THE THREAD OF RECOVERY
By
Jay B. Gaskill
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ON THE NEED TO BE A MORAL AGENT
Once in a great
while, I find my general optimism about the human condition validated.
Two
evenings ago, in a
Dr.
Needleman (a self described “Jewish boy”) was by far the “oldest” soul in the
standing-room-only book talk area, but he quietly and lucidly demonstrated the
supple mind of someone four decades younger.
It
was refreshing, to say the very least, to encounter a professional philosopher
(Dr. Needleman still teaches at San Francisco State) for whom the grand old
subject represents the integration of real life lessons. His was the kind of
discourse in which one hears insights from Plato, Socrates, the Stoics, Meister
Eckhart, Paul the Apostle, and Hillel the Elder.
And
more deeply impressive still, was his transparent moral authenticity. When Dr.
Needleman talked about conscience as a
faculty, as something far deeper and more important than Freud’s “superego”, he
was sharing a secret lost on the post-modern culture, and he was revealing his
own life journey.
Here
is a brief excerpt from the book, to give you a flavor:
“Twist and turn as we may, explain it or
deconstruct it as we may, we know that though we may be animals, we are ethical
animals. In everyone, in every place, in every occasion of our lives and
culture we see that we are failing what we are meant to be – and we suffer from
that, we run from one answer to another – religion, relativism, psychology,
medical drugs, psychotropic drugs, mass movements, charismatic leaders,
fundamentalisms of all kinds from the religious to the atheistic to the
scientistic; we run here and there looking for our moral power, trying to
exercise it even though all evidence screams out to us that we do not have this
power, that we cannot be the moral beings we know, down deep, that we are meant
to be.” (244)
IS THERE A DEEPER WORLD VIEW
THAT UNDERLIES THE TRADITIONAL WORLD RELIGIONS?
LET’S NOT
FORGET OUR SPECIES’ CORE HUMAN DISCOVERY
WHY
ASK THE QUESTION?
The
moral order does not automatically self-perpetuate itself. If you doubt this, I invite you to reread the
bloody history of the 20th century during which otherwise morally
intelligent populations in
As the
21st century dawns, we still rely on the intergenerational
transmission belt to maintain the moral order.
That belt is broken in many places in urban America, and the “broken
belt” problem is growing among our comfortable intelligentsia among whom all
religions tend to be disparaged as retrograde fundamentalism or as mindlessly
anti-scientific, or both.
The
means by which we preserve and transmit our species’ collective moral memory
constitutes the social capital of the moral order. That social capital is made
up of a core underlying belief system and a cadre of adults who are committed
to its perpetuation in the culture.
All
parents are at least minimally responsible to prepare their children for the
challenges of the world. As part of that
preparation, the parent generation needs to impart a robust moral code to those
who follow. That crucial intergenerational moral transfer is not taking place
in the post-modern family setting because of the decline of religious
observance among our most educated populations.
These are the people who otherwise would be our cultural, political and
commercial leaders. I am not making an
apology for any particular religion or pattern of observance. I am issuing an invitation for the
intelligent, but spiritually disconnected among us to look deeper.
There
is a deeper metaphysical model that underlies the great religious
traditions. I call it the Core Human Discovery. It is not my goal to simplify this world view
in order to make it directly accessible to children. That task has already been accomplished in
large part by the orthodox religions, many of which have incorporated its main
elements or been grown and nurtured on its broad morphological features,
without always understanding that they are standing on deep inter-religious
common ground.
When I
say the orthodox religions are built on the Core Human Discovery and that its
common morphological features are visible, say, in Christianity, Buddhism and
Judaism, I mean “common morphology” in the following sense: Fish,
dolphins and sea lions are different species that share a common morphology, a
shared engineering solution to the problem of moving smoothly and efficiently
while submerged in water. That
streamlined, tear-shaped form and those tails and fins are close to the optimum
transportation solution for each species, given its travel medium. Buddhists, Jews and Christians may not swim
in the same sea, but they all swim somewhere in the larger ocean of humanity;
and they all share a common spiritual-ethical morphology that includes similar
models of exemplary moral behavior and several common moral prohibitions. In each tradition, we find the same injunctions
against murder, theft and mendacity, and that these moral precepts are anchored
on deeper terrain than the shifting sands of fashion. They are part of a “norm
set” that is close to the optimum group survival solution for all who swim
among other humans.
