Why I put "Naturism" as my religion on the census form
Yes, this is going to be another big ranty post about religion. Hopefully, the last for a little bit.
liminal_melody asked me why it means so much to me to prove that I'm right. I'm not sure it's a question I can answer. I just have this compulsion, you see, to try and understand things and then talk about them. Now, I find it exciting, exhilarating, when I'm reading something difficult and I finally find I can wrap my mind around it. I know just why it's right, and I want to share that knowledge with the world. After all, thinking and writing are the two things I've always been told I'm good at. But, the thing is, I get precisely the same compulsion when I suddenly comprehend why some particular idea is wrong, and, as you may imagine, that's something that happened a lot about seven years ago when I had my big change of belief. It would appear to be a heritable trait. I know exactly what ozarque means when elfwreck quotes her as saying"We have to agree to disagree" is irritating because it's coercive; verbally, it's the use of force. Very gentle force, but force all the same. It says "You'll be wasting your time if you continue to present your side of this issue we disagree about, because I refuse to participate in any further interaction with you on the subject."
Now, as part of my quest to understand anything and everything I can possibly understand, I take it as a basic principle that nothing is unquestionable. "How do you know?" is a relevant response to any statement. You can't, for practical purposes, apply it to every situation in ordinary life; but when somebody presents you with something they want you to believe, you should at least ask that question until you get down to something you're reasonably certain of. And even "reasonable certainty" should always be considered provisional. You may be too busy to investigate all your beliefs yourself, but you should at least be open, should contrary evidence turn up, to reconsidering them.
Now, simply on the basis of that rule that nothing is unquestionable, you can make a couple of deductions. First, Essentialism is not true. Essentialism is the view that things have fixed, central "essences" or identities which cannot be analysed or pared down to anything more basic. So a chair is a chair because, well, that's what a chair is, and there's no more to be said. It's a very seductive way of thinking, but it violates the questionability principle because it is simply a way to forestall questions without answering them. Why does the moon have phases and eclipses, Aristotle asked? Because it is the moon's nature to have phases and eclipses. You can see, I hope, that that isn't an answer to anything.
I have recently learned, by the way, that a similar denial of Essentialism is at the core of Buddhist thought, which has given me a good deal of respect for Buddhism; mind you, one of the more popular sects of Buddhism claims that what Buddha really meant was that things do have fixed, real Essences, but they just aren't here in the physical world, which is not a way of thinking I can follow.
Which brings me to the other deduction you can make from the questionability rule: there is no Supernatural. I'm using C. S. Lewis's definition here: to be "supernatural" means to be somehow outside the physical, observable universe, and yet capable of producing effects in it. The Supernatural is, by definition, not available for scientific study. It is, in short, unquestionable. It's entirely possible at least, it's not unquestionably false that the universe might turn out to contain things we are not accustomed to thinking of as physical. I'm pretty sure it contains human minds, for instance. But such things are capable of being discovered and investigated, and are, therefore, not Supernatural.
Now I come from a belief system which is founded, absolutely and unavoidably, on the notion of the supernatural. I should point out that the questionability principle doesn't automatically rule out what might be called "religion" or "spirituality" since those are, strictly speaking, about what you revere rather than what you believe. But in the Christian system, reverence can only be directed towards a supernatural God, and to question the belief is to be irreverent. All organized religions have something you're expected to believe, but in Christianity belief "faith" is a prime virtue. Furthermore, it was axiomatic to the kind of Christianity I grew up with that Christianity was the only true religion and that all the others were roads to hell, in stark contrast to, well, say, Hinduism, animism, Buddhism, or the Baha'i faith.
Taking questionability as the core of my philosophy, I see no reason why the physical world should be considered undeserving of reverence. It includes the mind-blowing vastness of the night sky, and the intricacy and subtle power of living things, which create new worlds simply by being what they are. Or, I should say, simply by being what we are. The human mind is something very special indeed, but its specialness does not lie in its being outside of and superior to "Nature".
Nature itself, then, is the object of my reverence. Now, one powerful symbol of "nature" as such is the human body, without the concealments invented for it by the mind. If there's one thing that distracts us from the fact that we are, fundamentally, a part of nature, it's how very different the products of our minds are from other physical things. Swathed in clothing, it's too easy to believe that humans are somehow a different kind of thing from animals, that animal-ness is something to cover and be ashamed of rather than to revel in and celebrate, that only our heads and faces are "ourselves" and the rest, wrapped up in cloth, is just something to move the ghostly self around and feed it.
Anyway, that's what I was trying to express when I wrote NATURISM in the "Religion" box on the Census form three weeks ago. It seemed to fit better there than under "Marital status" or "Yearly income".
