what I believe: supernatural

Most of my religious history has resulted in realizing what a problem beliefs are.

Beliefs can easily become the things you bend over backwards to cling to, despite the accumulation of evidence -- and they can make you stop looking for or noticing said evidence. At the same time, you can't remain permanently undecided and neutral: certain beliefs eventually settle in, but you can choose how to weight them. You don't have to make everything binary: "everything I believe is absolutely true, and nothing else is." You can have a working set of assumptions, the things that you're pretty sure are true unless evidence points to the contrary -- which is the way science works, and the way you write a book.

When I was a kid, there wasn't an internet yet, for all intents and purposes: you could get online, but not only was there no World Wide Web as we know it today, it was very hard to browse the internet, period. You kind of had to have a destination in mind.

But I did spend a lot of time on Bulletin Board Systems, both local ones and long-distance ones, including some of the ones associated with Phrack and 2600 (hacker zines) and the Cult of the Dead Cow (notably Demon Roach Underground) -- the late 80s, early 90s hacker scene. I didn't really have any interest in hacking, though I sort of thought I did, and like everybody else, I screwed around with the novelties of pay phone and voice mail phreaking for a while.

Like I said, there weren't web pages at such, but there were a lot of text files that were circulated, from ezines like Phrack to a transcript of the text from Agrippa to public domain (maybe?) texts on Buddhism and Wicca. This was my web surfing or Wiki hole for the time. I was a smart but bored kid, irregularly attending a not very smart high school in a pre-internet suburb with a library not much larger than a classroom. I read through everything in Phrack especially, and depending on my download quota, I'd download whatever other text files sounded interesting or engaging.

That's how I learned about memetics.

"Meme" these days usually means "some image that is reblogged a lot with varying captions," but the concept is a lot broader than that and a lot older. Richard Dawkins coined the terms meme and memetics to evoke gene and genetics in his initial discussions of how ideas were replicated, altered, and propagated, and other people ran with the ball. A specific joke -- "why did the chicken cross the road; to get to the other side" -- is a meme, sure, but a joke template -- the existence of the many many jokes that depend on prior knowledge of that chicken joke, or the template of "knock knock" jokes -- is a much more interesting meme, and the idea of joke templates is a more interesting meme still. The existence of memes and the framework of memetics is, itself, a meme.

The idea of memetics will probably come up a lot in this blog, but one of the terms I came across at the time was meta-meme: a meme that influences how you receive other memes. "Critical thinking" is a meta-meme, or really, a set of meta-memes that provides you with a skill-set and the motive to use those skills in order to evaluate new data, and especially new claims, to determine if they're sound. "Grammar stickler" is a meta-meme that affects how you receive others' use of language, according to an arbitrary list of computer-like rules that you probably don't understand very well. "Grammar descriptivism" is a meta-meme that affects how you feel about grammar sticklers. (There is a good argument that the idea of joke templates, in the previous paragraph, is a meta-meme: or maybe more interestingly, that there is a particular subtype of "sense of humor" that depends on receiving the idea of joke templates as a meta-meme.)

Beliefs about the supernatural, or about ethics, or about how people function, are obviously all important meta-memes. We hear all the time about people who reject the teaching of evolution because they've adopted supernatural ideas that they believe are in conflict with speciation and the evolution of humankind from earlier primates.

This is how objectively intelligent people are able to adopt and champion stupid ideas.

I'm not going to pretend all beliefs are equal, or that all unprovable beliefs about the supernatural are equal, which is what I think people actually mean when they say that -- I don't even think people who profess such an egalitarian view are actually capable of holding it, I think it's just something they repeat by rote in part because they have such a poor understanding of other peoples' beliefs that they don't realize what a wide variety they are, and how mutually incompatible some sets of beliefs are. Christians and non-theists raised in Christian cultures tend to assume that all or most religions revolve around the idea of an afterlife, for instance.