A
WORD ABOUT CIVILIZATION
Civilization
is the critically necessary social technology by which the human species has
managed to achieve planetary dominance (recalling that in the beginning we were
weak and lived in constant fear of other predators); and civilization
represents the sole social technology capable of sustaining our species over
long spans of time. Civilization
crucially depends on the widespread acceptance of and general adherence to a
set of norms. This norm set constitutes
the normative architecture of civilization.
To
flourish, our children need to inherit a robust, liberty friendly creative
civilization. Our legacy to them must
include the inculcation of the essential values and operating principles upon
which such a civilization depends, and to instill in them a willingness to
fight for its preservation. This latter
point takes us beyond mere utility; we need to access the deeper motivations.
THE
UTILITARIAN PREMISE AND ITS LIMITS
Part of
any child’s preparation for adulthood is the transmission, teaching or
encouragement of the suite of faculties, skills and knowledge needed to
function successfully in a then exchange milieu that constitutes modern
life. But the child needs that which the
civilization also requires: A moral anchor.
All the
purely utilitarian arguments in favor of moral behavior can go only so
far. This is not to disparage the wisdom
of the utilitarian concerns, but it does suggest a caution for those who try to
relay on utility alone. I am reminded of
the British men and women who shed “blood, sweat and tears” against the Nazi
onslaught. Clearly they were motivated
by something more than the “greatest good for the greatest number”. That ethos,
brainchild of the British utilitarian moral philosopher, Jeremy Bentham
(1748-1832), rings hollow when heroic resistance is called for.
I’ll
return to this point soon, noting that a traditional anchor can prevent drift
but it cannot drive a boat through troubled waters.
Any
civilization worthy of the name requires modalities of social control aimed at
restraining predators and otherwise supporting an expectation of rational
predictability in all dealings. For this
system to work at all (let alone well), the modalities of social control need
to be linked to a normative architecture that is crafted to enable,
support and protect the interactions of peaceful civil exchange.
For the
modalities of social control to enjoy wide support within a civilization, the
moral precepts and principles upon which they are based must be generally
understood to have an objective authority, i.e., they need to be understood as
more than mere tribal constructs, but as derived from the very fundamental
normative underpinnings of the human enterprise itself. Ideally the moral structure of a civilization
will be understood to represent the application of a few, well understood
principles.
AN
ANCHOR THAT MOVES THE BOAT –
THE
SEARCH FOR RELEVANT TRANSCENDENCE
The
successful intergenerational transmission of our species normative architecture
over more than two or three generations requires an anchor outside social
convention, secure from the whims and currents of fashion. But – and this is where my seagoing metaphor
breaks down – the anchor (as it operates in each mind) must not only rectify,
reassure and reveal the moral realm, it must motivate us to act. For reasons that should be evident as this
discussion progresses, I believe we are necessarily talking about a transcendental
anchor, located in effect beyond our immediate reach, but tethered to our
deepest longings and motivations. To
date, only the religions in some form or other have provided that transcendent
moral anchor on a sufficiently large scale to be effective.
The
decline of religious affiliation and adherence among the Western intelligentsia
is a troublesome development for this very reason.
The
post-modern condition has given rise to outbreaks of spiritual hedonism. These
are part of the “crystals and aroma” New Age ethos that flourishes because it
feeds the need for spiritual reassurance and comfort while it starves the
equally strong need for connection to a robust and occasionally demanding moral
order. We enjoy transcendence but
we need morally relevant transcendence.
Relevant
transcendence, in the sense used here, means an accessible non-mundane,
non-transitory reality such that the transcendent connection exists and is
potentially available to every thinking, potentially moral agent, and has at
least these three properties:
So, moral
relevance is the key. To be relevant,
any transcendent moral anchor must have authority. Its credibility must be internal as well as
external.
Our
species’ religions have succeeded in helping sustain civilization the last few
millennia because they have provided a linkage (however imperfect) between
one’s own internal evaluative/value-assigning faculty and that to which
transcendence points: the ultimate common source of all value.
Relevant
transcendence must continue to provide our primary value-supporting connection,
one that opens up our access to a universal repository of value.
By
necessary implication, this calls for or implies a relationship with ultimate
personality. Whether ultimate personality is seen concretely, virtually, or
symbolically, the ultimate relationship that is implied by moral transcendence
leads us to a common center of caring.
The capacity for caring is so central to personhood that,
frankly, it is impossible to imagine caring as a disconnected,
disembodied, impersonal force. I believe that this holds true even for Buddhism
in the sense that there are really no impersonal values. We may from time to time be propelled by
inertia, discipline, or external authority into obedience to a moral precept,
but the underlying values that give that precept life are driven by caring. Put another way, the transcendent moral
anchor is and must remain the primary authority for our “post-mortal
caring”. Think about it carefully: The question, “Why should I care about the
world or any part of it after I’m gone?” can be answered with real authority
only via access to the experience of moral transcendence.
