Skepticism and the Word
There was never any god in my house and almost no talk about spirituality that I remember. My entire life, I've been free to believe whatever I wanted. I've believed some really outrageous things - some of them invented, some of them written by people with no scientific literacy whatsoever. I believed like a child for a long time, with no discrimination at all. Then in high school, I would up becoming close friends with a couple Christians.
Now I'd had run-ins with Christians all my life, most of them unpleasant. My best friend in 4th grade, after she found out that I didn't love or care about Jesus, couldn't play with me any more because I was going to hell and it made her too sad to be around me. That typified most of my interactions with Christians until high school.
In high school there came the additional bonus of my friends (some of whom I liked and respected very much) telling me that I should go to church with them, that their church was different, and that I'd really want a personal relationship with Jesus if I did so.So I tried out a few churches, from the dynamic non-denominational church where the pastor performed healings and the congregation prayed for the gift of speaking in tongues to the standard (boring) sermon-with-singing presbyterian church. I went to a church with a rock band, a Christian Scientist church, community churches, and one very fun Unitarian Universalist church where half the congregation was gay. (My mom and I went to that one because she went through a phase of looking for God to find meaning. Unfortunately, the UU church weirded her out and we never went again.)
I went to those churches thrilled, excited, ready to embrace God - and I left defeated, because they all seemed to believe that same old bunk - stuff that, in my mind, made no sense at all. At last, disillusioned, I armed myself with a few Free Thought and Atheist texts and battled with words to get the Christians off my back. But even while I used logic and historical evidence to critique their arguments about the superiority of their religion, I was doing my own exploration into the metaphysical. Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, a little Kaballah, Wicca, traditional witchcraft, Atlantis, crystals, LaVeyan Satanism, herbal medicine, karma, etc., etc., etc. Everything started out with the same old enthusiasm, but I got to the point where after reading a book or two on a given subject, I knew whether or not it would work for me.
None of them worked. I got so upset over my inability to understand the mystical experiences of othes that I even became a religious studies major for a while, but I burned out on that too.
My time in the military really undermined my confidence in so many ways (not due to the military, which I respect very much, but due to very bad personal choices.) I found myself needing something spiritual in my life again, something to make me feel like my life had meaning. Before, since the age of 12, I'd always had my writing. But the depression I suffered while enlisted knocked the desire to write out of me.
I got involved in a very delusional, very unhealthy subculture based on an erroneous belief that I'd had a mystical experience when I was fifteen. At first, it felt like I'd finally come home. However, as time wore on, I saw more and more of the ugliness and the fundamental self-loathing that so many people in this subculture shared. On a positive note, I did meet my fiancé through a forum based off the subculture, but that's the only benefit I ever derived from knowing those people.
Despite the year I spent on that forum, involved with those people, despite feeling almost like I belonged for a while, my depression didn't lift and I didn't start writing again.
After things very dramatically fell apart with that group and Dan and I split off from them completely, we both decided to work on a relationship with God. I was also still curious about a lot of the New Age beliefs, including Ascension. Studying all this stuff kept me busy, but I still never felt right or happy. I knew, deep down, that I was choosing to participate in an illusion, that I was willfully forcing myself to believe in something false.
Three of my favorite books, read over the course of my life, included Ancient Mysteries by Nick Thorpe (a debunking book that went after the woo-woo beliefs about Atlantis, Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines, the pyramids, etc), The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom (a socio-biological excursion into the forces of history that is about why humans beings tend to do evil to one another - no devil required) and The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (classic skepticism work about the dangers of believing in things that aren't true.) Every time I got my hands on one of these books, I devoured them. The information in them made sense; it clicked in a way religion and spirituality did not. The arguments revolved around science, facts, and actual history. It gave our ancestors their due. It placed our gods and demons on our own heads and gave us the choice of whether or not to allow ourselves to be haunted.
Yet as enlightening as these books were to me, as much as they changed my entire outlook on the world, my friends felt differently. So many times, they told me to shut up because "no one cares about that shit but you." None of them were willing to listen with an open mind to what science said about their beliefs. I can't say that I blame them; no one likes to be wrong. But speaking just for myself, I simply don't understand how people can be presented with impeccable evidence that a belief is patently false, yet they still dogmatically insist that it's true.
So after enough verbal smackdowns after completing each book, I'd finally give up those beliefs that made so much sense to me, the science that refuted the very things that filled me with such disquiet. I'd go back to my frantic search that maybe the next bizarre belief would be the right one, the one that stuck.
