Saturday, January 25, 2014

Skepticism and the balm of reason


My partner seemed genuinely disappointed that in my previous post I suggested self-loathing and distrust were endemic to the human race. By way of explanation, I pointed to my Catholic upbringing as the setting for many of my observations. The world as painted by that brush is one in which joys are few and their attainment heavily prescribed by a very specific course of action, usually on a daily basis. This alone is not so onerous, but the consequences of even a minor lapse in one's actions is justification for absurd amounts of punishment.

And so my internal red flags were raised even at a very young age and pretty much stayed there indefinitely. Rather than being angry about this, I now see how useful it has been to me in shaping my ability and desire to seek alternative ways of viewing the world and the people in it.

Nowhere have I found a more entertaining product of exploration than when I came across Sam Harris on YouTube talking about free will. This is a long vid, but worth every minute you spend listening to it. To give you a sense of my gleeful release from the burden of Catholic dogma, here is a sampling of the balm of reason that is so characteristic of him:

"If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you've lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Christ, you're just a Catholic."
 And thus vanished the last drop of cognitive dissonance in the religion bucket of my life. Hallelujah, brother!