THE CORE
HUMAN DISCOVERY IN OUTLINE
(1)
Transcendence
is a common human experience, more often than not accompanied by a life
altering moral insight.
(2)
There is
a common moral realm, whether seen as universal conscience, natural moral law,
or a core set of universal moral precepts derived from transcendent moral
values.
(3)
Exemplary
moral individuals arise (as a gift to us) who personify or incarnate (1) and
(2), and whose lives generate, validate and give force to our ongoing moral
traditions.
(4)
The
moral Truths of the Core Human Discovery are Truths with a capital “T’; they
transcend and stand over the mundane truths (with a lower case “t’) of
day-to-day reality (including the theories and experimental outcomes of
science).
Our
species’ mainline orthodox religions have operated effectively in deploying the
Core Human Discovery on four levels:
(1)
Top down
literalism, something akin to the simple, but effective strategies of a good
dog trainer;
(2)
Sophisticated
allusion using metaphor and allegory;
(3)
Teaching
by moral example;
(4)
Employing
liturgy, ritual and the disciplines of meditation and prayer to facilitate
individual reconnections with the Core Human Discovery
I
believe that these four strategies have worked over the centuries because the
Core Human Discovery is actually true, and because religions in general
have been (and may remain) the single most effective means for the
intergenerational transmission of the moral knowledge that we humans need to
sustain our working civilizations.
The
competing model is materialistic scientism.
This model denies the possibility of transcendence altogether and by
extension it denies the Core Human Discovery.
EMERGENT
PURPOSE = SOFT TELEOLOGY
Assume
for the sake of this discussion that the eventual development of civilization
is “programmed” into the sub-architecture that governs development paths in
this universe. This is not a great
stretch for science because most practicing scientists are willing to seriously
entertain - even adopt as a working model - the general idea that this universe
was so constructed that the eventual emergence of life was virtually
assured. A plurality of working
scientists would also concede that the emergence of intelligence within a
robust ecology of living creatures is almost inevitable, given sufficient time
for natural selection to operate, because of the competitive advantage reason
confers.
The
logic that leads us to expect the emergence of intelligence whenever local
conditions in the universe permit also leads us to expect to foresee the
self-organization of intelligent beings into social modalities that foster
group survival. These modalities are
forms of “civilization.”
The
Core Human Discovery continues to integrate all these insights, including the
many reported experiences of transcendence as discovery (as opposed to
illusion). Through the Core Human Discovery we humans have found and continue
to find purpose in this universe instead of meaningless accident.
The
Core Human Discovery therefore is teleological (because it tells us how
the world is imbued with purpose and direction) but I hasten to add the recent
implications drawn of chaos theory and quantum physics: The course of the world
is not fully pre-deterministic.
This is why I used the term virtually assured above.
Purpose
and value make their appearance in the physical universe gradually but
almost inevitably because they are inherent design features of the robust,
fecund life-forms that emerge opportunistically through “natural” selection,
but become dominant through “self assertion”.
Our starting point is the growing
realization that the eventual development of civilization is virtually
programmed into the sub-architecture of the natural world; that the rules,
regularities and conditions that tend to govern development paths in this
universe, combined with random chance and the passage of time, virtually assure
civilization’s eventual appearance. Once
that happens, creative intelligence (as it operates in the service of the life
forms that gave it a platform) is amplified greatly within the interactive
context of a civilization.
Think of civilization’s
educational institutions, the communities of thinkers, the creative teams, the
inventors at the head (or at the service) of supportive organizations, the
dramatic creative synergies in
We can also allow ourselves to
realize (as should by now be obvious) that several key norms are necessary for
the emergence and continuity of civilizations because the social arrangements
of civilization need to support peaceful exchange relationships among
semi-autonomous intelligent actors. We can even expect that, over time, these
norms would have become “soft-wired” via natural selection into the
sub-architecture of volitional consciousness itself. Therefore we should not
have been surprised by the recent findings that, within proto-intelligent
animals capable of at least minimal social cooperation, there are early signs
of the emergence of social norms. [Certain proto-ethical behaviors among the
great apes have been detected. Whether and to what extent these are inherited
weak tendencies combined with learned behaviors, or something more, is a
pending issue.]
