The Very First Skeptic

[evangelicalhumanist]

Who, I wonder, was the very first skeptic?
Not the priest, no, not he upon whom the fortunes of all depend!
Not the king, with no claim to kingship but divine kinship.
Perhaps it was one wizened, wisened soul,
Watching yet one more sacrifice
And remembering, “They never work.”
Or perhaps it was that man upon the altar,
About to meet the gods whose help won’t come,
Because, he thought,
“Maybe they aren’t there.”

[Baruch]

Nice The first skeptic (not first nihilist) was any non-conformist. Ancient technology was made by religious ritual. So the first person to make a new tool, was that non-conformist. So the first non-conformist was the first inventor!

Shalom

[Mirage]

Most if not all of us are skeptics. We just differ on what makes us skeptical. Most religious people I know wrestle with religious doubt. I do, too. What if I am wrong? We do ask that. And usually, yes, when we don't get our way. Let's say those things never work. Is it logical to assume there is no such thing as nature, because we made a sacrifice, and failed to control the weather? You have touched on something here that I think is partly why I went from atheist to agnostic. I didn't see much evidence that if God existed, God could be relied upon to do everything I as a teen considered to be best. So God must not exist, right? One day I realized that was a bizarre bit of logic. Might as well disbelieve in my parents, too, if that logic was enough.

What you have written is poignant and sort of reminds me of a poem I once wrote, less well. But what it argues is if we take actions intended to bribe or control or appease the Divine, and they don't work, there is no Divine. I am, er, ...skeptical. Maybe we should just drop the human sacrifices, if we see that they don't work.

How I went from agnosticism to Christianity is a different issue, but still at least partially based on personal experience. It's hard to escape that, isn't it? Rain usually comes if you wait long enough, and death always comes if you wait long enough.

[evangelicalhumanist]

Well, I'm not sure I'm quite ready to agree that "most of us are skeptics" quite yet. I'll need a bit more evidence to back that up.

And of course, we're on ground which I truly don't understand, and on which we are unlikely ever to agree, and that's okay.

"Is it logical to assume there is no such thing as nature, because we made a sacrifice, and failed to control the weather?" No, of course not. Because we know that the weather has no interest in our sacrifice. On the other hand, if we were to pour silver nitrate into some clouds, or fill the atmosphere with tons of greenhouse gases, we might find that indeed we can have some effect on the weather. And that is perfectly in keeping with our understanding of nature.

The ancients who sacrificied thought along the same lines, but without the scientific thinking that goes behind it. After all, things sometimes go right. So if you make a sacrifice, and things turn out well, it might seem perfectly reasonable (but without any actual reason except happenstance to back it up) to assume that the sacrifice was efficacious. On the other hand, if things don't turn out so well, the assumption that keeps the cycle going is "we did it wrong, and angered the god!" It's like those people who believe that things always happen in threes. Of course they do. They also happen in twos, or sixes, or elevens. It all depends on how high you count before you reset and start again. If you always count to three, and start counting again from one the moment you reach it, you will have "proven" to yourself that things do indeed happen in threes.

Still, although I officially call myself an atheist, I will admit to a smidgen of agnosticism, if only because I can make no more "proof" than the theist can. The balance of evidence seems weighty enough to me to come down on the atheist side, but I suppose there is always that niggling possibility.

However, the one thing that I do "know," and I know it from the evidence of the hundred thousand religions that have appeared on planet Earth, is that we humans do not know anything whatever about god, if there is such a being. And if we don't know anything whatever about this entity, it seems remarkably foolish to try to appease it -- with sacrifices or with anything else, including worship.

[Mirage]

Not sure if you entirely got my point, but basically we like to think we can control everything, even God and nature. A lot of times it's pretty clear God isn't controllable if He/She/They/It/Other exist because we tend to ask for pretty specific things we want to happen immediately. It often looks like we can control nature, but our attempts to do so often result in some sort of natural backlash down the road because what we do often unbalances the system. I could argue that it's actually harder for us to tell when our attempts to control nature do not work or go awry longterm. We might be dead before we see the eventual results.

[Baruch]

Mirage - All of us are skeptics? Don't tell the orthodox, they will get a hernia repeating the stomping act of Rumplestiltskin! Given chaos theory, I can guarantee, any attempt to control the weather, even by global warming, or trying to stop our contribution to global warming, will not result in predictable phenomena.

