be interested in hearing your supporting arguments, Andy. How is it "antiquated"

Ockham, I think there’s room for growth in our interpretation of the story of Original Sin, in the sense that we can seek more depth, meaning and integrity. When the story is interpreted in a more positive light, greater meaning comes to the fore.

For example, consider the basic tale:

Adam and Eve were created in Paradise. Everything was harmonious and good, and pain and death didn't exist. But God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they would surely taste death. Adam and Eve were so tempted, they ate the forbidden fruit. As a result, they were banished from Paradise, and had to “till the ground” and “by the sweat of your brow to eat your food”. The consequence of their choice was passed on to all of Adam and Eve’s descendants.

What can we make of this tale? In my opinion, when we share and combine insights from different religions, we can attain the full meaning of the story. For example, exactly the same story is described at the beginning of the Qu'ran, but with a profound twist, as follows:

Surah 2.35: “O Adam! Dwell you and your wife in the Paradise and eat both of you freely with pleasure and delight, of things therein as wherever you will, but come not near this tree or you both will be of the wrong-doers.” [Inevitably, Adam and his wife eat the fruit from the forbidden tree, and we read]: “Get you down, all, with enmity between yourselves. On earth will be a dwelling place for you and an enjoyment for a time. … Get down all of you from this, the Paradise, then whenever there comes to you guidance from Me, and whoever follows My guidance, there shall be no fear on them.” (Surah 2.36; 2.38.)

Here, we can see that the story of Adam and Eve comes into its own when we assume that humanity were created at the outset in Paradise - Heaven. Due to Adam and Eve’s free choice, (not God’s), we had to be driven out of Paradise in order to taste the fruits of pain and evil and experience suffering and death, (which would have been impossible in Paradise, where life is eternal and everything is harmonious). Yet Jesus' life and death showed that God shares our suffering, and that God took our sins onto His own shoulders, and forgave us for the "Original Sin". (The Original Sin was when Adam and Eve first chose to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). Christ's resurrection showed that death was conquered once and for all, and when we die we will share in Christ's resurrection in Heaven-Paradise. The consequence of Adam and Eve's choice was passed down to the whole human race, in the sense that we are born into this crap-hole called earth, where pain and death abound. Yet we will end up in Heaven to live life eternal.

Furthermore, Christians’ heartfelt belief in an all-loving God is now upheld, even whilst assuming a literal interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, (well nearly a literal interpretation).

Doesn't this classic tale now make sense? I think we need to deepen our interpertation of our sacred texts in order to understand the Truth which they hold.

For some extra fodder, consider some more verses from the Qu'ran, which indicate that Eden is actually referring to Heaven. (Bear in mind Islam is our latest world religion in the evolutionary line, and evolution = growth; growth = advanced insights and enligthened points of view)...

Islam discloses that in the afterlie, God has prepared for us “Gardens under which rivers flow to dwell therein forever, and beautiful mansions in Gardens of ‘Adn (Eden Paradise). … And Angels shall enter unto them from every gate, saying, ‘Peace be upon you’, for you that preserved in patience. Excellent indeed is the final home.” - Surah 9.72; Surah 13.23-24.

Also, from the Bible, while nailed to the cross, Jesus said to the criminal hanging beside him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise”. (Luke 23.43).

I personally believe that this interpretation is aligned with "the Truth". We can safely assume that Paradise exists in a different dimension. (Scientists will endorse this possibility by appealing to “String Theory”, which is a contemporary scientific theory that predicts the existence of different dimensions in the universe).

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 18, 2004

I think there’s room for growth in our interpretation of the story of Original Sin, in the sense that we can seek more depth, meaning and integrity

Interpretation of stories - interpretation of ANYthing with intent to use that interpretation for determination of action - is a method of stagnation, not growth. I understand that the story of the guy that burned his hand while touching the hot stove has a value. But that story doesn't require "interpretation" of the level we're discussing. The minute a story requires subjectivity to extract any arguable value, it no longer has any objective value to extract. If in the "interpretation" of such a story as Adam and Eve, or the 7 day creation, or whichever, an actual objective value is extracted, that value does not come from the story. It comes from the teller of it, and it's more than likely serendipity.

We can seek more "depth, meaning, and integrity" only in objective terms. To do anything else is the equivalent of simply telling yet ANOTHER story that maybe someday someone will try to extract some value from (and when they do, they will have to do so subjectively, because you can not get OUT of a box that which has not been put in to it.)

Islam discloses that in the afterlie, God has prepared for us “Gardens under which rivers flow to dwell therein forever, and beautiful mansions in Gardens of ‘Adn (Eden Paradise). … And Angels shall enter unto them from every gate, saying, ‘Peace be upon you’, for you that preserved in patience. Excellent indeed is the final home.” - Surah 9.72; Surah 13.23-24.

