Myth and Deception

Myth is a lie told to reveal a truth.
Deception is a truth told to conceal a lie.

I love Christianity as mythology, like St. George the dragon slayer, but not only the fanciful stories of the saints, but also the stories directly from the Bible.

When you drop the does-this-make-sense, does-this-contradict-anything, and is-killing-everyone-with-an-epic-flood-a-good-use-of-divine-power questioning attitude and just look at the stories themselves; the characters, their choices, their emotions, etc., often they speak to different aspects of our lives that we can relate to, even thousands of years later.

Perhaps that's why I still enjoy a good sermon.  To me, a good sermon tells a good story, and provokes some self-reflection.

But one of my biggest gripes with Christianity is that it is not written like Mythology.  Although there are mystics and progressive Christians which would like to suggest otherwise, the Gospels are written as though they are literal truth.  Yet comparing one Gospel to another reveals them to be false, or, at the very least, not completely true.

And that's one of the big reasons why I have a gripe with Christianity.  It is told as truth when it clearly is not.  While I love the mythology, I despise the deception, because it is this deception of truth which emboldens people to act like the southern half of a north-bound horse towards their neighbors when they don't happen to believe the same things, and it is this deception which claims the lives and resources of the pious prematurely and disproportionately. 

Keep the Myth.  Keep the self-reflection and stories.  But let's ditch the false truth.

...now that that's settled, how do we go about getting people to do that?  ;-)

7 Mind Hacks to Let Go of Guilt

Quick question:  In the photo above, which path would you like to walk down; A, B, or C?  Well, that's pretty much a no-brainer, right?  Unless you're just trying to stroke your ego to claim that you've taken a path that no one else has taken, B is the only obvious choice, because it's the only obvious path.  Put that in the back of your mind for just a moment.

In the recent past, I posted a couple self-help messages.  The first, "The Point of Vectors," emphasized how, at each moment, we have the opportunity to choose the narrative of who we actually are, as opposed to who we were.  The second, "Good Guilt," explained that we should use guilt only as a way to learn, and then, after we have learned, we should move on; not letting our past mistakes define our present selves.

These principles are sound and practical, but they can be difficult to implement, because it often seems like our brains have minds of their own.  ;-)  Sometimes, no matter how much we know of a better path, our brains prefer to travel down a different path.  Our minds loop around and around... repeating the same behaviors... repeating the same thoughts...  repeating the mental movies of our blemished past... repeating the feelings of guilt and shame of our prior mistakes...  It can seem like our minds are stuck in a hopeless, endless loop.  And worse yet, depending on the memories, we might feel like we deserve to be stuck in that loop.

That's not the way it's supposed to be.  So what's going on with these detrimental "do loops?'

Your brain is an incredible interpreting, predicting, and learning machine, but it's also a complicated chemical, biological, and electrical system.  Because of this complexity, there could be a myriad of possible causes of these chronic cycles.  However, in most cases, there are a number of simple steps you can take to change the chain of guilt.

Before we get to those steps, let's talk about the brain really quickly, in an overly simplistic and metaphorical fashion.  Thoughts make chains, linking together neural pathways.  Just like a muscle gets stronger with use, those neural pathways get stronger with use too, in a manner of speaking.  Each time these neurons are energized, they also get more blood flow, which means they get more nutrients.  Nearby neurons join the party, and pretty soon you have a very healthy pocket of brain cells, but those healthy cells may be stuck processing some unhealthy things...

Remember the path choices in the beginning?  In a way, your brain makes the same type of choices.  Often thought-about topics create well traveled paths (relatively large, healthy pockets of neurons), which in turn promote frequent thinking about those same topics.  It's a self-strengthening cycle, and often that's a good thing; promoting "second-nature" learned behaviors; like driving a car, for example.  However, sometimes it's not so good; limiting our perspectives or, as we are focusing on here, looping a painful past path.  These pathways figuratively get so wide and well trodden, that unless there is some strong compartmentalization going on (like how "car driving" thoughts are only activated when you are in a car or thinking of travel), all sorts of even-loosely affiliated thoughts and stimuli can trigger the brain to "walk" down that same looped path again.  And that brings us to:


7 Mind Hacks to Let Go of Guilt

Above I said "change the chain of guilt" as opposed to the cliche chain alteration: "break."  That was intentional.  There isn't an instant or overnight solution to this problem.  Heck, how many of us have had a song stuck in our head that has absolutely no emotional investment in thinking of it?  If we can't get rid of silly songs, how much more of a problem we would expect to have with our over-processed guilt?

