No Easy Answers
Jun. 26th, 2002 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomAs is often the case when I read about how the world is going today, I am feeling somewhat unsettled and down this afternoon. Some of the issues are personal, others global.
I suppose that one of the things I miss out on by not being especially religious is not having simple answers to a lot of complex questions. At least, as a non-believer, that appears to me to be the purpose of a lot of religions: to reduce big and difficult issues to articles of faith that are easy for even poorly-educated folk to grasp and be assured by so they can get on with their lives. (I'm not saying this is why everyone turns to religion; and heck, I could be completely wrong.)
Right now I could use a little opiate of the masses. But Pascal's wager aside, faith isn't something one can choose to have, based on logic or game theory; you've either got it or you don't. And I can't make myself believe in some active interventionist deity who makes things turn out all right according to some ineffable plan. (If such a being does exist, then based on what I observe of the world around me - including most players of The Sims - He She or It is more likely to be a bored sadistic bastard, like the old Greek or Norse gods. But I digress.)
In daily life, I don't see any great blueprint or script holding the world to a set of moral or dramatic rules, where the good are rewarded and the evil punished - just me and six billion other size-XL chimps trying to advance our personal agendas, usually at each others' expense, mostly still following the old rules for success. (Do what the leader tells you. Compete for mates. Breed to the capacity of your habitat and beyond; those extra bodies will come in handy when you go to the next valley over, kill the strangers there, and take their stuff. If some of yours get killed in the process, hey, fewer mouths to feed. Those not of your tribe are competitors; hate and fear them, or they'll kill you and take your stuff.)
We want to believe there's more than this. We want to think that there are things greater than the daily struggle for survival, that it all makes sense on some higher level, that there's a REASON for everything that happens, even the manifest inequities of life. The same impulse fuels religions and conspiracy theories. We want one-sentence explanations for processes that are too complex for most single minds to grasp, things that involve millions of people and hundreds of years, moral issues that one could struggle with for a lifetime without coming to a decision on.
We want things to be simpler than they are. We want someone to make sense of the world for us. And we flock to those who promise to do so, for they allow us to be children again, if just for a little while - when your parents had all the answers and the world was full of possibility and you would be taken care of, as long as you were good and did what you were told.
I suppose that one of the things I miss out on by not being especially religious is not having simple answers to a lot of complex questions. At least, as a non-believer, that appears to me to be the purpose of a lot of religions: to reduce big and difficult issues to articles of faith that are easy for even poorly-educated folk to grasp and be assured by so they can get on with their lives. (I'm not saying this is why everyone turns to religion; and heck, I could be completely wrong.)
Right now I could use a little opiate of the masses. But Pascal's wager aside, faith isn't something one can choose to have, based on logic or game theory; you've either got it or you don't. And I can't make myself believe in some active interventionist deity who makes things turn out all right according to some ineffable plan. (If such a being does exist, then based on what I observe of the world around me - including most players of The Sims - He She or It is more likely to be a bored sadistic bastard, like the old Greek or Norse gods. But I digress.)
In daily life, I don't see any great blueprint or script holding the world to a set of moral or dramatic rules, where the good are rewarded and the evil punished - just me and six billion other size-XL chimps trying to advance our personal agendas, usually at each others' expense, mostly still following the old rules for success. (Do what the leader tells you. Compete for mates. Breed to the capacity of your habitat and beyond; those extra bodies will come in handy when you go to the next valley over, kill the strangers there, and take their stuff. If some of yours get killed in the process, hey, fewer mouths to feed. Those not of your tribe are competitors; hate and fear them, or they'll kill you and take your stuff.)
We want to believe there's more than this. We want to think that there are things greater than the daily struggle for survival, that it all makes sense on some higher level, that there's a REASON for everything that happens, even the manifest inequities of life. The same impulse fuels religions and conspiracy theories. We want one-sentence explanations for processes that are too complex for most single minds to grasp, things that involve millions of people and hundreds of years, moral issues that one could struggle with for a lifetime without coming to a decision on.
We want things to be simpler than they are. We want someone to make sense of the world for us. And we flock to those who promise to do so, for they allow us to be children again, if just for a little while - when your parents had all the answers and the world was full of possibility and you would be taken care of, as long as you were good and did what you were told.
