[extropy-chat] Re: John Wright Finds God

[john-c-wright at sff.net]

Dirk Bruere writes:

>There is the experience, and then there is the 'explanation' which is 
>the cultural context in which you place it.
>Different cultures will provide different explanatory frameworks.
>While the experience stands as it is, the explanation does not.
>The clearest 'context free' analysis, which is no analysis (subtle 
>joke), is Zen.

Sir, you hit upon a point that I confess I find fascinating, namely, the
question of objectivity within religious experience and sentiment. I am familiar
in an amateur and passing way, with Zen, to the extent that I spent one weekend
at an Ashram meditating. I found the Rochi to be gravely serious and impressive
men. 

The firmest argument against religion is that the dogmas of the various churches
of man do not agree. As Mr. Broderick so aptly puts it, if f L. Ron Hubbard's
world view is right, the Pope's is not. 

On the other hand the counter-argument usually raised in defense of religion is
that the fundamental and mystical experience, that haunting idea that the world
is other than it seems to be, is a foundation for all religious sentiment.
Baldly put, all faiths agree that there is a supernatural world. 

It is possible that both the Pontiff and the Scientologists might be partly
agreed on a truth they both grasp only in part. As Mr. Albright suggests,
"Rather than viewing one deeply held belief as right and another as wrong, it
seems to me more effective to see each as part of a coherent whole, on which we
all would agree, given the same context, but on which can never be fully objective."

Here I will venture my own opinion. The hunger for truth is universal: I cannot
see how any organism can survive without it. The hunger for the spirit world is
widespread; it exists in most men, most of the time, but by no means in all. 

If the hunger for the spirit world is merely the blind programming of inanimate
nature organizing the molecules of our brains over generations of evolution,
then we are trapped in an illusionary belief by our basic drives and instincts.
In such as case, the atheists may rightly congratulate themselves in using their
minds to break free from a innate but demeaning instinct: their victory is as
honorable as a pacifist renouncing violence, or a nun renouncing marriage.  

If the hunger for the spirit world is sent from the spirit world, like music
heard across a starry sea, promising a farther shore, then the hunger has a
proper object to satisfy it; an object not found on any earthly shore. All
spiritual travelers depart from matter and materialism in their search:
mysticism, by which I mean specifically the search for knowledge by
non-rational, non-sensory means, is the common ocean onto which all such
travelers embark. 

Now then, at this point, the skeptic can say that these so-called different
travelers all ferried themselves to islands existing in their imaginations only,
and brought back reports fished up from merely dreams and hallucinations: no
wonder they disagree. 

The point is well taken. And yet, it is ships that sailed from England that
colonized North America, not elsewhere, and our language bears the stamp of that
ancestral isle. South America bears the stamp of Portugal and Spain. The
descriptions of the Spanish Main do not match the descriptions of New England. 

If we were as skeptical of claims of the New World as we are of claims of the
spirit world, each contradiction between the traveler's tales would encourage
our disbelief. 

Likewise, the spiritual travelers who set off from Calvary and those who set
sail from the Deer Park in Benares may have reached the same New World, but not
the same continent.  

My experience tells me that Zen is like the first step of seamanship. One must
let go of solid land to sail the mystic oceans. But, if there is a Truth out
there to be found (or, in my case, a Truth that set sail to come find me) we
cannot expect anything other than it will be stranger than we expect; we can
hope it will be more glorious than we can hope. A Christian believes the Person
of God passed that ocean, otherwise impassible, to land ashore at the most
unlikely spot imaginable: the smelly stable in the crowded inn of a conquered
nation.  

Of the many faiths of Earth, I am not bold enough to condemn any as utterly
false, and my prayer is that all of them might lead sincere hearts, somehow, out
of this sorrowful world where we find ourselves, to the shining lands of which
the prophets speak. And yet is seems a cruel truth that not all peoples are
equal to the task, any more than all nations are equal to discover the arts of
ship-builders and longitudinal navigation. Likewise, some faiths are better than
others: the cruelties of the Aztecs are not to be compared to the subtle
reasonings of the peaceful Buddhist. 

You may think it terribly un-multicultural of me to believe that the Jews
discovered (or were chosen to receive) a monumental truth by which all the
nations of the world would be blessed, and that the Messiah appeared among them,
not elsewhere. Perhaps so, but I cannot picture it happening any other way. It
is not odd or absurd to learn that Euclid elaborated the geometry, or Ptolemy
the astronomy, which was less developed even in other civilized lands. No one
thinks the truths in these sciences are invented by nor restricted to one race
of men. They are objective truths, free for all to discover. But, then again,
but no one uses Eskimo or Hottentot mathematics and astronomy to determine his
position at sea.