Yet, little by little, we can taper off the travels along those painful paths.  We can change the intensity of the mental processing spent on our past issues.  And, just like how a well traveled trail will be reclaimed by nature if left unused long enough, leaving only trace evidence of its former history, so, too, can the neural pathways of our guilt wane into faint scars of past lessons we have learned.

Disclaimers and Notes:  I'm not a psychologist.  This is largely based on what I've learned through my years.  Consult a therapist if necessary.  Not every technique will work for you.  In fact, I expect most will seem to work only in a limited sense at first.  Continued practice of techniques should make them work better, so you may want to commit to a week to a month of a technique before dismissing it.

The following is ONLY for guilt that you feel you have adequately learned from, and so it no longer serves a purpose.

1. Know that it's OK:  What you did may not be OK in your eyes, and that's probably part of why you feel guilty, but what I mean is that it is OK to think about it.  Guilt is healthy.  Or at least it can be if you learn from it.  Now that you've learned from it, it is time to let it go, but it is still OK to think about it.  This may seem counter-intuitive, but you do not want to try and suppress your guilty thoughts.  Doing so is actually counter-productive.  The goal here is to let the guilt fade naturally, just like path through the woods will become slowly overgrown with disuse.
   
   
2. Breathe:  When you have that bit of should-be-let-go-guilt hijack your thoughts, pause for just a moment and take five to ten deep breaths, focusing on your inhaling and exhaling.  Then, if your mind happens to drift back to you guilty thoughts, that's OK.  If it is persistent, or just as strong as before, try the breath exercise again.  This trick works in a few ways:
   
   • Deep breaths help to relax you, easing the associate stress that may crop up when thinking of your guilt.
   • Deep breaths increase oxygen in the blood supply, and that additional oxygen can help other channels of thought to open naturally.
   • The temporary interruption can reduce the intensity of the guilty thought.  In our trail analogy, this is the difference between simply walking down the trail versus using a machete to clear the brush along the path while you walk.  So the goal here is to help this neural channel shrink naturally, and reducing the intensity helps that process along.
   
   
3. Schedule a time:  This is another counter-intuitive trick.  Schedule a time to think about your guilt, say maybe every Saturday morning at 10 AM for ten to fifteen minutes.  As opposed to suppression, you engage the guilty thoughts head-on.  Now, you may be wondering how this is going to help let the guilt fade naturally when you are actively thinking about it.  Well, this is how:  Anytime you recognize that your guilty thoughts have started throughout the week, just say to yourself that you will think about that at your scheduled time and then work to change your thoughts to something else.
   
   This is unique because it captures some of the short-term (and usually short-lived) benefits of suppression, and yet, because you have committed to think about it, this approach does not leave the "pressure" of your guilt building in the background unresolved, which could later sneak up on you in even worse manifestations as would be the case in actual suppression.  To further distance yourself from the drawbacks of suppression, you should not be "actively on the lookout" for your guilty thoughts.  Instead, just when you happen to notice them on your own pace, take the action to tell yourself that you will think on them later, and don't forget to follow through with your schedule.
   
   As for the exact interval and duration of your schedule, adjust it to where you are at in your healing.  If you think about your guilt on a daily basis, maybe start with an every-other-day schedule.  If it's a rather a handful of times a month, schedule a monthly thought session.  Etc.
   
   
4. Exercise:  Exercise is a powerful, powerful tool.  Regular exercise can help you in so many ways that there is too much to go over about it here.  And that doesn't necessarily mean grunting and groaning while lifting chucks of stupid iron.  Just walking around for a half hour or so is great.  So do it already!
   
   But in the context of our guilty thoughts, exercise can help both generally and acutely.  The general aspects are more nebulous, so let's talk about the acute affects.
   
   When you notice that you are having guilty thoughts, do some sort of exercise as soon as you notice them.  Naturally, you may be limited depending on the situation you are in, like if you are at work when you have these thoughts, so it is good to know of exercises that you can do in nearly any situation, like "Dynamic Tension."  However, the more complex the exercise the better.  For example, if you are coordinated enough, balance on one leg while reaching down like you are picking up an invisible object off the floor, or lay down on the floor and then try to get up with the aid of just one of your arms.
   
