Month: May 2019

Mythology was never intended to be taken literally.
Most common problems between human beings can be boiled down to semantics problems – a sickness of words. A poor conveyance of truth.
There’s a reason why we hold in such high esteem the reliability of a man to be “good as his word”. Our lives and safety can depend on it. So we symbolize our reverence for this character ideal by anthropomorphizing it – we turn the word into a person, so we can create memorable stories using his ideal, if fictitious, behavior as a role model.
“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

Here’s the deal:

Humans need to acknowledge God.

The point is not whether you envision God as a literal, sentient, all-powerful, supreme being, or a metaphorical personification of our highest values, humans are designed with a god-space in our mental machinery.

But, the more literally you take the god-figure, the more literally you are obliged to live “by the book.” Genuine belief is not just a matter of self-proclamation, it is known by its demonstration. Belief claimed and not demonstrated is self-deception at best.

People whose God is metaphorical are free to live without guilt, shame, fear, and envy, if they’re willing to do the work, and aware enough to realize the Universe is much more powerful than they are. It created them. It will eventually take their life back from them. It is bigger and more complex than we can understand. It is eternal. It provides for our basic needs, but it requires that we live within the laws of what we have named physics. Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where to draw the line between metaphor and literalism. Reality is reality, no matter how we envision it, measure it, or describe it.

My failure to recognize my relative smallness in the greater scheme of things is perhaps the greatest hazard I face in this life, for my own sake as well as that of those whose lives I affect. Something besides myself needs to be named as the greatest power. I can conceive of, and name that entity any way that suits my temperament. But I need a conceptual placeholder, at minimum, to represent the reality of that relationship, however described.

It’s not practical, or indeed even possible, for an individual to accurately declare “how things are”. The nature of Nature is just too immense. So if I am to attempt a disciplined life, I must arrive at some reasonable compromise between my best assessment of “how things are” in greater reality, and “what works” in the pursuit of my desired outcome.

So if, in the construction of a worldview, we think we have really captured “how things are”, we are flirting with self-deception. But if, in an effort to avoid that deception, we abandon the chore of refining our worldview altogether, we are flirting with irresponsibility. So we are left with the unenviable task of setting some artificial, if not perhaps totally arbitrary, constraints on our “practical reality”.

This is in no way any kind of license to overthrow or ignore aspects of “objective reality” that have proven to withstand the scrutiny of long-form science. To the contrary, these hard-won nuggets of gold should comprise the skeletal tissue of any reliable worldview. But realistically, these bones will always be a minority of the overall volume of “reality” in which our lives must play out. The unknowns will always outweigh the knowns, but we are called to live a full life, not merely a frame of a life, so a certain amount of judicious creativity may be unavoidable.

For purposes of filling in the gaps, the most useful operating system will not only resist the temptation to weave the soft tissue from comfort-oriented raw materials, but will also volunteer for the creative constraints which, under experimentation, prove to generate the desired result.

Rejection of irrational or destructive self-denial need not assume an all-or-nothing attitude toward self-regulation in general. If I assume that, in every location as yet uninhabited by science, I am God, then I am clearly setting myself up for some rude awakenings. But at least equally unfortunate would be to assume that, therefore, I am no part of God, and then not even try.

A healthy worldview construction plan needs the deepest practical familiarity with well-established scientific thinking (at least where it bears on the outcome of living one’s life) without fanciful embellishment, but not without science-informed conjectural projections into the unclaimed territory.

Realistic (likely to produce desired results) projection respects the laws of limitation, just as the known material world does. The job of guessing these limits accurately is more of an art than a science, but an indispensable art, and arguably, the greater part of assembling a useful map.