Wednesday, May 24, 2006Intellectual HonestyA friend's blog up in Redding elicited a heated and passionate response from me. I wrote him a long email that he edited down and, to my surprise, posted on his column as a response.I have to say, whether it's because of the editing or the passion that inspired the email, it's pretty good. Good enough that I want to share it with my own readers. Marc Beauchamp's blog in the Redding Record-Searchlight website, May 20, 2006: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- What's next? My faith, at age 53, I find, is more informed by a single night in the Sahara Desert in southeastern Morocco than by all the religious teaching and cues I've received. Since that night, roughly 12 years ago, I have slipped from belief to agnosticism to a non-proselytizing atheism. It was then, watching the universe spin slowly overhead in the desert clarity and utter silence that convinced me there could be nothing after death, just unconscious oblivion. What other possibility could there be if you were intellectually honest and opened your eyes to that benign vastness, that exquisitely beautiful and coldly indifferent cosmos? A dear old friend today said he was looking forward to something after death - something, he said, that "none of us could imagine." With respect, that fails to pass the occam's razor test. But something else he said earlier rang true: There is no meaning to life, he said. We must bring meaning to life, infuse our lives with it. Alas, many of us will fail. But each of us must try. Alone. Because, as Shakespeare had Hamlet say as his life drained away, "The rest is silence." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- My response: Your blogs are disturbing these days. The death/atheism one makes me want to tenderly and gently say the following things re the following achingly beautiful paragraph.... "It was then, watching the universe spin slowly overhead in the desert clarity and utter silence that convinced me there could be nothing after death, just unconscious oblivion. What other possibility could there be if you were intellectually honest and opened your eyes to that benign vastness, that exquisitely beautiful and coldly indifferent cosmos?" What other possibility could there be? What other possibility than what our two pounds of gray matter can comprehend? Well, take those two pounds of gray matter, as wonderful and magnificent as it is, and compare it to those cosmos stretching overhead. Do you think that gray matter can understand even a fraction of even a fraction of what's going on out there, or inside, or anywhere? What other possibility could there be? I believe that if you're intellectually honest, you'd come up with the answer that there are as many possibilities as stars in the night. That even though the brain wants to know everything, it's obvious it doesn't. It can't. It's a lovely thing, our brain and our consciousness, but we just don't know everything. What other possibility could there be? There could be happiness. There could be a sense of purpose. There could be the oneness of the Buddhists. There could be the metaphors of the Hindus. For all we know, there could be a pantheon of greek gods and goddesses up there squabbling and running the show. There could be Jesus bleeding from stigmata and there could be the Virgin Mary appearing on the sides of mountains. We don't know. We can't know. You have to get out of your head because your head is only one tool for apprehending it all. And none of our tools -- intuition, heart, emotion, intellect -- are sophisticated enough to get it all, to ingest it all. I look at those stars and see infinite possibility. I look at the ocean and see that I cannot possibly understand its magnitude. I look at the world around and am humbled and inspired by that humility. It's GOOD that it's bigger than I am. It's GOOD that I'm not the biggest brain around. It's incredibly beautiful out there. What can I learn from it? How can I grow and expand inside to match its beauty? Is the point just to suffer and die? Nowhere in the cycles of the world is that the case. Nowhere does something exist for a point in time and then snuff out completely. Matter or energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Everything is cyclical -- from the leaves on the trees, to the seasons, to the ebb and flow of the tides. Yes, you can see yourself as a leaf, Marc, doomed to bloom for one short season, fall and disintegrate. You can do that. Or you can see yourself as the tree. Always going through cycles of rejuvenation and decay. Yes, death is part of the cycle. Yes, there is shadow. But it is part of a bigger system, in which there is also life and birth and brightness. To look at only the decay and death part of it is as intellectually dishonest as looking always at the la la happy side of it. It is both. It is a whole. It is both simpler and more complex than we are. Posted by Kathy at May 22, 2006 12:45 PM # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 5:12 PM  
Comments: Infinite possibility - I'm starting a church dedicated to it. # posted by  Simon : 6:56 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home
|
