August 26, 2012

• Another thing people don’t get

  My prior post may have horrified a few people who think of divinity as a construct of the mind. I can appreciate that from that point of view, the human-divine relation appears to be an inversion of the typical real/unreal relationship.

  However, religion is far from the only field in which people place the unreal (if unreal it is) above the real. Consider the number of people humanity has executed for being enemies of the state.

  Is not the state similarly a collaborative fiction? If you consider religion a fiction, you can hardly deny that most of our groups and associations are at least equally fictions. A nation is real only because we make it so, due to our persistent beliefs and actions in accordance with those beliefs. Most of you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a government executed someone for treason, or on suspicion of plotting terrorism, or the like. Is that not all theoretical? None of it is physically real (the terrorism because whatever act they plot hasn’t happened yet.) We make many labels for things which are orderings or assemblies of smaller components – calling a chair a chair and a desk a desk – but do not be confused into thinking this has any physical reality. A chair has no “chair nature.” It has only the nature of its component particles. Similarly, our concept of people as discrete entities – so central to our ordering of society – is itself a convenient fiction.

  It’s silly to the point of incoherence to point fingers at people for believing in religion, and then turn around and believe in laws, treaties, governments, inalienable rights*, assemblies of nations. All these things exist in the mind and are made real by peoples’ adherence.

  If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. No problem. But don’t act as if it’s categorically some horrible mental flaw that you have no part in. Odds are, you’re carrying around quite a few mental constructs of your own.

  *I mean really, why define as inalienable rights things like access to the Internet, which 70% of the planet doesn’t have anyway? At least put the infrastructure in place to guarantee it first, if you’re going to mouth off about it.

  • 2:05 pm
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