Life does benefit from
intelligence and intelligence benefits from civilization; and the social
technology of civilization actually requires a robust moral (or
normative) architecture. So here is the
takeaway point: Not all individuals
are perfect; not all moral systems work perfectly; and not all civilizations
are equally well constructed; but, over time, things gradually improve. This is because both the so called
“blind” evolutionary processes (I note that natural selection operates as if it
were a proto-intelligence at work) and actual thinking beings (working both
individually and collectively) tend to learn from their mistakes: The
better planners and adapters in this universe enjoy a survival advantage.
Therefore, there is a very long term tendency toward improvement. It is
more clearly visible at a remove. It
operates because intelligence and creative innovation, and yes, a moral context
for these attributes, collectively confer a marginal survival advantage. Of course, success is never guaranteed.
STRICT
MATERIALISM AND ITS LIMITATIONS
Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins
are members of the anti- religious, anti-transcendence intelligentsia. [See Breaking
the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennett (Penguin)
and The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton Mifflin) and the
review by Michael Novak referenced below.]
These and the other God-hostile
intellectuals must necessarily work overtime to avoid
the teleological implications of the general pro-life, pro-intelligence,
pro-creative adaptation tendencies that nature has exhibited over the last
several billion years. I suspect that teleology must be strongly denied by
these authors because to admit that a pervasive purpose is at work in the
universe implies that there is a meta-being somewhere in the mix with the
capacity for purpose and a will to exercise it in favor of living creative
moral beings.
The
ultimate metaphysical ground upon which scientism rests is the doctrine of
strict materialism, the strikingly arrogant claim that the primary subject of
the physical sciences, the realm of matter and energy, represents all that
is and ever was real. This view
empowers the arch-materialists’ claims that purpose is nothing more than
a human invention; that God cannot exist because there is no experimentally
verifiable evidence for a deity having “caused” any event; and that everything
is “explained” by purely physical/material processes. In other words, the scientific study of mere
“stuff” - matter and energy in all its forms - provides our species with all the
guidance it will ever need. Scientism claims to hold the sole explanation of
Life, the Universe, and Everything.
The
Core Human Discovery is durable for a reason.
An embedded “soft” teleology is clearly at work in the universe. As we begin the 21st century, this
is as the heart of the Core Human Discovery:
The
tendency/soft teleology that has become increasingly evident in this universe
is civilization-friendly. This simple fact strongly implies the central
presence of deity as the core animating, organizing principle of development.
Why
speak of a Caring Deity instead of some impersonal “force”?
(1)
Because
consciousness and conscience cannot be separated in the real world;
(2)
Because
conscience cannot be divorced from caring;
(3)
Because
the tendencies for the emergence of consciousness and conscience are encoded in
the warp and woof of the universe;
(4)
Because
the Ur-source of consciousness and conscience cannot be adequately apprehended
or described as a purely impersonal mechanism.
I
propose that esthetics, empathy, ethics and the experience of transcendence are
all deeply linked to each other in that they are aspects of a common faculty
(or bundle of faculties) enjoyed by healthy conscious intelligence. They are part of a suite of special cognitive
abilities that include our capacity to recognize other thinking, feeling beings
as real persons, and to grasp in a meaningful way what is actually going on his
or her “head and heart”.
The
striking inability of Dr. Dennett to “explain” consciousness (“Consciousness
Explained” Little, Brown &
Recently,
I was struck by the revelation that the last century’s most famous atheist,
Sigmund Freud (1836-1939), hated music. I wonder whether Dr.
Dennett and the other materialist atheists might accept the description of
Bach’s “B Minor Mass” or Beethoven’s “Eroica”, or Johnny Cash’s “Walk The
Line”, or Dave Brubeck”s “Elementals’, or Duke Ellington’s “Take The A train”
as fluctuations of air pressure that produce characteristic electrical activity
in the brain? In a special sense, the exercise of rigorous materialism by those
who profess the faux religion of scientism has a disturbing resemblance to the
mindset of the autistic.
I am
personally persuaded that the saints, bodhisattvas, seers, mavens and mystics
who have been able to record their intimate and awesome experience of the
Presence of an ultimate, caring Being (sometimes reported as a “beingness” or
simply as an encounter with the numinous – a truly life-changing experience
when not denied) were telling the Truth.
And I am personally persuaded that they were employing the same suite of
cognitive abilities that all healthy humans can potentially access. Through
this suite of abilities we humans are gifted to be able to recognize, know and
love each other and to enjoy and be moved by art, music and humor. In this sense what we sometimes call faith is
nothing less than self-confidence in the veracity of our apperception of the numinous.