Some of the beliefs that really get under peoples' skin and affect how they receive new ideas or information are the ones that inform self-image and group identity, which is pretty clear if you open the window and look out in any direction right now. The anti-vaccine community has had to contort its reasoning in so many ways in order to continue maintaining the belief that vaccinating children is dangerous: in a matter of a few years they have gone from misguided but well-meaning parents to conspiracy theorists on the same level as birthers or 9/11 truthers. Meanwhile, the defense of the Confederate flag requires avoiding history as though it is the floor-become-lava and you are the world's most agile toddler, and white folks keep getting all pissed that non-white folks are daring to complain about institutional and individual racism, because it makes them feel attacked for being white folks.

There's a lot of stupid on the breeze.

Anyway. I try not to hold too many specific beliefs about the supernatural, principally because I think it's the least important part of religion, and that the people who prioritize the supernatural are the ones who cause the most harm with their religions. I think this is partly because metamemes about the supernatural are more likely to be especially sticky -- hard to shake -- because the lack of sufficient evidence for them one way or the other means they can only be held by a firm grasp.

Make a face long enough and it stays that way.

This is all prefatory to a brief list of my specific beliefs. For the last twenty years or so I have mostly described my religious beliefs in terms of what I reject or want to distance myself from, since I view so many religious positions as extremes -- I am equally opposed to fundamentalist Christianity and to the New Atheism, both of which see Christianity in largely the same terms while disagreeing only on its validity. Both have been marked by willful stupidity and ignorance of basic religious history.

Figuring out what you don't believe is plenty useful, but eventually you have to figure out what you do believe, so this is me articulating a working draft.

Dot dot dot.

I don't particularly believe in an afterlife. This is not a very strong belief: I don't specifically believe it exists, but neither am I strongly opposed to the possibility.

What I do believe very strongly is that it is a terrible idea to focus on a reward- or consequence-based afterlife as the center of any religion. So many modern Christians associate the Heaven-or-Hell issue so strongly with their experience of religion that it can be hard to get them to accept that not every major religion even believes in an afterlife, or that there are very serious questions about whether their modern beliefs in Heaven have anything in common with those of Jesus and the first Christians.

Maybe something happens to you when you die. Maybe it doesn't. I certainly reject any model of the afterlife that it is possible to have "proof" of before your own death, whether that means recovered memories of past lives, visions of Heaven during near-death experiences, whatever.

Getting into Heaven or avoiding Hell is not an appropriate motivation for any action in life. That is my strongest afterlife-related belief, and it makes any other details about the afterlife irrelevant. This is the life you have. This is the world you're in. Serve yourself, the world, and God by conducting yourself accordingly.

Consequence-based afterlife -- an afterlife the quality of which is determined by your performance on a given checklist in life -- is such a compelling meta-meme that it tends to blind people to the other aspects of religion. Everything is filtered through this idea that religion is a set of instructions for getting into the right place.

I believe in the existence of something I'm comfortable calling God, a force that created the universe we experience and did so with purpose. I am not comfortable with anthropomorphizing God: assigning motive or gender to God, assuming God takes special interest in humankind or Earth, assuming that God is watching me right now or has the ability to keep me from hitting the red lights when I'm late for an appointment.

I think there are many interesting questions we can ask about God, and that there are many useful frames to use in thinking about God, and gender and motive (among thousands of other things) can play roles in those frames. There is a lot you can take away from traditional God-as-Father theologies, and a lot to take away from the feminist theologies of various denominations. It's when we let these frames calcify that we have problems. It is one thing to describe God as the creator of the universe. It is another to define that creator role in such a way that it supersedes our science. There is no need to see a conflict between belief in God and acknowledgment of scientific truths, including the Big Bang theory, an extremely old Earth and older universe, and the evolution of humanity from earlier primates. You can believe in the carpenter without denying the hammer. The beauty of the carpenter is not his ability to bring cabinetry into being out of nothingness: this would be ridiculous. The beauty is in watching the specificity and precision of his skills come into play. This is not a modern or novel approach to theism. Nobody woke up and said holy shit, we have steam engines and Coca-Cola, it's time to realize God might actually work through mechanisms that follow the laws of the universe he created. These are old ideas that have been bullied out of the conversation.

