21st-century Christian Philosopher

There’s a line out there that if you believe in God, you don’t “think for yourself”. You’re brainwashed, mind-controlled. (see Chomsky)

Of course, this line probably wouldn’t be so repeated if more anti-theists did.

I’m going to display a diagram to help them out. I thought it up (myself, mind you!). I don’t suggest that it represents anything you need to accept, so you’ll still be free afterwards to form your own opinion about it.

It’s more food for thought.

It’s a sort of “vector map” of thoughts in relation to the middle consensus. The consensus does not have to be in the exact center, the range of thought is not necessarily equidistant to the consensus.

You can think of the dotted black lines as the momentary vectors, showing the direction and intensity of current individual’s thoughts. And just for comparison purposes, I included the idea of “thought paths” which more or less represented changes in direction over time.

Probably the good majority of thought takes place in that little off-blue circle called consensus. But it could be a little fuzzball with small arrowheads sticking out of the perimeter everywhere. But we could say that however the vectors in that circle go it represents a dense middle.

Notice, that I’m even giving each and every atheist the maverick designation they might desire, having braved the disapproval of the crowd. Intrepid explorers! In that diagram you have to have a vector away from the crowd in order to pass over the line of disbelief.

It really doesn’t matter to me though. Because if you viewed a central consensus and independent thinkers capable of going off in 360º from there, it becomes a rather simple thing to say that because you stay within the designation of 80-85% of the population, you do not have a mind of your own.

I also find it ironic. One of the values of “Science” is peer review. That means that you accept something partially based on a collective agreement that it is unexceptionable.

Another standard by which we people of faith fail is “objectivity”. If everybody can see it, then it is more likely to be true—especially if people with accredited degrees from acknowledged institutions.

In fact the final criticism is that we think too unlike these others. That we do not constrain our imaginations to what has been accepted by the technical society.

Add to that, the typical atheist observation that we do not agree in matters of faith–and this is carried forth even in discussion about people of a single faith. How many variations of “Christianity” are out there?

What apologist hasn’t heard the argument that we need to figure out what it is we believe before they can understand what it is they should believe?!

As long as I’ve heard the argument that we all think alike, I’ve often heard the argument that we can’t agree in the same discussion. Of course in light of this trend, I think the individual atheist needs to decide which it is.

For my part, I’ve often been the witness of all sorts of broad-brushing about me which is laughably alien. I’ve been an invidual all my life. My main link to God is not a fear of death (I do retain some fear of death, but that is God-neutral, really) –and I really wasn’t close to anyone who had passed on before 10 years into being a Christian.

The answer is pretty simple to me–it has to do with my temperment, “the way that God made me”: God holds the Teacher’s Edition of the Mysteries of the Universe. That’s my vision of transcendence. Of course, I’ve never entertained the stripped-down version of this: that God exists to be my afterlife librarian or documentarian. That’d be a little too convenient. That’s not what I’m looking for.

I’m back on the blog. No trumpets. Just a simple post, discussing a recent rant by Ray at The Freedom Sanction. (dissing philosophy ;D ) Before I go much further though, I should confess that I know that Ray’s post is titled as a rant, and I should not take it as his depth of understanding. What I mean by “confuse” should become obvious by the end of the post.

Ray writes:

Philosophy shatters the whole into smaller parts. Philosophers divide the smaller parts again and again to the nth degree. Deconstruction is the natural end of philosophy. If I may verbify the adjective, it seems that the nth-ing inherent in philosophy makes investment in time and effort of study less and less attractive.

I want to make three points: 1) Ray, you’re confusing analysis with philosophy, 2) This comes from the distaste moderns grew for “philosophy”, and 3) how the death of modernism affects religous and non-religious postmoderns.

The Confusion

First, we can easily confuse philosophy with analysis, as Ray does here. It comes easy if you’re used to a modern way of thinking. The success of technology, which requires analysis, has warped the public view of this art. Philosophy faded to become a poorer form of science in the views of the pragmatic moderns, and those who still felt some attraction to it responded to that with some amount of shame by making philosophy as obscure as technology research.

I’d like to introduce a link here that explains the difference: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=analysis. Here’s what it basically says. Philos (love, passion) + Sophia (skill, practise, wisdom — you have to go into the Greek for this.) This is most often translated “wisdom”, which has a common history with the rather un-stodgy “wit” and “vision” in our language.

On the other hand, we have analysis => ana + lysis, “a breaking apart” as the etymology goes. I find it fitting that “lose” also comes from this root. I once wrote that in a philosophy which just take things apart, we find parts rolling off the table, through the cracks in the floorboards, and “lost” forever. We then find that we can’t get it back together again.