ET - You don't give the ancients enough credit. Too much of that ... they were a bunch of unfortunate ignorant superstitious fools bigotry. There are a number of ways, to articulate our human experience, which are not mutually exclusive. One way is thru what you call objective rationality ... the intellect. But there is also the subjective artistry ... the emotions. See, I try to see things poetically (but also rationally when I feel ... like it). I don't think the only thing people were feeling back then, was obeisance to a bigger version of their own tribal chief. But they must have done plenty of metaphoring along those lines, and why not?

Not to pry. But all us men try to stuff our emotions, lower our EQ. Kind of like women who try to hide their IQ, because it isn't feminine. You have had a lot of trauma, maybe you are too good, too habitual shutting down your emotions. Perhaps that is why you seem to lack a spiritual sense (not that you are inferior in any fashion for that, mind you). You seem to like poems, but perhaps only intellectually? Well for me, religion is like poetry or music ... drama really.

Shalom

[Mirage]

You've guessed him wrong, I think. EH seems deeply spiritual to me,and if anything a bit mystical about humanity. Really. Also, it turns out he and I share a love of Shakespeare, and specifically Romeo and Juliet. That's a pretty emotional play.

Oh yeah, and gimme some of your IQ, eh? Test has validity issues, but still.

[Baruch]

Could be. Harold Bloom would say, if you love Shakespeare, you love what is best about the West, where the most (but not only) wisdom is found in our culture. But then I must ask, do you see yourself as Romeo, Juliet or Mercutio? And similarly the same question for EH. I would be Mercutio (and the Merchant of Venice, except in my version he would win his lawsuit, then show gemilut chesed, by not taking his pound of flesh).

Shalom

[evangelicalhumanist]

Lots too answer, here.

I am in agreement with Mirage about our subjective belief that we can "control" things. I know how often the unlooked-for side-effect smashes all our efforts. But we grasp and we try, and we get better at it, little by little. Is it an upward climb by humanity towards god-hood? Who knows, but the writers of Star Trek, The Next Generation frequently think so. And so, possibly, do I.

Baruch, I'm actually a very emotional person. I respond viscerally to a great many things, with tears, a lump in the throat that makes swallowing difficult, with great joy or laughter, with anger sometimes. I am a huge lover of Shakespeare (I see myself as sometimes Romeo -- with a Romeo partner -- and sometimes as Benvolio. I am frequently a peacemaker). I'm actually a huge lover of theatre of all kinds. In fact, tonight I'm going to see a pair of plays, Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer (a farce in which the audience can see the light but the actors can't) and The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard, another farce which skewers the murder mystery genre. Then on Sunday I'll be going to the Stratford Festival (one of Canada's best Shakespearean etc. festivals) to see "The Trojan Women" by Euripides, which will probably be my last chance to see one of our greatest actresses, Martha Henry. Then two weeks tonight, it'll be Ring Round the Moon, a translation of "L'Invitation au chateau" by Jean Anouilh. Joseph and I see at minimum a dozen plays, musicals, operas etc. every year. It gets expensive, but it's our one major indulgence.

Back on the subject of emotion, I have been known to actually cry during a performance. After the play "Night, Mother" by Marsha Norman earlier this year, I couldn't get out of my seat for several minutes. A little embarassing, but I respond to all emotional stimuli with emotions of my own. Always have. But I think, too. I've actually been measured with both a pretty high IQ and EQ (Reuven Bar-On's test). I don't put all that much stock in either.

Part of what I think might be at least slightly "spiritual" about me is that I recognize that I cannot understand everything. I wrote the following a couple of months ago, and repost it here for convenience:

I think we conflate spirituality with religiosity, and yet they are not the same thing. It is quite possible to be religious without having much of a spiritual side to you at all, and yet it is also possible to be an atheist, and remain quite spiritual.

Consider, for a moment, Buddha. Almost everybody thinks that Buddha was a very spiritual person, and yet he never expressed a belief in any god, and even urged his followers not to spend any time speculating about such things, but rather focus on this world.

Spirituality is what happens when we contemplate those things for which we cannot find answers. We are a finite species confronted with a universe that is infinite, so far as we know. We are a very temporal species (quite short, actually) in a timeless reality.

These things are deeply mysterious. We cannot make any real intellectual sense out of them. Therefore, we have to probe ever more deeply into our very selves, our understanding of what it means to be us, finite in an infinite universe, perishable in a reality that will not perish. What can it mean? Asking those questions, and looking inside of ourselves, is what spirituality is.