The sense that a “great veil has been stripped away” to reveal that which is a
wonder to behold” is so common in human history and has so often been coupled
with great moral insight that to deny its reality and significance seems to me
to hint of pathology. In this sense, the intense work of an intellectual, like
Dr. Dennett who purports to “explain” (read “explain away’) consciousness,
resembles the remarkable feats of memory and mathematical calculations of an
autistic savant who cannot stand to be touched.
Of
course Daniel Dennett is by all accounts a normal, civilized fellow. I suspect
therefore that the strict materialism upon which most of his work is based is
more of a rhetorical construct than an operating life principle. Then there is the possibility that he is
living in genteel denial. Like the other
great doubters (I think of the billiard playing David Hume – 1711-1776), the
comfortable, prosperous, well protected atheists of our era have taken the
blessings of civilization for granted and seem to think that drawing room
civility is an exportable product in its own right.
I want
you to think of Dennett and Hume occupying an elegantly decorated, large
elevator, equipped with the comforts of a study room at
Each
atheistic “parent” who cannot communicate the elements of the Core Human
Discovery has to rely on the power of imitation without the power of renewal. This kind of cultural transmission belt is
subject to decay over time just as in the whispered message in a parlor game
where a sentence is quietly told ear-to-ear around the table, only to end up
garbled at the end.
I wrote
about some of these issues in my early twenties. The following image (captured
in old handwritten notes) seems to capture the plight of the “children” of the
elevator people:
I see
the falling away of the underpinnings of common morality as a result of the
structural damage done by a pathological extension of skepticism. I imagine the
whole body of human ethical principles, precepts and core beliefs as body of
water held together by a bucket which represents the religious underpinnings of
morality.
That is
frame one.
In
frame two, the bucket is removed, revealing the temporarily bucket-shaped
glistening contents hanging in the air.
In
frame three, without any support, the contents become a quivering blob. And in frame four, gravity takes over.
Our “modern” culture hovers between frames two
and four….
THE UNIVERSE
THAT NEEDS TO THINK:
THE BIG BANG
AS ILLUMINATION.
The
Core Human Discovery has developed in tandem with the scientific world view (as
distinguished from scientism), and is not inherently hostile to science. I
believe that the “CHD” can easily support a newly discovered core principle: The
self-organizing universe is also the proto-thinking universe. A universe that exhibits a trend towards the
emergence of thinking is a universe that wants to think and eventually (though
us) will think.
Because
we are the only self-aware thinking elements of the universe about which we
have any direct knowledge, the follow-on question is ours alone to ask: Why?
That
simple question: “Why are intelligence, purpose and conscience emerging within
this universe?” is the one that we will be called on (in varying degrees of
simplicity) to answer for our children.
I propose (consistent with the “CHD’) an
answer: The emergence of intelligence, purpose and conscience in the
universe was foreordained by an Ur-intelligence that cared for and therefore
wished for that outcome. A logical
chain of reasoning and a well known bit of ancient scripture coincide here.
“God said: Bear fruit and be many and fill the earth and subdue it!” Genesis
Any
strict materialist must also address the cosmological/physical issues
surrounding the scientistic trump card of the last century. The present universe began about 14-6 billion
years ago from the Big Bang.
What
came before the Big Bang?
An
almost perfect consensus of physical scientists hold that all of space-time as
we know it was once held compressed in a tiny entity of such density and
infinitesimal “size” (a term that may not even apply) that none of the
physical laws with which science is familiar can describe it.
It is
called the pre-big Bang “Singularity”.
Was all
the creative information, all the plans, designs, laws, forms that were later
to emerge contained in this impossibly perfect “hard drive”? I’m tempted to
think of infinite information storage in a point. Is this really plausible in a perfectly
materialistic model of reality? Plato
would have had not problem with the notion that form (and by extension
information) occupies a different realm that the merely physical. But Plato has no standing among the
arch-materialists. The fact that none of
our physical laws and none of our mathematics can adequately describe what goes
on “inside” the Pre-big bang Singularity is what people in my profession call a
clue. Either all of the
information that was later to emerge and define the contours, development
principles and very space-time architecture of this universe were resident in
the Pre Big Bang Singularity, or they were resident elsewhere (using the
term “where’ loosely, of course).
Any
serious materialist must therefore consider and address:
(1)
The
“regression-of-creative information problem” (running the big Bang movie
backwards) – in effect asking, “Where did all the creative information go?” or
conversely
(2)
The
progressive “unfolding-of-creative information in space-time to the present
problem” (running the big Bang movie on fast forward) – in effect asking,
“Where did all this come from?”