   When you do this, do not specifically try to stop thinking about your guilt, but don't actively try to think of it either.  Just be passive about it, like thoughts you have just before falling asleep.  What sometimes happens is that you will stop thinking about your guilt naturally as your brain shifts to focus on the mechanical execution of the exercise.  Or, if it doesn't stop thinking about it, the intensity will be greatly reduced because of the shared focus.  Just like with the breathing technique above, this kind of drop in the intensity will help the natural healing pattern of this neural pathway.
   
   
5. Claim it:  The premise is this: let yourself know what you already know.  You are done with this guilt.  This can be done:
   
   • Silently... When you notice your guilty thoughts, mentally tell yourself that you have already processed this guilt and that you are done with it.  Other than that, do nothing.  If the thoughts continue on for a little while after making that claim, it's OK.  Don't make an active attempt to stop them.  The disruption by telling yourself what you already know is good enough.  And the next time you notice the guilty thought arise, make note again that you are done with it.  Repeat as necessary, and eventually the idea of being done with processing that guilt may sink in for you.
   • Out loud...  Thinking things is one thing, but saying them and hearing them takes it to another level of effectiveness because you are thereby stimulating multiple parts of your brain simultaneously to tell you this message that you already know.
   • Physically...  This is yet another layer of sophistication you can use, one that capitalizes on other parts of your brain's learned behavior.  When you are telling yourself that you are done processing this guilty, physically move your hands as if you were balling up a piece of paper that holds your guilt, and then move them in a pattern as though you were throwing away that balled up paper.  Thinking, saying, hearing, and acting out the disposal of these particular guilty thoughts may help train your brain to recognize what you already knew.
   
   
6. Play it out:  This method draws on one of the classic psychological treatments: role play.  But this has a slight twist to it.  Role play is usually used to resolve an issue with a particular person.  And if your guilt is because of wronging someone, perhaps you do need to make peace with them.  Role play can be a safe way to do that, but that's not what I am talking about here.
   
   Instead, in my experience, it seems that lingering guilt is often  associated with unique events and situations.  With other forms of guilt that you do release, often you have the chance to actively go through the same scenario again and again.  For example, if you accidentally cut someone off in traffic, every time you change lanes thereafter, you then have the opportunity to show that you have learned your lesson.  Therefore, this guilt becomes resolved.
   
   But our greatest guilts are usually one-time occurrences, and so we don't have the chance to actively demonstrate that we have learned our lesson.  Without that chance for demonstration and feedback, the guilt may remain unresolved, so we may continue to beat ourselves up about it because we can't prove to ourselves that we've gotten better.
   
   So try this out; once a day, or maybe once every other day, or at whatever frequency seems appropriate to you, play out an imaginary scenario in your mind which is similar to but different than the one that has caused all the guilt.  However, this time, at the critical point where you made your mistake, play out the scenario in your mind according to what you have learned now.  Do the right thing, the thing that you would do now if you could go back and change it all.  Each time you imagine it, paint the details a little differently if possible, but preserve the critical components.  These repeated mental simulations may help your brain realize that you have learned your lesson now.  In that way, this guilt will be diffused and resolved, just like the guilt of other mistakes you've made and learned from through the years.
   
   
7. Change it:  This is a new tool in the kit, and I'm not sure it will really work.  However, a recent psychological study has proven that recalling memories actually alters them.  They can be made stronger.  They can also be changed, including the addition of completely fictitious elements.  And yet your brain may not know the difference between what was real and what is now remembered.  So here is the plan:
   
   Similar to the "play it out" technique above, imagine the scenario which is the origin of your guilt, only this time imagine the exact details as you remember them as opposed to creating a similar situation.  However, as you loop through the memory, intentionally change it.  Not all of it.  In fact, you would want your change to be minimal so that your brain still recognizes it as your memory.  The goal here is to let your memory evolve.  Make little adaptations over time, progressing them a little bit further each session you remember until eventually you have a scenario where you are free of any self-blame.
   
   This may seem like lying to yourself, and it is, sort of.  I've seen people lie to themselves and distort their memories at the drop of a hat.  But this is a little different because, while that type of lying is a form of denial, in this case you are approaching this strategy because you have the exact opposite of denial going on.  You are remembering what happened and beating compulsively yourself up with it beyond what is healthy.  Now that you've learned your lesson, it's time to move on, and this is just one way to do that.
   
