I have had the worst possible day today. It was not because things around me were going bad. On the contrary, things went quite well for me today. Rather, my day today was awful because I was just too frickin riled up. You see, I did not get a lot of sleep last night and so I compensated by drinking tonnes of coffee and energy drinks and anything else I could get my hands on.
So I spent the whole day in a paranoid stupor. Whenever I made a social faux pas (and there were many) I over-reacted by chastising myself to no end. What's worse, some guy outside is blowing shit up for some reason. Anyway, what I meant to say is that when I got home I acted totally paranoid around one of my family members. I hope she can forgive me.... There I go again, chastising myself!
About Me
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Cosmic Concrete
Today I was once again confronted with the reasoning behind my defection, as it were, from Christianity. Indeed, I was so confronted on two occasions. The first occurred while I was talking with a young lady during lunch at work about the novella that appears in Don Quixote. I told her about the impertinent curiosity and of Lothario's claim that a newly-wed man's friend ought to work to keep his wife in line. I added that this was after all Christian Europe and so that kind of conduct was necessary under the laws of that culture. I was ashamed to be a man, much less one of European Christian descent.
Perhaps I generalized a tad too much about Europe. When I later talked with my more conservative friend (to whom I shall, for the sake of creative license refer as Lothario) on the way home the topic of discussion wandered to women. He reminded me that the Bible contains many warnings about women. For various reasons I have felt it prudent to keep from him my true atheistic sentiments for fear that my revelation of them would provoke a flurry of proselytism.
Lothario has afforded me no shortage of reminders concerning the true nature of Christianity. He is in my eyes the best example of a Christian I have yet encountered. A devotion to Christian scholarship along with a life lived entirely in the faith has made him a perfect specimen. When I was a Christian I looked to Lothario as a shining example of the way I ought to conduct myself.
Alas, however, it was Lothario also who taught me why I needed to leave. His offhand comments about women and about homosexuals and about first nations peoples were enough to convince me of the folly of my decision to become a Christian in the first place. Indeed, I had, over the course of my time as a Christian, opportunity to meet many others who taught me similar lessons. One agreed with the actions depicted in Robertson Davies' "Fifth Business," in which a woman's husband ties her up in their home as a punishment for an act of infidelity, while another thought that an attack on a homosexual man's laboratory 'helped the cause' of stopping the gay agenda. I even recall listening to a supposedly progressive evangelical scholar lamenting the fact that an epidemic of racism had broken out among evangelicals in some parts of the United States.
Now some of my readers might be thinking that perhaps these examples were simply people who were too conservative. A casual stroll through the various denominations of Christianity is enough to reveal that the Christian is someone who subscribes to a faith which has no root in the real world. The fact that there is so little agreement amongst Christians concerning such things as infant baptism, women in ministry, military service, and even the trinitarian nature of God -- much less whether or not he has a nature(Alvin Plantinga once gave a lecture entitled "Does God Have a Nature?") is enough to convince one that the fundamental core of Christianity is not a person or a god but rather a text and its interpretation. Dogmatic adherence can and does arise in every Christian denomination. After all, why not? What is to prevent adherents of one interpretation of the Bible from being less correct than adherents of another, God?
Suppose that you had many friends and that you offered them some advice. How plausible is it that these friends should then fight amongst themselves about what that advice meant without ever approaching you for clarification. Our hypothetical scenario can be made even more comical. How plausible is it that not only do your friends fight amongst themselves but also bow their heads and allow their gut feelings and emotional responses to constitute an expression of your volition concerning their conduct?
