KNOWLEDGE AND GOD STUFF

The other day, I was wondering why my taste for fictional literature has eased in my older age. I came to the conclusion that, nowadays, I seem to crave knowledge of myself and the material reality my fleshy body swims through. Science books interest me more than religious books, though I keep coming across the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness”, even in Newsweek this week, and that idea seems to fit with science as well as with healing the psyche. To become ever more conscious is what Jung thought a human being ought to be about. I like it.


THE CHRISTIAN WORLD IS LOSING OUT

The other day I was exchanging e-mail with a fundamentalist Christian, and he expressed in passing that “the church” is under attack. Well, yes, I suppose it might seem like that to him.

For example, most modern Christians find themselves in, accept and live in a world created by science. They depend on it for their medical needs, to get to and from work, to light their nights and heat their winters. They know their solar system and of the existence of distant galaxies and suns through the predictive methods of science. They no longer believe that the heavens are a sort of Sistine Chapel of the World with stars painted onto the roof for their amusement and enjoyment. Yet, when it comes to evolution, they balk. Look, folks, either science has got it all correctly so far or nothing works as we think it does.

Joseph Campbell taught me so much when he pointed out that every religion which has come along at first represented the latest “scientific” view of the universe. So in the past we had a hierarchical system of kingdoms to rule under a hierarchical heaven. The seasons of harvests and plantings were firmly represented by rituals followed out by kings and shamans. Religions must die when they no longer fulfill the knowledge which the age gives us. We’re slowly sliding from beneath the view that Kings rule by divine right, yet the Christians hang on to the outdated symbolism of kings and princes.

In short, a religious world view which ignores the facts cannot stand forever. Ironically, Christians must embrace a modern world’s knowledge or its spirit will inevitably fade.

For example, is the human animal the toy of a puppet master Christians and Moslems call “god” or a semi-free being, just beginning to emerge from the domination of his animal instincts?

MOVE OVER, MAN, THE ANIMAL’S HERE

In A Mind So Rare, Donald states the case for determinism, even though his book will argue against that conclusion: “it [findings about the nature of consciousness] would suggest that we are. . . preposterous illusory creatures who inhabit the cognitive underground along with the rest of creation while harboring delusions of intellectual grandeur.”

If consciousness is as fleeting as research shows it to be, then what control do we have over our thoughts and actions? That’s the case Donald hopes to state. Don’t you love these theories that belittle man’s vaunted intellect? According to some researcher writers, we are barely more conscious and in control of our instinctual life than the dog and cat.

I recall John Houston's Freud movie with Montgomery Clift in the role of Freud. Houston himself does the voiceover which introduces the movie. He points out how science has progressively dethroned mankind from being the king of creation to just being another animal. He mentions Ptolemy and Galileo, Darwin and Freud, each making man less and less special. Now evolutionary psychology is making us out to be hardly more than animals when it comes to our actions. Don’t you just love it? I do! How can there even be an unconscious when, perhaps, we’re hardly more than unconscious every day in every way.
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"Egotist: A person . . . more interested in himself than in me." —Ambrose Bierce