   As far as what changes you make in your memory, that will naturally be highly dependent on what your exact memory was to start with.  But taking a simple case where you said something that you now deeply regret, try changing one word at a time during each session of remembering the event.  Maybe you remove a word.  Maybe you change a word out for one with a similar meaning, but one that is less harsh.  Slowly, slowly drive these changes as far as is necessary until the memory is no longer hindering you and then stop.

Hopefully you've found one or two methods here that sound like a good fit for you.  There's no need to try them all.  One or two will work just fine.

You've learned from the guilt.  You are wiser now than you were back then.  That's OK.  We're allowed to get smarter, just as we're allowed to make mistakes.  So I wish you the best of luck with working through your guilt, and fully recognizing that you are who you are based on what you will do, not what you have done.

Good Guilt

I am what I will do, not what I have done.

A Christian friend of mine recently asked me if I feel guilt.  It was such an odd question to me because it's not like I had just kicked a little girl's puppy and laughed about it.  We were just having a debate about the mechanics of God's forgiveness, but we hadn't hinted at guilt in the preceding discussion.

Guilt is BIG in Christianity, and there is no need to rehash that here, but I did want to share thoughts about how I process guilt, because I think most people do it all wrong!  ;-)

Guilt is a mental pain which should be used to teach you a lesson.  Just like the physical pain you would get if you touched a hot stove teaches you not to do touch hot things and helps preserve your health, guilt should be processed the same way.

Guilt teaches you not to do particular actions (or to do other actions), which ultimately helps preserve your health, the health of your relationships, and the health of the community at large.

And here's the key: Once you learn your lesson, there's no point to clinging on to that guilt.  Let it go.

Just like in our physical analogy of burning yourself, if you keep touching the burnt skin, it will not properly heal.  If you keep recycling though your guilt causing memories, that guilt will not properly heal either.

That's not to say you will not think of those memories and have some guilt from time to time, just like your burnt skin will still be painful when you accidentally bump it in its healing process.  But there is a big difference between bumping a burn blister and rubbing it on a cheese grater, just like there is a difference between passively thinking of the guilty memories and actively looping and focusing on them.

The point is this:  We were not born knowing everything.  We will make mistakes.  Learn from them, and move on.  Do not define yourself by what you have done.  Define yourself by what you will do.

The Point of Vectors

You know what you are by what you were.  Usually that works to your advantage; providing stability, a sense of purpose, and a sense of direction heading forward.

In the grand scheme, we learn the history of our respective counties to know our identities and directions as citizens.

In the same vein, our personal history defines our own identity and individual direction.  But sometimes, if not usually, our histories contain some "blemishes," for lack of a better word.  These blemishes can, and often do, affect the relationships we have and the choices we make, ultimately affecting the direction we take in life.

These blemishes affect the direction we take because emotionally, and/or logically, they point to the next steps of our behavior.  And those next steps lead to others, and those lead to others, etc.  But they don't have to.

Not to trivialize it, but after a blemish has happened, it is just a story, and you find yourself at a point where you choose to continue that story, or to break away on a new path.

You choose the narrative going forward at each moment in your life:  Either you are offended, an orphan, a victim of abuse, a liar, a thief, etc., or you were offended, an orphan, a victim of abuse, a liar, a thief, etc.  What is history truly is history.  Whether or not it lives on in our minds is our own choice.  Depending on the type blemish, it can be hard to let it go and leave behind, but that's where history is; behind us.  None of us claims "I am five" when we're actually twenty-seven years old, yet we all were five.

I challenge you to know yourself, not by who you were, but by who you actually are now, and who you seek to become.  A new vector can start at any point.

I'll leave you with a classic Buddhist tale to ponder:

Buddhist monks were forbidden to touch women, but one day a particular monk noticed a woman in distress who needed to cross a river to get to her family.  The monk picked up the woman and carried her across the raging river torrent.  Other monks had seen this activity, and they became indignant of the helpful monk.  They scorned him fiercely for breaking his vows by touching a woman.  The helpful monk replied in his defense:

"Friends, I set the woman down at the river bank.  Why do you still carry her?"

What are you still carrying?

Like an Ape Out of Water

Thinking back to the 2012 Summer Olympics, two things stand out in my mind:  One, it was amazing to me to see just how specialized the body forms were in order to excel at certain sports.  I've seen that in other Olympic games, but for some reason in this year's competition it seemed even more prevalent.  Two, in the majority of the swimming competitions, the participants have mastered what I would call a "dolphin body kick" where, from the mid-to-lower back and on out to the toes, the athletes would propel themselves with a rhythmic waving motion in their latter half.

