The Big Questions
January 07, 2009 11:27 AM
As you might imagine, I’ve been preoccupied with the
idea of death a little more than usual these past few
months. And some people, knowing what I’m going
through, have asked me to share just these thoughts.
I mean, I know how it is supposed to go, the idea
that people dealing with a potentially terminal
illness must suddenly have profound insights into the
meaning of life and the human condition. Its natural
to wonder what things look like when the ground
you’ve been standing on isn’t there anymore.
And so to the question....have I had any profound insights? I’m just going to let this blog post roll off of my fingers and we’ll see what we have at the end.
No discussion about the meaning of life, or the possibility of life after death can happen without bringing in religion, so I’m going to start with a bit about my relationship to God and to religion in general.
So here is a little background...
I was raised in a Catholic family. We went to church every Sunday. In spite of my mother’s best intentions, it didn’t stick, at least not for me. For my sister, by comparison, it did. So its a mystery to me that this is the case. We were raised in the same family, went to the same church services, etc. I don’t know why faith evaded me. I just didn’t understand the benefits of the church or religion in general.
I do remember a particular moment when, at the age of twelve, I had to participate in a religious ceremony called Confirmation. This is basically a ceremony whereby a child openly declares their devotion to the Catholic faith and promises to live their life within the tenets of the church. I understood the nature of the ceremony at the time and I also remember having my first crisis of faith because of it. I told my mother that the entire point of the ceremony was to confirm your faith, and if I didn’t have faith than I shouldn’t participate. I was not trying to be cute or clever. I took the matter very seriously and I did not want to be a hypocrite in a ceremony that was presumably about openly declaring your actual faith. My mother argued back that I would go through the ceremony and that was that.
My cynical and critical views of religion probably started then. And I spent my teen years bewildered at what was obviously a source of joy, direction and purpose in life for most of the people around me. And yet I was dumbfounded by the ideas that people had to hold to to make their lives square with what their religion had taught them. For example, when I was about ten years old, I had an acquaintance of the same age ask me, “Where do angels go when there is a tornado?” Good grief! They actually thought angels were walking around up on the clouds! Even then I was stunned by the naiveté and simple mindedness of the question.
Later, when I turned eighteen, I went to art school in Kansas City. The liberal arts education I received there only strengthened my position that traditional religion was an archaic social artifact that people should liberate themselves from, if not seek to supplant in society entirely. The wider world that my professors introduced me to, i.e, aesthetics, philosophy, history, literature, linguistics, were the real food that made my heart take flight. And none of it was even hinted at in my religious upbringing. I felt I had been deprived of real knowledge, and these new subjects actually scratched where I itched!
The questions that held me were not matters of sin, guilt, evil, life after death or living a life of Christ. And all of the Sunday sermons I endured that addressed these issues may have well as been delivered in Chinese. They did not connect with me.
No, my deepest personal questions were more on the order of, “Why does the sight of those cows on that hillside make my heart race? Why does that piece of music move me to tears and not that one? Why does the physical desire for women feel so glorious? Why do some dinners with a circle of friends seem to transcend space and time and others are banal and forgettable?” In other words, I was consumed by matters of aesthetics and sensuality. And these are two subjects that religion had no insights to offer me. The Catholic faith treats all aesthetic judgements as equal. All artifacts of the human imagination are taken to be either evidence of the glory of God, or created in honor of the glory of God. And sensuality? Do I even need to say what the Catholic faith thinks of that? So I never found peace by seeking out religion or religious ideas.
To put it concisely, I am a committed secular humanist, with deep sympathies and appreciation for the efforts of artists.
What does that mean?
1. I do not believe in God or in any god like entity. I certainly do not believe in some magical father figure who lives in the sky.
2. I do not believe in an afterlife, at least as commonly described by western religions.
3. I do not believe that Jesus Christ, if he was a real living breathing historical person, was the son of God, or God becoming man.
4. I am a hard core (to the point of obsession) defender of the separation of church and state. And the fact that the state of California requires my children to recite “One nation under God” every day in the classroom is tantamount to a murderous crime in my opinion.
5. Religious feelings, religious language and religious organizations have no place in the public realm. But I do believe that one of the roles of government is to protect individual freedoms of religion.
One of my heroes, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once stated, “If there was a god, who really was a god who saw and knew everything, I would regard it as my duty to defy him.” When I discovered that quote, I was deeply moved and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
So the question remains from the beginning of this blog post, now phrased thus: How does a secular humanist face death? What do I think will happen when I die?
Well, I think I have made it clear that I certainly do not believe I will arrive at some pearly gates in the clouds. Nor do I think I will somehow be reunited with dead friends and relatives. These thoughts might be comforting, and even beautiful, but they are, to me, just products of human imagination with no basis in fact. I actually do not think death is ever experienced. Experience requires a living experiencer, so to speak. So the awareness of one’s own death actually never arrives. In this way, we can have something of the understanding of everlasting life, since it is all we can know.
