Labels

It’s odd. I know that I’m quite prone to black and white thinking (called splitting) when it comes to most things in my life. It’s a result of my mental illness. Yet when I look around at the overwhelming majority of mankind, I cannot believe that their petty squabbling about political philosophies, theological differences, or even opinions on something as pedantic as the corporate tax rate, is something that ought to be considered normal. Here’s a fun game: just mention the topic of abortion in any group conversation and watch everyone cluck and sputter in their best attempt to mimic a chicken with its head cut off.

Clearly, people have strong opinions. I guess that shouldn’t be too surprising. Yet what amazes me about “normal people” that don’t have BPD or Asperger-like symptoms is this: they may be more comfortable with their own thoughts on how the world should be… or to put it another way, they quite enjoy agreeing with themselves on every issue, and they’re also inclined to find solidarity with social groups that espouse those exact same things. Conservatives seem to get along with the Republican Party just fine, while liberals seem to get along with the Democratic Party just fine. However, what they can’t tolerate is another idea that has any sort of baggage that strays from their own ideological lens.

I’m not smarter than the average guy on the street, but I am more intellectual about the world than most. However, because of my BPD tendencies, I’m unable to craft a coherent sense of self like most of humanity. I’ve constantly gone back and forth as to what philosophical label applies to me. Before understanding that I had Borderline Personality Disorder, I simply thought that there was something wrong with me on why I couldn’t form a systematic theory of ethics unto myself.

It turns out that I just had the reverse problem of mankind. The average person may be “proud to be Irish” or “proud to be Italian.” They might also shout “Black power.” Of course, some of them (as just demonstrated in Charlottesville last year) may also chant “blood and soil” and everyone’s favorite, “Jews will not replace us.” For example, as an objective observer of reality, I can look back into the 1960’s and plainly see that when Malcom X was part of the Nation of Islam, an organization that literally believes white people were created by a mad scientist named Yakub 6600 years ago (look it up), he was being just as bugfuck bonkers as a KKK member who believed in “racial hierarchies” with the white man on top.

I remember the day after Barack Obama was elected again in 2012. I was talking with a friend of mine and his wife, who were both very active in their conservative church. I tried to treat the discussion with kid gloves, so as not to trigger them. Even in doing so, the wife abruptly started sobbing about “unborn children” and how President Obama was apparently going to kill them all one by one. At moments like these I simply marvel at our species for its incredible inclination for irrational thinking.

Everyone wants a label. It seems they need it to be able to rationalize their existence on a pale blue dot spinning in the dark depths of space. Over 1300 planet Earths could fit inside Jupiter alone, and we’re here debating tribalistic nonsense like whether a football player taking a knee during the American national anthem is somehow disrespecting the troops or that it’s not the right time and place to protest. Want the answer? Well, here it is: Who gives a shit either way? Who in their right mind concerned about globally critical issues like terrorism, poverty, and climate change can possibly think anything involving the respect or disrespect of an inanimate object like a flag could possibly chart even a two on the 1-100 “Does it matter at all-o-meter?”

I think if we’re ever going to move past the “indelible stamp of our lowly origin,” as Darwin once said, then we’re all going to have to remove as much vestigial black and white thinking as we can from our collective consciousness and attempt to have discussions with people we strongly disagree with. Maybe you believe that transgender couples should have all the rights afforded to them as straight couples. That’s completely legitimate and constitutional. However, the majority of religious people on the planet do not believe that transgenderism is a legitimate phenomenon. Even if you feel emotionally triggered, you cannot coerce people into believing something they don’t. That being said, if there’s hate or discrimination based on your gender identity, then everyone regardless of labels should come to your defense as fellow human beings.

I’ve become an Agnostic, and I often get lunch with Christian friends of mine that are absolutely certain that if I don’t believe the Nicene Creed as written in 325 AD before I die then I’m going to burn in a lake of fire with demons for all eternity. This is actually what they believe. Of course, I think that’s laughable. However, I'm still convinced that we can all work together despite seemingly insurmountable division.

I think at the root bottom of morality is something innate. It’s certainly metaphysical, and you might even call it supernatural to a degree. What I mean is that while we obviously have great debates on how things ought to be, we really do have a core of hard ethics that seem to crop up on its own. When I say supernatural, I merely mean to suggest that since we cannot look at “good and evil” under a microscope, or any other scientific method, that it doesn’t seem to simply occur naturally as a survival mechanism.

