March 2008

March 13

[Ok – now this is getting silly. I am blogging about my journal, which here is an entry about the blog I created to record my journals!]

1994 is really hard to release without commentary. It is just so clear to me now that I wanted to be a Christian, wanted Christianity to be true, largely to please my parents and make them love and accept me – which is not to say they didn't already love me.

But it didn't take long at all for the questions to arise, for me to become uncomfortable. I persisted for a couple more years – in a very serious way – because I was determined to make it work. I gave it the fairest shot I was capable of giving. And what came out of it for me was again more guilt. More pain. More inability to measure up. Where others are able to find forgiveness, I just keep finding condemnation. Standards set impossibly high. Each of my rounds with Christianity is flavored with anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear of being excluded, left behind, and rejected.

Part of that is my own personal pathology. Since my father is (was) a minister, my ideas about the Christian God will forever be entangled in my impressions, conceptions and emotions about my Dad. As others have argued before me and about gods in general, my picture of Yahweh is one big Rorschach test. Clearly I have long had issues of desperately wanting to please my father but never being able to. A great fear of being rejected by him, being unloved. An uncertainty about how my actions will be interpreted, but deep anxiety that they my intentions will always be misread. And those fears are writ onto my image of god.

But I don't think all of these feelings and ideas are personal, or ideosyncratic, I think they are a result of this kind of theology. If you posit a heaven and hell, for example, or any system of eternal rewards and punishments based on a single life – to which no one can know the outcome until they are dead, you are going to create anxiety in people.

I have written a lot in my life about the difficulty in reconciling the Yahweh of the Old Testament with the Loving Abba Jesus mentions. Well, the presence of the one ought to produce a little confusion in anyone who's paying attention. There are just too many places where Jesus himself says things that can only be interpreted as exclusionary. So you have to decide that a) he didn't really say them, b) he didn't really mean them, or c) he's preaching something different than you thought he was.

In some ways I hate this dredging up, because I really am tired of arguing with Christianity. Why can't it just go away? I mean, out of my head. I don't want to have to keep explaining why I don't practice that faith. But that's the key argument for doing this. Put it all out there on the blog – warts and all, and then my family and closest friends will know how I think and why I think that way and I will never have to explain it again.

We may have some cool discussions, and maybe even some arguments or debates, and that would be wonderful and welcome. Certainly, if anyone has the stamina to wade through the whole thing, there is no way anyone can claim I haven't thought about my position.

March 30

I haven't mentioned I'm reading Wicked, which is wonderful. Concealed as a fairytale about the backstory of Oz' Wicked Witch of the West, it's really a treatise on the nature of evil. He explores the struggle to explain and deal with evil among followers of folk religion/superstition, pagan worship of elemental and creator gods and forces, organized religion and its bureaucracies and ties to the state (and thus its interest in maintaing the status quo), and secular humanism, with its potential for revolution or democracy or anarchy; moral relativism.

Super good. He's just had a character say that evil always precedes good in folk tales. Is that true? "There once was an evil witch . . . " Or a cruel giant, an ogre, etc. Peasants and earlier, didn't care where evil came from, he argues. They just assumed its existence. Is this true universally? In Europe? In agricultural societies?

It is at first an appealing argument. One wants to accept it at face value. But the Mbuti? Do they have stories of "evil beings?" I don't know. Surely they must. How else to explain the urge to be stingy that comes over people? For them the Forest is Mother and Father, source of Life and all good things. But evil things might live in the forest. I just don't know.

The !Kung have evil beings in the myths. Or they have beings that behave evilly. Hyena, for example. Of course, Hyena is only following his nature, just as Rabbit is only following his. It isn't necessarily considered "evil" by them, the way we would consider it, any more than the scorpion is evil for stinging. So I'm doubting this hypothesis that evil always precedes good, universally. As we've defined it. Which actually is what another of Maguire's characters says, "It is at the very least a matter of definitions" p.231.

One thing I wonder about – in societies with religions like Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., where the philosophy is non-dualist, or monistic, is it only the monks and priests and ascetics who really get that? While the masses go right on believing in devils, witches, demons and ogres? It seems the latter is more true, because look at the rich and fascinating body of evil (and good) deities, heroes, spirits, legends and magical creatures throughout Asia. Or do people kind of believe both things simultaneously, even though they contradict each other? As Holland et al quote somebody (and I cited in my dissertation but can't remember right now who said it originally) – one of the key hallmarks of human thinking is our ability to believe two or more mutually contradictory things.

This reminds me that I need to write more, soon, about the new stuff I've been learning about how brains work, which is not in a linear, analog kind of way. All our ideas about us being like computers are basically wrong. What I began to see awhile ago, about thinking metaphorically, is actually true. Means a lot of our thinking is non-linguistic, which has serious implications for how I conceptualize and how I teach about the development of language, cognition and emotion. Oops – almost to Detroit so I'll have to expand this later.

2006 - Nature of Evil

With the end of August in 2006 came the end of free time for a loooooooooong time. It was my first semester in my first academic job, and I could not believe how busy I was. I had thought graduate school kept me busy! Yet I found time (usually in those few minutes before sleep, to help my mind wind down) to read a few pages of fiction or something non-work related. And finally, in November, I had something of relevance to this blog to say.

