The Automat Model of Spiritual Dining: Just Take What Looks Good to You—Maybe Like the Inventor Intended
A long time ago I attended a membership recruitment presentation by Amnesty International, since I was mostly very supportive of their work. Who doesn’t hate people being imprisoned for speaking their minds and acting as their conscience demands?
But I ran into a little trouble. I also support the principle of capital punishment for certain crimes, and they said I had to be fully against that too. So I shrugged and kept my money and walked away, nonmembershipped.
Yes, but…You just try posing that question to any belief system you can think of.
History’s littered with the bones of people who other people thought had thought about things too much. We better work real hard now to extirpate the concept of heresy.
I’ve got a new friend over in Substack Commentstan, and we’re a lot more cordial now than from where we started, but it annoys the heck out of him that I won’t confess to some dogmatical perspective of my own while so rudely asserting that no one can claim to know The Truth.
You see how aggravated people get when they can’t slot you in your place like a cheese sandwich?
I ain’t got a belief system. I think it unlikely that any religion/cult with ancient roots should not have managed to grasp some universal truths in its journey through life on earth, but that’s not proof of anything, in the scheme of things, except the existence of mathematical chance.
And you know what they say about math.
As the talking Barbie of the 1990s/2000s said, "Math is hard."
SCA: "... extirpate the concept of heresy ..."
Indeed. You know of course about Brodsky's post and my shot at Josh there, but you may not have run across another post along the same line by Adam Coleman titled, "Are we becoming the monsters that we are fighting?"
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that/comment/13196844
Largely my point on Brodsky's post about too many on the "anti-woke" side being almost as bad as many of the woke for dogmatism, for deplatforming people, for consigning them to the "outer darkness" for a heresy of one sort or another.
Reminds me of a favourite quote, if a somewhat painful one, from Pascal:
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/blaise_pascal_133606
Such "convictions" aren't unique to the religious. As I think you suggested, atheists can be just as bad for that.
Though you might be somewhat amused to note that our good buddy Josh may have experienced something in the way of a "Road to Damascus conversion" as a result of Coleman's post, and of the blowback he got for various "intemperate" comments he'd made earlier about Walsh:
https://adambcoleman.substack.com/p/are-we-becoming-the-monsters-that/comment/13193433
SCA: "... some dogmatical perspective of my own ... claim to know The Truth"
Not sure, of course, what that particular perspective might be, or what is being claimed as "The Truth", but kinda think it ties in with my argument that too many people seem to think that some definitions have to be seen as gospel truth. Like "trans women are women" or "sex=gender" or "woman=adult human female" ...
Makes the discussion about consequences, about ways and means fractious at best if not impossible. More tractable, more conducive to progress to recognize that such definitions are often a matter of choice, of consensus, of considering the consequences of particular choices and changing them accordingly. Not a matter of divining the will of the Lord ...
SCA: "... you know what they say about math ..."
No, what do they say? 🙂
Fascinating topic -- I find it so in any case, even if I'm hardly more than a dilettante. But seems that one of its major claims to fame and fortune is a bedrock recognition that the conclusions we reach are generally only as good as the premises we start from. That the whole edifice is fundamentally contingent on those premises, that it is based, to some degree, on various articles of faith. Something related thereto from "The Human Use of Human Beings":
"I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law." [pg. 193]
http://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf