Contest #3: "I believe..." (essay)

Stephen Uhl · Posted: Mon Jul 28, 2008 11:35 am Post subject: Honest Ethics for all

Thanks to both Hegel1066 and tarav!

I think we are making good progress. And, John, you ask a real boatload of good and pertinent questions. For adequate answers to all of them, it would take a little book; and that book has been published. It is Imagine No Superstition, and you can find it on my website, imagineNOsuperstiton(dot)com. Or you could listen to it (in installments) on my podcast (www.nogods.libsyn[dot]com).

Enjoy all of this life, both of you,

Steve

BabyBlues

I believe in the magnificence of motherhood. In no other endeavor that I have engaged have I felt the extreme range and power of emotions as I feel from my daily interactions with my two daughters. Many people say motherhood is a glorious job that should not be seen as a sacrifice. What a limited view! Of course motherhood is a burden and a sacrifice. Many of our most important and satisfying jobs in life have a sacrificial element to them. That is part of how we know it means so much, but it is also how come we get so much from it. For example, if I wasn’t just chasing my “spirited” two-year old down the street at nine at night while she was having a tantrum, if I had not just spent twenty minutes cleaning up the baby powder that she had “accidentally” used to decorate my entire bedroom, I might not have savored cuddling with her tonight, her hand on my face, her soft angelic voice saying, “Momma, you my bes’ fren’.” In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield tells us that all mothers are slightly insane. Until I had my own children, I chalked that up to a teenage boy providing insights into his own unstable mother. Now, I see some truth to his offhand remark. Yes, mothers are a little nuts; only through a love as intense as a mother’s could one reach the pure range of emotions and mental states that a mother feels. Why would I believe in the power of motherhood, when the responsibilities of motherhood can be so daunting? How can I sacrifice so much of my life and still feel I have gained? I look through generations for the answer. I see my own mother and my Oma, each enduring so much for their families. I feel the lifeline that connects the mothers of each generation. I see my daughters with their lives ahead of them. My four year old says “Mommy, I don’t want to grow up because I always want to be by you.” (This heartwarming sentiment also helps her try to rationalize why she doesn’t want to eat her vegetables so she doesn’t need to “grow up nice and strong”). What I try to explain but will never probably be able to convey is that she will always be with me, and she will take me with her where she goes, just like my mother and my grandmother are in me, in my thoughts and my hopes and most of all in the way I mother. My daughter cannot comprehend this, and she probably never will….until she becomes a mother.
Yawn

GentleReader9 · Posted: Fri Sep 19, 2008 5:39 pm Post subject: I will try this.

As you requested above, I am stating my intent to do an "I believe..." topic essay on this string. It's due by the end of September?

DWill · Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2008 5:06 pm Post subject:

Stephen Uhl wrote:

"If objective reason reigns, the moral decision is not so difficult. But when personal emotions and subjective faiths override reason as to the proper balance between means and end, immoral conclusions readily result."

Ever since I read Antonio D'Amasio's Descarte's Error, I've been on the fence about whether reason can reign alone, that is without assistance from areas of our brain that make us feeling creatures as well as rational ones. I think D'Amasio's conclusion from the Phineas Gage case was that Gage's reasoning in no way seemed to have suffered from his accident (metal rod blowing through his forebrain), but he had become emotionally debilitated, a problem which led him into severe difficulty in living, actually, a reasonable life.

So I'm wondering if the action born of pure moral calculation is really possible, in terms of how we are made up. Do we invest something of our feelings in decisions no matter what we may tell ourselves, and is this in fact a good and necessary thing?

I hope this comment may have some relation to your fine essay. Thanks.

DWill

DWill · Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 11:39 am Post subject:

babyblues

I thought your essay was a good example of lived belief. I liked it because there were none of the usual problems when we talk about beliefs abstractly. We could have deduced your belief even if you hadn't told us, because you talked about real things, not abstractions. I sometimes question whether announcing our beliefs has any value at all. How we go about living is the one important thing, no matter what we may say we believe.
DWill [/i]

DWill · Posted: Thu Sep 25, 2008 11:50 am Post subject:

Keeping the Faiths
DWill

I still believe in tolerance of diverse religious beliefs. I consider this to be a bedrock American value. Though we have never in reality achieved this perfect tolerance, it is an ideal worth keeping.