I believe that truly appreciating the universe, truly engaging in the world in a religious and spiritual way, requires paying attention to and living these specifics. To deny the fact of the hammer is foolish. It does God no favors and certainly does none for you.

The reason for the apparently conflict between God and evolution, God and a very old universe, is the mistake of literalism. Literalism is a perverse approach to the Bible that insists on reading it as literal truth, or as close to literal truth as possible -- I think most, perhaps all, literalists agree that the parables Jesus tells do not have to be stories about actual people, for instance, but they insist on a six-day creation of the universe, on a very young Earth, etc etc.

While there have always been literalists among Christianity -- and literalist approaches to the Jewish scriptures before that -- the modern-day prominence of literalism originates around the turn of the 20th century, as part of Christian fundamentalism, a new conservative Christian movement that sought to restore supernaturalism to American Christianity in response to the more socially and politically active Christianity of the late 19th century, which had occupied itself with such awful things as caring for the poor and sick, and working to end child labor. The great victory of conservative Christianity in the century since has been to take over the conversation and convince both the religious and the irreligious alike that literalist conservative Christianity is the native and natural position, that all other Christianities as diluted variants.

One reason it is impossible to argue with many conservative Christians is that so many strains of conservative Christianity incorporate into their self-image the idea that they are the lone voice in the wilderness -- they are satisfied and comforted by the idea that other Christians disagree with them, and so when you argue with them, you're just reassuring them that they're on the right track. Again, think of this from a memetics point of view: think of what a fantastic and insidious adaptation that is, the way those ideas are protecting themselves. The further you get to their fringe, the more important ideas about false prophets and antichrists become.

Suffice to say you do not need to throw out Genesis if you don't believe the world was created in six days. The Bible has been read figuratively for as long as it has been written down.

This is something that's going to come up a lot, because it's one of the metamemes in modern religious illiteracy that has had the biggest impact.

I believe in the mystical. What exactly we mean by mystical is a complicated topic that may someday be less complicated. I believe that science is on the path to better understanding the neuroscience of the mystical experience, but that this no more discredits or renders irrelevant the mystical experience than understanding the physiology of taste makes pistachio ice cream less delicious.

That's another aspect to this false conflict between science and religion, I think: this idea that somehow if we understand how something works, if we seek that understanding, that this is a less religious or less spiritual approach. That somehow this invalidates the religious experience. What incredible horseshit. Religion has always been truth-seeking. The differences between various religions and denominations is certainly important, but it has always been a methodology for sense-making. We should seek God in science, and appreciate the ineffable beauty of evolution. We should seek God in the universe beyond our solar system, in the culture of whales, in the tool use of crows, in the strange ways our minds work, in the mystery of how a self emerges from the mechanisms of a body. If we have any duty to God, what could it be other than to better understand and appreciate our humanity and our experience of the universe?

I believe that in some meaningful sense, Jesus was the son of God. I don't believe he was the biological son of a father-God who impregnated a human woman. Adoptionism -- the idea that Jesus at some point became this "son of God," usually assumed to be at the point of his baptism by John the Baptist -- makes much more sense to me. I believe that Jesus is far more important as a human than as a divine being: that he was a revolutionary religious leader, one whose teachings are often hard to discern and often hard to untangle from the context of his time and place, and that no Christian leader since has surpassed him. At the same time I believe that his teachings and popularity were exploited almost immediately after his death -- if not before it -- and especially in the subsequent couple centuries as an orthodox Christianity was formed by political and pragmatic forces.

Obviously the point here is that the list of supernatural things I believe in is pretty small, but that doesn't make them less important, and it hasn't required me to toss religion aside just because we understand the world in slightly better detail than we did in the past. The only people who think that science destroys mystery and wonder are people who don't know very much science and probably haven't experienced much wonder.