Christians are akin to Star Trek aficionados in that both debate endlessly the merits and drawbacks of this or that school of thought on this or that issue as it is found in a static artifact. Fortunately for the Trekkie, however, one rarely finds genocidal zealots populating Star Trek conventions. My point is to highlight what happens when you take a child and bring him up in a particular school of interpretation of a particular text and instruct him to believe that the text in question not only has a basis in reality but also underpins it. The god and the tradition are one and the same. I should add that this is generally the case of any Christian. The Bible is a translated volume of texts compiled over several centuries and then interpreted as a coherent narrative documenting the salvation of mankind (oh wait, I am falling back anachronistically into my Dutch Reformed theological training). Without something concrete to back him up, God ceases to exist. In the case of Christianity, the concrete is the Bible and its perspective applied to all things natural and man-made. Without presupposing the veracity of the Bible Christianity falls apart.
Perhaps I generalized a tad too much about Europe. When I later talked with my more conservative friend (to whom I shall, for the sake of creative license refer as Lothario) on the way home the topic of discussion wandered to women. He reminded me that the Bible contains many warnings about women. For various reasons I have felt it prudent to keep from him my true atheistic sentiments for fear that my revelation of them would provoke a flurry of proselytism.
Lothario has afforded me no shortage of reminders concerning the true nature of Christianity. He is in my eyes the best example of a Christian I have yet encountered. A devotion to Christian scholarship along with a life lived entirely in the faith has made him a perfect specimen. When I was a Christian I looked to Lothario as a shining example of the way I ought to conduct myself.
Alas, however, it was Lothario also who taught me why I needed to leave. His offhand comments about women and about homosexuals and about first nations peoples were enough to convince me of the folly of my decision to become a Christian in the first place. Indeed, I had, over the course of my time as a Christian, opportunity to meet many others who taught me similar lessons. One agreed with the actions depicted in Robertson Davies' "Fifth Business," in which a woman's husband ties her up in their home as a punishment for an act of infidelity, while another thought that an attack on a homosexual man's laboratory 'helped the cause' of stopping the gay agenda. I even recall listening to a supposedly progressive evangelical scholar lamenting the fact that an epidemic of racism had broken out among evangelicals in some parts of the United States.
Now some of my readers might be thinking that perhaps these examples were simply people who were too conservative. A casual stroll through the various denominations of Christianity is enough to reveal that the Christian is someone who subscribes to a faith which has no root in the real world. The fact that there is so little agreement amongst Christians concerning such things as infant baptism, women in ministry, military service, and even the trinitarian nature of God -- much less whether or not he has a nature(Alvin Plantinga once gave a lecture entitled "Does God Have a Nature?") is enough to convince one that the fundamental core of Christianity is not a person or a god but rather a text and its interpretation. Dogmatic adherence can and does arise in every Christian denomination. After all, why not? What is to prevent adherents of one interpretation of the Bible from being less correct than adherents of another, God?
Suppose that you had many friends and that you offered them some advice. How plausible is it that these friends should then fight amongst themselves about what that advice meant without ever approaching you for clarification. Our hypothetical scenario can be made even more comical. How plausible is it that not only do your friends fight amongst themselves but also bow their heads and allow their gut feelings and emotional responses to constitute an expression of your volition concerning their conduct?
Christians are akin to Star Trek aficionados in that both debate endlessly the merits and drawbacks of this or that school of thought on this or that issue as it is found in a static artifact. Fortunately for the Trekkie, however, one rarely finds genocidal zealots populating Star Trek conventions. My point is to highlight what happens when you take a child and bring him up in a particular school of interpretation of a particular text and instruct him to believe that the text in question not only has a basis in reality but also underpins it. The god and the tradition are one and the same. I should add that this is generally the case of any Christian. The Bible is a translated volume of texts compiled over several centuries and then interpreted as a coherent narrative documenting the salvation of mankind (oh wait, I am falling back anachronistically into my Dutch Reformed theological training). Without something concrete to back him up, God ceases to exist. In the case of Christianity, the concrete is the Bible and its perspective applied to all things natural and man-made. Without presupposing the veracity of the Bible Christianity falls apart.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Christianity and my Autism
Playing games of imagination has always been an essential part of my nature. It is easy to dismiss pretending as a childish activity. It is not just the autistic adult, however, who plays such games. Rather, adults of all walks of life set up elaborate games of pretend called religions and indulge in those all the time.