And
more to the point: “Where did we come from?”
The
final nail in the coffin of the strict materialist world view of scientism is
that the very architecture of space-time in this (or any universe) is
necessarily prefigured outside of that framework.
I
strongly suspect that in most of the academy, strict materialism is a pose
adopted as a convenient platform - the pulpit of scientism - from which to
attack the supposed evils of religious fundamentalism. But there is a crack in the materialist wall
large enough to accommodate a creator that operates from the very beginning and
in the present moment though the propagation of creative information as design.
I came
away from this kind of exercise (and I’ve mercifully condensed a several years
of thought and reflection here) with the notion that, information qua
information (see my article links below) were precedent at the Beginning as
creative potential. The question of “where” and “when” that creative
potential resides is strictly “non sense”. After all, these are time and space
questions about something outside time and space.
But
there is a shorthand answer. I find it deeply explanatory and intellectually
and personally satisfying. It encodes an entire metaphysical outlook. I believe
it is the very essence of the Core Human Discovery. It is the only
comprehensive reality model that has yet been posited that actually integrates
all we really know about “Life, the Universe and Everything” without excluding
our deeper selves from the universe.
The
shorthand answer to where and when the potential for all space time and the
resultant universes resides is this:
They
reside in the God Mind.
JBG
A
Critique of Dennett, Et Al. “Lonely Atheists of the Global Village” By Michael
Novak (reviewing Dennett, Harris and Hawkins latest books: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25770/pub_detail.asp
Note that Novak writes more
sympathetically of atheists than Dennett, Harris & Hawkins do of theists:
“… in my own early work
was centered upon the dialogue between believers and unbelievers, the intellectual
horizon of the Absurd (as Camus, Sartre, and so many others called it) and that
of Biblical faith — in such books as Belief and Unbelief and The Experience of
Nothingness, for instance. For that reason, I really wanted to like these new
books on atheism. I have learned a lot about atheists and believers from Jürgen
Habermas, possibly the best-known atheist in
“Alas, it is extremely
difficult to engage on the same level with Harris, Dennett, and Dawkins. All of
them think that religion is so great a menace that they do not have much
disposition for dialogue. The battle flags they put into the wind are
Voltaire’s Ecrasez l’infâme! Meanwhile, all three pretend that atheists
“question everything” and “submit to relentless, almost tedious,
self-criticism.” Yet in these books there is not a shred of evidence that their
authors have ever had any doubts whatever about the rightness of their own
atheism. Self-questioning about their own scholarly indifference to their
subject; about the horrific brutalities committed in the name of “scientific
atheism” during the 20th century; about the restless and mercurial
dissatisfactions in atheist and secular movements during the past hundred
years; and about the demographic weaknesses thereof — all such questions are
notable by their absence. Moreover, although an atheist zeitgeist dominates
university campuses in
LINKS
To Some of Jay B. Gaskill’s ESSAYS AND ARTICLES
The Purpose of the Universe
http://www.jaygaskill.com/generatropicuniverse.htm
2Be or not: The Designs of
Intelligence http://www.jaygaskill.com/Designofintelligence.htm
The Matter of Reality
http://www.jaygaskill.com/Critique.htm
To See the Invisible
http://www.jaygaskill.com/Toseetheinvisible.htm
Reflections on the Stages of
Awareness of Being
http://www.jaygaskill.com/Awareness.htm
The dialogic imperative
http://www.jaygaskill.com/i2i.htm
A Theology for the 21st
Century
http://www.jaygaskill.com/elements.htm
More Articles on The Policy
Think Site
The Human Conspiracy Blog
http://www.jaygaskill.com/blog1
AN ADDENDUM TO “Let’s Not Forget Our Species’ Core Human
Discovery”
WHAT ABOUT ISLAM?
Not all religious leaders are
aware that their respective religions are based on a universal gift that they
share in common with all other authentic religions. Not all religious leaders are aware that such
a gift always carries a concomitant obligation.
Islam went unmentioned in the
last posting for a reason: The jury of history is still out; the verdict is
still pending; and the outcome is still very much in doubt.
When the canon of scripture and
its accepted interpretations are closed; when the circle of belonging has been
virtually locked to outsiders, then our species’ universal source of creation
and moral guidance has also been banned from the circle.
In my shorthand, this is a
defining characteristic of a sect.
When any religion no longer is
producing saints, seers, mavens, bodhisattvas and other enlightened leaders
whose exemplary moral lives continue to illumine and enliven the original
faith, spiritual entropy is afoot. Institutional death will soon follow.