Actually, what weirded me out the most was ticking Yes to "Do you have a disability?"
liminal_melody asked me why it means so much to me to prove that I'm right. I'm not sure it's a question I can answer. I just have this compulsion, you see, to try and understand things and then talk about them. Now, I find it exciting, exhilarating, when I'm reading something difficult and I finally find I can wrap my mind around it. I know just why it's right, and I want to share that knowledge with the world. After all, thinking and writing are the two things I've always been told I'm good at. But, the thing is, I get precisely the same compulsion when I suddenly comprehend why some particular idea is wrong, and, as you may imagine, that's something that happened a lot about seven years ago when I had my big change of belief. It would appear to be a heritable trait. I know exactly what ozarque means when elfwreck quotes her as saying"We have to agree to disagree" is irritating because it's coercive; verbally, it's the use of force. Very gentle force, but force all the same. It says "You'll be wasting your time if you continue to present your side of this issue we disagree about, because I refuse to participate in any further interaction with you on the subject."
Now, as part of my quest to understand anything and everything I can possibly understand, I take it as a basic principle that nothing is unquestionable. "How do you know?" is a relevant response to any statement. You can't, for practical purposes, apply it to every situation in ordinary life; but when somebody presents you with something they want you to believe, you should at least ask that question until you get down to something you're reasonably certain of. And even "reasonable certainty" should always be considered provisional. You may be too busy to investigate all your beliefs yourself, but you should at least be open, should contrary evidence turn up, to reconsidering them.
Now, simply on the basis of that rule that nothing is unquestionable, you can make a couple of deductions. First, Essentialism is not true. Essentialism is the view that things have fixed, central "essences" or identities which cannot be analysed or pared down to anything more basic. So a chair is a chair because, well, that's what a chair is, and there's no more to be said. It's a very seductive way of thinking, but it violates the questionability principle because it is simply a way to forestall questions without answering them. Why does the moon have phases and eclipses, Aristotle asked? Because it is the moon's nature to have phases and eclipses. You can see, I hope, that that isn't an answer to anything.
I have recently learned, by the way, that a similar denial of Essentialism is at the core of Buddhist thought, which has given me a good deal of respect for Buddhism; mind you, one of the more popular sects of Buddhism claims that what Buddha really meant was that things do have fixed, real Essences, but they just aren't here in the physical world, which is not a way of thinking I can follow.
Which brings me to the other deduction you can make from the questionability rule: there is no Supernatural. I'm using C. S. Lewis's definition here: to be "supernatural" means to be somehow outside the physical, observable universe, and yet capable of producing effects in it. The Supernatural is, by definition, not available for scientific study. It is, in short, unquestionable. It's entirely possible at least, it's not unquestionably false that the universe might turn out to contain things we are not accustomed to thinking of as physical. I'm pretty sure it contains human minds, for instance. But such things are capable of being discovered and investigated, and are, therefore, not Supernatural.
Now I come from a belief system which is founded, absolutely and unavoidably, on the notion of the supernatural. I should point out that the questionability principle doesn't automatically rule out what might be called "religion" or "spirituality" since those are, strictly speaking, about what you revere rather than what you believe. But in the Christian system, reverence can only be directed towards a supernatural God, and to question the belief is to be irreverent. All organized religions have something you're expected to believe, but in Christianity belief "faith" is a prime virtue. Furthermore, it was axiomatic to the kind of Christianity I grew up with that Christianity was the only true religion and that all the others were roads to hell, in stark contrast to, well, say, Hinduism, animism, Buddhism, or the Baha'i faith.
Taking questionability as the core of my philosophy, I see no reason why the physical world should be considered undeserving of reverence. It includes the mind-blowing vastness of the night sky, and the intricacy and subtle power of living things, which create new worlds simply by being what they are. Or, I should say, simply by being what we are. The human mind is something very special indeed, but its specialness does not lie in its being outside of and superior to "Nature".
Nature itself, then, is the object of my reverence. Now, one powerful symbol of "nature" as such is the human body, without the concealments invented for it by the mind. If there's one thing that distracts us from the fact that we are, fundamentally, a part of nature, it's how very different the products of our minds are from other physical things. Swathed in clothing, it's too easy to believe that humans are somehow a different kind of thing from animals, that animal-ness is something to cover and be ashamed of rather than to revel in and celebrate, that only our heads and faces are "ourselves" and the rest, wrapped up in cloth, is just something to move the ghostly self around and feed it.
Anyway, that's what I was trying to express when I wrote NATURISM in the "Religion" box on the Census form three weeks ago. It seemed to fit better there than under "Marital status" or "Yearly income".
Actually, what weirded me out the most was ticking Yes to "Do you have a disability?"