On a seemingly unrelated note, I have always been curious about why we look so different from our evolutionary close relatives.  Why are we bipedal when they are not?  Why are we naked when they have fur?

Back when evolution's implications were being explored, scientists of the time came up with an answer to those questions:  We moved from the jungles to the savannah.  We needed to stand to see prey and watch for predators in the tall grasses.  The heat of the savannah and other factors helped to make our fur coats unnecessary, so they were shed in an evolutionary process.  Etc.

As archeologist dug into our past, they discovered a big problem with that theory:  The fossilized plants found with the ancient hominid skeletons were not from the savannah!  However, academia has become a little too attached to the previous theory. It has become a faith.  Even though there is this glaring problem with the theory, they still cling to it.   They use it as a foundation for teaching and as a springboard for their questions in interpreting archeological findings rather than embracing the void of no theory, or exploring other possible options...

NetFlix has recently incorporated "TED Talks" into their library, and one particular series of talks called "Ancient Clues" discussed this little big issue.  A delightful elderly lady scientist, named Elaine Morgan, discussed a theory which offered to fill in the gaps and step past the savannah issue.  It's a theory from back in the early 1960's which never got any traction, nor apparently was it ever properly refuted.  It goes like this:

What if we had aquatic ancestors in our evolutionary family tree?  Aquatic chimps?  Strange, yes, but there are several factors which we seem to share with other mammals of aquatic ancestry.  I'll list a few to entice you to check out the talk for yourself:

1. Except for one subterranean mole in South America, all "naked" mammals have an evolutionary aquatic ancestor.
2. Only mammals with aquatic ancestors can consciously control their breathing.  (This is critical for our ability to speak.)
3. Only mammals with aquatic ancestors have a layer of fat under the skin, like we have but chimps do not.

If you have an interest in evolution science, you should definitely watch this.  Also, if you can appreciate how the beliefs of even scientists can morph into a system resembling religion, you should definitely watch this.

This may not be the correct answer to the question of why we are so different than other primates, but we owe it to ourselves to honestly explore this theory as a possibility.

Enjoy!

The Superpersonal God

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. - Nikola Tesla

Tesla had some interesting religious views.  I haven't done an exhaustive study on his beliefs, by any measure, but it appears to me that he was a Monist.  Tesla's Monism seemed to be a hybrid between a monkey religion and a cat religion (see Sabio's great post on these religion types).  Tesla's upbringing was Christian, but he was a voracious reader who came to appreciate other religions as well, like Buddhism.  Possibly due to that Christian influence, while Tesla's monkey god just lumbered around doing what it pleased, it would also be just as happy to carry and guide us if we were willing to "concentrate our minds on that truth."

When we left off in the last post, Carus had made the conjecture that the God of the future would be superpersonal, and he would go on to say how we could tap into that knowledge of God...

But how shall we reach this knowledge of the superpersonal God? Our answer is, with the help of science. Let us pursue in religion the same path that science travels, and the narrowness of sectarianism will develop into a broad cosmical religion which shall be as wide and truly catholic as is science itself.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

What Carus suggested here is developing an empirically based religion!  Instead of relying on unique revelations made to specific people in divine scriptures, he posited that the powers of objective observation would reveal the real God.  However, Carus was not ready to trash scriptures completely...

Symbols are not lies; symbols contain truth. Allegories and parables are not falsehoods; they convey information: moreover, they can be understood by those who are not as yet prepared to receive the plain truth. Thus, when in the progress of science religious symbols are recognized and known in their symbolical nature, this knowledge will not destroy religion but will purify it and will cleanse it from mythology.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

In some ways, Carus' prophesy has come true.  For example, while there are some serious moral blunders God's Law (the Torah) in the Old Testament, such as complacency to slavery, conceptually there are some truths which can be skimmed from the myth:

A dietary restriction on eating pork would have been effective at preventing trichinosis parasite ingestion (Leviticus 11:7).  Isolating people with skin infections would help prevent the spread of contagious varieties (Leviticus 13:45-46).  Destroying a house which had an untreatable case of spreading mildew would prevent respiratory issues of the occupants (Leviticus 14:43-45).