When a religious body or its
leaders advocate or condone or passively allow the forcible conversion of the
non-faithful, then our species’ coral moral injunctions against assault and
murder are abrogated. That brutal phase passed for Christianity hundreds of
years ago (after all, the Roman Church’s Inquisition no longer defines Roman Catholicism)
but that phase has lingered at the heart of institutional Islam for more than a
millennium.
In my shorthand, this is a
defining characteristic of an ideology.
Yes, vital elements of the Core
Human Discovery are alive within Islam. But this hopeful leaven neither
dominates nor defines that faith, at least not for the majority of its most
visible leaders.
Institutional Islam has yet to be
rescued from its demons.
JBG
Posted
THE FLIGHT
FROM MEANING
In my earlier post, I cited an
article by Michael Novak, “The Lonely Atheists of The Global Village,” in which
he discusses recent books by three prominent atheists.
His piece begins….
“Time magazine, ever the vigilant trend
spotter, has celebrated a recent wave of books by atheists — among them, these
three by Sam Harris, Daniel C. Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. These books have
three purposes: to speed up the disappearance of Biblical faith, especially in
America; to proselytize for rational atheism; and to boost morale among
atheists, in part by calling attention to support groups for them.”
Michael
Novak’s full article is available on line at --
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.25770/pub_detail.asp
.
Here is
the key excerpt:
“The whole inner world of aware and self-questioning religious persons
seems to be territory unexplored by our authors. All around them are millions
who spend many moments each day (and hours each week) in communion with God.
Yet of the silent and inward parts of these lives — and why these inner
silences ring to those who share them so true, and seem more grounded in
reality than anything else in life — our writers seem unaware. Surely, if our
atheist friends were to reconsider their methods, and deepen their
understanding of such terms as “experience” and “the empirical,” they might
come closer to walking for a tentative while in the moccasins of so many of
their more religious companions in life, who find theism more intellectually
satisfying — less self-contradictory, less alienating from their own nature —
than atheism.”
Mr. Novak is the George Frederick
Jewett scholar of religion, philosophy, and public policy at the American
Enterprise Institute.
[][][][][][][]
For my own part, I think we must
undertake the task of climbing out of that arid desert of the soul -- that
imagined realm where there exists no good, no evil, and no loving Creator - as
a matter of survival. Finding the way up
and out is a matter of attaining the appropriate scale perspective and a
willingness to take in the deep implications.
We have a hint of that process
from that nominal atheist, Carl Sagan, who wrote:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and,
if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it,
everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their
lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every
hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and
peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and
father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt
politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in
the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a
sunbeam.
“The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that
in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction
of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one
corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner
of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill
one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined
self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the
universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic
dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help
will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been
said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building
experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly
of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores
our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and
to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
Excerpted from the famous
commencement address delivered by the late Carl Sagan on
Without necessarily being able
to explain how, human intelligence is able to proceed from the awe-at-creation
narrative to an ethic of kindness and compassion.
Awe is the beginning of
wisdom. I return to this idea below.
THE
POST-TRAUMA ATHEISTS
I suspect that naïve atheism, the
kind that remains open to new insights about the topic, is simply the natural
and health product of a reasonable mind when exposed only to the explanatory
power of science and the narrow irrationalities of strict fundamentalism. God loves these atheists because they are
seeking the truth.
But this naïve view tends to
harden into flinty, cold doctrine. This is a withdrawal from all meaningful
dialogue. The hardening takes place, I suspect, because of the pervasive propaganda
that tells “all thinking people” that the mainstream religions are
unsophisticated versions of the original fundamentalist perspective, protecting
the ghettos of intolerance and the rigid, Taliban-like authority that inhabit
their core.
I also strongly suspect that some
of the most militant atheists are revealing signs of an early trauma, the
lingering pain of their sharply bruised expectations.
I can imagine an adult version of
Santa Claus betrayal that goes something like: “I no longer buy the notion that
there is a loving God. There never was a loving God. I was lied to!”
This becomes betrayal so painful
that any hopeful view of things based on the existence of a benign higher being
or power must be a fraud. Once jilted, the wounded personality is never again
led to trust: “I hereafter refuse to
believe in fairy tales.”
In the wounded soul, all claims
about the ultimate power and authority of the good become mere arbitrary
assertions. The bleak implication is
that all “good premises” about ultimate reality are demoted to arbitrary
assertions. All moral authority is arbitrary and therefore all moral “truth’ is
reversible.