I remember how it happened. Someone was talking about Indigo Children. Only half-familiar with the term, I looked it up on a New Age site. The site's creator, despite her woo-woo beliefs, scoffed at the idea of Indigo Children. At the bottom of her page, she provided a link to the Skeptic's Dictionary by Professor Robert Carroll. I followed the link, and fell into an entire world of skeptical, critical thinking. He covered everything from 2012 to Intelligent Design to Witchcraft and he backed up every argument against the credibility of these things or people with scholarly, scientific articles. Long story short, he kicked the mysticism right out of the world and back into our brains where it belonged. His "What's the Harm?" archive spoke clearly of the dangers of believing in unreal things while ignoring science. It's superstitious beliefs that allow female genital mutilation and honor killings to continue. It's ignorance that makes a mother allow her child to die despite medications available to treat the child's disease. This nonsense drives the lie of a Christian Nation that's tearing us apart. It just goes on and on. The benefits, touted by so many, seem paltry in comparison to the human suffering and the loss of life. I fail to see how "it makes me feel good" and "it gives my life meaning" stack up against believing something that is, in essence, a lie. These are lies that get people killed. But so what? They make other people feel good!
Dan told me the greatest story the other day. He's struggled a lot with the shift in my beliefs. He's not a fundamentalist Christian in any sense of the word, but for the world to make sense to him, there has to be a Creator. (He was raised Christian and his mom is a touch fanatical, so it's understandable.) Now, while I don't feel that I have the authority to say for certain whether or not God exists, I don't conceive of him in religious terms at all. Maybe he's responsible for the big bang. Maybe he's not. If he does exist, he is so far beyond human comprehension that he might as well not exist. That's my current relationship with religion in a nutshell.
At any rate, Dan was playing WoW and the topic of 2012 came up. Everyone on the com channel began to bleat about how the Mayans predicted the end of the world, and it was just around the corner. Dan, who used to believe in 2012 but changed his mind after I did solid research and we discussed the complete crap that passes as prophecy (no one has ever predicted anything that they couldn't have predicted by chance) and he laid into the guys with evidence and logic. More or less, he shut them up. I asked him how that felt, to argue for something using science and fact as a basis. He laughed and said, "Actually, it felt good. Damn good. I was right and I could actually back myself up."
So I guess knowing how the world actually works feels good too.
Ranting and raving aside (which in the future, there will be more of), something amazing happened while I was re-embracing science, logic, and skepticism. I started writing fiction again. But this time, it was different. I write fantasy-horror. Before now, I've always had some predetermined mystic world view that I was trying to integrate into the story line. If Wicca happened to be my thing, than Wiccans had magic powers and the Goddess was real. If I was on a Christian kick, deference to Christian mythology played a key role.
Now that I'm over all that, I'm writing with unbridled freedom and inventing on a whole new level. I'm writing precisely what I want with no deference to anything. I'm not trying to dumb down anything to make it palatable, not am I trying to subtly explain a mystical world view. I'm writing in shades of gray with no chear, bogus references to good and evil, and my fictional world functions with its own internal logic. Sure I'm using woo-woo motifs like witches and demons, but they're fun again. I'm not trying to integrate a dozen theories about what each actually is because neither actually exists in the sense of a supernatural being with magical powers. In this sense, I can trick them out and let them have at it. I can write for the sheer joy of writing and storytelling. It's been a miracle, and that's where my spirituality lies: within myself.
With science and skepticism, I live in a world that makes sense, that doesn't submit itself to some arbitrary laws of karma. I don't need some benevolent sky daddy approving of me in order to love myself. Human evil arises from humans, not some mystical force, and therefore it can be comprehended and ultimately overcome. These are the beliefs that give me hope, the truths I can trust, and the place where spirituality becomes real. We do have magic, and it's called science. It's how we exorcise our own demons. It's how we make the world a comprehensible place.
I've heard it so many times now. "That's so sad. Your world has no magic in it." Balderdash. My world has plenty of magic, and it's all real. Maybe it's meaningless to other people because they take it for granted, because they want some kind of Hollywood-movie level of magic. My magic just happens to be magic that works every time and that science can explain: cell phones, computers, cars, modern medicine, skyscrapers, and on and on. When you consider our origins as starstuff (a la Sagan) and amino acid chains in a pool of primordial goo then step outside and see that marvelous abundance of life and the endless evidence of of human innovation, how can you not believe in magic? It's all around us and it's real - no metaphysics required.
