how to stop and have a think
in the cult we used to talk about repentence a lot.
i'm not sure why, actually. we were all hardcore calvinists at least nominally so we were undertaking to believe that everything that happens was ordained before the foundations of the universe by what i now imagine to be a clockwork monster god. anyone's good works (repentence very much included!) were not their own. filthy rags and all that. but the corollary that no one really wanted to talk about was that all your bad works were also not your own.
there's a fascinating asymmetry there where you don't get credit for your good works but you do get eternally screwed (i wonder if this word i've just substituted counts as a good work? not that it matters, i'm just working out the capital-p plan) for your bad works, and/or for being part of the inherently sinful human species, which is apparently enough to do it?
but we never really teased these downstream effects out. doing so was something we left to theologians and other obsessives who we viewed (if they weren't dead!) with a fair amount of suspicion. after all, what was there to say that calvin, peace be upon him, had not already said?
this all changes for me one evening in the most whatever-the-opposite-of-dope-is circumstances you can imagine. no angel visits me. no lights from heaven illuminate as i kneel below the cross. no vagrant turns out to be a prophet.
i am playing minecraft and watching youtube. at the same time. because i'm digging big hole in minecraft and digging big hole is fairly boring.
i'm about to get my shit rocked.
i've been watching a lot of philosophy videos--and as you know this can go a bunch of different ways depending on your temperament but i was always suspicious of the stoics and i don't have nazi inclinations so i wasn't going down the rightwing ragehole--which was all well and good until i start a series of lectures from an actual academic instituion about approaches to the afterlife.
oops.
looks like the godless commies in the liberal arts got me.
i don't remember the series now, but what i do remember is this guy going through all kinds of approaches to the afterlife that i didn't believe in and didn't find particulary interesting. but then he gets to exactly what i believed. and he does the same thing he did for all the other systems of belief, which is to stop and talk about it for a bit. and not in the way where you ask a question about the afterlife and everyone throws up their hands and says it's a mystery in stop-thinking-so-hard tones and the conversation moves on to other more pragmatic topics.
instead he starts taking claims for a walk, taking them way past where i am comfortable taking them. he asks questions like what would it actually be like to be alive for all eternity?
now this is all fine and dandy and in fact does nothing to change my mind about anything; i am, in the moment, comfortable with most of the conclusions that make sense to me.
but this method, this taking your claims for a walk, this is the thing that's stuck with me so many years later. it seems to me that believing or asserting stuff is easy, but what that actually means in real life is something else entirely. where the rubber hits the road and all that.
this process of decomposing the abstract into the concrete strikes me as one of the most valuable bits of thoughtcraft you can adopt. because the human mind is not first and foremost an organ of believing things that are true. it is silly putty that wants to survive and survive it will if that mean believing something insane.
and frankly since most of our beliefs are no longer directly tied to survival--and to be clear this is not a problem or something i want to solve; i like there not being a bear at the end of my philosophising--and so it becomes very easy to believe a range of crazy bonkers things.
a lot of the bonkers can be avoided by driving things from the abstract (remember! things are easy to say!) into the concrete. this can be as easy as just teasing out the implications of your systems of abstraction.
take the reformed tulip. now i am friends with very good people who believe this stuff and i am not trying to throw them under the bus here. however. the first decomposition that really rocked this for me was, surprisingly perhaps, the perseverence of the saints. (sidebar: a big warning sign here is the involvement of augustine. my thoughts on augustine are not charitable and if i could pinpoint where exactly the church lost its way it would either be hitching our boats to augustine of hippo or capitulating to empire. depends on my mood.)
i know a number of people who what i would call strong christians who had all the experiences and said and did the right stuff and showed every evidence you could ask for of the working of the holy spirit... and yet twenty years later are lapsed. some are bitter atheists. some just don't believe anymore without an particular antipathy.
augustine and calvin would have me believe in spite of the things i have seen with my very own eyes that these people were never among the elect. or that their lapses will come undone later and they will return to the loving arms of the clockwork monster.
sorry but this doctrine just sounds like bitter grapes and/or cope. i understand that it's a consequence of believing other things; it's downstream of election and all that. but it's a silly consequence! it's transparently contradicted by all available evidence, and frankly, if you can't tell who the elect are by their actions and testimony, what's the point? why believe such a thing? (and just in case you're thinking you have a really great answer to any of these questions, i assure you i've heard it and it's not convincing--remember that your apologetics are built for people who already agree, and i don't!)
this is what i mean by decomposing from the abstract to the particular. take the results of your systematic whatever and compare it to the facts on the ground, and try to be as even-handed as possible and not let your apologetic impulse (which i've written about previously) cloud your vision.
i'm not talking about ideas here. no: i'm talking about people. people that i know. the evidence of my eyes contradicts the doctrine. so the doctrine has to go.
this is by the way how all doctrines eventually go. there have been a million different doctrines. most of them are no longer held. and i think most of the time the testamony of reality is what gets in the way, that sort of friction you have in your head that comes from trying to reconcile what you believe with what you see.
jesus believed that the kingdom of god was here, almost. imminent. just around the corner. the gospel writers have jesus swearing that the current generation will not pass before it arrives.
and yet.
that generation and a few more have passed. the testamony of reality causes a great disturbance in the doctrine and we develop all kinds of clever workarounds to have jesus actually saying something else, or that the son of man actually did come but it was a secret, etc.
heaven and earth has not passed away, unless i missed a memo? but it sure would seem that some of those words have. yikes.