SEEING
FARTHER AND WISER
I have come to fully accept the
world view that God communicates to intelligent life in many different ways.
One of these ways is via the meta-scale morphologies of the Life, the Universe
and Everything, confident that sufficient intelligence will emerge that humans
will be able to tease out the profound implications that are encoded in the seemingly
simple.
The universe is embedded with
Meaning. The large scale form of the timeline of our making is a message in
itself. There is a compelling narrative
arc(h) from Big Bang to the appearance of morally founded civilizations. This
narrative makes its deepest sense only when the outcome is understood as having
been prefigured in the Beginning. This is a narrative of foreordained
births – of the eventual arrival of meaning, value and significance in the
World coupled with the foreordained arrival of thinking beings who are able to
glean the embedded meaning, value and purpose. This is a comprehensively integrated
view of reality that neatly transcends the arch-materialist claims of
procedural Darwinism and value-free physics because it accepts the world yet
folds in our own esthetic, empathetic and creative capabilities.
Religionists of many stripes,
especially Christians, Jews and Buddhists, can quibble over the exact nature of
the Great Intentionality that hovered over and sparked that Beginning.
But one aspect of the first Event
is beyond reasonable question: It was an act of benign caring; put
another way, it was an act of love.
To arrive at that simple
assessment, we need only accomplish two mental feats:
(1)
We must recover from the self-imposed
faux autism of the scientistic mindset that would deny our own interior
knowledge of the good, the beautiful and of Beloved Other.
(2)
We must be able to do writ large that
which we naturally tend to do writ small among our friends: Recognize love when
it is manifestly demonstrated, and return it when it is wanted.
Carl Sagan of blessed memory was using secular language but he was decoding a divine message: “…our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
A REFLECTION ON TOY BUMPER CARS
AND
FLOGGING THE GODCICLES
By
Jay B. Gaskill
The term atheist is overused. Early Christians were “atheists” from the point of view of the multi-deity Roman Pagans of the first century.
A full-on atheist in the modern sense has adopted a faith stance that mirrors that of the fundamentalists that she/he so passionately opposes. That mindset boils down to something like this:
“Because I reject the (“brutal” or infantile” or ….choose an epithet here) God you espouse, and because I see no concrete evidence of that entity’s existence in the real world, I firmly believe that there is no God whatsoever (deity by that or any similar name). We humans are completely alone in the universe and that is all there is to it. Deal with it”
The 21st century’s version of this full-on atheist mindset is founded on a strict arch-materialist (or “physicalist”) view of things. This is the general notion that everything is completely accounted for and explained by the elements of a purely physical reality, i.e., that only matter and energy in its various forms and manifestations constitute all there was, is or ever can be.
It is a short jump from this mindset to the position that everything inside our minds and “hearts” (taken metaphorically of course) is nothing more than a complex of electro-chemical reactions. I personally am persuaded that the next step (and this is the reason that I keep flogging my arch-materialist friends) is the inevitable loss of our species’ deep moral connections.
These are the Doctrinaire Defensive Atheists (you’ll know the “DDA’s” by their uncompromising rhetoric and the rejection of a meaningful dialogue). The “DDA’s” should be distinguished from all of the spiritually aware “nominal” atheists who are on that quest for the same deeper meanings that the rest of the thoughtful people share. This second group is filled with the “noetic explorers” whose questions and insights keep the rest of open to the great undiscovered Truths.
But the former are so obsessed with reacting against the rigid, literalist-authoritarian religious constructs that they miss the bigger quest altogether. The “DDA’s” remind me of those self powered, mechanically obsessed toy bumper cars that bump up against the wall, over and over again, until they run down or are redirected. I choose to call the archaic religious constructs that have set them off, the simplistic and concrete God models if you will, our species’ “godcicles”.
A few of our atheist friends have
got themselves caught in a loop: They just can’t stop flogging the dead godcicles.
A self described “atheist” (whom I know to be a thoughtful and morally centered man), wrote me recently. He made a number of points. A key excerpt:
“I am an atheist because anything more concrete than that makes me uneasy; that the word God has been used to manipulate, intimidate, and kill…
“If you think of Love as the prime mover of the universe--fine with me. Again, anything more definitive is coercive distortion.
“Organized religion ruins good spirituality.”
His last line is a keeper. To
that trenchant observation, I can only say: amen. To his first line, I might add a
quibble: We get to name ourselves, but
in my universe he has described something other than atheism; clearly his is
the path of a fellow spiritual seeker.
As I pointed out in yesterday’s post:
God loves these atheists because they are seeking the Truth.
JBG