Now I'd had run-ins with Christians all my life, most of them unpleasant. My best friend in 4th grade, after she found out that I didn't love or care about Jesus, couldn't play with me any more because I was going to hell and it made her too sad to be around me. That typified most of my interactions with Christians until high school.
In high school there came the additional bonus of my friends (some of whom I liked and respected very much) telling me that I should go to church with them, that their church was different, and that I'd really want a personal relationship with Jesus if I did so.So I tried out a few churches, from the dynamic non-denominational church where the pastor performed healings and the congregation prayed for the gift of speaking in tongues to the standard (boring) sermon-with-singing presbyterian church. I went to a church with a rock band, a Christian Scientist church, community churches, and one very fun Unitarian Universalist church where half the congregation was gay. (My mom and I went to that one because she went through a phase of looking for God to find meaning. Unfortunately, the UU church weirded her out and we never went again.)
I went to those churches thrilled, excited, ready to embrace God - and I left defeated, because they all seemed to believe that same old bunk - stuff that, in my mind, made no sense at all. At last, disillusioned, I armed myself with a few Free Thought and Atheist texts and battled with words to get the Christians off my back. But even while I used logic and historical evidence to critique their arguments about the superiority of their religion, I was doing my own exploration into the metaphysical. Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, a little Kaballah, Wicca, traditional witchcraft, Atlantis, crystals, LaVeyan Satanism, herbal medicine, karma, etc., etc., etc. Everything started out with the same old enthusiasm, but I got to the point where after reading a book or two on a given subject, I knew whether or not it would work for me.
None of them worked. I got so upset over my inability to understand the mystical experiences of othes that I even became a religious studies major for a while, but I burned out on that too.
My time in the military really undermined my confidence in so many ways (not due to the military, which I respect very much, but due to very bad personal choices.) I found myself needing something spiritual in my life again, something to make me feel like my life had meaning. Before, since the age of 12, I'd always had my writing. But the depression I suffered while enlisted knocked the desire to write out of me.
I got involved in a very delusional, very unhealthy subculture based on an erroneous belief that I'd had a mystical experience when I was fifteen. At first, it felt like I'd finally come home. However, as time wore on, I saw more and more of the ugliness and the fundamental self-loathing that so many people in this subculture shared. On a positive note, I did meet my fiancé through a forum based off the subculture, but that's the only benefit I ever derived from knowing those people.
Despite the year I spent on that forum, involved with those people, despite feeling almost like I belonged for a while, my depression didn't lift and I didn't start writing again.
After things very dramatically fell apart with that group and Dan and I split off from them completely, we both decided to work on a relationship with God. I was also still curious about a lot of the New Age beliefs, including Ascension. Studying all this stuff kept me busy, but I still never felt right or happy. I knew, deep down, that I was choosing to participate in an illusion, that I was willfully forcing myself to believe in something false.
Three of my favorite books, read over the course of my life, included Ancient Mysteries by Nick Thorpe (a debunking book that went after the woo-woo beliefs about Atlantis, Stonehenge, the Nazca Lines, the pyramids, etc), The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom (a socio-biological excursion into the forces of history that is about why humans beings tend to do evil to one another - no devil required) and The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan (classic skepticism work about the dangers of believing in things that aren't true.) Every time I got my hands on one of these books, I devoured them. The information in them made sense; it clicked in a way religion and spirituality did not. The arguments revolved around science, facts, and actual history. It gave our ancestors their due. It placed our gods and demons on our own heads and gave us the choice of whether or not to allow ourselves to be haunted.
Yet as enlightening as these books were to me, as much as they changed my entire outlook on the world, my friends felt differently. So many times, they told me to shut up because "no one cares about that shit but you." None of them were willing to listen with an open mind to what science said about their beliefs. I can't say that I blame them; no one likes to be wrong. But speaking just for myself, I simply don't understand how people can be presented with impeccable evidence that a belief is patently false, yet they still dogmatically insist that it's true.
So after enough verbal smackdowns after completing each book, I'd finally give up those beliefs that made so much sense to me, the science that refuted the very things that filled me with such disquiet. I'd go back to my frantic search that maybe the next bizarre belief would be the right one, the one that stuck.