I am quite content to say that death is a mystery. I can no more say what will happen after I die, than I can say how many stars there are in the universe. I simply don’t know. And more, I don’t think anyone knows. I recognize no authority in this matter. In fact, I recognize no authority in any metaphysical matter, like what is the meaning of life, what is the origin and purpose of the universe, etc. These questions intrinsically can not be answered. And anyone claiming to have access to these answers is a charlatan.
And as far as my cancer diagnosis goes, I can’t say it has done anything to change my mind about these matters. It really has only honed my sensibilities. It has helped me to awaken from lazy states of mind which everyone drifts into occasionally. It has reminded me to look closer at people’s faces, and consequently, to discover a bit more about them. And it has helped me to be a better listener, because I’ve become very interested in other people’s lives and learning from them.
“But Jim,” I hear some readers respond, “if you cannot turn to religion to provide peace and guidance during moments of spiritual and existential anxieties, where can you turn? Surely you must recognize that all of the subjects you say enlightened you are merely intellectual subjects. They can not help a person in a moral crisis.”
I have really only found one refuge for these matters, and that is in the world of art. Both in creating it and appreciating it. Through art, I feel mankind can achieve sublimity, insight, peace and create new ways of living. And perhaps there is no art better suited to provide these things than music, or as the writer Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Music is the only art worth a damn anyhow.” To my regret, I must admit that I know nothing about creating or playing music. My insights have come only from from listening.
The only other refuge I might recognize is through the honing of any craft or discipline to the point where one truly loses themselves in the work. At that point, many of the sources of existential anxiety or spiritual malaise simply disappear and the questions are calmed. I suspect this is something akin to Zen, but I really know nothing about Zen, so I won’t say more about it.
Now I know that to many people, the world of a secular humanist appears to be a cold, joyless world devoid of meaning. But this is not the case. In fact, in the world of a secular humanist, certain human activities take on enormous significance. For example, I have a deep appreciation for simple human kindness. In a world without God, there is no need to be kind in order to earn points toward a ticket to heaven. There is no “ulterior motive” to being a good person. There is simply the decision to be a decent person. And it is just this decision, made against the backdrop of a cold and careless universe, that makes actual acts of kindness acquire profound meaning. Kindness, and I might add, acts of love, are meaningless when they are executed for a reason.
But when acts of selflessness and love are carried out for no reason, then they shine brighter than the brightest stars in the sky. And they make life worth living.
And so to the question....have I had any profound insights? I’m just going to let this blog post roll off of my fingers and we’ll see what we have at the end.
No discussion about the meaning of life, or the possibility of life after death can happen without bringing in religion, so I’m going to start with a bit about my relationship to God and to religion in general.
So here is a little background...
I was raised in a Catholic family. We went to church every Sunday. In spite of my mother’s best intentions, it didn’t stick, at least not for me. For my sister, by comparison, it did. So its a mystery to me that this is the case. We were raised in the same family, went to the same church services, etc. I don’t know why faith evaded me. I just didn’t understand the benefits of the church or religion in general.
I do remember a particular moment when, at the age of twelve, I had to participate in a religious ceremony called Confirmation. This is basically a ceremony whereby a child openly declares their devotion to the Catholic faith and promises to live their life within the tenets of the church. I understood the nature of the ceremony at the time and I also remember having my first crisis of faith because of it. I told my mother that the entire point of the ceremony was to confirm your faith, and if I didn’t have faith than I shouldn’t participate. I was not trying to be cute or clever. I took the matter very seriously and I did not want to be a hypocrite in a ceremony that was presumably about openly declaring your actual faith. My mother argued back that I would go through the ceremony and that was that.
My cynical and critical views of religion probably started then. And I spent my teen years bewildered at what was obviously a source of joy, direction and purpose in life for most of the people around me. And yet I was dumbfounded by the ideas that people had to hold to to make their lives square with what their religion had taught them. For example, when I was about ten years old, I had an acquaintance of the same age ask me, “Where do angels go when there is a tornado?” Good grief! They actually thought angels were walking around up on the clouds! Even then I was stunned by the naiveté and simple mindedness of the question.
Later, when I turned eighteen, I went to art school in Kansas City. The liberal arts education I received there only strengthened my position that traditional religion was an archaic social artifact that people should liberate themselves from, if not seek to supplant in society entirely. The wider world that my professors introduced me to, i.e, aesthetics, philosophy, history, literature, linguistics, were the real food that made my heart take flight. And none of it was even hinted at in my religious upbringing. I felt I had been deprived of real knowledge, and these new subjects actually scratched where I itched!