In abstraction, the Torah was a system of repentance, thankfulness, obedience to a moral and legal code, and the love (and fear) of God.  The rewards for adherence were said to be happiness, prosperity, peace, health, and long life.  Recent scientific studies on gratefulness show an increase in the subjective feeling of happiness associated with the regular practice of being grateful.  A society where people obey the laws sets the stage for stability and security, which in turn can help lead to prosperity.  Peace, on an individual level, can be a product of obeying the law, as you have less to worry about if you are doing what you should be doing, and when everybody else does the same.  Finally, as far as health and long life, well, there is some evidence suggesting that a practicing belief in God will extend your life and promote health as well.

However, the God that Carus is suggesting is not wholly defined in any religious tome...

We define God as "that authoritative presence in the All, which enforces a definite moral conduct." God is that something which constitutes the harmony of the awe of nature; God is the intrinsic necessity of mathematics and logic; God above all is what experience teaches us to be the inalienable features of righteousness, justice, morality. This presence is both immanent and transcendent: it is immanent as the constituent characteristic of the law that pervades the universe; it is transcendent, for it is the condition of any possible cosmic order; and in this sense it is supercosmic and supernatural.  HOD, P3-4, Paul Carus

So this is not quite Tesla's Monist God here. Rather, this is similar to the God Albert Einstein was referring to when he said:

"I want to know how God created this world... I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details."

Although, instead of Carus, Einstein followed the earlier writings of Baruch Spinoza, as can be seen in Einstein's lesser-known quote:

"I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."

By contrast, Carus expanded beyond scientific laws, and into the foundations of our selves...

We do not say that God is impersonal...  ...God, although not an individual being, is the prototype of personality; although not a person, thinking thoughts as we do, deliberating, weighing arguments, and coming to a decision, he is yet that which conditions personality; he possesses all those qualities which, when reflected in animated creatures, adds unto their souls the nobility of God's image, called personality. Therefore we say, God is not impersonal, but superpersonal.  HOD, P4-5, Paul Carus

Thus, Carus' God is at the heart of our understanding and our motivation. Not to say that we all understand this God, or that we are all motivated to the same course of action. There will be many differences as surely as there are different personalities. However, through reflecting on the universe, our own daily lives, and the lives of others, we can comprehend who we really are and why we do the silly, horrible, and wonderful things we do. With that comprehension comes the fully realized ability to change for the better... at least I would like to think so.

That is enough about God for now. This book is about the History of the Devil and evil, for good reason...

While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected. And yet the Devil is, after all, a very interesting personality, grotesque, romantic, humorous, pathetic, nay, even grand and tragic. And if we have to declare that the idea of God is a symbol signifying an actual presence in the world of facts, should we not expect that the idea of the Devil also represents a reality?  HOD, P5, Paul Carus

Just as many people today portray God in their own likeness, how the Devil is portrayed also provides revelations of the inner workings of a mind and/or culture. If you know a person's Devil, you know their fears and insecurities, and maybe even their repressed desires.

I hope you will enjoy the coming studies as I blog the rest of the book, and dig into the cold, black heart of evil.

A Vision of the Future

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Now, over one hundred and ten years since Paul Carus wrote his book, with advancements in linguistics, archeology, genetics, cosmology, etc., it seems that we have metaphorically eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge, and our eternal expulsion from the Garden of Eden of naivety, with its selfish love affair of personal deities, is only a matter of time.  What will remain?  Carus' vision still saw a place for religion:

"...there are freethinkers who declare that Atheism will supersede all the different conceptions of God. But this is not probable.  The Monistic tendencies of the age will not destroy, but purify and elevate religion. ... the religious ideas of the present time are symbols.  Taken in their literal meaning, they are untenable, but understood in their symbolical nature they are seeds from which a purer conception of the truth will grow."  HOD, P2, Paul Carus

Carus prophesied the emergence of a new type of religion, a better religion, which would grow out of the body of faith, once it had shed the chaff of its dogmatic, literal constraints.  To him, wide scale Atheism was not feasible, as he explained:

A state of irreligion in which mankind would adopt and publicly teach a doctrine of Atheism is an impossibility.  Atheism is a negation, and negations cannot stand, for they have sense only as confronted with the positive issues which they reject.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

In a sense, Carus' words are right.  Atheism is really just a negation.  However, there are definitely anecdotes of public teaching of an Atheist doctrine, if you can use the term "Atheist doctrine" in any kind of meaningful way.  For example, I had a physics professor who wouldn't hesitate to mock the concept of God in front of the whole class if she was given a cue.

So unlike Carus, I do think that an Atheist doctrine could be part of the standardized school curriculum, but I would never endorse it, because if that were to happen, Atheism would truly become just like the religions it was denying validity.