Cool. "And AndyBaker discloses," (just for 100 years in the future when this discussion occurs again with different players), "that evolution = growth, and growth = advanced insights, and Islam is the latest product of this course. Therefore, since evolution has not ceased, you have proclaimed that in the future, Islam, and all the quotes you have written here, as well as all the Christian references, will also be antiquated by the arrival of whatever is next down that evolutionary chain, right? If that is the case, then why should any stock be put in it now?"
- Ockham 8:18:27-31

I personally believe that this interpretation is aligned with "the Truth". We can safely assume that Paradise exists in a different dimension. (Scientists will endorse this possibility by appealing to “String Theory”, which is a contemporary scientific theory that predicts the existence of different dimensions in the universe).

"*You* can safely assume that. I safely assume that paradise exists right here right now, but most people have an intolerable time STAYING in the here and now so paradise is lost. Most people are too busy thinking about what happened in the "before time" (which is a memory, and not reality), and what might happen in the "later time" which is a fantasy and also not reality. And just when is 'now'? "
-Ockham 12:48 and 16:32

By the way, "Scientists" is the set of all Scientists. Yet many don't completely concur with String Theory. Many also dig Loop quantum gravity. And some buy neither.

Whatever the case, your using the theory of extra dimensions to find a place for paradise is a bit weak. Before you start describing what String Theory is to me, you might want to check out the rest of my blog to see if I seem the type that might already know something about it. My very name might have been an indication, come to think of it.

I don't mean to seem offensive, and if I have, I apologize. The problem (for me) is that I have a hard time listening to the same trite rhetoric that has no basis in objective reasoning. I personally do not recognize "love" in a God that requires faith or interpretation or studying to believe in. I do not recognize "compassion" in a God that requires me to be "successfully subjective."

Further, I do not recognize a shred of versimilitude in anything that requires me to stop depending on what I observe and what my mind can process of what I observe in order to "see" something that is not there before me. I do not recognize that to do so is an advancement - I see it as destruction of the only thing mankind has that is objectively valuable - the ability to think.

Truly I say to you and to all, that if you are seeking paradise, you've already missed it.
Ockham 1:1

Pearlcaster

on Aug 19, 2004

When I was a child I had no understanding of Original Sin. Now I am an adult I remain in ignorance of its nature still - but I have long since shed the guilt that it inspires. Not that I have become Godless, rather that I have shed the Christian accretions around the (to me natural and unthinking) Monotheism that has been a part of my view of the universe for as long as I can remember. It is in my nature to believe in Sovereign Authority, just as it is in the nature of others to believe in other things.

It is a natural injustice to impute to another the guilt that belongs to someone else - especially when the other cannot possibly have been party to the original crime.

My God made men to love and to hate each other, to be confused as well as illuminated, to be vicious as well as virtuous, compounded as much of air and fire as earth and water, with no division of moral and immoral, physical and spiritual, between those elements. And the judgements my God passes are aesthetic - not based in jurisprudence, nor on a 'personal commitment', nor on any other criterion than how well or ill a particular life adorns a design that cannot be properly understood by any creature, because that which is less than (and less than because in itself incapable of creating anything truly new) cannot understand that which is greater than (greater because of this capacity for original creation). Which does not mean that even the most fundamental of the operations of the universe are beyond the reach of our reason, nor unamenable to our control. However, God is not the universe. God is more, and greater than, the universe.

There is no sin in the sense of an infraction of Divine law. There is however what is beautiful and what is ugly in the eyes of God. However, what constitutes this beauty, this ugliness, is a mystery to me.

If I could understand the criterion of God's aesthetic the existence of natual injustice would also be comprehensible, and would be seen not as injustice at all but as adornment. That it is an adornment (whether in ugliness or beauty I cannot say) in the eyes of my God I infer from the fact that it exists as a perpetual aspect of human existence - just as natural justice does.

Someone will ask me 'But why suppose the existence of God at all?' To me that basic assumption is as natural and necessary a part of my being as is the act of drawing breath. God is. What God is, is a different question, and one that I can debate.

God's favourite hobby appears to be genocide. To the humanity that suffers it, genocide can only appear as an ugliness. To God, however, such a moment may be one of supreme aesthetic pleasure, and the opposition between his pleasure (if pleasure it is) and our suffering, along with the capacity to ask 'Why are we suffering?' without being able to determine an answer, are enactments of his humour.

As is sex. And the existence of the Ostrich and the Duck-billed Platypus. And the Ebola Virus. And AIDS.

I am convinced in my own mind that the debates which rage over the nature of God, Sin, Virtue, Heaven, Hell, and all such (or at least the creation of the capacity to carry on such debates, as well as the limitation that prevents us from resolving them) are also his sense of humour at work.

My God has made himself known to me, and at the same time made me understand that I cannot know him, cannot buy salvation from him through obedience, cannot buy damnation from him through disobedience, and that the attempt to conceive of him under any head of human experience is a form of blasphemy. Fortunately, it's a form that appears to amuse him.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts." Isaiah 55: 8-9

C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.

