Motus Mentis

Readers will have noticed that I have been posting a little more often lately about the “science vs. religion” debate, and may have got the feeling that I am leaning rather more on the side of the skeptics than the believers. Well, that is indeed the case, and in private correspondence I have taken, lately, an even more partial view. I think I am going to have to come right out and be a bit of a Grinch about the whole business, even though Christmas is right around the corner.

In my earlier days I was quite the atheist; I was raised by two scientists, after all. Although I had actually been baptized — I can’t recall in which sort of church — I think this was just a sop to my Scottish grandfather, who was a Congregationalist minister. My brother, born five years later, was not, and my parents used to joke that they were just trying to be scientific about things: they had one child baptized, and kept the other as a control.

When I was a boy — I must have been about seven or eight — I remember noticing that different parts of the world had different religions, and realizing that they couldn’t all be true. I saw that this meant that most of them must be false — and that, in the absence of a good way to choose, one would naturally just go along with one’s neighbors, despite the fact that even if there were a true religion, the odds were that it wouldn’t be yours. This, it seemed to me, was the only way, aside from there being some sort of geographic variation of Truth itself, to account for the regionality of religion, and it was a startling insight for me: a revelation, even.

But as I grew a little older and learned more about the world, and about how little we really know about ultimate questions, my atheism began to soften. Taking up the practice of certain inner disciplines — first through the meditative aspects of the kung fu system that I began steeping myself in at nineteen, and later by way of some more focused esoteric training that I have touched upon briefly in these pages — opened my eyes to approaches to insight that were not within the purview of conventional science, at least not yet. In a common sort of psychological hysteresis, when I began to let go of atheism, I swung, perhaps, too far in the other direction. I began to focus on the smugness of many scientists, on how quick they were to reject that which did not fit comfortably into existing models of the world, and on the changes that had occurred in me as a result of my inner work, changes for which conventional models could offer no account. Doubt replaced certainty, and readings even in Western philosophy showed me that the question of the existence of God was not one that could be answered with sureness either way. It was all too much for me, I thought; who am I to pass judgment on such enormous mysteries?

But the fact of this world is that there are many indeed who pass such judgment, quite publicly and often quite violently, and the teachings they espouse with such fervor are often, it must be said, notions that, were they not embraced by entire cultures all at once, would be taken as the most hallucinatory lunacy, alleged as they are on no evidence beyond some or other antique Book. I of course will defend anyone’s right to believe whatever they like, but when the circle of believers comes to include a majority of my homeland’s population, including its senior officials, and when what they believe is palpable nonsense about, among other things, the basis of life, the age of the world, and the very purpose of human existence, and when they attempt to base public policy upon such superstition — at a time when the framework of civilization itself is eroding and crumbling as a result of intractable inter-religious hatreds — then it is incumbent, I think, upon those of us who are not taken in by this astonishing mass delusion to begin pushing back a bit. And this is why I have been posting more frequently on these issues, linking to the Beyond Belief conference videos, and so forth.

There is obviously much more to say, and readers needn’t bother pointing out that neither religion nor science has an advantage — yet — when questions of ultimate origins arise. And I realize also that all religions, and all believers, are not alike. I will return to these critically important points in forthcoming posts. The problem really is one of trying to be honest with myself, and I am suddenly finding it more difficult to wear a sort of patiently tolerant inclusiveness and suspension-of-disbelief that lately feels quite insincere, especially when the stakes seem so high. I’m tired of faking it. I simply don’t believe these quaint old yarns, and from now on the burden of proof regarding gods and devils, immaterial spirits, heavens and hells, angels, Adam and Eve, raptures and resurrections, past lives, and all the rest of it, is, as far as I am concerned, on the religions.

By all means, lets find the truth of the world. But let’s do it by painstaking inquiry, and by some sort of dependable and repeatable method, rather than relying on old folk stories. If the stories are right, then we ought to be able to put them to the test. And if they pass, then we shall wholeheartedly embrace them, knowing, finally, that we aren’t simply deceiving ourselves. And if they fail, let’s all see them, together, for what they already appear, to me, to be — the comforting myths of Mankind’s childhood, always to be an important part of our history and our cultural heritage — and move onwards, together, into what Churchill might have called the “broad, sunlit uplands”: the right and genuine understanding of the world that is our brightest chance for real awakening, and for a better tomorrow.