These ramblings are my attempt to understand some things that may not be understandable, but can only be taken a position on, even if that position is that I do not understand them.
Are we puppets that have been created through the accident of consciousness as Thomas Ligotti believes? This is a belief, albeit a bleak and pessimistic one, like any other belief man creates to make sense of the meaning of his life.
Atheism is a belief just like Christianity, and all of the beliefs are at odds with other beliefs because they declare truth where there is no truth to be verified except by belief or faith or dogma to be recited like some robot that has been programmed for this purpose. I'm begging you not to be a robot, which reveals that I do not side with Ligotti on his belief in a world cursed by conscious puppets.
The problem with belief is that it is created by people, and people are not perfect, nor perfectly good, or very smart. Their biases creep into whatever belief they think that they have been given or discovered. Who am I to say that someone was not given a revelation that is outside the normal parameters of life? There is strangeness in this world that invades either through imagination or some other means that we either cannot explain yet, or that is beyond our ability to understand maybe forever. The problem is that I cannot experience what someone else has experienced in order to know the truth. This is the weakness of all belief, and it is why belief is easy to exploit in other people by the leaders of belief systems, or faiths.
When belief leads to the suffering and death of others, or outright defies the facts and truth of this world and can be proven to not be natural or even supernatural, this is the space where Atheism takes hold. Atheism takes science as it's dogma, and I'm not sure that dogma belongs anywhere, least of all in science or beliefs that come out of science. In science there is proof or there is the unproven, but it is hubris to think that the unproven is not true. The unproven is a mystery that has not yet been revealed through experience or experimentation. It is the grey area of a Schrödinger cat-like scenario. Mystery is uncomfortable. So is Quantum Physics, which I will not try to approach here because I am no Quantum Physicist.
Do you not feel that itch you cannot scratch in your consciousness when confronted with mystery? The mind tries to rationalize mystery as either something that can be proven to be false or something to be accepted as truth without proof. Rational thought is not comfortable with the idea of accepting something as true that has not proof in our reality, because we cannot know any other reality but the one we inhabit.
Being confronted by mystery can be maddening. You can question your senses or the interpretation of your senses. You can question your sanity. You can question reality itself as something that is not what it seems. How can this be? How can this thing I have experienced have happened to me? Your choices when confronted by mystery are to explain it as a mistake you have made in interpenetrating reality or as a mystery that can neither be explained nor understood. The first is easier to accept than the second. The second way takes more courage, but will also test your sanity and your tidy explanations about reality, which are in themselves beliefs built upon facts and theories (insert beliefs here is you like) unprovable, at least the so far unprovable. Surely there must be a rational explanation for what you have experienced, because to accept the mystery as unprovable is to accept that the world does not work the way that you and other people believe it to be.
In the end, you will have to accept your experience by believing that it is explainable or unexplainable, even if the explainable is based on unprovable beliefs or scientific facts. It is much harder to live with a mystery that remains a mystery with no belief system underpinning it to the reality that you inhabit. And that can be the cause of much stress and distress.
What have you chosen to believe? How hard was it for you to accept it? Do you really accept it as a truth? Would it make more sense to accept it as a mystery that has no rational explanation based in fact or a belief system? Could you go on functioning with the last choice without feeling like the world was not some mystery itself that defies explanation? What do yo choose to accept, let alone believe?
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