The questions that held me were not matters of sin, guilt, evil, life after death or living a life of Christ. And all of the Sunday sermons I endured that addressed these issues may have well as been delivered in Chinese. They did not connect with me.
No, my deepest personal questions were more on the order of, “Why does the sight of those cows on that hillside make my heart race? Why does that piece of music move me to tears and not that one? Why does the physical desire for women feel so glorious? Why do some dinners with a circle of friends seem to transcend space and time and others are banal and forgettable?” In other words, I was consumed by matters of aesthetics and sensuality. And these are two subjects that religion had no insights to offer me. The Catholic faith treats all aesthetic judgements as equal. All artifacts of the human imagination are taken to be either evidence of the glory of God, or created in honor of the glory of God. And sensuality? Do I even need to say what the Catholic faith thinks of that? So I never found peace by seeking out religion or religious ideas.
To put it concisely, I am a committed secular humanist, with deep sympathies and appreciation for the efforts of artists.
What does that mean?
1. I do not believe in God or in any god like entity. I certainly do not believe in some magical father figure who lives in the sky.
2. I do not believe in an afterlife, at least as commonly described by western religions.
3. I do not believe that Jesus Christ, if he was a real living breathing historical person, was the son of God, or God becoming man.
4. I am a hard core (to the point of obsession) defender of the separation of church and state. And the fact that the state of California requires my children to recite “One nation under God” every day in the classroom is tantamount to a murderous crime in my opinion.
5. Religious feelings, religious language and religious organizations have no place in the public realm. But I do believe that one of the roles of government is to protect individual freedoms of religion.
One of my heroes, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once stated, “If there was a god, who really was a god who saw and knew everything, I would regard it as my duty to defy him.” When I discovered that quote, I was deeply moved and I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment.
So the question remains from the beginning of this blog post, now phrased thus: How does a secular humanist face death? What do I think will happen when I die?
Well, I think I have made it clear that I certainly do not believe I will arrive at some pearly gates in the clouds. Nor do I think I will somehow be reunited with dead friends and relatives. These thoughts might be comforting, and even beautiful, but they are, to me, just products of human imagination with no basis in fact. I actually do not think death is ever experienced. Experience requires a living experiencer, so to speak. So the awareness of one’s own death actually never arrives. In this way, we can have something of the understanding of everlasting life, since it is all we can know.
I am quite content to say that death is a mystery. I can no more say what will happen after I die, than I can say how many stars there are in the universe. I simply don’t know. And more, I don’t think anyone knows. I recognize no authority in this matter. In fact, I recognize no authority in any metaphysical matter, like what is the meaning of life, what is the origin and purpose of the universe, etc. These questions intrinsically can not be answered. And anyone claiming to have access to these answers is a charlatan.
And as far as my cancer diagnosis goes, I can’t say it has done anything to change my mind about these matters. It really has only honed my sensibilities. It has helped me to awaken from lazy states of mind which everyone drifts into occasionally. It has reminded me to look closer at people’s faces, and consequently, to discover a bit more about them. And it has helped me to be a better listener, because I’ve become very interested in other people’s lives and learning from them.
“But Jim,” I hear some readers respond, “if you cannot turn to religion to provide peace and guidance during moments of spiritual and existential anxieties, where can you turn? Surely you must recognize that all of the subjects you say enlightened you are merely intellectual subjects. They can not help a person in a moral crisis.”
I have really only found one refuge for these matters, and that is in the world of art. Both in creating it and appreciating it. Through art, I feel mankind can achieve sublimity, insight, peace and create new ways of living. And perhaps there is no art better suited to provide these things than music, or as the writer Kurt Vonnegut once said, “Music is the only art worth a damn anyhow.” To my regret, I must admit that I know nothing about creating or playing music. My insights have come only from from listening.
The only other refuge I might recognize is through the honing of any craft or discipline to the point where one truly loses themselves in the work. At that point, many of the sources of existential anxiety or spiritual malaise simply disappear and the questions are calmed. I suspect this is something akin to Zen, but I really know nothing about Zen, so I won’t say more about it.
Now I know that to many people, the world of a secular humanist appears to be a cold, joyless world devoid of meaning. But this is not the case. In fact, in the world of a secular humanist, certain human activities take on enormous significance. For example, I have a deep appreciation for simple human kindness. In a world without God, there is no need to be kind in order to earn points toward a ticket to heaven. There is no “ulterior motive” to being a good person. There is simply the decision to be a decent person. And it is just this decision, made against the backdrop of a cold and careless universe, that makes actual acts of kindness acquire profound meaning. Kindness, and I might add, acts of love, are meaningless when they are executed for a reason.
But when acts of selflessness and love are carried out for no reason, then they shine brighter than the brightest stars in the sky. And they make life worth living.
. . . . . . . . . .