~~DivasRule~~

AndyBaker

on Aug 19, 2004

Without wanting to be pompous, I need to put a copyright on that last post, cuz I'm writing a book. So in the true style of our good friend Mr Dedalus,

Copyright © 2004 Andrew Baker All rights reserved. August 18, 2004.

(That's for that last post)

AndyBaker

on Aug 19, 2004

I safely assume that paradise exists right here right now

Ockham, I agree, and I think that we’re both right. We can indeed experience paradise on earth here and now. But I believe that Paradise also exists beyond the veil of death, where we’ll continue to experience life, only with a little less pain and discord.

Regarding your points about interpretation and subjectivity, I think that it’s important to recognise that our interpretation of anything ‘objective’ is necessarily subjective. This is a profound paradox and an irony, yet it is one that we cannot escape. Whether it be a story, a scientific theory, or the universe itself, an individual’s interpretation and conclusion about it will necessarily be drawn from within a finite well of subjectivity (i.e. our human mind).

Whilst “The Objective” remains the same, our interpretations can change. Or, more precisely, our interpretations can advance and evolve as we grow. For example, our early scientists believed that the world was flat. Later, our scientists found out that the world was round, but believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Later, scientists discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, yet believed that the fundamental building blocks of matter adhered to Netwtonian laws. Now we know about quantum mechanics, and so it goes.

Adapting our interpretation of life and of the world to suit our increasing knowledge and awareness of reality is all part of growing up. This applies on a smaller scale to each of our individual lives, and also applies on a larger scale to the evolution and growth of the human race. Thus, we can logically conclude that some interpretations of “the objective” are more aligned with ‘what is so’ than others. For instance, a person who believes that the world is round, would hold an interpretation of the world that is more aligned with ‘the truth’ than a person who believes that the world is flat.

Due to this business about ‘finite subjectivity’, we cannot expect science to answer the eternal philosophical questions. Science can only explore, describe, and interpret the universe, and cannot “explain” why it exists in the first place. This is because the nature of ‘the Infinite’ transcends our finite minds. Thus, faith is inherent to the human condition, (at least to those who choose to hold a stable belief about the nature of our existence and Ultimate Reality). Pearly made a profound remark when she said, (correct me if you’re male, Pearly):

that which is less than (and less than because in itself incapable of creating anything truly new) cannot understand that which is greater than (greater because of this capacity for original creation).

Here, Pearly's wisdom comes into its own when put in context with “The Infinite”. What is the nature of the Infinite? Does the universe have any purpose or not? Is our time on earth the be all and end all of our existence, or does our self-awareness and subjective experience continue to exist, and continue to interpret Reality beyond the veil of death in another dimension? It’s in our own interests to keep an open mind. Otherwise we could find ourselves stunting our growth and also the growth and advancement of humanity as a whole.

What does this have to do with the interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve? It has everything to do with it. Our world religions and the wisdom of the ages claim to hold revelations regarding the true nature of Ultimate Reality. Oftentimes, our religions deliberately portray these revelations in the form of childlike imagery and metaphorical statements, in order to express deeper spiritual truths that cannot be contained or understood in a finite mind. To interpret these stories through a ‘literal’ lens, as so many of our religious fundamentalists insist upon doing, can sometimes lead us to miss the deeper convictions of our religious wisdom. However, a literal interpretation of the story of Original Sin might not be too far off the ball.

The minute a story requires subjectivity to extract any arguable value, it no longer has any objective value to extract

Ockham, the minute you make any comments regarding the meaning, or non-meaning, of the story of Original Sin, it necessarily comes from your own personal subjective opinion, regardless of any apparent "objectivity". This is the same as my interpretation of Original Sin, as with anyone else's. In the same way, the moment any scientist utters declarations such as, “The Universe has no purpose”, it comes from his own personal subjective opinion - regardless of whether or not it is aligned with "Objective Reality". Who, incidentally, has the final say? Who knows the Whole Truth? Indeed, who else, but the One Who possesses infallible knowledge of everything - the attribute given only to God?

As for us humans, regarding larger matters of existence, including our religions' underlying revelations, it’s all a matter of faith. (Although I personally prefer the word “trust”). It so happens that faith is more at home with religion than it is with science. Because our finites minds and intellectual faculties will necessarily hit a ‘brick-wall’ regarding ultimate issues of existence, we must seek a higher consciousness in order to align ourselves with The Truth. By the natural laws of growth and evolution, I believe that there will come a time when we will possess enough awareness, knowledge and wisdom, to sufficiently determine ‘What Is So’.

Humanity are on the threshold of a new spiritual awakening. … In my opinion.

Copyright © 2004 Andrew Baker All rights reserved. August 19, 2004

OckhamsRazor

on Aug 19, 2004

There is no way I can better address what you have said than with another long quote from the philosophy I began all this by quoting. I simply cannot come close to saying it the way Ayn Rand did, so I won't try. Mr. Baker, and all, if you will, please turn to "Who is John Galt Redux" on my blog where I will excerpt at some length again.

Thank you all for taking interest in this conversation, the new post will be up shortly.

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