The moment we realize that we know a great many facts, and can perceive a great amount of the reality of the world around us -- and at the same time realize that we don't, not really, know what they are for -- and then begin to wonder about the answers to that simple question -- "what are they for?" -- we are spiritual.

But many people imagine that, in a frenzy of over-wrought emotionalism, probably brought on by too much dancing, too many shouts of "hallelujah," or possibly the after-effects of a misspent evening, that they have experienced "a rebirth," some sort of transformation caused by the acceptance of this saviour or that into their lives.

This is emotion. Our emotions, based as they are on what is uniquely our own and nobody else's, which cannot be felt by anyone else except through empathy, are one form of spirituality. Our ability to love (or to hate) are spiritual because they speak to our deepest understanding of ourselves and those for whom we feel those emotions.

It does not require a belief in god to be spiritual, for which I am grateful. After all, there is simply no evidence that there is such a being, and yet I still wonder about so many things. If I couldn't be spiritual because I didn't believe in god, I would be terribly diminished.

And yet, I recognize the mystery of life. I am constantly amazed that the more I learn, the more mysterious it all gets (that's what Socrates meant), and that the ultimate answers get pushed further and further away. For example, when I was a child, I learned that everything was made up of atoms, too small to see, and even that atoms were made up of even smaller bits, called electrons, protons and neutrons. I was happy. I "knew" how everything was made, and a little study of the periodic table helped me understand how it all fit together to make a real world. Then Quantum Physics came along. Then String Theory (which I understand not a tiddle of), and all my truths -- for all my study and learning -- got pushed further and further away. It turns out I know less, much less, than I thought I did.

But my endless longing to know, to understand, to figure out how it works -- and how I am a part of it all -- that is spirituality. That doesn't require god. It requires me and the universe, that is all.

I could as easily suppose there was a god there as not, and yet I do not because I see no evidence to support such a supposition. Making things up, inventing answers, does not seem to me a good way of getting at the truth of things. And for that reason, I also think that making up gods to answer the unanswered questions is not spiritual but is, rather, a step away from spirituality.

That is not to say that a religious believer cannot be spiritual, either. Of course they can. But they are spiritual in the same way that I am spiritual -- through the endless wondering about themselves, the universe, what it all means, where it all came from, where it is all going.

As an atheist, I do not feel the compulsion -- which I think that some religious people feel -- to pretend to understand all of the mysteries. I don't need to create answers (and label them God) to explain everything that I cannot understand.

Now, as to the other points that you raise, I have to point out -- as I do so very often on this board -- that the business of "spirituality" that you describe as "experiences," this business of coming into contact with "higher powers" is, in my view, much more likely to be nothing more than tapping into your own subconscious resources. Whether you do that through meditation, through frenzied dancing or handling dangerous snakes, or taking drugs, or standing on your head for 10 minutes and then standing upright so all the blood rushes out and you get dizzy, or by any other means is not important. The important thing to recognize is that, until somebody gives me a reason to believe otherwise, I will always believe that these "experiences," this contact with something higher or other, is really generated inside of our immensely complex brains. They are as much an intimate part of us as being able to see the blue sky.

Ultimately, I believe that trying to understand the universe, and our place in it, by forcing religious explanations and dogma onto the unknown is to miss the point altogether. You cannot learn or understand anything new when you are no longer asking the questions, and that is what religion essentially asks us to do -- accept the religious answer as "the truth," and stop asking questions.

You are much better off using simple "spiritual" means to seek understanding -- means like intuition, your emotions, wonder, and ultimately to accept that if some things are ever to be really understood, that understanding will come with time and real evidence. But if the answers don't come, spirituality means also being able to accept that, and continue to wonder.

[Baruch]

Good to be corrected. I probably forgot earlier posts you made on emotion. I mostly react to a post with pretty narrow peripheral vision.

You realize that institutional religion, is theater? It is where your secular theater came from. In honor of the goat god, Pan. And Pan causes panic, which is an irrational emotion. So what if it isn't theistic. And as an organization, theater people must not be as tightly regimented as more formal religions, with membership requirements and disciplines. So you are also spiritual, in terms of individual wonder and introspection. So why do you consider yourself agnostic even, you are religious, but not theistic, like in Zen. What is the sound of one actor on stage?

Shalom