At least two forces threaten the existence of the ideal. The first is the erosion of the separation between church and state. For diversity to continue to flourish, there can be no official or de facto state religion. This fact—that the U.S. has never had a state religion—has leveled the playing field for all faiths, ensuring that they can thrive. Insistence that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation and should be formally recognized as one, has grown in recent years. Last spring, we witnessed the spectacle of the two presumptive nominees for president submitting to public examination by Pastor Rick Warren. Is a religious test for public office very far away?

The other force originates in far different quarters. It promotes an idea of religious faith as sometimes dangerous and always an affront to reason. Though still much the weaker of the two forces, it has grown stronger since 9/11/01, when Islamist extremists did grave harm to our country. Though it is now imperative to take seriously the threat posed by this and other extreme groups, it is a gross exaggeration to say that religious belief itself is a moral hazard.

Religious belief is censured as irrational because some of it relies on the supernatural, and some flavors of it deny the findings of science. I realize that thresholds of arousal will differ among observers of the religious landscape. I can’t prove that I am right to be sanguine about this matter of what people believe; my threshold of arousal is high. I am not concerned at all by a belief in a God who ministers to each individual, or in an immortal soul that finds its way to heaven. I am mildly disturbed by a view of earth history that ignores the last 200 years of science, but think it best to let this go, unless creationists infiltrate the school board and try to introduce a “balanced” new biology text into the district.

We hear a lot about beliefs causing this or that harmful behavior. Not to discount the concern entirely, but does a belief ever cause a behavior by itself, except in the case of psychotic command hallucinations? In the normal brain, there is more than likely a conjunction of forces, say intense grievance over historical wrongs, simple desire for power, AND religious fervor. It will be hard to tell which force is ascendant in a given person. We do know that humans are good at cloaking their primary motives in idealistic terms. Religion is a handy source for the terms.

The vision of anti-religionists is of a world in which superstition has been swept away and reason and science reign. My reaction is that such a world appears less interesting and more lacking in diversity, a diversity that may include a measure of weirdness, it is true. I want to preserve and encourage diversity of any kind, whether of languages, flora and fauna, or human types. I envision more of a Whitmanesque world in which all difference is not just accepted but celebrated. We could do worse than to take our lead from a poet. So my vision extends beyond simple tolerance.

At the least, we should pay attention to the words of Thomas Jefferson, a severe skeptic on religion who nevertheless wished it to prosper: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Saffron · Posted: Fri Sep 26, 2008 8:27 pm Post subject:

DWill

GentleReader9 · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:30 pm Post subject:

On Belief

The first of three definitions in my dictionary reads:

DWill · Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 9:37 pm Post subject:

GentleReader9 · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 10:42 am Post subject:

Thanks, DWill, for taking the time to read and encourage others. You already "get" everything important I have to say, anyway. I'm glad you're here.

Saffron · Posted: Tue Sep 30, 2008 6:37 pm Post subject:

GentleReader9

Chris OConnor · Posted: Sat Oct 18, 2008 1:41 am Post subject:

Thanks for your submissions. While I enjoyed running this contest and reading the entries I now realize that we are going to have to form a Book Award committee to help me with this project. There is so much administrative stuff to do to keep BookTalk.org running along smoothly that I might be biting off more than I can chew with these contests. I will try to find a few members to help me in the future. For instance I could have used some help with reading these essays, and contacting the participants, and then finding out which free books they would like.

I am going to offer free books to everyone that participated:

Stephen Uhl
BabyBlues
DWill
GentleReader9

If you're one of these 4 people please email chris@booktalk.org with your book choice from the "Books Available For Awards" thread. Just click here to see the long list of books. http://www.booktalk.org/books-available-for-awards-t4515.html It would be wise to send me your 1st choice and 2nd choice, just in case their is a conflict with book choices. Last few times several people quickly claimed the same book. LOL


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