In their book “The Bondage Breaker,” Neil Anderson and Dave Park list several items which are counter to Christianity. Everything from imaginary friends to Buddhism and even certain movies are deemed “counterfeit to Christianity.” (Neil Anderson and Dave Park. “The Bondage Breaker: Youth Edition” Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 1993. p. 189ff). With my earlier discussion of creativity and fantasy in mind, it is easy to understand why someone who postulates the reality of his fantasy would then want to condemn all other fantasies.
Fantasy and imagination, being outpourings of creativity are naturally arbitrary and individualistic. When one tries to portray one's fantasies as real one must face the risk that she will encounter something contrary to the fundamental tenets of those fantasies. We see several examples of reactions to such encounters in the form of young earth creationism and fundamentalism in general. In Anderson and Park's case, the antithesis to their imaginings happens to be the existence of other imaginings – and quite naturally so for how can one assert the reality of one imagining over another when both imaginings happen to stem from the workings of humans? More generally, the fundamentalist Muslim beating an unveiled woman beats her for the same reason that a paranoid pseudo-scientist in the United States rails against the theory of evolution and tries to portray it as being in league with the Devil. Both of these men are trying to fight back the intrusion of reality into a fantastical world that should have been left in the realm of individual experience. In the case of the Muslim the reality is that women, being human agents, are quite capable of effecting their own actions and the consequences of those actions. In the case of the creationist, modern science has discredited his bronze-age text's assertions concerning how the universe came into being.
In 1995 I read Anderson and Park's list of prohibited fascinations for the first time as I grew into a fundamentalist Christian. It was that list and others like it that weighed heavily on my mind as I researched Zen and Taoism in 2007, bothering me immensely. It was those lists that resulted ultimately in my turning to atheism (or perhaps I should say ceasing to believe in the Christian God). Christianity is the destruction of whatever Jesus might have stood for (and I do not think we will ever know) in favour of lists of banned ideas, thoughts, activities, and lifestyles. It is a fascism of the mind, where creativity and originality are attributable solely to God (C. S. Lewis. “Christianity and Literature” in “Christian Reflections.” London: HarperCollins, 1980. p. 8).
Because Christianity is incredibly restrictive in what kinds of spiritual exploration are permitted under the so-called freedom of Christ I simply could not live with it any longer. In an era of rapid change the necessity for adaptability out-stripped the utility of Christianity. This is especially true in a life like mine, gripped by autism and its obsession with regularity and order. It was in the ideas of Taoist philosophy that I began to see a more practical way of carrying myself in life, and more importantly a philosophy that piqued my interest. Why not explore something that fascinates me in order to step out into the real world of disorder and chaos (William Stillman. “The Soul of Autism.” Franklin Lakes: Career Press, 2008.
p. 46)? Taoism then, with its emphasis on the tao, something which cannot be named or understood, was to me a perfect expression of the chaos of the real world. Any systematic understanding of the world begins to fall apart when it is actually applied to the world. To be sure, a system might work well for decades, even centuries, but there will inevitably come a time when it will need to be replaced because the world it encompasses (or pretends to encompass) will no longer fit into the pattern of that system. Ultimately, during all the years that I was a Christian, functionalism served as the key to allowing me to side-step the fundamentalism of Christianity in favour of the creativity afforded by autism.
Autism for me allows for atheism to have purpose. It is easy to assert that in a world without God life ceases to have purpose. But in the world of my autism life already has no purpose. Instead, the majority of the people whom I encounter in life in life are concerned with more practical and dare I say mundane things than the things which which I am concerned. This leaves me ultimately alone and without meaning in the world. Thus, I must create my own meaning and purpose out of the world as I experience it. I must assert his own destiny because the only telos offered by the external world is one which I either do not understand or one which I consider too monotonous to be worth my time.