In some sense, I think protagonists/antagonists, like my professor, play their little roles in changing the culture, but this kind of challenge and change should not be done on a mandate basis.  For starters, such a mandate would be unconstitutional, akin to the government sponsoring a national religion, even if it is more of an anti-religion.  Beyond that, I feel that spirituality is something to be worked out on a personal level, and any spoon-fed source of it, be it the classroom or the clergy, should be highly scrutinized.  Rather, the job of educators in that arena should be to enhance critical thinking skills, to present the facts, and to present the unknowns.

Besides, we shouldn't have to teach Atheism, any more than we have to teach that there is not a magical, pink, glittery, rocket-propelled hedgehog in orbit around Neptune.  Atheism comes from our understanding and perception of the world.  As such, in our modern era with our level of scientific understanding, some people will naturally choose Atheism.

At the same time, other people will understand or perceive some invisible agent, and will choose religion and/or spirituality, regardless of what is taught in our classrooms.  Spirituality will persist, even when all formal, doctrinized religions are proven wrong, or proven to be valid only metaphorically.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, if we can harness our spiritual side for creativity, mutual understanding, and a greater moral impetus.

As opposed to indoctrinating the negation of Atheism, Carus had a different concept of where our spirituality would turn...

Yet our present anthropomorphic view of God, briefly called Anthropotheism, which as a rule conceives him as an infinitely big individual being, will have to yield to a higher view in which we shall understand that the idea of a personal God is a mere simile.  God is much more than a person.  When we speak of God as a person, we ought to be conscious of the fact that we use an allegory which, if it were taken literally, can only belittle him.  The God of the future will not be personal, but superpersonal.  HOD, P3, Paul Carus

A superpersonal God?  What does that even mean?  We'll explore that next time...

Where We Were, and Are

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Reading an old book is often like being an archeologist; digging into a layer of time buried by the sediment of past eras, and discovering a little about the way people lived back then.  While real archeology offers mainly views of where people lived, what they ate, and other factors which are inferred from the physical remains, old books offer an explicit peek at what people actually thought in the days gone by.  Those ideas can be peculiar to that era based on the culture, or they can be transcendent of that era based on the common experiences which are replicated today in one form or another.  The theology/philosophy of Paul Carus has both of these aspects.

Will Monism eliminate the idea of the Devil in order to make God the One and All? Or will it abolish both God and the Devil, to leave room only for a world of matter in motion? Will the future of mankind be, as M. Guyau prophesies, a period in which religion will disappear and give way to irreligion?  HOD, P2, Paul Carus

It is easy to imagine how someone today could be asking the same questions, but Carus was writing back 1900 C.E., in a time which is considered to be the "Golden Age of Freethought."  By then, Bible and comparative religion studies had rendered Christianity to be of questionable veracity, the theory of evolution had presented a conceptually feasible origin of our species, and astronomy was revealing our true place in the universe.  While most of the public was still religious, there was a buzz, a growing excitement among those bold enough to ponder the ramifications of this relatively new information, and they figured that the world was on the cusp of developing a new paradigm; but exactly what that would be was still unknown.

Now, over a hundred and ten years later, I think we are where Carus thought we would be within a few decades of the questions he had posed.  Our theological future is still unknown, but there is an accelerating decay from the Biblical dualism of the old era.

Atheism is gaining momentum.  Many decades ago, atheists were largely "unnatural," because faith was still so ubiquitous among the population that it took individual reasoning to overcome the mass cultural perspective of religion.  Now, atheism is a sizable enough minority that there are many atheists who were brought up without the trappings of faith, or who found that Christianity simply did not "work" for them and so they have dropped it for what seemed to be another viable option: no faith at all.

Others who are disenfranchised with divine duality delve into different formats of spirituality. Some define their own paths.  Some have become enchanted with Eastern-influenced versions Monism; either that there is but one God (who is more of the deist persuasion) or, more usually, that God is in everything and/or is everything.