I remember how it happened. Someone was talking about Indigo Children. Only half-familiar with the term, I looked it up on a New Age site. The site's creator, despite her woo-woo beliefs, scoffed at the idea of Indigo Children. At the bottom of her page, she provided a link to the Skeptic's Dictionary by Professor Robert Carroll. I followed the link, and fell into an entire world of skeptical, critical thinking. He covered everything from 2012 to Intelligent Design to Witchcraft and he backed up every argument against the credibility of these things or people with scholarly, scientific articles. Long story short, he kicked the mysticism right out of the world and back into our brains where it belonged. His "What's the Harm?" archive spoke clearly of the dangers of believing in unreal things while ignoring science. It's superstitious beliefs that allow female genital mutilation and honor killings to continue. It's ignorance that makes a mother allow her child to die despite medications available to treat the child's disease. This nonsense drives the lie of a Christian Nation that's tearing us apart. It just goes on and on. The benefits, touted by so many, seem paltry in comparison to the human suffering and the loss of life. I fail to see how "it makes me feel good" and "it gives my life meaning" stack up against believing something that is, in essence, a lie. These are lies that get people killed. But so what? They make other people feel good!
Dan told me the greatest story the other day. He's struggled a lot with the shift in my beliefs. He's not a fundamentalist Christian in any sense of the word, but for the world to make sense to him, there has to be a Creator. (He was raised Christian and his mom is a touch fanatical, so it's understandable.) Now, while I don't feel that I have the authority to say for certain whether or not God exists, I don't conceive of him in religious terms at all. Maybe he's responsible for the big bang. Maybe he's not. If he does exist, he is so far beyond human comprehension that he might as well not exist. That's my current relationship with religion in a nutshell.
At any rate, Dan was playing WoW and the topic of 2012 came up. Everyone on the com channel began to bleat about how the Mayans predicted the end of the world, and it was just around the corner. Dan, who used to believe in 2012 but changed his mind after I did solid research and we discussed the complete crap that passes as prophecy (no one has ever predicted anything that they couldn't have predicted by chance) and he laid into the guys with evidence and logic. More or less, he shut them up. I asked him how that felt, to argue for something using science and fact as a basis. He laughed and said, "Actually, it felt good. Damn good. I was right and I could actually back myself up."
So I guess knowing how the world actually works feels good too.
Ranting and raving aside (which in the future, there will be more of), something amazing happened while I was re-embracing science, logic, and skepticism. I started writing fiction again. But this time, it was different. I write fantasy-horror. Before now, I've always had some predetermined mystic world view that I was trying to integrate into the story line. If Wicca happened to be my thing, than Wiccans had magic powers and the Goddess was real. If I was on a Christian kick, deference to Christian mythology played a key role.
Now that I'm over all that, I'm writing with unbridled freedom and inventing on a whole new level. I'm writing precisely what I want with no deference to anything. I'm not trying to dumb down anything to make it palatable, not am I trying to subtly explain a mystical world view. I'm writing in shades of gray with no chear, bogus references to good and evil, and my fictional world functions with its own internal logic. Sure I'm using woo-woo motifs like witches and demons, but they're fun again. I'm not trying to integrate a dozen theories about what each actually is because neither actually exists in the sense of a supernatural being with magical powers. In this sense, I can trick them out and let them have at it. I can write for the sheer joy of writing and storytelling. It's been a miracle, and that's where my spirituality lies: within myself.
With science and skepticism, I live in a world that makes sense, that doesn't submit itself to some arbitrary laws of karma. I don't need some benevolent sky daddy approving of me in order to love myself. Human evil arises from humans, not some mystical force, and therefore it can be comprehended and ultimately overcome. These are the beliefs that give me hope, the truths I can trust, and the place where spirituality becomes real. We do have magic, and it's called science. It's how we exorcise our own demons. It's how we make the world a comprehensible place.
I've heard it so many times now. "That's so sad. Your world has no magic in it." Balderdash. My world has plenty of magic, and it's all real. Maybe it's meaningless to other people because they take it for granted, because they want some kind of Hollywood-movie level of magic. My magic just happens to be magic that works every time and that science can explain: cell phones, computers, cars, modern medicine, skyscrapers, and on and on. When you consider our origins as starstuff (a la Sagan) and amino acid chains in a pool of primordial goo then step outside and see that marvelous abundance of life and the endless evidence of of human innovation, how can you not believe in magic? It's all around us and it's real - no metaphysics required.