We lose something in analyzing things past the point. Take this post as an example. I “break up” words. I “break apart” the modern perception and the historical understanding. But I can only go so far. I have to leave it to you to “see” that “passion for vision” is quite different from “breaking things apart”.

So I agree with your wisdom, that endless analysis is hell of its own. But it’s also a good thing to “break apart” what has been wrongly “fused together” (literally con+fused), and by people who did not in any sense “love” anything but “tearing things apart”.

Love of Reduction

Next, postmoderns tend to be frustrated moderns. Regardless of belief structure. Notice that I used a method that I found to be very common in deconstruction, etymological analysis. But one thing separates relgious postmoderns from secular postmoderns. Secular postmoderns don”t believe.

The reductio is the heart and soul of modernism. Reduce everything to its basic parts, and then we would see how the machine of the universe worked. Even people of faith, like Galileo believed this idea.

They take the hopelessness of constructing a world from a modernist perspective and dispair. Even their view of “freedom”, derriving from a break up of modernism, reeks of this secular dispair. Postmodern Christians, see themselves just as free as modernist Christians (and perhaps a little more, but only a little more). But we do not argue that we have lost all ability to communicate values and standards. And we do not rejoice that we now have tools to break apart all words that would create common values and standards, and so we can question the very reason that anybody should expect anything from me.

If postmodern Christianity borrows from that part of postmodernism, then I they have missed the boat.

When you see the End of the Modern World, you can go two ways: into the inanity of secular postmoderns, or into confidence that people essentially know what they are talking about even though we can in no sense prove it. That is where we conflict.

Some postmoderns lose all confidence in their fellow man’s judgment, because it is not proven through unshakable mathematical formulas or laboratory experiment. We who believe, but also see a problem with proof, never demanded proof in the first place. Man is not unable to communicate because he cannot be proven to communicate. We view the flaws in modernism as a bad turn from the confident to the pedantic.

Paul advocated a sort of deconstruction in (2 Corinthians 10:4). In “tearing down strongholds” of “presumption” with “words”. Thus, for non-believing postmoderns postmodernism is a destruction of their confidence in the conceit of modernism. But to us believing postmoderns, the destruction of the modern mind that had begun to prove God “meaningless”, substantiates the powerful weapons of God that Paul talked about. And that even though his believing people had started to abandon him for the certainty of modernism, he would smash presumptions and “loftiness” flat with the frustration of the 20th century.

I do not hope to prove what I say as much as I hope that it has been sound.

My last post, It’s a Dang Shame, starts a “series” from which I wanted to conclude the lack of Atheism as the foundation of any guilt culture. Where it must infuse the innate sense of guilt, it needs to do so by resorting to a sort of faith, because as Atheism has no content, there can be no gaurantee of emprical principles of the advisability of an ethical system.

I also wanted to make a observation that in Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian, he maintains that his desire to stay out of jail and what he likes to think about himself, are the main forces that can keep him as a “moral” individual. Thus, there is at least a hint of suggestion that he can defer to the society. Russell’s own history shows that even while he was forming a theory of the “nonsense” of moral language. He could not accept the dictates of a society that could not match his ability to discern morality as “meaningless”—all the while implying that his sense of “shame” and unexplicable guilt (which he hardly maintained) would assuage your feelings about atheists being “moral”.

I think this is illustrative of the “anti-theocratic” movement which wants to regard that any law which does not have a “strictly secular” reasoning be repealed by an enlightened view. We also have a development that the very burdon of shame itself has become too much of a burden for a contentless designation.

Moral atheists can exist. I said before that people can hold diverse views at the same time. I even indicated that this is much more characteristic of my thought than say, Harris’. Russell could actually proffer that he could accept part of the hoard’s definition of himself that he could be trusted to keep within these bounds, while all the while being a primary instigator against the “superstitious” understanding of the masses.

Now, it can be easily leveled against me that I do not prove these conclusions (which is why I have only chosen to outline them.) But it is also true that despite certain atheists accept of Michael Martin’s defense of “moral atheism” with an uneven treatment of the implications of the intersection of groups. In attacking faith, Martin says that Faith is antithetical to Science for his TANG argument. This, despite the existence of an intersection of Christians with scientists. However, he argues that Ethics can be consistent with atheism, simply by the intersection of moralists and atheists. My view would not have to be construed as a claim that this is the empty set, just that atheists have typically relied on the “moral instinct of man” while all the while discounting the decision of a “superstitious” public—where even the maintenance of pre-secularist traditions must be eschewed as the call to theocracy.