In their book “The Bondage Breaker,” Neil Anderson and Dave Park list several items which are counter to Christianity. Everything from imaginary friends to Buddhism and even certain movies are deemed “counterfeit to Christianity.” (Neil Anderson and Dave Park. “The Bondage Breaker: Youth Edition” Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 1993. p. 189ff). With my earlier discussion of creativity and fantasy in mind, it is easy to understand why someone who postulates the reality of his fantasy would then want to condemn all other fantasies.
Fantasy and imagination, being outpourings of creativity are naturally arbitrary and individualistic. When one tries to portray one's fantasies as real one must face the risk that she will encounter something contrary to the fundamental tenets of those fantasies. We see several examples of reactions to such encounters in the form of young earth creationism and fundamentalism in general. In Anderson and Park's case, the antithesis to their imaginings happens to be the existence of other imaginings – and quite naturally so for how can one assert the reality of one imagining over another when both imaginings happen to stem from the workings of humans? More generally, the fundamentalist Muslim beating an unveiled woman beats her for the same reason that a paranoid pseudo-scientist in the United States rails against the theory of evolution and tries to portray it as being in league with the Devil. Both of these men are trying to fight back the intrusion of reality into a fantastical world that should have been left in the realm of individual experience. In the case of the Muslim the reality is that women, being human agents, are quite capable of effecting their own actions and the consequences of those actions. In the case of the creationist, modern science has discredited his bronze-age text's assertions concerning how the universe came into being.
In 1995 I read Anderson and Park's list of prohibited fascinations for the first time as I grew into a fundamentalist Christian. It was that list and others like it that weighed heavily on my mind as I researched Zen and Taoism in 2007, bothering me immensely. It was those lists that resulted ultimately in my turning to atheism (or perhaps I should say ceasing to believe in the Christian God). Christianity is the destruction of whatever Jesus might have stood for (and I do not think we will ever know) in favour of lists of banned ideas, thoughts, activities, and lifestyles. It is a fascism of the mind, where creativity and originality are attributable solely to God (C. S. Lewis. “Christianity and Literature” in “Christian Reflections.” London: HarperCollins, 1980. p. 8).
Because Christianity is incredibly restrictive in what kinds of spiritual exploration are permitted under the so-called freedom of Christ I simply could not live with it any longer. In an era of rapid change the necessity for adaptability out-stripped the utility of Christianity. This is especially true in a life like mine, gripped by autism and its obsession with regularity and order. It was in the ideas of Taoist philosophy that I began to see a more practical way of carrying myself in life, and more importantly a philosophy that piqued my interest. Why not explore something that fascinates me in order to step out into the real world of disorder and chaos (William Stillman. “The Soul of Autism.” Franklin Lakes: Career Press, 2008.
p. 46)? Taoism then, with its emphasis on the tao, something which cannot be named or understood, was to me a perfect expression of the chaos of the real world. Any systematic understanding of the world begins to fall apart when it is actually applied to the world. To be sure, a system might work well for decades, even centuries, but there will inevitably come a time when it will need to be replaced because the world it encompasses (or pretends to encompass) will no longer fit into the pattern of that system. Ultimately, during all the years that I was a Christian, functionalism served as the key to allowing me to side-step the fundamentalism of Christianity in favour of the creativity afforded by autism.
Autism for me allows for atheism to have purpose. It is easy to assert that in a world without God life ceases to have purpose. But in the world of my autism life already has no purpose. Instead, the majority of the people whom I encounter in life in life are concerned with more practical and dare I say mundane things than the things which which I am concerned. This leaves me ultimately alone and without meaning in the world. Thus, I must create my own meaning and purpose out of the world as I experience it. I must assert his own destiny because the only telos offered by the external world is one which I either do not understand or one which I consider too monotonous to be worth my time.
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