Today, within some mainstream denominations of Christianity, while God persists, Satan has become a figurative or metaphorical character representing our reprobate desires within (as is possibly suggested in Peter's episode of rejecting Jesus' plans in Matthew 16:22-23 and Mark 8:32-33).  In some denominations, while Heaven persists, Hell is no longer a physical place with perpetually burning fires of torture, but has morphed into either a place of eternal separation from God or a state of annihilation.  O divine wrath, where is thy sting? (Matthew 3:7-10, Luke 3:7-9)

Of course, any time traditional ideas are challenged, there will be a faction which digs in, conservatively clinging to the past, willfully oblivious of the evidence against them.  We see this in the resurgence of Christian Fundamentalism.  I wager that we still have about a decade, maybe even two, before Fundy-lunacy reaches its peak and begins its painfully slow decline.  The shift will come primarily from the younger generations, who will be less willing to take such hard line stances against reality, or will be lured by more-tolerant, more-metaphorical denominations of the faith, or by the charismatic mega-churches with better religi-tainment, if they remain "Christian" at all.

Restriction of knowledge and cultural isolation are the strongest forces to abate the inclination toward Christian apostasy.  These strategies are increasingly difficult to execute in our modern world.  That is why I predict that within three decades, Christian Fundamentalism in the United States will become highly regional; down to specific smaller cities and towns, like Decatur, Alabama, as well as certain rural swaths, like the Appalachian Mountains.

I'll go into some of Carus' answers to those questions next time...

A Dance with Duality

This post is part of the History of the Devil series from Chapter 1: Good and Evil as Religious Ideas.

Carus begins with this:

THIS WORLD OF OURS is a world of opposites. There is light and shade, there is heat and cold, there is good and evil, there is God and the Devil.

The dualistic conception of nature has been a necessary phase in the evolution of human thought.  HOD, P1, Paul Carus

Dualism, in a nutshell, is the concept of a world of opposites, and usually implies or explicitly states that when you have one option, there will be opposite option.  A Christian trite and weak explanation for the evil in this world is the dualist concept that freewill requires both the ability to do good and to do evil.  Don't worry.  Carus is no believer of dualism

Upon close inspection, it is clear that the concept of Dualism does not actually line up reality, at least not most of it.  Physicists will tell you that there is not light and dark, but light and the absence of light, and there is not heat and cold, but heat and the absence of heat.

What is the opposite of green?  You may think back to the color wheel for a conceptual understanding, but "green" is really nothing more than electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths of around 520–570 nanometers.  So what is the opposite of 520–570 nanometers?

What is the opposite of God?  Certainly, one could say that Satan opposes God, at least in the way that Christianity often frames the relationship, but Satan is far from being God's opposite.  For example, let's take God's alleged characteristic of omnipresence and consider its true opposite.  The opposite being present everywhere is being present nowhere.  While I don't believe Satan to be present anywhere, the common Christian thought is that there is nowhere where Satan isn't trying to ensnare souls.  Christianity has an omnipresent concept of Satan, at least for the realm of earth.

Dualism fails in our reality of continuous, and sometimes discontinuous (quantum), spectrums of manifested matter and energy.  Not every relationship is polar.  In fact, very few are.  Dualism only works as a metaphor, an extremely simplified model.  That said, even primitive models can be useful, as long as we never forget that they are just tools.

Unfortunately, when religions get to the stage of conceptualizing dualism, it is not considered a model, but rather an actuality.  Carus goes on to explain the "necessary phase" in our development coming to be like so:

But the principle of unity dominates the development of thought. Man tries to unify his conceptions in a consistent and harmonious Monism. Accordingly, while the belief in good spirits tended towards the formation of the doctrine of Monotheism, the belief in evil spirits led naturally to the acceptance of a single supreme evil deity, conceived as embodying all that is bad, destructive, and immoral.  HOD, P1, Paul Carus

Interestingly enough, the Judeo-Christian faith is an example where we can see this evolution to dualism in action.  The God of the Old Testament originally wielded the forces of both good and evil, ultimately for His conception of the greater good, but the New Testament largely purges God of those evil roles, making Satan their supreme owner instead.

Christianity usually holds that the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was Satan, despite the obvious clues to the contrary.  With that perspective, they miss the evolution completely, even though the Scripture is often explicitly contrary to a dualist interpretation.

There are several incidents which come to mind to support this evolution to Christian dualism, but for the sake of brevity, I'll leave you with one potent example.  In Deuteronomy 13:1-3, we find:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. NIV

Right there, in black and white (wink), in the Old Testament God tells us that He will send false prophets to lure the Israelites away from worshiping Him; tempting them to sin and testing their faithfulness to Him.

Now, in the New Testament, in James 1:13-14 we find:

When tempted, no one should say, "God is tempting me." For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. NIV

So instead of God tempting people in the New Testament, Satan gets that job, as we see in 1 Corinthians 7:5:

Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. NIV