Posted by:
Amos
(
)
Date: September 25, 2010 05:23PM
I'm in the army camping out in "the field" at a large base in the US, with nothing but my 3G to pass the time between jobs. I'm in a reflective mood because I picked a quarrel with a very senior officer and he's mad at me, and everyone between he and I are mad at me for making him mad. The bull sh1t here at home is worse than it was in the "sandbox".
So anyway I'm reflecting on how since joining up I've gone from TBM to athiest along a very emotional road, but yet seemingly involuntarily hanging on to a faith in purpose.
I'm watching YouTube videos, especially moved by an exmo Christian woman who blew away any testimony I'd ever heard, and also watching Dawkins and Hitchens debate equally articulate theologians, and I've got my Dennett and Sagan books, and I'm thinking, geez, EVERYONE's got a point and also everyone's got a foul.
Which brings me to my point, which is that I have faith in everything and in nothing.
Evolution clearly churns out the diversity of all living forms and functions in the world, both physical and mental, so I accept it at face value that it in no way requires a God. But, I also, just as clearly, percieve that there's an ever expanding empirical horizon, and a conceptual horizon much farther out, and there's no reason to think that there's any end out there past them. It just keeps going, forever, in all directions and dimensions.
So, perhaps ironcally, my faith and hope in all the unlimited possibilities has mushroomed. My "eternal perspective" as a TBM was, I'm finding, quite small- more like my hut right now. The dogma of authority tells me this is my place, but my faith tells me no. I can see a few miles in all directions, and I'm just as sure my place isn't somewhere in that scene either. I "know" that my place is somewhere past the horizon in any dimension. I can't help it.
I'm an atheist in that I definitely do not believe a god created me or owns me, but my faith is even greater than it was before that there's a vast liberated dimension out there past conceptual horizons more foreign and vast to me than the world is to a landlocked forest aborigine. Maybe the "God" who will save me is some conscience not yet even in existence, or is otherwise in a dimension far beyond all my horizons.
I prefer this wide-open faith to the boxed-in faith I had, that it's straight from here to the spirit world, ineligible for church work there because I failed to meet the valiant-in-Jesus bar as a mortal Mormon, then on to the terrestrial kingdom, without my family, at best.
As for all these earthly faiths, they all have their pros and cons. They all, according to Dennett, arose by due process evolutionarily, so in the economy of nature something sold it and something bought it, and now I'm once again a consumer in a free market. I have to pay, so I get to choose.