November 12
What is on my mind today? Mostly my book (A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry), and India in general. Here’s the puzzle – how can the most ancient, most enlightened, most cosmic and yet most sensible religion the world has ever produced, spawn such evil? There are times when I wonder if there isn’t something inherently wrong with Christianity, since it so regularly leads to exclusion, discrimination, intolerance, hatred and injustice. But one only has to look at India to see the same things, and for Buddhism look at Cambodia and Sri Lanka and China. For Islam there is Egypt and Sudan and Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Jews also have bloody history and the current state of Israel could hardly be more evil. You know what they did this week? After the Palestinians had managed to hold to a cease fire for 7 months – a remarkable feat considering the heterogeneity of political/military groups in their midst – the damned Israeli army sent a succession – 6, not 1 – missiles to destroy a civilian apartment building in Gaza. 14 children were killed, 6 or 7 all from the same family. And what do the Israelis say? “We’re sorry, it was an accident.” Animals!
It is easy to see why some would come to the conclusion that religion is the root of all evil. I don’t believe that, but I do wonder why religion is so weak. Pundits talk about the power of religion to motivate people, etc., but really isn’t it that religion is powerless in the face of human greed and hatred? It certainly seems to me, looking back at all of history, that it is much more often the case that evil people turn religion into a tool, than that religion transforms and uses evil men.
I presented this to Jim just now over a cigarette and it spurred an hour long debate/discussion that began philosophically but ended with application. He first tried to make it about creating a stronger religion, one that could stand up to human evil, but we didn’t get far with that. It did lead me to say that I think humans are so fallen, so evil, that we can’t base a religion on human nature. He said I sounded like I was talking about Original Sin. I said not necessarily, the original “sin” could simply be a factor of how we evolved. Competition, he said, is the root of all evil. We are hard-wired to compete. Yes, and we discussed that awhile.
But, as I’ve said before, we are also hard-wired to cooperate. Our species would have died out had we not cooperated with one another. Jim made/used a clever metaphor of the Strong and Weak forces in physics – it looks like the strong force is stronger, it is when measured immediately. But it is the weak force that holds the universe together. So we both agree that what needs to happen is an increase in our awareness and practice of cooperation, rather than competition. We argued awhile about how to do that, and the extent to which it is already occurring.

November 13
Oh my. This book I’m reading . . . It is just one heartbreaking tragedy after another. Nearly unbearable to read. I keep looking at the table of contents, scanning the chapter titles for some sign of brightness, some hint of a happy ending. It doesn’t provide much optimism. How can people be so terrible to one another? Modern psychology, with its almost complete lack of attention to issues of power, provides no help in understanding it.
I, from my relatively safe, secure, loving childhood and privileged white middle class status, have no capacity for understanding what makes people hate so globally. I get being angry at someone you know, hating individuals for hurting or thwarting you. But how does that translate, or mutate, into a rage and hatred so general that one can be cruel to perfect strangers? And the contempt! How is it that people can sort others into categories and the despise and reject their humanity based on that category and their membership in it?
I have certainly felt contempt for individuals, and have bordered on hatred because of it. And I admit I’m more prepared to despise people who fall into certain categories – Neo-con Republicans, Bible thumping bigots, bigots in general. But I at least give individuals a chance. Its only when they open their mouths and utter opinions I find despicable that I feel contempt. And I don’t believe I have the capacity to deny food, water, or shelter to even those I despise the most, like Bush. I don’t believe I’m capable of beating or raping or setting their houses on fire, either. Or even shipping them off to be beaten and exploited and worked into the ground.
So how do so many humans find it so easy, so casual, to do all of the above and worse, to people they don’t even know? Just because they are poor, or black, or Mexican, or Buddhist, or Jewish or French, or female or working class or a stranger? I don’t even know how to begin to understand it. And it is so common! Much more common than simple kindness.
We talk about Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot as if they were rare aberrations. But really, aren’t their feelings and theories and callousness closer to the norm? There have been so many evil, despotic rulers, but for each one of them there are millions of soldiers, prison guards, gang members, lawyers, business men, shopkeepers, farmers and even religious leaders (high and low), who feel and behave in exactly the same ways. They just don’t have the power to do it on a grand scale. Although the inhuman decisions of CEOs and bankers destroy lives in vast, uncounted numbers.
How can one not despair? Why do we have it so good in the U.S.? Because we wrote laws and voted on them in an attempt to curb the worst abuses, to try to protect ourselves from the monstrous people in our midst. But now people, in their fear of unpredictable and largely fabricated threats of terrorists, are ready – no, eager – to suspend all those laws that protect us, just to have the illusion of security. Please tell me how removing all of our civil rights and liberties will prevent the spread of anthrax, or stop a nuclear missile, or prevent explosives from exploding? It’s a myth, but frightened people eat it up.
Maybe what they really need is a reminder of what happens in places without these protections. And someone to connect the dots for them, so they see why we must have freedom of speech, law of habeas corpus, and the right to face one’s accuser. Maybe they are so uneducated, taught all the wrong things in all the wrong ways, so that they don’t know.

December 21
Jim shared some of his struggle for meaning. By the end of that conversation I was convinced more than ever that he would benefit from Taoism. So I brought him down the Tao te Ching before I went to bed.