Live long enough on this spinning rock and you’ll probably encounter enough people to provide you with an awfully broad perspective on “the human condition”. One aspect of this that fascinates me is the varying degrees to which people will invest themselves in an “idea” whether or not the foundation for the idea bears any attachment to fact and evidence. How often, especially as children, are we told “just because I said so” in regard to some instruction we’re given or some direction we’re sent in? Quite often, most likely.
So, as young children, we’re given a handful of parables and stories to believe and fully invest in, that we’re later told to completely divest ourselves of. These vary in their details from culture to culture, but they exist in some form in almost all of them. In the west, the most obvious ones take the form of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, the boogey man, and the list goes on. No one would ever dispute that, the plan from the beginning is that there is an unspecified date in time where it is intended that SOMEONE would be explaining to us, something to the effect of “Ok joey, about that whole “tooth fairy” thing……………………..”
And yet, there’s no foundation in evidence for any of these parables. They all serve a purpose during our impressionable time. The whole issue with Santa, like it or not, is that he keeps a “naughty and nice” list, and he’ll fuck up your Christmas morning with a sock full of dried shit if you’re not “nice”. So it’s ostensibly about “control”, whether you like it or not. I dare you to deny that, at some point in your child’s life, or at some point in YOUR life as a child, the words weren’t spoken that resembled “If you don’t behave, Santa is not going to come.” At least in my experience, the tooth fairy was used in the same way. If I acted inappropriately as a child, when I put the tooth under my pillow, I was told that the tooth fairy would leave a nest of live scorpions under my pillow and I would be doused in gasoline and set on fire in the middle of the night.
Ok, I made that last part up, but the idea is still the same.
And still there is a whole other category of information we’re fed as a child, that there is no plan in place to assist us in divesting from. This category contains information that is no different, in almost ANY way, from any of the previously mentioned examples. They are stories in books. Yes, there may be some circumstantial archaeological evidence for the actual physical existence in the past of a few of the characters described in these other stories, but in truth, there is more concrete forensic evidence for the actual existence of St. Nicholas the Bishop of Myra, than there is for Joseph of Arimathea, or his alleged progeny.
So the question that comes to mind for me has to do with what leads one group of adults toward continuing to be inextricably invested in these stories of old as though they were absolute truths, while another group will look at the same information and determine that they are just that……….stories?
Obviously, the answer is going to be very subjective, based on a good number of lenses through which each person sees the world. If I look at myself and my own perceptions (which is the safest thing to do in this case, because a huge number of people are going to be “put off” by this.), I can draw upon my own evolution in my perceptions of the world and myself in relation to it.
I was raised Roman Catholic. Therefore, I was “told” that “This is the way things are” with regard to God, religion, spirituality, piety, penance, judgment, and all other things related to such. It was instilled in me at a very early age that the precepts I was being supplied with could not be challenged. They were not open to interpretation, they could not be questioned. There were books and texts and songs that were to serve as my definition for all things. Almost every behavior that was expected of me was outlined in these books. That was that. This indoctrination was SO successful, SO effective, that, as I grew older, any fleeting thought which might come to me in the form of “Wait, how is THIS possible?” or “This doesn’t sound right”, would be quickly internally countered with a wave of anxiety as I waited for some unseen being to strike me with a plague, or, at least, bad fortune. Ultimately, the anxiety around questioning what I was taught to “believe” resulted in the irrational fear that there was some “lake of fire and burning sulfur” waiting for me just because I might decide that the stories I’ve been told were designed for something “else” other than being blatantly true. Granted, the world was FULL of things that I was told could be attributed only to a supreme being, because no one else could seem to explain to me the “how” or “why” of how they came to be. So the stories filled gaps. Gaps that human nature abhors leaving in place. So that was good enough at the time.
Somewhere around age 18, again, due largely to circumstances in my life at that time, I made an overt decision to divest myself from anything having to do with the Catholic church, religion, or the idea of “God” at that time. Several dynamics resulted from that decision. First, the inevitable anxiety was there around the decision to do so. A vulnerability resulted from this anxiety. Having given up my membership in that club, a forfeiture which would be met with some of the most vile shunning, mostly by my immediate family, I was left seeking membership elsewhere. The only paradigm I could find at that time, was Madilyn Murray O’Hair’s “American Atheist” club. I was a card carrying member and all. Boxes of literature for me to spread on my college campus were shipped to me and they were relentless in making me feel like I “belonged”. Yet there was a “snarkiness” to their campaign which never sat well with me. It was still a “my way or the highway” sort of philosophy.
