A Higher Power: Meaning or Marginalization?
Offline That grease stain with the Fred Durst hat that debates with YouTube atheists was the most recent I can think of, but many religious people have resorted to this premise: that life is imparted with "meaning" (through a chain of logic never illustrated, with "meaning" never being defined) on the condition of there being a "higher power" of some sort. Heading east on Wilshire at 5 MPH, it occurred to me out of nowhere: it doesn't provide "meaning," rather it confesses a desire to marginalize and quantify the subjective human experience so that it can be definitively judged by the believer. The result really being an oversimplified set of parameters in which actions are measured against a set of rules; what the rules themselves are not being terribly important. They could be The Marquis of Queensbury Rules, The ColdFusion syntax, the checklist of hang-gliding: the point being that for them to qualify as value gauges, their own value as gauges must already be assumed. By someone, i.e. you. Once that's been decided, the believer doles out his or her own sense of anxiety or comfort based on their interpretation of actions through the rules.
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... " I.E. YOU " ......
yup, get use to it already ..... YOU are god, GOD , GAWED !
That means everyone .... no way around it !
Atheism Books.
Thus "meaning" is "arbitrary validation" where real validation may be absent. It makes sense in the superego/internal parent framework of Freud's, considering the deity is usually conceived as a parental entity. The Great Father In The Sky is, of course, simply the superego, and in order for it to not be a simple case of over-inflating a psychological mechanism, people have to make it a Really Big Deal.
No, I couldn't possibly just be experiencing a common psychological process, it has to be something special. Because I'm special. So it's ghosts. Uh, powerful ghosts.
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Thanks for playing, here's your parting gift.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I'll have to look into psychology in the future, Will. Thanks for that angle on it.
What's funny about this whole thing is the breathless admiration for "infinity," which I've never understood, and on some examination doesn't ring sincere. If anything, it's fear of infinity: anxiety that a single action or position could be interpreted a hundred different ways, or that what seemed right based on one premise could be totally wrong with further information. So the idea behind the comfort of religion is to lock such gauges down, no matter how large the rift between them and perceivable reality grows.
I'm reminded of a fantastic quote from Kierkegaard: "Anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility."
Everything I know may be completely wrong, based on a false concept of the world. I've somewhat jaded myself to the possibility, since I already know I'm only measuring perceptions against perceptions, symbols against symbols. I couldn't reconstruct reality from what few facets of it I understand, or even perceive. The concept of an absolute anything becomes remarkably impertinent when you realize how little our thoughts may have in common with reality.