Early life concepts of Heaven:
- Heaven as the place where God is present (as opposed to hell, lacking God, or purgatory, some sort of inbetween place)
Heaven as angels clouds and joy (the cartoon version, I guess)
Heaven as everlasting happiness (this one particularly popular; when I asked my parents if a favorite stuffed animal would be in Heaven, they replied that it would be, if it was needed to make me happy).
More recently:
- Heaven is now / heaven as now. Supported by childhood concept #1, I suppose. Heaven as a matter of perception.
But the concept of heaven I alluded to while commenting to Andrew's post is heaven as the eternal band-aid, the place where everything gets made right (God doing all the fixing, of course). That's a God I no longer subscribe to, and thus a Heaven I no longer believe in. Which is too bad, because it's really comforting in situations with no apparent end, especially tragic and remote ones. All tears wiped from eyes, injustices righted, and such. The concept has the potential to let people count on God to fix things later when perhaps people could do something now, be God's hands or something. (Isn't that in the Bible someplace?) But I'm getting sidetracked.
In any event, all that, are nice thoughts. They're comforting. They might even be true. Who knows. They're stories we tell, to explain the unknown. And that's fine.
In many ways this earthly life might be purgatory and heaven and hell, all depending upon one's consciousness of the presence of God. Maybe the individual bits, us, stop existing and get absorbed back into the whole, at death. The idea of reincarnation is nice, though, because it supports the idea that, in the end, everyone's a winner - or could be - and gains that more eternal perspective for which Christ, Buddha, Lao Tzu, are revered.
Perhaps I'm becoming a sort of militant agnostic, insisting that there are limits to knowledge. Well, yes, that's true, I am. But everything contained in a deep breath, in that moment between exhale and inhale, betrays such an insistence. Maybe it's closer to the truth to say that there are limits to expression.
In the end there are things that can be known but not explained, communicated to others.
And in the end, we wonder, and tell ourselves (and each other) stories to explain what we experience, or what we can't.
Is the unknown a subject of so much exploration because we are curious, or because we're somehow threatened by our own unknowing?
9 comments:
I am a curious person. I desire to know or understand what reality truly is. How do things work? Why are we here? What is my purpose for being? These are the questions that hold my attention.
If we were threatened by our ignorance, we'd have been extinct long ago, because ignorance and stupidity seem boundless and widespread by and large. Isn't a common theme in The Bible where Israel experienced woe after ignoring the wise man's warnings? Yet, the Jews have survived several subjugations and several genocides, an extreme one by the Romans and smaller one from Germany. They still persist, so mankind will likely persist if they are taken as an example of the resiliency of humans as a species. Whether their survival is because of their beliefs or in spite of them is another question?
Is a person the sum of his or her environment, genes and psychology, or just the sum of his or her environment and genes, and psychology has nothing to do with it for the most part? I mean whether you believe in God and Heaven doesn't really impact your overall survival in your current environment. Remove you to the middle of the Pacific, left afloat on a raft to your own devices, such beliefs might keep you going just a little bit longer, long enough to be found by search and rescue. This latter thought is totally hypothetical and not necessarily fair or true, but I point out this extreme case to show you how insulated we are from Nature's violence for the most point, and how little attention people need to pay to their surroundings to survive in this "human" world we've devised for ourselves. People can believe in magic, dragons and fairies, and believe that cars are a form of magic, and for the most part they will lead normal, happy lives even if they are extremely deluded,and people will tolerate their ignorance or beliefs. You have to be directing traffic for imaginary UFOs to be institutionalized and that's likely only temporarily.
Questioning one's beliefs and ideas put' s you in a significant minority of people. That one trait makes you special whether you realize the significance of it or not. Whether you are an agnostic or not, doesn't really matter. You will discover the truth if you haven't already in due time because you are a seeker of truth above all.