Again, circumstances took their turn and my gaze turned back toward “the church”. This time, it was the Anglican church, which seemed to me to be a sort of “Catholic Lite” that was more digestible to me. In the end however, when I got around to questioning the “how” and “why” of what they were preaching, and the best answers I got were still coming from the angle of “because this book says so”, the end result was the same. No. just because it’s written in a book and there are millions or billions of people who believe the book to be fact, without any evidence, simply does not “make it so”. I began to look farther, as there were still circumstances in my life and dynamics in the world around me which still seemed to have no logical explanation as to their “how” or “why”. Again, because nature abhors a vacuum, I turned to another religion. This time, one without a seeming monotheistic deity. I turned to Shinto Buddhism, which told me that, if I could divest myself from all attachments that I would find the answers I was looking for.
Seemed simple enough.
Not so much. Turns out being a good Buddhist and practicing the disciplines outlined in the Ten Precepts is hard as fuck. I was just not cut out for it. I maintained it for a few years, and I tried, I really did, to do what was required. Ultimately, what I gained from it, was a new perspective on what both binds, and differentiates, almost all of the monotheistic and polytheistic religions of the world. This had some value to me. For the first time, I had a level of comfort in looking AROUND me as well as WITHIN me, to see things as they are, as they were, and not as people were telling me to see them. One of the educators which became most valuable to me was Joseph Campbell. Campbell made a very clear archaeological case for the relationship between the world’s religious practices, seeming to be able to show a balance between them and emphasized how similar they all were, as opposed to how different each one tried to be from the other, on their own. What I determined was that, in almost every case, subscribing to one set of religious beliefs or another, meant that you HAD to dictate that ALL other religious beliefs were wrong. You cannot be a Christian and claim that the Muslims are going to be allowed into heaven. That is, unless of course, the Muslim does what the Christian says is the requirement for membership, which is to tout that Christianity is the one true religion with the one true god, etc, and so on. An act which the Muslim surely won’t do, because they, themselves, believe that THEIR interpretation of God, life, and “the afterlife” is the one true definition. Now, according to each, only one can be right. Also, from each perspective there exists no “other god” than their own god. Therefore, from the Christian perspective, the Muslim god does not exist and their prophets are false. Ipso Facto from the Muslim perspective. Additionally, there are millions of Hindus who believe in millions of gods. Go further. The Seventh Day Adventists, a Christian sect, believes in a very different set of behaviors which brings one in God’s favor. A set of behaviors that is limited to a specific NUMBER of people, and the rest are going to hell. The Mormons believe that some snake oil salesman in the desert had a private meeting with god and chose HIS people to inhabit the earth after some Armageddon. The bottom line is that there are hundreds of religions and they all purport to be the “right one”.
To align myself with any ONE seems crazy. To align myself with ALL of them is equally insane. So, I go to each one and say “show me the evidence which supports your contentions.”
They all just point to their stories in their books. All of them. Just print on a page. Nothing else. Then they turn around and point to their own millions who have invested in the same words on the paper that they have, and state that, because their numbers are greater, that they must be right. Then they turn and point to the mountains or the sunset, or the stars, and say, “MY God made those”. But I say, “here is how that happened. Here are the actual atoms doing the actual things that made those things you’re pointing to possible.” And on and on we go, down the rabbit hole. With each layer of minutia I provide physical evidence explaining the cause for and existence of, everyone’s explanation is “Yes, and MY God made that possible”. Still, no evidence.
Inevitably, we will get to the point where science has not yet defined and provided empirical evidence for the cause for, origin and mechanics of. When we do, the response is typically “that’s where God is”. Yet “show me” gets no answer. The response to that is almost always “you know nothing of faith”.
I suppose I have little use for it, as it’s defined. “Trust” is another issue altogether. I’ll choose where to put my trust, and I’ll do so based on evidence, not “faith”.
So, finally, in looking back at the whole dynamic, I tend to find that most of us believe what we believe because we’re told to believe it. We’re told there are consequences to “not believing”, and it’s explained to us that “bad things will happen” to us simply by not believing. Ultimately, our own mortality is the things which drives us to invest in these idea which carry no evidence of fact. Part of the human condition is the fear of our own mortality. It’s comforting to invest in the idea that this is not “it” as far as our existence. It’s comforting to think that some form of immortality is possible. And we’re compelled to think that our immortality must carry with it our consciousness. To unlink those makes the idea of immortality less than palatable. Yet, that’s the path that most Buddhists have taken with their idea of reincarnation.
Still, zero evidence. No evidence that anyone’s idea of “immortality” actually exists. Except for one. Only one. The passing of our chromosomes and genetic information to our children and onward from there. But there’s no comfort in that for most people.
So, to the original question, of what allows one person to question what another refuses to.
My guess is "fear"
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