I had an epiphany just last week when I read the nightmarish story in California about 13 children being physically and mentally tortured by their parents for untold years. There seems to be a metaphorical switch in our brain that trips when we hear about something monstrous like child abuse. This might be an extreme example, but I think it shows that deep down we all truly do care about each other. Children aren’t pigeonholed by partisanship, so we’re able to love them unconditionally. Imagine if we got rid of labels like children do. I don’t know if what I’m positing is that there’s some kind of cosmic force that planted these objective ethics into our DNA, but it seems to exist regardless of the origin. Maybe if we work together we’ll be able to get a beer together.

A Convinced Agnostic

I’ve decided to write this for my own catharsis and nothing more. I don’t expect it to change anyone’s mind. To quote Jethro Tull, “I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think.” I can only say that I’m being true to myself.

To clarify some unfortunate cultural ignorance, Agnosticism actually has two definitions. One is what most people say, which is that they’re undecided on Theism or Atheism and they’re still looking for evidence. The other definition, of which I fall under, is that any talk of God or any ultimate explanation as to why we’re here is fundamentally unanswerable. I’m not waiting for new evidence to come in, because any possible data we receive would be inherently unacceptable under the lens of scientific rigor.

I want to make another distinction here, in that I’m only talking about being Agnostic in the sense of a prime mover or a Deistic creator that metaphorically “wound the clock” of the cosmos. Or perhaps even that life was seeded by an alien species so advanced that they would functionally appear as gods to our primitive ape-like minds. All of these are interesting and plausible ideas. Hell, if you really want to go crazy, you can even say that since philosophically we can’t prove our five senses past brain chemicals, we could all be in the Matrix. Of course, the probability for the last one is pretty low I’d wager… Not that I wouldn’t want to be Neo. Despite the lack of evidence, I even admit in wanting to believe that there's an afterlife.

What makes me an Agnostic as opposed to an Atheist would be my attempt to be humble about not knowing everything. Science is the best tool humanity ever invented. In just a few hundred years from Galileo, we understand so much about our universe. We know the Earth rotates around the sun and not vice-versa. We know that all species evolved from a common ancestor through natural selection. We know that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We even know what the surfaces of all the planets and moons in our solar system are like through photographs sent back from probes like Voyager 1 and 2.

As grand as all that is, science is only capable of answering “how” questions. In which I simply mean that science explains natural phenomena in the material world. It cannot, and is not even supposed to, try to answer a question like, “Why are we here?” That’s not to say we can’t fight back against pseudoscience like young earth creationism, but it does mean that there are boundaries. For example, what caused the Big Bang is a realm that we cannot enter. Theists say God created everything, however, this only begs the question as to who created God. Atheists say that there might be billions of universes, a sort of “multiverse.” Of course, that also just begs the question as to where the multiverse came from. So, at the end of the day, we merely have to be skeptical of any “grand theory” be it theistic or atheistic.

Concerning the religions on this small planet, specifically the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I am as close to being an Atheist as I possibly can be as an Agnostic. I view their likelihood as I would with Greek or Roman myths. However, I also recognize that the Golden Rule found in all major faiths has tremendously helped progress our collective ethics. Stories like Jesus' Sermon on the Mount still have moral power and relevance.  

I was a Christian for a long time. In fact, I only left it very recently, so I don’t view religious people in contempt or anything of the sort. As I said, I simply must be true to myself. I could easily spend pages upon pages dismantling Christianity and all its intellectual pretenses as a justification for my apostasy, but the truth is there are better things to do. I was born Jewish by heritage, an Atheist for most of my life, then a Christian, and now an Agnostic. However, these things don’t define me, nor should it anyone. The only thing that ought to matter is how we treat one another. If humanity fails to love everyone, even those they disagree with, then it won’t much matter who was right when we all kill each other.

"I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide. I am aware that if we admit a first cause, the mind still craves to know whence it came from and how it arose. Nor can I overlook the difficulty from the immense amount of suffering through the world. I am, also, induced to defer to a certain extent to the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God; but here again I see how poor an argument this is. The safest conclusion seems to me to be that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man's intellect; but man can do his duty." -Charles Darwin, 1873