I think it was St. Teresa who said the thing about being Christ's hands and feet, but that's just as good as far as I'm concerned. :)
I like your thoughts here; I like hearing how people's thought processes evolve over the years; most of the time it seems we act like whatever we feel or think now, we've always felt or thought, or we were stupid for doing otherwise. In view of the constant flux of the human mind, militant agnosticism seems basically sensible! But only as long as it's not cynical or bitter, I would probably add.
As to your final question, about whether we're curious about or threatened by the unknown, I would say both/and, depending. We are a mixed bag.
Blogger word verification: junkxx. A comment on the quality of this comment? :)
Julie,
Nice post. What do you mean by this?:
"But everything contained in a deep breath, in that moment between exhale and inhale, betrays such an insistence. [that there are limits to knowledge]"
JB,
You're right that "Questioning one's beliefs and ideas puts you in a significant minority of people."
But (1) why do you say with certainty that "You will discover the truth if you haven't already in due time because you are a seeker of truth above all."?
And (2) why do you think there's such a thing as truth?
Just curious. I don't know what your definition of truth is, and whether you feel you've found it, or whether you feel that it must be available because so many people say it is. If you feel inclined to answer, put in a blog post if it's too long for a comment! I'll go read you. Or maybe you've already written about truth somewhere?
a,
I enjoyed your comment, ". . . militant agnosticism seems basically sensible! But only as long as it's not cynical or bitter . . ."
My agnosticism probably runs more to radical agnosticism than militant agnosticism. That is, it's not something I'm trying to force on others, if that inclination to be in-your-face about agnosticism could be implied by "militant". For me, for what it's worth, agnosticism doesn't seem to include cynicism or bitterness, or for that matter, despair. I have no idea why, because it seems to me that these things could be a logical result. It does include love. That came as a surprise.
P.S. Julie,
Forgive me for commenting/replying not only to your post, but also to comments on your post! I know that's your job . . . they were just interesting.
And you did say on a's blog, "And what of Meaning and Truth and Beauty? (I'm really interested in a protracted discussion on this one, but need to get back to work.)"
So I'm contributing to the discussion! :-) (I hope.)
I've written a post in response to Night Sky's questions. Not sure if I answered them or not, but I tried. It's funny how much stock and mental effort we put in the metaphysical, instead of seeking out what the reality those metaphysical musings point to. And for the most part, our ideas about the metaphysical have little impact upon our daily lives. If you are a compassionate human being, you will likely always be such. There is no need of a divine afterlife or fear of a retributive supernatural force to make you be compassionate towards other beings. If you desire heaven, make this now your heaven and you shall not want.
Night Sky - as always, thank you! I'm glad to host a conversation, very glad indeed.
There is a LOT to respond to among all these comments; I'll do my best to work throughtfully through them.
Julie,
Well, now you've got to go over and read jbmoore's post and our (endlessly long) comments over there, too, because you're hosting part of the conversation here, and he's hosting part of it there, and now there are too many ideas floating around all over and none of us will ever get the dishes done (or have time to correct our run-on sentences)!
Andrew,
Paul wrote about everybody being parts of the body of Christ, which is what I was thinking of... forgot about St. T.
I guess I've become more forgiving of my own process; I couldn't have gotten here without the reams of stupidity that contributed to forward progress. I don't suppose that "militant" is the right word; perhaps insistent agnosticism?
In architecture it's easy to become cynical, bitter, or both; in many ways, it's actually being realistic.
There was a good reason for that last question, and I do think that the answer can be both. There have certainly been times where I thought that if I failed to figure it out, the world would somehow end.
Night Sky,
"But everything contained in a deep breath, in that moment between exhale and inhale, betrays such an insistence. [that there are limits to knowledge]"
I meant that if I pause for a half a moment, stop all the damn thinking, that I intimately know things I cannot quite express.
As for Meaning and Truth and Beauty - or God and purpose in life - discussion on that can take place anywhere from the narrow my-point-of-view everyday level, to the broadest, most encompassing, it-all-works-together one. But claiming, even believing, that everything works together in the end, doesn't stop one from being upset over the little injustices that happen now. Doesn't stop me, at least.
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